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Old 08-23-2016, 12:37 PM   #36
Dan Richards
Dojo: Latham Eclectic
Location: NY
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 452
United_States
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Re: Reconcile the world

Quote:
John Hillson wrote: View Post
The author does go on to make a call to arms of sorts Mr Richards. War is strictly the province and tool of politics; the relative stability of my own country gives me opportunities to try to reduce violence and suffering in my own backyard. Do you encourage your own students to embrace these opportunities? What work do you think the author says is just beginning?
War has a much wider scope than just politics. We can see it in many micro and macro levels.

With regards to training, most of what we do explores the micro level of the war taking place inside the self. The real fundamentals of aikido are found in moving yourself first—not other people. If you move correctly, by default others will move.

So we explore the war inside; the tensions, the structural misalignment, the misplaced focus, the fear,
the resistance, the non-integration and misunderstanding of forces.

There is an intrinsic strength and power in the design of the body. By bringing that into alignment we find that there is a wellspring of peace and effortless power available.

And we need to move into those levels on the micro before fretting about the macro. And when exploring the macro, where are we getting our information?

The baseline of this topic is your blog entry, and you obviously becoming disheartened by too much exposure to the effluvium of information that is programmed by interests that have the precise goal of disempowering you. It worked. You drank the Kool-Aid. And then you write your entry, post it here, and attempt to get others to join your impoverishment.

I don't buy it. Sorry. At the time of the writing of your entry, you had lost your center, and were not coming from an integrated and powerful place, and focused on the problem to the extent that you became so incapacitated that you further spread the defeat and resignation that you allowed to seep into your psyche.

There is another war waging in the world, and it's one waged by big corporations and industries whose sole purpose is to weaken by giving misinformation, unhealthy food, destructive drugs, and disempowering the population with unnecessary repetition and talking heads.

It is the default setting of this society. And the default setting of many people is that they don't know how to do very basic things in their lives: how to breath, how to sit, how to stand, how to move, how to select and make healthy and enriching foods for themselves and their families. Because of this, we have a society of tired, worn out... I guess we could say "rats."

Aikido at its best has everything to do with moving away from the learned default cultural settings that disempower us, and moving into natural intrinsic power—and therein lies the beginning of the peace that would reconcile the world.

Ueshiba was clearly coming from a place of higher consciousness. He understood the relationship of the micro to the macro, and as he found more peace inside himself it would naturally be reflected in his outer world.

Yes. We are that powerful. And this signpost is one that all the great teachers have shown us—and one which modern physics confirms.

Anyone who desires to reconcile the world has to first begin at home. And "home" in this case is the domain of our own bodies and minds. We all have internal wars and skirmishes we can use to awaken us, and expose areas we need to reclaim on the path of integration and power that nature has given us.

If we are poor, it's only because we are blind to the universal gifts that are constantly available and on tap for us.

If we want to see changes in the world, they have to begin inside of us.

That's not even philosophy. That's straight up engineering and science.

Peace.

Last edited by Dan Richards : 08-23-2016 at 12:45 PM.
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