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Old 06-23-2010, 07:48 AM   #38
oisin bourke
 
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Re: Transmission, Inheritance, Emulation 18

The Japanese term "meijin" possibly correlates to Gladwell's description of Outlier?

The idea very interesting, but the 10,000 hour thing seems to be more easily correlated to disciplines that operate within well defined parameters,e.g sports. For example, how would one judge that Bob Dylan or Samuel Beckett had put in their hours on the way to becoming "outliers"?

IMO, Japanese Budo in general, and Aikido in particular, exists in a purgatory between "art" and "sport" that defies neat taxonomy.

On a completely different note, has anyone read a book titled:
"When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth" by E.T Barber and P.T Barber?

It explains creation Myths from around the world as being born of the need for pre-literate societies to "encode" and transmit important environmental data to future generations.

The part of the thesis relevant to this discussion is "The Silence Principle" which is something that is known to both speaker and listener is never explicitly mentioned. However, when a society dies, although its stories may survive, vital information has been omitted. Therefore, future researchers must re-interpret these stories, often with erroneous results.

Someone with a good knowledge of Ueshiba's speeches might find it a fruitful read.
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