matty_mojo911

George - Thankyou (in particular) for your first post on this thread, a very good read and in my opinion spot on the money.
From everything I know O'Sensei was far more spiritual than Martial, and unless you are like him you will never "get" what he did. But some of his basic teachings are perhaps obvious - love, harmony, that sort of thing.

Also, it is a natural progression for something to splinter, and fracture. If you teach me something, I listen to you, and 2 years later teach it with my "take" on it - nothing wrong with that, and it ocurs in most facets of life. Change is natural.

When we start breaking down "styles" of aikido and pigeon holing them due to the fact they do "this technique and not that one" again that is natural. However I do think that it is a mistake to stick religiously with a way of doing a technique, because that has "always been that way."

Sensei Dave Lynch here in NZ, who trained with O'Sensei, once told me at one of the Aikikai Dojos that when he trained there as a youth (in Japapn) they did a particular technique a certain way, he always thought it wasn't very good. 20 years later he went back and trained with them again and they had not changed it at all, though the rest of the Aikido world had. He laughed about it and said "that isn't taking an art forward is it?"

Good to remember, but good to change, splintering, fracturing are human nature.