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Old 11-21-2011, 01:04 PM   #51
graham christian
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Quote:
Dan Harden wrote: View Post
All due respect I have seen you move. We are far apart.
I know it sounds cagey...I get it. But there is no conspiracy theory going on when a thousand people train under a bunch of different teachers and they all end up seeing and talking about the same thing.
As one Shihan said to me (who teaches around the world) your've ruined me. Every where I go, from students to my own teacher, every one's a mess!! We don't know what we're doing or talking about." All I said was "Now you know how I've felt watching you guys."
I just heard from a bunch of people training at a recent seminar who said "This is incredible we're just walking through people and they can't throw us or lock us." This was their old crew, who started to ask "What are you guys doing?" Likewise, I am a sweety and would never harm you, I don't know why but I kind of like you, but Buddy boy, you would be brushed away like you weren't even there. I don't think you really understand or have ever felt what I am talking about. Therefore it doesn't register. It can't. You have no frame of reference for the soft power being discussed. And no I am not just talking about me.
There is simply no comparison to be had between what you have shown on all your videos and then this type of training. There is a certain commonality that would ring true and be more definable. I didn't know the chinese lingo for much of what I do, I had to learn, but the principles are consistent and I could discuss them with grandmaster level guys who had their hands on me and telling me what they called this or that. So outside of verbiage, there is feel. Maybe someday we can play and then go to dinner and share some laughs.

Dan
One day no doubt. As I said, I know and can explain relaxation to those who see it as you describe and they end up with renewed views.

I also said you don't know how many things I agree with you on. Teaching methods being one. Far out concepts I can explain and get people to do, that's my major skill so you don't have to tell me who you can talk to and what they say when you teach for I have the same responses and have done for years. Nothing new to me.

I like it when experienced people see those videos for I like their responses. It tells me what they can see, what they think they can see and what they are unaware of. Indeed I expect it as they are used to what they are used to and so anything outside of that framework they cannot see or understand.

There may be no comparison between what I have shown and what you do but that's all good to me as I don't do what you do.

Come on you and I know why you don't post videos yet you set a different criteria to mine as I see it.

Ha, ha, talk about lost in translation. That's all part of good teaching isn't it?

Regards.G.
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Old 11-21-2011, 01:18 PM   #52
ChrisMoses
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Katherine Derbyshire wrote: View Post
Japan has an advanced, technology-driven economy. There's nothing inherently vague about the language: it can be as precise as any Western language when the situation calls for it.

OTOH, the difference between technical Japanese and literary Japanese is quite dramatic. I'm only a very beginning student of the language, but I find technical Japanese much easier to read. The vocabulary is harder, but it largely dispenses with the grammatical constructs that give literary Japanese its layers.

Was your audience composed of people based in California, or in Japan? My Japanese friends here in the US seem to appreciate American directness.

Katherine
They were all based out of Japan and had flown over for the presentation.

While I agree that it is possible for Japanese to be just as detailed as other languages, I find it interesting that as you begin to get more and more detailed about IS concepts, everyone I've dealt with begins to leverage Chinese terms. "Hara" and "koshi" are rather ambiguous terms that can describe a fairly large area of the body and don't contain the detail that you need to really discuss what's happening in the body. What is the Japanese term for "kua" for example? The "one point" as Tohei described it is often associated with the dantien, but I don't think this is a good 1:1 association.

Chris Moses
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Old 11-21-2011, 01:27 PM   #53
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Maybe the use of Chinese is similar to the use of Latin for medical terms and scientific names. Not more or less precise, necessarily, but a common vocabulary across countries and training traditions.

Katherine
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Old 11-21-2011, 04:06 PM   #54
SteveTrinkle
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Re. Japanese teaching methodology... I only have experience with one group in Japan, it's where I first started aikido. The senior students had all done lots of training with Yamaguchi Sensei since their late teens. They had very heavy hands and very soft touch and could move me in ways that just felt like something weird had happened. But the teaching methodology was to throw the crap out of you until you were so tired, until your muscles were useless and your brain completely fogged,until (as I understood it) your body just had to rely on something other than usual kind of movement. They would always say, "rakuni..." (which was translated as "relax" but not quite relax in the Western meaning). I really think that they just did not know any other methodology and did not know how to describe more clearly what was happening with their bodies. Plus they really liked the macho aspect if this kind of training. In any event, like many have already said, I wish I had been taught this IS/Aiki long ago. Like others have already said, this IS/Aiki approach is showing me something I was looking for for a long time, and really not getting.

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Old 11-21-2011, 05:00 PM   #55
graham christian
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Hi Steven. That's interesting, I was trained the same way except I was given more explanation. So there you are, different teachers again.

Regards.G.
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Old 11-21-2011, 05:39 PM   #56
Eric in Denver
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Christian Moses wrote: View Post
The "one point" as Tohei described it is often associated with the dantien, but I don't think this is a good 1:1 association.
Perhaps a digression, but I think an interesting one. I attended a seminar with Tohei's son last year, and he explained the one point as now being located much, much lower than tradition descriptions of the hara. He identified it as the area a few inches below the knot of a hakama.
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Old 11-21-2011, 05:58 PM   #57
graham christian
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Eric DesMarais wrote: View Post
Perhaps a digression, but I think an interesting one. I attended a seminar with Tohei's son last year, and he explained the one point as now being located much, much lower than tradition descriptions of the hara. He identified it as the area a few inches below the knot of a hakama.
That's right. It always has been that location.

Regards.G.
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Old 11-22-2011, 06:21 AM   #58
phitruong
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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David Orange wrote: View Post
One of these days, we'll have enough interested people in Birmingham that you could come here.

I can probably still get the same guys for Atlanta, though. They were all interested--and Phi Truong would probably come.

David
phi would definitely like to come, since he still has lots to learn, and atlanta or birmingham is still within driving distance.

"budo is putting on cold, wet, sweat stained gi with a smile and a snarl" - your truly
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Old 11-22-2011, 07:45 AM   #59
phitruong
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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And the breath helps loosen the tightness of the abdomen and the fearful, avoiding emotions that would hold it hostage by "protecting" it. And letting the abdominal fascia loosen up, freeing the emotions, deepening the breath, lets the ki move freely. And then the mind can be involved with the dantien and the ki. Then you can harmonize the bones, muscles and fascia with the ki, mind and kokoro.

After that, you can learn methods of really coordinating the body through dantien. So I hear.

David
don't have anything to say about emotional aspect, since i am a bit emotionally retarded.

i don't know enough about the dantien/hara movement to really describe, only that it's the focus and control mechanism of your internal power, and i don't meant it's in the sense of holding hand and singing kumbaya kind of sense. lately, i have a mind that we should have started the IS training here, dantien/hara movement, before other aspect of IS. but what do i know about these stuffs other than talking out of my ass.

"budo is putting on cold, wet, sweat stained gi with a smile and a snarl" - your truly
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Old 11-22-2011, 08:31 AM   #60
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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don't have anything to say about emotional aspect, since i am a bit emotionally retarded.

i don't know enough about the dantien/hara movement to really describe, only that it's the focus and control mechanism of your internal power, and i don't meant it's in the sense of holding hand and singing kumbaya kind of sense. lately, i have a mind that we should have started the IS training here, dantien/hara movement, before other aspect of IS. but what do i know about these stuffs other than talking out of my ass.
The best place to start is probably wherever we can. It is probably a 99.9999% (yes, made up on the spot) certainty we will screw up badly, and that screw-up will have later consequences that we will regret. But at least when we learn better and fix it, we'll have the conviction of hindsight. There is no perfect system. No perfect teacher. Our bodies are the product of billions of years of evolution, and we're silly enough to think anybody can really explain it all. No way, Jose! But then again, maybe we've actually hit that 00.0001% chance of being right from the start, and are too naive or stubborn to realize it? Better to just eat what is put on our plates than starve. There is no dantien with foie gras and a nice Chianti at the banquet I got shuffled into, but they got brussel sprouts, too much snow, and freezing weather, but maybe that is what I need in the end.
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Old 11-22-2011, 08:56 AM   #61
Eric in Denver
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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lately, i have a mind that we should have started the IS training here, dantien/hara movement, before other aspect of IS.
Interesting you say that, Phi. I worked with the suit in finger tips stuff for like a year, and got some sense throughout a large part of my arms, little in the back and kidney area, but couldn't really do anything with it.

Towards the end of summer, I got some feedback, which basically lead me to starting everything over again. So I started back with leg strengthening, being relaxed while standing, jinpath/weight underside practices, and gave up on the finger-tip jin stuff. I also went back to abdominal breathing instead of reverse breathing and started working on feeling suit from abdominal area out instead of the other way around. I feel like I am getting a bit further along now.

If I am in a stance for torifune, I can now use my breathing to rock forward and backwards on my legs a few inches, and can get just a litte motion from my arms. Interestingly, I tried it yesterday while holding a flimsy jo made from a superlight wood, and I completely lost the sense of being connected. I think I have a long ways to go before I get up to pole shaking.
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Old 11-23-2011, 02:16 AM   #62
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

David, I was thinking about what you said about kokoro at the beginning of this thread. This tied back into an article I had read maybe two weeks ago about the wonders of implicit memory.

It gave an example, imagine you are driving a car, now put your hands on the wheel and change lanes.

Okay, the details of the example were slightly foggy, but it was pointing out that what you just did with your hands, under the guidance of your explicit recollection of what you do was actually wrong: you just turned the wheel to one side and relaxed it back, whereas it was claiming what you actually do without realizing is then turn the wheel just as far in the opposite direction, then back. Okay, so I don't have a car to verify the details, just a beaten up cheaply mass-produced bicycle that I soon need to replace, but I got what it meant.

It's not terribly earth-shattering an idea, and I think we all realize it to the point that it is pretty quaint. Your body learned it, it is accessible via an external environmental context, a mnemonic, but if you have to give a conscious recollection of it, you will most likely be unable to just do it without deliberate memorization of the process as it is happening. But then again, it has strange repercussions for body conditioning...

I came to an incidental realization this morning that brought that to a head. Lately in my training I have noticed that the less I self-impose via spatial/thought reasoning in my mind's eye, the less I narrate what I am doing via that process, the better my body would seem to self-organize. I was down to, in essence, a skeleton thought in my head to get my body moving, okay force out there via that body part, force out over there via that body part.

But then I noticed something funny, I got rid of one of the ends. A block in my training I have had related to the mobility of the cervical spine disappeared. It was not that I was trying to impose on it, I was just thinking where I wanted to go, without the how, but I dropped even that. Hmm, maybe there was something wrong with my mentation process, and I just needed to shift that around. So I kept stewing on that during the morning, and then for whatever reason, I dropped both ends, there was nothing left. Or rather, there was still something left, but it was completely below the level of the voice-in-the-head brain, it felt like existing in my body. Like I had to consciously invade every part of my body with my awareness. If I failed to even invade one little place, things would go wrong, but if I focused whatever it was, things started going right again. What the hell was that?

Stranger, when I did this, my body assumed an organization, just even posturally, it clamped down a bit, to something that was much better connected, better able to move and change. After a few minutes, I figured out how to intensify this. It struck me like a cannon ball. This was a mnemonic below the level of my conscious thinking, but still deliberate in a way that is hard to explain. I was feeling my training, nothing more, nothing less. The feeling was exactly that of my practice, but without the mental thought overlay, and reduced to a tingle; it was every pattern I had trained into my body over the past year, with layers peeled off (indeed which I had been told to peel off, but still in the process of figuring how). This was not some mental state that I could have just accessed via a year ago, because there were no underlying patterns to access; it was a superposition of that experience. All the countless movements I have been training, all the improvisation, it had blurred and blended down to one mental mnemonic, that so long as I was that mnemonic, I could access it all, but without thinking about it, and just doing it, at a rate the conscious mind would have been unable to process.

TL;DR Deliberate training of things builds patterns we can later access below the level of heavy-handed conscious thought, but so long as we carry that deliberate shepherding of our bodies outside the training, the actual training can never come out. We must explicitly work towards that.

Last edited by Lee Salzman : 11-23-2011 at 02:29 AM.
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Old 11-23-2011, 11:20 AM   #63
sorokod
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

The IS/IP claim is that it/they provide a superior way to manage confrontations, generate physical power and more. It is then natural to ask why these abilities aren't available to humans "by default" and require a fundamental retraining of the body.

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Old 11-23-2011, 12:35 PM   #64
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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David Soroko wrote: View Post
The IS/IP claim is that it/they provide a superior way to manage confrontations, generate physical power and more. It is then natural to ask why these abilities aren't available to humans "by default" and require a fundamental retraining of the body.
If anything, it may be rather a measure of the unintended abuse humans put upon their bodies and the warped line of evolution through which we arrived at our peculiar form. Our bodies are evolutionary overkill, because they had to be to survive everything a silly monkey could do to it. That overkill can be exploited, but it is not very easy and requires a long and focused period of learning.

That's no different than elite level performance in any physical or mental endeavor. People are not just born sprinters or swimmers or cyclists or gymnasts or writers or astrophysicists or violinists. Sure, you can try to do any of those things without practice, you just will suck at it relative to what is possible. You have to actually develop your innate biological potential, it doesn't just happen on its own. We can already move, balance, absorb and generate power, feel, react, blah blah blah, without training, just rarely good enough to deal with the unpredictable nature of monkey-on-monkey combat.

Also modern living style is mostly sedentary, so we spend a lot of time conditioning in bad movement and thinking habits and postural perversions. We also learn bad movement habits from our parents, who also most likely learned bad movement habits. Half the practice is just removing all the bad crap you've accumulated before starting training, which was allowed to develop because it was never physically stressed enough to fail, which, as far as one-trial human learning goes, gets interpreted as success.
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Old 11-23-2011, 12:43 PM   #65
Janet Rosen
 
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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David Soroko wrote: View Post
The IS/IP claim is that it/they provide a superior way to manage confrontations, generate physical power and more. It is then natural to ask why these abilities aren't available to humans "by default" and require a fundamental retraining of the body.
It starts as soon as we put children in structured rigid shoes and sit them down at desks mist of the day...take it from there...

Janet Rosen
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Old 11-23-2011, 12:51 PM   #66
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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It starts as soon as we put children in structured rigid shoes and sit them down at desks mist of the day...take it from there...
Following this logic societies that don't do so consist entirely of people posseing the IS qualities.
Is this really the case?

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Old 11-23-2011, 01:19 PM   #67
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Following this logic societies that don't do so consist entirely of people posseing the IS qualities.
Is this really the case?
This is sort of like arguing that just because you did not actively forbid your child from reading, but merely failed to provide him with books or show him how to read them, that it is his fault for being illiterate.
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Old 11-23-2011, 01:24 PM   #68
BWells
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

I grew up in a mining town in Colorado and had a couple summers working for the town digging sewer ditches. Had a couple of older (60 maybe) tramp miners doing the pick and shovel digging as well. I'm not saying they had Aiki but they could go all day while my 17 year old body burned out in an hour. They were relaxed, used their whole bodies, used their connection to the ground to throw the dirt with the shovel and when they hit a large rock it seemed like they never fought the rock, but blended with the shape and usually moved it fairly easily. I think anyone who does physical work over a long time and who is good at it does get some parts of Aiki or they beat their bodies up. It's not trained and from the martial arts perspective there are a lot of elements missing but IMHO there are pieces learned over time to in being good with many kinds of physical work.
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Old 11-23-2011, 03:30 PM   #69
sorokod
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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This is sort of like arguing that just because you did not actively forbid your child from reading, but merely failed to provide him with books or show him how to read them, that it is his fault for being illiterate.
Not quite. To follow your analogy it is like sorrunding children with books, encouraging those who try to read and punishing those who don't. Over many generations. Yes they will all be literate.
I assume here that this is/ip thing gives advantage to those who have it and puts those who don't at a disadvantage.

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Old 11-23-2011, 03:35 PM   #70
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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I grew up in a mining town in Colorado and had a couple summers working for the town digging sewer ditches. Had a couple of older (60 maybe) tramp miners doing the pick and shovel digging as well. I'm not saying they had Aiki but they could go all day while my 17 year old body burned out in an hour. They were relaxed, used their whole bodies, used their connection to the ground to throw the dirt with the shovel and when they hit a large rock it seemed like they never fought the rock, but blended with the shape and usually moved it fairly easily. I think anyone who does physical work over a long time and who is good at it does get some parts of Aiki or they beat their bodies up. It's not trained and from the martial arts perspective there are a lot of elements missing but IMHO there are pieces learned over time to in being good with many kinds of physical work.
Perhaps I am wrong but I think that what mr. Harden is claiming has a totally different quality.

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Old 11-23-2011, 04:10 PM   #71
BWells
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Oh I agree that they didn't feel like Dan and , none of these folks could have done any of what Dan does, but they had a much more integrated body than someone like me at the time. As i said it wasn't Aiki but with work and training (and a lot less booze, they really could drink!) they would have had a head start on folks who spend all day at a desk
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Old 11-23-2011, 04:54 PM   #72
sorokod
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Lee Salzman wrote: View Post
If anything, it may be rather a measure of the unintended abuse humans put upon their bodies and the warped line of evolution through which we arrived at our peculiar form. Our bodies are evolutionary overkill, because they had to be to survive everything a silly monkey could do to it. That overkill can be exploited, but it is not very easy and requires a long and focused period of learning.
This is interesting. Are you saying that due to some evolutionary pressure the use of is/ip fell into disrepair? What would this pressure be? Also this implies that some earlier ancestor of ours did have is/ip. Is that your position?

Quote:
That's no different than elite level performance in any physical or mental endeavor. People are not just born sprinters or swimmers or cyclists or gymnasts or writers or astrophysicists or violinists. Sure, you can try to do any of those things without practice, you just will suck at it relative to what is possible. You have to actually develop your innate biological potential, it doesn't just happen on its own. We can already move, balance, absorb and generate power, feel, react, blah blah blah, without training, just rarely good enough to deal with the unpredictable nature of monkey-on-monkey combat.
Actually as presented it is quite different. If I want to become stronger I can devise some half baked training scheme and if I follow it I will become stronger. Not as strong as I could be with professional coaching and not as strong as top athletes, but stronger. Same for sprinting and other activities you mentioned. With is/ip as described here we have something qualitatively different. It is not more of the same, it is counterintuitive and it can not be acquired without a teacher (or can but with vanishingly small probability). If I am misrepresenting the is/ip case, please correct me.

Quote:
Also modern living style is mostly sedentary, so we spend a lot of time conditioning in bad movement and thinking habits and postural perversions. We also learn bad movement habits from our parents, who also most likely learned bad movement habits. Half the practice is just removing all the bad crap you've accumulated before starting training, which was allowed to develop because it was never physically stressed enough to fail, which, as far as one-trial human learning goes, gets interpreted as success.
How do you define modern? Since the industrial revolution? Do you believe that before "modern" times humans could tap into is/ip directly without a need to retrain themselves? How about those tribes in the Amazon basin (probably don't exist any more but just for illustration), are they (were they) in a ip/is state of grace?

As I was was writing this another question occurred, are humans are the only beings capable of achieving is/ip? If so why? If not who or what else?

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Old 11-24-2011, 01:15 AM   #73
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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This is interesting. Are you saying that due to some evolutionary pressure the use of is/ip fell into disrepair? What would this pressure be? Also this implies that some earlier ancestor of ours did have is/ip. Is that your position?
No, I am saying it never actually existed as an inborn trait. Humans are not born knowing how to read. But with lots of training and learning from their parents, they can. And only after that, in which you had societies stable enough to pass on reading, could you legitimately say that being a better reader could function as a selective pressure. Even then, that is comparatively modern. Go back a couple hundred years. What were literacy rates like then? What was the state of literacy like throughout most of the timeline of the modern human species (wikipedia claims anatomically modern human is 200,000 years old, and behaviorially modern is 50,000)? Reading is pretty new as a widespread phenomenon. Compare to IS, which has much less reason to spread than reading.

The human mind and body are very powerful, but for reasons totally unrelated to IS, or at best the precursors of IS. If you take the flexibility rolled into the system to do many things, and you instead apply it to one purpose that necessitates all of that functionality, you get something way more than the sum of its parts, like the ability to read books.

Quote:
Actually as presented it is quite different. If I want to become stronger I can devise some half baked training scheme and if I follow it I will become stronger. Not as strong as I could be with professional coaching and not as strong as top athletes, but stronger. Same for sprinting and other activities you mentioned. With is/ip as described here we have something qualitatively different. It is not more of the same, it is counterintuitive and it can not be acquired without a teacher (or can but with vanishingly small probability). If I am misrepresenting the is/ip case, please correct me.
The likelihood you will encounter certain feelings on your own at such a magnitude that you will recognize them as significant is vanishingly small without a huge amount of experimentation in the actual domain which could take a lifetime, several lifetimes, to accumulate. A teacher can painstakingly get you to feel just a bit of it, and give you positive motivation to continue further even when that little taste he allowed you to feel would otherwise not feel very motivating to you. Especially when other alternatives may feel immediately more productive, but have way lower potentials in terms of ultimate utility. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Example: when you throw a punch, it may feel like you get more of your body mass into it by throwing your hip forward with your torso to get your torso moving like a giant swiveling door. Indeed, this is an actual improvement over just flopping the arm out at your target, because there is a bigger mass accelerating. But now your torso is unstable, and your arm is, by virtue of being upon it, unstable, and has comparatively little power to if you learned how to strike without bleeding there, with, well, jin, if you wanna call it that. But since the torso swivel is a relatively easy thing to to learn by comparison, you see pushing the hips through everywhere.

Likewise, winding up for a punch may feel like it makes your punching immediately stronger, because you now have a longer time to accelerate your fist. People instinctively do this. But, it now takes you much longer to prepare to strike, so people see you coming from a mile away, but also there are a lot of other factors that can still make the end result weak even when it lands, like the above. But with, practice, you can learn to increase the power of your striking in ways that take quite a long way to learn, but eliminate the need to rely on windup to actually accelerate.

Those two issues are a matter of bodily harmony and how it applies to punching. You will not get your entire body to act in harmony on your own very quickly, no more than you will independently discover quantum physics on your own, without lots of painstaking research that may be too much for just your lifetime, having never learned anything about physics. Some things are very hard to see even when they're staring you in the face.

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How do you define modern? Since the industrial revolution? Do you believe that before "modern" times humans could tap into is/ip directly without a need to retrain themselves? How about those tribes in the Amazon basin (probably don't exist any more but just for illustration), are they (were they) in a ip/is state of grace?
I refer to the accumulation of maladaptive habits by Homo Sapiens Officus Workerus. I am a programmer, I spend a lot of time sitting down, only using part of my body outside of exercise or other times I'm allowed to pry myself away from the computer. If there were ever a chance to learn IS spontaneously, it would not be at the keyboard, verily. A miner or agricultural worker or samurai probably has a better chance at independently discovering IS than me.

Last edited by Lee Salzman : 11-24-2011 at 01:29 AM.
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Old 11-24-2011, 03:41 AM   #74
sorokod
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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Lee Salzman wrote: View Post
No, I am saying it never actually existed as an inborn trait. Humans are not born knowing how to read. But with lots of training and learning from their parents ...
So as is the case with reading, while the brain that didn't evolve "to read" (so to speak) it is capable of reading, it is the same with is/ip where the body didnt evolve for it but is capable of
aquring it. Is this a fair summary? If so, do you beleive that is/ip is exlusivley a human capacity?

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... You will not get your entire body to act in harmony on your own very quickly, no more than you will independently discover quantum physics on your own, without lots of painstaking research that may be too much for just your lifetime, having never learned anything about physics. Some things are very hard to see even when they're staring you in the face.
Not quite like sprinters or swimmers then.

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...A miner or agricultural worker or samurai probably has a better chance at independently discovering IS than me.
Which one is it, quantum physics or physical labour? I don't think that you can have it both ways. Seems to me that the amount and scope of training that is needed (it is claimed) to obtain is/ip implies
great amount of leisure time which would be inconsistent with a agricultural worker.

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Old 11-24-2011, 03:55 AM   #75
Lee Salzman
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

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David Soroko wrote: View Post
So as is the case with reading, while the brain that didn't evolve "to read" (so to speak) it is capable of reading, it is the same with is/ip where the body didnt evolve for it but is capable of
aquring it. Is this a fair summary? If so, do you beleive that is/ip is exlusivley a human capacity?
I tried asking some dolphin friends. Responses were not forthcoming.

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Not quite like sprinters or swimmers then.
Or is it? Could a swimmer necessarily coach himself to know everything there is to know about at the highest levels of competitive swimming? I think you are underestimating the difficulty.

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Which one is it, quantum physics or physical labour? I don't think that you can have it both ways. Seems to me that the amount and scope of training that is needed (it is claimed) to obtain is/ip implies
great amount of leisure time which would be inconsistent with a agricultural worker.
It's not either-or. The point I am making is you will need hands on experience in the domain in question in sufficient quantity to discover it independently through reasoning about that domain, and that is only a possibility. On the other hand, physical laborers lack a competitive context, in which, having discovered it, they would either gain such an advantage that it would be highly sought after, or that others without it would be at such a disadvantage that they would feel a driving need to pursue it just to compete. That competition alone would ensure it was not only discovered, but continuously improved. Physical laborers might benefit from it, but not as much in the status sense as a soldier or military leader would that would drive the evolution of it. Empirically, historical warriors did discover it and continuously evolve it, because they had the hands-on experience and the need, or we wouldn't be discussing it now.

Say it took you a lifetime to get the seed idea and develop it. Then maybe you didn't understand it well enough that you could get others to do it, despite trying desperately to explain to them. So maybe you're the lucky clever person who not only discovers the seed, but then also manages to get it to sprout in another human's mind by also discovering proper teaching methods so that your new lineage doesn't just die off. Then, along the way, many other humans improve on it, over the course of hundreds of years, to the point where it is a field of such astonishing complexity that no one human could have discovered it all, indeed didn't discover it all, because it took a bunch of humans hundreds of years at least to flesh it out. Even then, it is an ongoing process, much like physics.

Last edited by Lee Salzman : 11-24-2011 at 03:58 AM.
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