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Old 08-26-2009, 04:48 PM   #13
Erick Mead
 
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Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
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Re: How To Teach Power & Harmony?

Quote:
Robert M Watson Jr wrote: View Post
"Looks like meat is back on the menu, boys" would be my fav as this does cut quick to the meat of the subject.

And yet the ring is destroyed ...
Yes. But not by the straight road... In that lesson the straight road has been irretrievably bent. The point -- the safe way (morally, physically) to defeat contending power is not through linear opposition of counter-power but through circuitous recursive dissipative mechanisms, which are hard to see or to know that they should be opposed or are even moving against one (i.e. -- the actions of "the very small" and the toleration of pity toward an evil but conflicted will).

Quote:
Robert M Watson Jr wrote: View Post
You posit a definition of harmony "Unifying of opposing qualities without destroying any part of their distinctions. " Qualities of what?
Human and divine, attacker ansd attacked -- anything that stands in relation and distinction to another. The logic of power as such ends in annihilation of that which opposes it, therefore power, in the limit, is in relation to nothing but itself . Without a will to allow contrasting action, power is therefore incapable of unity with genuine distinction -- or generating true novelty. Not Takemusu Aiki, in other words

Quote:
Robert M Watson Jr wrote: View Post
Also "Aikido is seen (by the Founder) as both the tool producing the unification and the product of its work, a form of recursive or circular reference." I never heard it put this way and I'm at a loss as to stipulate such for the sake of argument. ...
This presupposes that his conception of the divine as eperate and distinct from the universe and I'm reading and rereading Prof. Goldsbury columns to attempt to gain some clarity on this aspect.
I greatly value Prof. G's linguistic and philosophical insights, and his patient development of a topic. It may be that Prof. G chooses not to indulge or express his capacity for his appreciation of mythic insight, and to concentrate instead on other expressions of his immense knowledge. He has said he intensively indulged the Spiritual Exercises at one point, so I do not attempt to make any comparisons on the point. He has been quite critical of some of the more wooly-minded aspects in those who have attempted to appreciate it in a particularly facile manner.
If I were to judge only from what he has offered on that score, however, I would have to conclude that he seems to possess a bit of tin ear (or too post-modern an outlook), when it comes to the music of mythical and mystical insight as a way of knowledge, and its recurrent non-linear "leaps."

Those attributes are indicative of the bent, recursive, elliptical way of knowing, which frustrates the linear mind to no end. What such minds see is only the point where the elliptically-minded happens to cross his linear straight road -- some times ahead, sometimes behind, but that indicates nothing of what he has seen or the gorund he has covered. It is common to consider such minds as realtively disordered in their thinking, but in fact what they are is ordered in ways the linear thinker does not easily perceive.

I judge Morihei Ueshiba to be of this turn of mind, as it is my own. But that is no more than to say that a lefty knows a lefty when he sees one, which is not to say I can pitch a a decent strike, much less a no-hitter.

I do not think Ueshiba presupposes "the divine as seperate and distinct from the universe" -- and I certainly don't -- for instance from the 4th transcript of the Takemusu Aiki lectures:

Quote:
Morihei Ueshiba wrote:
Those who desire world harmony must dedicate themselves to its realization and to the accomplishment of the Divine Plan for their own nation. The assigned task of a nation is the realization of national harmony as One Family. We must all accomplish our own missions, that is, our assigned duties, as our share of the Divine Plan. Thus, we must perfect our own selves before the perfection of others in order to render any service in accordance with the Will of the Great God. The very act of perfecting oneself is a rendering of services towards the perfection of the Universe.
The self-similarity of action or form to action or form at other scales within an coherent system is the hallmark of a recursive chaotic system. In other words, if the problem is abuse of power in the world at large -- the mirror is the first place for each of us to look.... That beam in my own eye, for example, I am told obscures a great deal...

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
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