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Old 08-27-2014, 05:32 PM   #279
Erick Mead
 
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Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,619
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Re: Demonstrating aiki, demontrating aikido.Same thing ?

Quote:
Christopher Li wrote: View Post
I don't disagree with that. In any case, I'll simply state that in my opinion Erick is way off track - and that model just won't (in my experience) take you where you want to go if you're interested in the kind of things that model is supposed to be explaining.
With that, I'll step out.
You can if you like. I am more interested in "what experience" you have had in "that model" to show that it won't take you where you want to go ___________ (where, exactly? what "kinds of things"?).

This is of a piece with your earlier post -- where you keep using indicative language (verbal pointing) rather than demonstrative language explaining it or describing.

Quote:
... to show that they know what they're talking about. They showed it and people have testified to it and they've also all shown that they can pass it on to some degree. You've done none of that.
Three "its, " one "that," and a "what" ...

Pronouns are indicative, like pointing -- not demonstrative or descriptive -- they are "pro" nouns, used "for" the thing they refer to -- in other words they assume you already know what they refer to.
Point at the night sky and say "Look at THAT!" Is "that" the Moon? Or the Dogstar ? Or Orion's Belt? A bird, a plane or Superman ?

- The thread topic is about demonstrating aiki and demonstrating aikido. We seem to be at loggerheads not just about what it means to demonstrate but what we mean to demonstrate. And this condition has been going on now for - well, over 8 years now since I started looking and discussing structure and dynamics seriously on this forum. Your response was the same response given then.

Theory is absolutely essential to discriminate what we mean to examine and attempt to repeat or improve -- from what we do not. There is too much else going on, internally, externally, subjectively and objectively that must be discriminated from what is critical.

The world unmediated by word and concept is a formless, cacophonous blur. The chain of transmission cannot rely on wordless, non-conceptual demonstration without conceptual knowledge and description. It hasn't done too well on the various traditional, ad hoc or idiosyncratic attempts at such description and concept either, and after almost 80 years and numerous efforts.

Pointing or showing is not demonstrating anything -- because there is far too much background needing to be ignored to pick out the thing meant to be pointed out. Without out guidance on what is important and what is not, even an actual physical encounter demonstrating the thing you mean to communicate -- does not do that unless you already have some idea what to pay attention to. Chicken, meet egg.

Ueshiba famously was asked by a photographer who liked the look of a move -- to do "that thing" again. He obliged several more times and after repeated requests -- never appeared (to the photographer) to do the same thing twice -- and yet he was. The photographer neither knew what he was asking for, nor what he was being shown when he saw it. He mistake was in seeing the merely the incidental as being the essential -- and this is a powerful and seductive kind of error in understanding.

If I say to my students "do this," and show them something, some regularly seem to do everything BUT "that." If I take and freeze them mid-engagement -- pose them like department store dummies and, say "Hold yourself this way. Now shift your support on this tangent, stretch here, settle there, turning to face this way." And they are surprised at what happens. Then I explain why what they were doing wasn't what I was doing.

I have come to a point that I can explain and improve what I and my students do -- and in these very terms. Ordinary mechanical principles they used to teach in high schools. Some straightforward physiology, and their interactions that simply have unexpected applications. No PhD or doctorate required.

(Not even a masters degree -- in engineering...)


Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
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