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Old 03-27-2014, 09:05 PM   #10
JW
 
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Location: San Diego CA USA
Join Date: Aug 2000
Posts: 561
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choosing the worm life

Thanks again- this is a great short-and-sweet chapter to read (I missed it before). It was great seeing this type of story through the point of view of the Yoshinkan. Also great to see the idea of "kojiki as code for body usage" explicitly stated, and so clearly.

Does anyone know what it means to "take the spirit of an earthworm?" The original Japanese may help elucidate this. Is it like, "take the wallet of a passerby?" Or, more like, "take the viewpoint of a person from another culture" (which would be akin to a teacher saying, "take the same posture that I am demonstrating")?

This is just way more shamanistic than anything I have heard regarding aikido (though I am still reading the TIE series!), so I am trying to understand exactly what I am reading. I guess my specific questions regarding the language are:

According to the verb and phrasing used, what would the earthworm have, and what would Shioda have, if the advice were followed?
Does the worm "lose his soul" to Shioda (or perhaps, if this is postmortem, the soul has become free for the taking anyway, and thus is taken by Shioda without being concomitantly lost by the worm)? And, once Shioda takes the spirit of the worm, is that to say he "has" it the way he "has" the ability to speak Japanese, or the way that he "has" the rank of 9th Dan? Or, is it more like he "has" it the way he has the identity of Shioda Gozo? (Does it become a facet of what Shioda is/has, or does Shioda become that spirit?)

OK-- well, the original Japanese may not be enough to address such questions but I throw it out there anyway. Of course, this question is for anyone not just Chris.
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