Thread: Aikido and time
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Old 08-31-2015, 04:18 AM   #1
StefanHultberg
Dojo: Roskilde
Location: Roskilde
Join Date: Jul 2015
Posts: 70
Denmark
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Aikido and time

This post will be long, please see it as an honest statement of ignorance and extreme frustration, a cry for help -- nothing more.

Time irks me. In this mysterious and wonderful (perhaps) 10 or 11-dimensional world of (possibly) vibrating one-dimensional filaments, in this dance of pure energy, the concept of time seems to annoy my brain more than anything else. There's one's own subjective experience of time, there's the physics, there's the spiritual and psychological wisdom of both east and west, add the dimension of aikido and it all becomes clear -- or not.

O-Sensei has many times been quoted as stating his belief that time (and space) does not exist. One example:

"Even standing with my back toward the opponent is enough. When he attacks, hitting, he will injure himself with his own intention to hit. I am one with the universe and I am nothing else. When I stand, he will be drawn to me. There is no time and space before Ueshiba of Aikido — only the universe as it is."

It does truly seem to be so -- time doesn't exist, at least not (only) the way we think it does. It is easy to assimilate this fact as a sort of "cold fact", but integrating this truth with "ordinary everyday time", everyday experience of time....

A few years ago I was practicing for a grade-test and was huffing and puffing myself (and my partner) through a series of free techniques (Jiyu Waza). My Sensei, presumably considering both the technique and the heart condition of the old man before him, said to me: "slow down to the point where you can give yourself time to feel every part of every technique". During ki no nagare techniques I try desperately to remember that kihon represents, amongst other things, the means to truly learn the details of technique and subsequent ki no nagare techniques should include all these details, albeit perhaps in modified form. I had heard it many times, and tried to live up to it, but this time it was different.

I tried again and truly experienced the phenomenon described in some of the dan-syllabusses as "extending time". It simply felt like I had much more time, and energy, to do what I did -- even if it didn't take more time. Someone here on aikiweb wrote: "slow means smooth -- smooth means fast". Those were pretty wise words I think. Admittedly we didn't make any empiric time measurements etc. when I had this experience, but it sure brought home to me the plasticity and elasticity of time, at least in a subjective sense.

Subjective indeed, if I understand some of the mainstream scientific thinking at the moment, time is always fully present in all three of its "components" -- past, present, and future -- and the fact that we experience these three at all is, in fact, a psychosocial construction, a consequence of the way our senses are constructed and the way we are "brought up". Time is like an old VHS videotape, the whole tape is there the whole time, but the detector (our own mind in the case of time) only reads one snippet at a time, and this snippet we call "the present". I find the idea that all time is there at all times a truly mindboggling concept, it is the mind's program apparently that experiences the "present", remembers the "past", and expects the "future". The mind is constructed to experience time in a specific way.

Mind over matter, or at least mind and matter in equality and harmony, those are considerations illustrated all the way from religion to philosophy and on to quantum physics. It does seem to be true that an elementary particle, existing in an indeterminate state between a wave and a particle, manifests as a wave or a particle only as it is observed. An electron exists as a probability wave function, a sort of oddly shaped "field" around the nucleus of the atom and, when observed as a particle, manifests as such at the location where the probability wave function determines that it is most likely to do so. Creation actually does play dice!

If you hold an elementary particle in your hand and send its antiparticle to the ultimate end of the universe the twin particles still apparently communicate. Change the "spin" of one of them and the other also changes instantly. Quantum entanglement -- freaky, do they actually talk over this vast distance or do they know that you are going to change the spin of one of them in the future? Do they operate completely outside our concept of time, or space -- or spacetime??

The faster you travel the slower time passes and at the quantum scale of things, in the so-called "quantum foam", time forms loops and spirals, goes around in circles, forwards, backwards and forms all sorts of tricks.

Myriads of questions and very few answers in my mind when it comes to true understanding of time -- or reality at all. True mystery.

Dogen says: "time is being" - what the hell does that mean?? Heidegger said pretty much the same, but did he mean the same as Dogen? In the end, though -- can you communicate the ineffable with words? In "The Sandman Ouverture", by Neil Gaiman, Lord Time is described by Morpheus like this:

"Time watches us from the micromoments between seconds. Night exists in the vast stretches of untime and unspace beyond every event horizon".

Reading what physics says about "true reality" I'm just about ready to believe anything....

In a practical aikido sense, understanding time better somehow seems important. A few months ago I noticed some of my students making grim faces every time they thought they had performed a technique less than perfectly. I considered this in my mental blender of time, kokyu-ho, mind over matter and intention, power through full focus etc. etc. and realized that perhaps one should use zanshin not to second guess your technique but to just fill yourself with a "feeling of perfectness" and focused energy. What if the period of zanshin is actually connected to the time at the start of the technique, could a feeling of having carried out a technique badly actually reach back in time and ruin the execution of it? I believe it would violate a few paradoxes and current physics-thinking, but I wonder.....

I once heard a Japanese Shihan talking about the absolute necessity of intention in kokyu Ho, the totally absorbing visualization of actually cutting the enemy with your sword in order to carry out true technique. Mind over matter. Judaeo-christian scripture says that if you have faith only as little as a mustard seed -- you can tell a mountain to rise up and throw itself in the sea. Mind over matter. A significant portion of different spiritual literature emphasizes mind over matter, faith as a precursor for action, dreams as the foundation of reality. It seems to me O Sensei pretty much emphasized the same thing, mind and matter in harmony, e.g.:

The secret of aikido is to make yourself become one with the universe and to go along with its natural movements. One who has attained this secret holds the universe in him/herself and can say, ‘I am the universe.'"

Mind and matter, mind and time, only a few things are certain -- we understand very little of it and everything is possible. I only know that I wish to understand more of this and I would like to include these possibilities in my aikido-training.

Could anyone add some wisdom in connection with time and aikido?
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