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Cliff Judge wrote:
I don't think Ueshiba thought of aiki as an ethically or morally neutral thing at all. This is one of the ways I think you guys are cutting yourselves off from the majority of the point of Aikido by framing aiki as a technical object. You are closing a lot of doors.
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I see it as opening doors. If there are no ethical boundaries placed upon it, we are more free to do what we want with it. At the same time it makes the ethical choice aspect all the more important: we have the power to destroy, but we choose not to. Why would an art stress ethics at all if to even apply it precluded unethical outcomes?
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I also think you are misapplying the term aiki. A year back people were speaking mostly of internal power and then it became IP/Aiki and now you just say aiki. Aiki is a term that was not applied to particularly important aspects of martial arts before the sensational, travelling medicine show days of the late Meiji / Taisho / Showa periods. Other Japanese systems had their own ideas about internal power, as inner teachings. If it was considered to be such a game-changer, you would imagine the game would have been changed when people relied on these skills to survive and do their job.
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Internal power and aiki are separate but related things, not to be confused. Internal power is the basis on which later aiki skills can be developed, but you're not going to develop aiki skills without sufficient internal power. IP is the fulcrum, so it just kind of goes without saying that when someone talks about aiki they are talking about IP, and a specific sort that is necessary to the later development of aiki. IP by itself does not automatically confer ability with aiki. I think if you look back on what people were saying, there is no contradiction here.