Kevin Leavitt

I will attempt to explain my perspective on Ludwig's comments.

Philosophically it is about balance or midpoint. Neither preserving or destroying. those are concepts on opposite ends of the spectrum and therefore, if you look at it strictly from the philsophical perspective, then leaning one way or the other is wrong. You want to "be" in the middle where their is not conflict at all.

However, in reality this is not possible probably since in a violent encounter there is on off balance and attempting to resolve it can be complex and you can't be literal in your application and return the situation to "nothing"...even if you physically resolve the conflict you will still have emotions, damage and pain that will last beyond this.

Also, if you go into the fight "constrained", that is constrained with the parameters that you can not use tools that might injure or hurt your opponent...chances are someone will get hurt. That is just plain wrong and stupid. It is also not correct to presume or dismiss intentions of attacks/responses...that is not within the context of aikido. We simply are there...at the midpoint. Possessing the ability, willing and able to deploy, but maybe if we are lucky making the choice to limit our response to an appropriate level of force.

It could be based on skill, timing, luck what not...but we don't assume or limit ourselves to options going into the situation based on some freaking philosophy that we have that we must always resolve fights without harm.

It becomes like a koan. "do no harm, stop harm"

I don't believe it is within the realm of aikido to presume anything at all.

I think this is a big part of the problem in much of the way I have seen many folks train. They want to be revisionist and remove or "set aside" things. Dismiss the violent aspects. to ignore them, reframe, and pretend that We are somehow more revolved, more refined, or above that.

Violence and anger exist. It is apart of the human element (unfortnuately). We need to embrace it, learn about it, figure out how to control and work with it to transcend it.

Therefore, if we dismiss certain aspects of the spectrum of martial training simply because we judge these things to be violent, less than ethical, or somehow "not aiki" we are not really learning what we need to learn and we are a danger to ourselves and others around us in reality.