Thread: Fear in Aikido
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Old 09-09-2006, 08:50 AM   #5
Fred Little
Dojo: NJIT Budokai
Location: State Line NJ/NY
Join Date: Apr 2001
Posts: 641
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Re: iwama note, censored?

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote:
Dammit, this is one of my favorite subjects and, while I agree to a small degree with the "fear" thing, I also disagree with it somewhat.

Many people who go into martial arts go somewhat because of "fear", but for many males, underlying that fear (or even quite apart from any fear) is a desire to be able to compete in the herd for breeding partners. Most of the things we are compelled to do in life can ultimately be attributed to breeding competitions or getting noticed in a way that makes us desireable as a breeding partner. As one stage actor related a conversation he'd had with Sir Lawrence Olivier when he'd wailed, "Oh Larry, why do we do it? Why do we give so much of ourselves for the public?"

Olivier replied, "We do it for 'look at me', 'look at me', 'look at me'."

Many things are done for that reason, including martial arts. It doesn't have to be fear. Watch the dojo politics sometime and see how much of it can be explained by breeding rituals, including pecking order, etc.

My 2 cents.

Mike

Mike:

I agree. This is just a question of labelling and drawing useful analytical distinctions, not of the underlying phenomena.

We could talk past each other for years if we obsess on the labelling.

I would just suggest that the flip side of "desire to have/desire to get" is "fear of not having/fear of not getting/fear of having and losing."

Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, I'm glossing over a huge area involving a biologically identifiable "fear response," pecking order and reproduction based triggers, and more culture-specific triggers that invoke those underlying mechanisms.

Like suffering, fear is an interesting phenomon because it can arise through anticipation or remembrance in ever more subtle forms.

Ah well.

Best,

FL
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