The reason for great distress is the body. Without it, what distress could there be?
Translation by Stefan Stenudd
The only reason we suffer hurt is that we have bodies; if we had no bodies, how could we suffer?
Translation by Arthur Waley
What makes me liable to great calamity is my having the body (which I call myself); if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?
Translation by James Legge
I always found this part from Chapter 13 of Táo Té Ching very inspiring. According to Arthur Waley, the word “body” in Chinese, shên, can have two meanings: “the physical body” or “the concept self”. What does this mean? What does the word “self” mean?
Our most basic way to identify our self, is our physical body, I guess. When we say me or I, as a child, we speak of our body. Our identity is inseparable from our physical appearance at this point of time. Of course only a very short time later our physical body has changed a lot, but we might be stuck for a long time with this idea of who we are. And if someone asks us if this person is you when showing us a photo ourselves in the past, we might start to get some idea that yes, it is still me, even though the body is different, because we are older at this time.
Most people will reach the point of maturity where we realise that who we are is a bit more deep rooted than the body. We did not choose who our parents are, or which time or which culture to be born into. It is just a throw of the dice deciding which body we end up with.
Our next identification, as we grow slightly more mature, is usually the mind. We will naturally have some opinions and emotions about different situations and subjects. There are patterns happening to us based on our body, and on the history we have experienced up to this point in our life.
As we already discussed, the genetics coming from our ancestors, what we inherit through the body, were not chosen, so therefore it is not personal. Also, what happens to us in our childhood and early life is a natural consequence of where and when we were born and which situations we find ourselves in. So our mind is just as far from personal as our physical body.
If we are not our body, and not our mind, who are we? We do have a body, yes; we also do have thoughts and opinions, yes; and in a way bridging our body and our thoughts, we have emotions. All of the above are random, in the meaning that they were not chosen by us. Is it who we are? Is this our self? Maybe, many will say that yes, this is who we are. And they are willing to fight their friends, and kill them, because they are in conflict with what their friends consider that their self is.
It really does not matter if it is political views, nationality, religion, or any other random classification based on our definition of self. The result is that we end up defending this self (the fake one in my opinion). Killing our friends. Attacking each other. Because we think that ourselves are different from themselves.
Because we are inflicted by thoughts and emotions telling us that the one we see in our inner eye is our enemy. At some level we would be able to see the person if they happen to be in front of us. This is the tool of a politician. It is easy to ask a soldier to kill an enemy they know only by their conspiring whispers. It is a different situation if the soldiers already know each other.
However, at a lower level our mind would even prevent us from seeing the reality because everything is filtered through our distorted view of the world around us. We do not even see them even if they are right there, because our mind blinds us from observing the real world. If we could see we will know that this is our friend. This disease is causing us to perform violence to our friends.
Naturally our friend have the same disease. They perceive us as a threat and will be attacking us. This mutual sickness is feeding itself, because hostile acts breeds more hostility. As we consider each other enemies, and we are always looking at ways of defending the self, there is eternal war.
We arm ourselves. We want to defend our “self”. We build armies and plot, and build up our image of who we are, as something separate from who they are.
Imagine two armed people meeting in a dark alley. Both are trained to the highest level in drawing and shooting, and they both have the best equipment available. They have been trained to look for hostility in the other. They see each other. They immediately see that the other is not a police officer, and they seem to be armed. Where are the hands of the other, and where are their own hands?
When these two both draw their guns and kill each other. Who’s fault would it be? They were triggering each other to draw at the same time. Was it the alley’s fault, that it was dark there? Or was it the fault of the person making the guns, or producing the ammunition? Or was it the fault of the people teaching them how to shoot? Or does the fault lie with the basic flaw in the mind that we want to defend what we define as our “self”? In reality they were both headed to the same restaurant, their wife or husband waiting for them at neighbour tables.
The mind is responsible for all the factors, except for the natural darkness of some alleys. It makes all environments dark because it prevents us from seeing reality, but some actual darkness will always be in some places. As long as there is light, there will be shadow.
In my opinion our path, or road, in the practice we are doing every day, is to increase our awareness about what is happening inside of ourselves. By being aware of what is going on inside, we have a basis for peaceful communication with ourselves. Not denying thought or emotion, but acknowledging that they are there, and respecting that this is the state we are in, at this moment.
This peaceful interaction with ourselves gives us a fundament to be able to act peaceful in our interaction with the world outside ourselves, even if some of the ones we are in contact with does not share our level of awareness. By seeing the causality of mind state and action, we have understanding when someone is doing something which might be considered not ideal. We understand that nobody can do otherwise than what the mind dictates, until we have the level to see what is going on in ourselves.
Most important of all, we have the freedom to choose independently of our mind when we realise that our thoughts and emotions are guiding us to act insanely.
We are relinquishing our self, by realising in our keiko, a deeper meaning of self. Maybe our self is life itself? What this is I would not be able to say. However, we could start by realising that our self is something which does not require defence. The reality is still true, no matter how distorted people’s opinion is about it is. There is no threat to neither reality, nor life itself.
Our body will die, so will our mind, with all its opinions and emotions. Even everybody who ever met us will die, and we will be forgotten. But life is always present. Just as it is in us now, like it was ten or thirty years ago, even though our body consisted of different physical material back then, and were quite physiological different from now. Life was there then, now, and until life goes on without our body. We can’t kill life, we can’t defend life. Is this our real self?
Since before I stepped on to the tatami, my opinion has been that aikido is the opposite of self defence. It is based on my experience. It has been solidified by my practise. Still, there are no problems practising with people doing self defence (they are quite few, in the part of the aikido world where I go most frequently, but they do exist). They have different experience and different training, so naturally their opinion will differ from mine.
This is no problem. We should practise together. We probably have different definition of some words, we might follow different principles in our physical keiko. However, it is fascinating to study how to do our keiko in a way that can satisfy our needs to proceed on our way. Our path of “The Art of Peace”, as the Founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba called it.
Now, I do not read Chinese, so whether the original sign in Tào Té Ching means body, or self, I would not know. However, I enjoy the observation of Arthur Waley that the word could have both meanings. No matter if that statement is correct or not, it awoke my curiosity, and sparked the fire for this little project of mine: To relinquishing the fake self, while nurturing and rejuvenating the body and the mind, getting in touch with whatever our real self could be.
A master of deception Who takes you by the hand Then leads you to the palace of the damned He pulls the strings inside you And plays upon your fears Your final scream is music to his ears
Robert Halford – Evil Never Dies
What is the meeting point in a verbal interaction? Is there such a thing? Lately I have been pondering upon the concept of the meeting point in a general sense; Not merely in our positional play in our physical structure on the tatami, but our meeting with people in the real world, even over the phone. In my experience, if the partners does not agree upon a meeting point, no exchange will happen.
A common problem in a conflict is that the two parts are blindly focusing on one single aspect, with no attention to the view of the other part. This tunnelvision is a common effect of the human mind, I guess. Sometimes we are so single-mindedly focused on the problem that even if a number of possible solutions are right there in front of our eyes, we will never be able to see them. So the “time-aspect” is of paramount importance as well ass the “space-aspect”. If we are lost in the past or the future, we are absent in the present moment, where all the solutions can be found.
In some cases, one part involved in the conflict has a more developed awareness. By being aware of what the mind is doing, they can still see the world around them, and even if the other part has a too low awareness to see anything outside their own emotions and thoughts, the higher level person could meet them where they have their attention or lead them to a reasonable location for a meeting point.
Christian Tissier sensei said something some years ago which has stuck in my mind: “If the partner does not accept the point, it is not a point.” So if two parts in a conflict are both trying to communicate through their separate meeting points, they will not get anywhere, because they are both having monologues, not a dialogue, because the phone line is going to different connecting places, and they are not speaking to each other, even though they are both speaking.
I have experienced this a number of times, and many times I have been part of this situation. My workplace is a very interesting laboratory for this kind of study (I work in the reception of a big dental clinic). Sometimes even though we see where our partner is, we can’t really meet them. And a great deal of the time we don’t have the level to even see the situation outside the maze of thoughts and emotions.
One situation I find myself in often is that once I shift my own attempt for a meeting to where my partner is, they evade my meeting by starting speaking of an entirely different topic. And every time I shifted to meet them, they kept jumping to a different theme. My theory is that I was mistaken about what the real meeting point was, and saw merely the outer physical contact point of our conversation. It does, to a certain degree, require a mutual level of awareness to come to a point where an exchange is possible.
One can still to a certain degree help the other achieve a higher level. Vice versa, a low level is contagious. So it does benefit the situation a lot if at least one part can see what our respective mind is doing, and through this, being able to observe the world outside ourselves, and noticing the partner, and their meeting point, because we do need to meet somewhere to have a meeting.
In music there are a lot of technical principles, scales, or modes, which transmits different emotions (ionian, dorian, phrygian and so on). In a way music and aikido are very similar in nature, because we are using technical principles to transmit emotions. Of course, in music this communication also is happening between the musicians, but with sound it gives the audience a more complete impression of what is going on compared to in aikido, where we use touch as the transmission medium.
Even in the relatively simple katas we perform with our friends in the dojo is sufficiently complex to easily get confused when analysing the meeting point. The first thing to notice would be that the meeting point is not always the same as a contact point. We might have many contact points, but there is always only one meeting. There are several levels of the meeting happening. But in all levels, and all categories, the partners needs to be in agreement about what the meeting point is.
Of course, this is not something we have to think about during our time on the tatami, because it will happen naturally in our movements. If we have a problem, we will experience the problem. And the grace of the keiko is that by continuing to study, we will close in on this theory with our movements, even if we did not think about these things. Just as a good melody in music can be found without knowing anything about musical theory.
In my opinion, aikido is more than just a physical activity, to keep ourselves fit. It is something which should benefit the world outside the tatami. Thus, it would be interesting to analyse these things, to find similarities with what we face, for example at work, on the phone, with a customer, a colleague, or a person from a different company. The meeting point becomes relevant.
A huge aspect of the meeting point is to be present in the world we live in at this moment. Very often our attention is drawn towards what has happened in the past or towards something we imagine will happen in the future. Even if we are discussing past events, or planning the future with our partner, it is fundamentally important to be in a realistic respect to what is, right now. Because no matter what has happened, or no matter what we want to achieve, the current situation is where we have to start from. No excuses, like “It should be like this!” will work, because what is, is the way it is, right now. And there is nothing we can do about that.
When we find ourselves in a situation at work where we feel stuck. We do understand that an exchange needs to happen for us to get on with our jobs, but we are just not able to. There is the time dimension, where the mind can be holding grudges, or we are acting out of fear or desire for some fantasy future situation. Or we just can’t see the meeting with our partner, because we are blinded by our assumptions, judgement and other pollution from our mind. No matter how hard we try we are just not able to meet our partner. Just as when I was shifting to meet my partner, and my partner was evading me (from my point of view) to a different subject because I did not have the level to see the real meeting point.
We could say that just like the scales and modes are describing a theory for what will sound good in music, the meeting on the tatami could be described as a fulcrum. We have an exhalation phase, we are closing in on the fulcrum, and an inhalation phase, where we are moving away from the fulcrum. At the same time we will have rotations around the fulcrum in any direction.
It is a bit like the gravitational interaction of masses meeting in space. There is a gravitational pull between all masses at all times, but as the masses close in on each other, they start to affect each other more. So they move towards each other, move around each other, and fly apart, with a fulcrum as the meeting point. Their centre of mass might never reach the location of the meeting point, but rather swing around it, closing in, and moving out again. Otherwise we would have a collision, and mechanically, the same principles would apply.
A fulcrum can move, it can even be subject to accelerations. However, in this case it is a relative fulcrum which a part of a bigger system, with more parts, also following the nature of fulcrums, moving in, moving out and rotating around a common centre point, which is the meeting point of the entire system.
A fulcrum protects the integrity of the partners. There is no way we can interact with our partner by pushing, pulling or twisting. Both partners have integrity, and the integrity is needed for the principle to be valid.
So what happens if we try to “violate the meeting point”? We will experience that our partner becomes “heavy”. Even if our partner is not physically resisting us, we will find difficulties in performing our movements. If we use leverage, timing and maybe superior strength, we still might be able to succeed in our movement, but “the lightness of touch” we have with our partner if we conserve the fulcrum, will be lost. And I guess this kind of experience will not help us in the world outside the dojo. You can’t solve a conflict with a person on the phone, or even across a desk, with physical strength.
There is a principle in tào which I prefer to call actionless activity (wu wei). This quality is sometimes translated as non action, or choosing the path of minimum effort. This quality is very interesting, because it is the only way we can have fulcrum conservation. In my opinion “actionless activity” is a good way to describe it, because “actionless” specifies that the action is always neutral, and “activity” means that we are active (not passive).
This is a hard challenge for the mind. We need to be present in the meeting. This means that we can’t run away from things which we fear; And it means that we can’t cling to things which we desire. Just being present in the meeting point, NOW. This is what is.
Very often our focus tends to shift to what tori is doing, and what tori should or should not do, and so on, while neglecting the role of uke. Both partners are part of a martial interaction. If one part moves, it has consequences for all other parts. If one side moves their tanks to strike, the opposing side will not stay in their current position, if the integrity of their ranks are compromised by the movement of the other side. If in chess our opponent moves a piece and will be able to strike at our piece on the next move, we need to reconsider our positions.
In aikido we are doing it together, so it is not like in war or in chess. However, the martial nature is still there. So when tori moves, uke should, in my opinion, continuously be searching for the best position, and not asking themselves: “Do I have to move?” (no you don’t, but then it would not be a martial arts any more, when the partner have the position for a significant strike, and will not because we don’t knock down our friends in aikido).
What is all of this good for? Why overanalyse and create theories about what is indescribable? The Way that can be described is not the general way. I guess, for at least me, it gives inspiration for the study. It is nice to have different aspects to focus on from year to year. We still study the same movements every day of the year. The theory brings spice to our aiki-food. I guess, at least for me, it is also important to relate all our study in the tatami to the actual world outside the dojo.
Besides, in many kata our contact point(s) are quite distant from our meeting point. So it really helps the understanding of the movement to be aware of where the centre of the movement is. As an example in irimi nage or shiho nage the contact point is in the height of our noses, while our meeting, in my opinion is in between our front hips. It does help our technique to be aware of this.
The most interesting moments, the situations where we learn the most, is when we meet partners who are not easy to practise with. This goes both for aikido and in life outside the dojo. We have to study, both the physical form, but even more the awareness of what happens in our mind when we encounter an obstacle.
In my opinion we should never ask our partner to change something, neither as uke nor as tori (unless it is a matter of safety). Every situation is an opportunity to discover new things. And yes, most of the useful things, which can make a change, are what happens inside of us. We can’t stop the greater conflicts in the world with our choices. The development of our species have to start with how we deal with the people we happen to meet. And aikido, in my opinion, is a kinder garden, an educational system for dummies in how to deal with conflicts, and how to live peacefully.
Do you need what I need? Boundaries overthrown Look inside, to each his own
Do you trust what I trust? Me, myself and I Penetrate the smoke screen, I see through the selfish lie
J. Hetfield
From the very beginning of my aikido journey I was told about keeping the beginner’s mind. Both my day to day teachers, which did aikido a few years at that time, and the professional teachers I met, who did aikido for a lifetime, spoke of the concept of shoshin. At a first glance, of course, this makes sense. To not become arrogant; To not consider myself an expert; To not stop learning. I considered it as a natural door to learn more. As a beginner this was never a challenge, and to this day those parts (I did not at that time see all the parts) has not been obstructing my road.
However, I think that there is a lot more to this concept than what initially meets our eye. Otherwise the professional teachers would not have spoken of shoshin as such a profound quality. All of them explained it in a way which I could not, at that time, relate to. I guess this subject passed out of my field of study, for a while.
At the time of the passing of T. K. Chiba sensei, a video interview with him was released. What I perceived from that video was that his most important recommendation to the future generations of aikidokas was to keep shoshin. Even though I never met this teacher personally (I only had contact with his students), I was inspired to put some emphasis into researching, for myself, what shoshin really means, for me. Presently I am also interested in how the concept of shoshin can help support us in the world outside the dojo.
According to wikipedia sho means initial, and shin means mind. So the translation I was given as a beginner: the beginner’s mind, is understandable. The mindset is open for new information, for learning.
But does this mean that the state of a person who never did any practise, at all, is of higher quality, than that of one who has been studying all their lifetime? This seems to be a paradox? Why practise at all, if we already have the quality we are seeking in the first place? Why strive for a lower quality than that which we already start with? We could of course escape that koan by saying that we are procuring other qualities, and in that process we should strive to preserve the initial one. I guess that would explain it, to a certain level.
What is easy for the beginner is to receive new information, because there is less content in their mind already, in this field of study. There is less past experience of this kind. Even if a beginner are dreaming of what comes in the future, it is not yet based on past experience, so the dream is easily “exorcised” by exposure to the present moment in the keiko. The beginner will more easily have the keiko as a support, or anchor, to stay present in the current situation, more so than the more experienced practitioner, which is more heavily restricted by the inner propaganda and censorship of the mind. I will explain what I mean by propaganda and censorship below.
The challenge will arise when there is an extensive amount of past experience and knowledge in our system during keiko (or in life). The shoshin is lost when our past memories triggers the mind into generating a projection of our past into a future time, where we will have an expectation of what is going to happen. What we expect might not happen. And the most problematic part is, of course, that our expectation is so strong, that even if it did not happen, we would interpret, and filter, the information we have from the situation, to fit our idea of “what should have happened”. For a scientist this is a calamity!
When the mind has a “reservoir” of information, it tends to label the information to reduce the amount of processes needed to perform a simple task. So if a teacher shows shiho nage, we will not see what the teacher is showing. At the moment our system recognise something we experienced in the past, we will immediately shut down and perform the same thing “we always do”.
Similarly, when we meet our partner to study we might fall into the same trap. It might even happen with the same partner we do keiko together with every single day. And more frequently it would occur during our first meeting with somebody new, at a seminar. The mind still tends to standardise the meeting to what we experienced in the past. Predicting the future, or rather, most likely, constructing a fantasy. As I mentioned before, if the current situation does not fit with our expectation of what the situation “should be”, the mind will hide the parts which contradicts our idea, and put more emphasis, on the parts which actually supports our view. It enhances whatever fits with the initial mind and suppresses whatever contradicts it. So in this way, the words “initial mind” means the exact opposite of what we are discussing here.
We should always be watchful of these things, as words has a way of oversimplifying things. As we saw above. Initial mind can mean many different things, even completely opposite things. We may argue the logic of both interpretations of the word. However, in this particular case the situation is trivial, because it is obvious for us that the word just turned the whole thing around for us. The more intricate situations on the tatami though, might be more perilous. Furthermore, in the complexity of life outside the dojo it is an immense challenge to not get trapped by the mind in this way.
I mentioned the mental labelling, and the mind’s tendency to protect it’s initial idea, protecting it’s “self”. A consequence of this “self protection” (or “self defence”) is the random preferences we tend to fall into, over time. We like this and we dislike this. From the start we just experienced it all for the first time, and some things we enjoyed more than other things. However, we still did not have time for investing our enjoyment in one thing naturally leading us to abhorring it’s opposite.
Sometimes two partners on the tatami have so different preferences (what we like and dislike), and ideas of what we think we should do, that we will experience a conflict. It could really be anything, but I will try to give just a few examples:
During katate dori one might put more emphasis on keeping a complete grab, while the other might put more emphasis on the integrity of the position (in some situations we have to choose a distribution between these two qualities, like 70% – 30%, so they may appear to us as opposites if the partner chooses the other way around);
One might be seeking to strengthen their posture by having a lot of pressure between uke and tori, while the other might be trying to remove more and more, making the contact between the partners more like we are one body working together (these might be perceived as opposites);
There might be a disagreement about which parts of the kata should be performed by uke and which parts should be performed by tori (even though we are agreeing on the form of the kata we have a disagreement about who to do what);
And last, but not least, there might be a disagreement of the actual physical form of the kata (there are a multitude of ways to perform each kata, and there is no lack of aikidokas who will defend the way they learned it as if it were a threat to their life if somebody do it differently).
So how do we use the concept of shoshin to help us keep our feet on our journey? In one way, there is no way to lose our way, because whatever choices, or mistakes, we make, and wherever we might go, it is where we have to go, to continue. If we “fail” we will experience some unpleasant situations, and we will have a “kick in the butt” (literarily or figuratively speaking) to evolve to a higher level.
However, some suffering is avoidable, if we already have the level for it. If we have the required level, we can see the activity of the mind during these little “conflicts” on the tatami. They are really small, you know, considering the major conflicts in the world outside. We are children playing in the kinder garden, gaining experience to deal with the “grown up life” outside the dojo.
Once we have the awareness, the simple observation and making a decision which leads to a productive keiko is extremely easy. The life in the dojo is really not that complicated. Outside the tatami however, the situations is very often very complex and intricate. On the level of manifestation there are no correct or incorrect answers. However, if we at least start from a state where we can see the situation, we might be better off than if we blindly follow whatever happens inside of us.
And to return to my initial question? What is shoshin, or a beginner’s mind? And does really a beginner have a beginner’s mind? So let’s take the second question first. No, they don’t, generally (there could of course be exception, but in that case they are usually not a beginner, as they received it from some other study). The beginner is able to manifest the outer form of shoshin even though they do not possess the quality, because the situation is new for them. In other aspects of life they do not have this “superpower”, so a beginner does not generally have a beginner’s mind, in my opinion.
As to what shoshin is, which we could describe by words, can easily be misleading, because, words have different meaning and association for different people. In my opinion shoshin is a level of awareness of the reactions of the mind. The mind is constantly clouding our vision of what is going on around us. If we are able to see the process of thoughts and emotions and their “haze equilibrium” of defensiveness, we can see the world around us in a different way. We have the freedom to make a choice. Or at least a higher degree of freedom than if we lack shoshin.
In Roppokai Daito Ryu we very often practice in larger groups, doing kakari keiko. One person is throwing the whole group in the role as tori and then shifting to the uke role, and so on. In this situation it becomes super apparent for everybody waiting in line (the ukes), who can see the eyes of tori, if they have shoshin or not. It is like it says in the Bible with the speck and the log in the eye, it is easier to see it happening to others, than to realise when it is happening to ourselves. When shoshin is lost, the eyes get “stiff”. This of course also becomes apparent in the waza we perform, as we will have difficulties with many partners.
Our “idea” of the movement does not fit with the experience from our partners, and in this situation the meeting is changing very rapidly, as every partner is different, and they are arriving in a flowing succession. This way of doing the keiko is one of many ways to check our level of shoshin. The past is not valid in the future. Actually the past is just a memory in the mind and the future is a fantasy from the mind. The only real thing is the now.
We all have our ideas and our opinions. The ideas and opinions are connected with emotions, about “our” philosophy, and the “other” way of thinking. There is an illusion that there is an eternal fight, between Good and Evil, and all of us wants to be on the side of the good. We will fight the evil. We will kill the Enemy!
The whole idea of self defence is internalised in this system. The idea of always having a bigger “gun” than “the other”. It is the same with individuals and the collective: religion, political views, nationality and so on. These brands we put on ourselves is of course imaginary. But until we see that, they are more real for us than anything.
The system in the world is based on the idea of fighting the evil. We can see it in social media as well, reflecting exactly the reactions of the politics of the world, as well as how we speak. If somebody we brand as one particular category does something “bad” we immediately side ourselves with the other category, judging everybody we put that brand on, polarising the world into “friends” and “enemies”, not realising that it was this very effect which caused the crime in the first place.
We might even think that it would be an evil act to not react to evil? Yes, I see the logic in that, but what action would be constructive, in this situation? Hate caused a problem, and we solve it by adding our hate, including a lot of individuals who was not part of the crime?
Even in the situation where this individual did something “evil”. How do we deal with the situation? This individual incident is reflecting the state of the world as a whole. “No! It is not! This one is EVIL!” Well, sometimes totally “normal people” act in ways which most of us would consider insane, and they are too many to be considered an anomaly. I will not get into the details now, but check out the collections of photos from my previous post. Inattention to our mind can lead us astray in disastrous ways, and it is really just a play of dice which way it will turn.
So how do we deal with the problem? I have no solutions on the outer level for the immediate problem. Neither is it my field of interest (actually I don’t think it can be solved on that level, but you are welcome to try). The solutions I see are inside of ourselves.
It is not really a philosophy. It is not an idea. It is not something to be argued about back and forth, and to become another subject for separation and conflicts. Either we are interested in awareness, or we are not. There is no right way to do it, or a wrong way to do it. It is simply attention. We can use a lot of different words for it. We can get into fighting about which words are right, getting lost before we have started. There are no ideas. Nothing to defend or fight against. Either we can see our thoughts and emotions, or we will be fighting what we consider is “evil”, while what we consider “evil” is fighting us, because it considers us “evil”. Nobody wants to be the “bad guy”.
The cool part is that attention spreads. It affects everybody we meet, just as inattention does. So one “mindful” person will make a shift in the world for the better in a positive way. There will still be people without attention, but they will be fewer, and they might even have a little more attention than if they only met people reacting to their acts of inattention.
It is some kind of philosophy obliteration. It is the end of treasuring ideas. It is the end of War. The ideas will still be there, but nobody will be fighting over which one is better.
But what I am writing now is also an idea you might say? This is not an idea for more discussion about which idea is correct. My words will naturally be selected like this (because of my history, practice and experience), but they are not important. The word “mindfulness” is not a word I appreciate, because it is kind of counter intuitive, but I will not waste time protesting against it, as it is a known concept, and more people would understand the situation than if I use the word awareness, attention or presence, maybe? The same goes for all the words I use. The words are not important. The idea is not important. The attention (or whatever word we choose for it) is important.
However, then comes the next trap which triggers discussion: Does this have anything to do with aikido?
Maybe it does, maybe it does not? I found this through aikido. It is one of the gates into this realm, and maybe it is one that is more accessible to great amounts of people than other things. It brings so much joy in the initial stages, when we might have no attention, and we get there without an effort?
Why this is important is self explanatory. War, violence, rape, abuse, addiction, etc. is consequences of inattention. To survive as a species beyond the two next generations we need to change. That is my opinion. That can be discussed. But it is not important. However, that is why I do it. Naturally you have the right to have your own reason for doing aikido, just as I have my reason for it.
What is aikido? I guess it is different for everybody. We all see something different in it, and we have different reasons for doing it. For a long time I had no idea why I needed to do it every day. And there was no problem. I knew what was right, but it took a long time to be able to have words for it.
Aikido is a gate towards a world in peace. We may use it, if we are willing, and if we are ready for it. And the best part is that even if we are not, the gate will still be there.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do
Luke 23: 34 – Douay Rheims Translation
The past few years I have had a project, in my study, based on the second half of Chapter 67 of Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. There are a lot of various translations to English. And in my point of view they are all valuable as a source, but neither variation of choice of words are the ultimate one (and the same could be said about the quote above). Of course, from the technical point of view, a translation should keep the original text intact, conserving the message of the author intact. However, for me, who can’t read the original Lao Tzu text, the focal point is merely if it inspires, or not, at my current situation on my aiki road.
This chapter mentions three treasures, and I believe these three are kind of fundamental to have present at all times in aikido. I previously wrote a post about the seven virtues of the samurai. I guess this is pretty much the same idea, but in a more condensed form.
At the highest level, I guess, is to realize that no idea (any formulation of words or thoughts) can capture this universal principle, without in itself violating the principle by making an idea of it, and giving it a name.
I will change the order of the treasures, saving the first one to last.
The Second Treasure: Economy
Alternate words for it could be (but is not limited to) “Frugality”, “Simplicity” or “Moderation”.
I guess, when we start our study of the basic forms in aikido, this is usually the first one to appear to us as a valuable principle, or treasure, to cultivate. It is true that some variants of basic forms, in order to teach management of distance, integrity and posture, we are doing things in a non economical way. However, that is only a step on the way to keeping what we learned, and transforming our kata into a movement which is economical.
As we proceed in our study we are removing more and more of the more rigid form we learned at first. Maybe the teachers did not tell us to do it in an uneconomic way at first, but that was the only way for our mind to grasp the content, so it simplified the principle down to an idea, to have somewhere to start. And it also is a common pedagogical trick, to first present a more uneconomical, simple, form, at first, and then as we continue to study it, we remove more and more, making it more and more economical.
Economy contains a lot of other principles. If either one of them is lacking it would waste energy. The paradox is that those values I mentioned above, often being taught by making rigid, uneconomical movements, are all necessary to make an economical movement.
I did not practice jiu jitsu a lot, so I will not make too strong statements about what they are doing, but seems to me a big part of the study. To make it stronger, it seems natural that it needs to be more economical. Spending less, to get a higher effect.
The study of this treasure continues also outside the tatami. In my opinion, the stuff we do should benefit the world we live in. How do we interact with ourselves? That question becomes the core of the more advanced objective: How do we interact with others around us?
From the beginning, our identity are our thoughts, our emotions, our “labels”: nationalty, political, gender, religion, occupation, viewpoint on a matters that seems important to us, the list goes on and on. By experiencing interaction with people with the same identification pattern (mind oriented identification) we will find that the only ones we can peacefully, or rather economically, interact with, are the ones with the same identification as ourselves.
In many cases, if we are not into studying economy as a treasure, we simply select to interact only with those individuals who are equal to ourselves, to avoid unpleasant confrontations, and ruckus, in our lives. We simply escape, or run away from every interaction with people who’s identification differs from our own. Is it economical? Well, as long as we never meet these people, at all, yes, but there is no development. And we will meet these people, eventually, and if we did not start our study before, we will be forced into it at that point.
I was myself mainly interacting with people with similar labels until fairly recently, and I was unaware about this. However, life brought me into a position where I was forced to deal with everybody, and I was unable to run away, or hide from certain people. It taught me a lot about myself. The thing is, I probably learned aikido more from life than the study on the tatami during the last decade, but without the foundation from the dojo, I would not be prepared for this.
In aikido we are practising with everybody, and it is relatively simple. We are all there to study. We all came to the dojo; We are all wearing the same uniform; We are all following the same etiquette. So we are already a quite uniform group studying together. Even here conflicts do appear sometimes. However, outside the dojo, not every body we meet will follow “our rules”. They follow “their rules”, and we might not think that their rules are fair, just as they might not agree that our rules are fair. And we are not allowed to touch!
All interactions in life usually have a more or less formal purpose. At least in professional life this is true. There are some specific task we should do together with “our partner”, or ” our partners”.
The economical way is to simply solve our task, together with our buddy. However, very often we will find that there is a lot of resistance in the one we are trying to work together with. And she/he will find that there is a lot of resistance in us. So in the end it does not really focus on the solving of the problem. There will be a lot of distortion caused by our “stiffness” in the mental movements. So instead of being focused on the task which we were set out to do, we are fighting against each other, trying to win over the other. So prevailing becomes the priority, and the “kata” which we started out with, is forgotten.
This is a thing which is only learned by failing, multiple times. And we could always blame the other. However, if we are interested in economy, we should maybe study the inside of ourselves? Trying to find out what is in our way. It will appear, at first, that the partner is the obstacle, because the real obstacle, inside of us, is naturally pointing to something outside (which we cannot change).
These things are difficult to learn while it happens, but after a conflict, we can go through the parts and find out what happened. With repetition, with many different people, and by constantly looking for a way to move mentally in a more economical way.
And yes, there is a huge obstacle for those of us who are already so powerful so that whenever somebody stands in our way we will merely brush them aside without a problem. There is never any challenge. The door to a more economical way of interaction with ourselves is open, but as there is no apparent need, we will never look what is on the other side of that door. We will always win so we will never develop.
In aikido this is much more apparent than in real life. Most people who just merely use their muscles to wrestle their partners to the ground move on to different activities, or start to study, within a very short time. In real life this is not so apparent. Many people will never face big enough challenges in their life, to be interested in this economy, until a disaster happens later in life, and then the opponent might be cancer, and all their strength and power counts for nothing, because this adversary can’t be bought, or scared away with all the prowess of the world.
It could be as simple as a red light in traffic when we are in a hurry. The red light is random, so there is no malice to us as a person. However, it is easy to get triggered to a lot of useless mind activity just by this. Very, very uneconomical, right? And with a person, a partner, it is even more easy to perceive the problem as something outside of ourselves. And as long as we run away from our problem inside, we will always be running away.
Returning to the actual keiko. Our first study might be to try to be straight, in the correct distance and we make sure that the structure of our body parts are aligned in a strong position. We are static in that position, and it is a good position. We study it, we are perceptive, and aware. Then we move to the next position in the kata, and study that position. Those perfect positions, where we would want somebody to take a photo, is all that our mind can see, at that point.
However, the photographer might take the picture in between those “pose moments”, right? What happens then? Well, we might not be so happy with that picture, right?
In moving from one “perfect point” to the next passes an infinite number of points. If we want economy, they should all be perfect. However, the only way to do that is to relinquish the initial idea from our mind of what the kata is (this position, this position, this position… or this movement, this movement, this movement…).
However, if nobody took a picture of us, or even more extreme wake up call, if we never saw a video of ourselves, we would maybe continue for a long time to study our “perfect positions” without being aware about what happens in between.
In aikido we are getting aware of our positions, physically in space. We are making our body move more economically. However, the awareness about the activity of our mind is a natural development of the bodily presence.
We might easily question what we hear, from others. And of course we should. We should always check everything which is important for us, for ourselves. Study it and find out how it works. However, we should also do this with our mind. We should question our thoughts. We should question our emotions. If we blindly follow them, we might end up alright now and then, but we could easily get lost.
The second treasure, economy, contains a lot more, of course. However, these are the main parts which are inspiring me right now, in my study of aikido, and study of life, which is basically a study of myself.
The Third Treasure: Humility
I would actually prefer to use the word “Meekness”, but no translations I have read used that word. Besides, my personal objection to the word “Humility” is probably only because in my mind the word “humility” is too similar to the word “humiliation”, which is a totally different thing (which has nothing do do with the treasure which we now discuss). A similar erroneous association could probably be made between the words “meekness” and “weakness”. However, just because the words resemble each other in pronunciation they might contain totally different things.
Other translations use a longer phrase basically stating a reluctance, or refraining from, taking precedence of others, or to be foremost of all under heaven, and so on. Anyway, the words are not important, but the principle which they are all pointing at, are valuable.
The reason I mention the association with similar sounding words in connection with this one is that it is not as clear as economy on what the treasure actually is. There is a trap, kind of, as we have seen, with regard to the word, and in the idea of the mind, of humility. What is humility?
Ego, the way is use that word, is the image we have of ourselves, when we are not aware of it. If we are aware of it the image, it is nothing more than an image, and it is not going to affect our choices. We will not react to situations based on our identification. So our Ego is our unawareness about our view on ourselves. There are different ways to use this word, so I will just clarify what I mean by that word before we proceed.
Ego is both the positive and the negative in our self image. Very often we have some positive parts, which we appreciate, and some negative parts, which we shun, if we can. Some of us are burdened with more negative, and some of us are burdened with more positive. What is a better or worse starting point, I do not really know.
A normal misconception about humility is that being humble is to think lowly of oneself. In my opinion this is quite the opposite of humility, just the same way as thinking highly of oneself is. Always downplaying our value, our skills, our achievements, is just as much Ego as bragging about them is.
I guess humility is to spend less effort thinking about ourselves and our position in the world, rather than thinking negative about ourselves. Humbleness is a natural quality of advanced experience. It is an expression of confidence. Being confident means that we have no need to neither add nor subtract anything, from just being. We are.
So humbleness, has nothing do do with humiliation, or being humbled. Like I mentioned, it is rather a natural consequence of confidence. However, a certain kind of confidence. Here the words can be used in different ways.
A high level form of confidence does not derive from being better, or having more, or knowing more, or being of higher status, than others. And so on. Humility is very often coinciding with a high level of experience, or skill. Although we will eventually lose the skill and the Ego-related confidence (the “I am better than you confidence”), the real confidence will remain: The Humbleness.
How do this relate to the life in the dojo, and the life outside? For me, once more, it starts with the interaction with my own mind. Having a peaceful interaction with my mind gives a foundation to having a peaceful relation with other minds.
In the dojo, everything is more simple, mostly because we are all following a certain pattern of form of behaviour. Outside it is often confusing, because everything is far more complex.
If we are confident in ourselves we have no problem with accepting imperfections, both in ourselves, and in others. There is no urge to correct our partners. There are no complaining chatter in our mind regarding what we ourselves, or others, do. No judgmental thoughts. No anger. No reactions. Merely awareness of the emotions and thoughts.
One might ask how does this improve our waza? Well, about that, it is kind of the chicken and the egg koan. Which came first? Our waza will be improved by the quality humility, but once we have the treasure the skill level of our physical play with our friends on the tatami becomes irrelevant for us.
But this humility might take the physical appearance of confidence as nothing can stop what we do when we are doing keiko. A humble aikidoka are able to proceed on their aiki road, no matter who stands in their way. They will proceed, and the obstacle with be “unobstacled”, and are able to without their obstacles continue on their aiki road. No words are ever needed. Just keiko.
If we are traveling to different countries, and meet different cultures, and practice with aikidokas from different schools, we are likely to meet aikidokas who do things slightly differently from ourselves. This could even happen in our home dojo. How do we deal with this? Do we need to disturb our keiko together to express the content of our mind to our partner? Or do we have the confidence to accept the situation that is, and find a way to proceed with the keiko, starting from what is?
The situation might be developing from the other side as well. Our partner might criticize us for our ways. That might easily trigger non confident students into defending, and criticizing the partner in return.
However, there is nothing to defend, is there? Aikido is, no matter what opinion any of us has about it. It is a universal principle, and it does not require me to defend it from accusations. However, if we are identifying with what is being criticized, we will feel threatened, although we do not see how this came to be. We just feel fear, anger and frustration, and react to it by striking back.
Humbleness is also to see the limitations in ourselves and in everybody around us. Nobody can be expected to act at a higher level of awareness than what they have exactly at that precise moment. Seeing this clearly gives an understanding of how the behaviour of the partner is originating in something they are not able to control. Just as we sometimes are not able to control what happens inside of ourselves, leading us to make mistakes, it happens to others. The only reason we can see it more clearly in others, is that we have the third person view of it, making it easier to see outside the maze of the mind. That is if we are not in the maze of our own mind at the time.
The same goes outside of the tatami, of course. If we are confident/humble we are able to act natural in a hierarchical world filled with people who play with power. I mean, we can’t change the world before we first change ourselves, so complaining about how it is, by thoughts, and by words, is not going to improve the world around us. However, by understanding how the mind controls us, it is easier, somehow to deal with our “training partners” in life outside the dojo.
The Ego´s view of the world is that it is the single hero in a world filled with villains. And it actually does not matter if we have a negative self image or positive self image. If we are fighting something, we see ourselves as the hero and our adversary as the villain. This does not really make much sense for those that have a negative self image, but our ugly bad image of ourself, becomes a hero in some bizarre reality where we are battling “evil”, even though the very image of ourselves might be that we are “evil”.
Humbleness gives us the overview, the confidence, as I frequently have called it in this post, to see this effect in ourselves, and act according to the situation. And to not react to our immediate thoughts and emotions passing through at that moment.
I guess a lot more could be said of humility, however let us now move on to the first treasure from chapter 67 of Tao Te Ching.
The Third Treasure: Compassion
This is maybe the one which adds the new level to aikido, which is missing in many other arts. There are a multitude of translations of this quality. I also gain inspiration from the words “Love”, “Kindness”, “Gentleness”. They fit very well to my study, at this time. “Mercy” and “Pity” are also translations frequently used, and although they do not give the same inspiration for me, right now, in my aikido study, they still are just as valid as a translation of the original text.
Like we actually started to touch in the previous part, when we realize that everything a person is doing is according to their current level of awareness of the mind, we are starting to realize the futility of discussing free will. I mean, we did not choose our body, neither did we choose our gender, our nationality, or the time and culture to be born into. Neither did we choose our mind nor how it is going to develop from childhood on. We stuck our hand in the bag and what we grab is what we get. That is all we can expect from our choices. We could have become “a murderer”, “a rapist” or even Adolf Hitler. And until we arrive at the level of questioning our own mind. There would have been nothing we could have done about it. Nada.
As long as we are run by the mind, we are blindly following our emotions and our thoughts. Until the moment we are starting to question what the content of our mind is, and where it came from, we have no free will.
This realization makes it possible to forgive. Nobody can be expected to do things above their skill level in any field. Presence is no exception. So what we received when we were born determines our starting point. And until there comes an opening, and we have the reason, and curiosity, to look what is on the other side of that door, we are on a one way street going straight, wherever. Hitler or a saint? Who would know? Maybe our victims would know?
So here we come back to the correction of others part. When I did my mandatory military service, about two decades ago, I joined to help kill Nazis, should there be a need to do so, again (Norway was occupied by the Nazis during WWII). My only solution was to just kill them all, every single one, of the ultimate enemies of the world, and there would be no more evil in the world.
I guess aikido has been developing me a bit, spiritually, since then. I don’t believe in violence any more.
We see the same effects as the Holocaust happening again and again in the world, mostly in less extreme cases, but still. Those perceived as different are still being labelled and treated with hostility. The idea, or ideology, is replaced in these cases, but it always returns to a difference of opinion and of mind, as well as physical differences.
I am not going further into politics, because it is neither an interest of mine, nor is it the subject of this blog. However, awareness is.
Sometimes we meet people who are challenging to have interaction with. On the tatami in a smaller degree, and outside the dojo to a greater degree. These challenges are the ones who develop us to the next level. Very often we realize after an interaction if we have erred. At the moment we were in the interaction we were “blind to it”. Sometimes we remain blind, even, for a long time after. And some, of course, would remain blind forever. Aikido opens the door, but unless there is a demon chasing after us, we might never consider what lies beyond that door (the spiritual part).
However, when we are still (after the thoughts and emotions has calmed down after a conflict), we can see how our thoughts and emotions worked against us, and caused problems which would not have been there, if we were present at the time. However, we can’t expect to have acted differently, because we were at that level, at that time, and things played out exactly as they did. Judging ourselves, or others for this, is futile.
Actually that is a new situation for consideration. It is a new challenge where we can fail or succeed. Looking what what happened, understanding the mechanics of the mind. Are we attacking our past selves for what happened, and is our past self defending itself against our judgmental self? Either we realize that neither of these selves are who we are, and seeing that the only road ahead is towards a higher level of consciousness, or we continue to feel shame, guilt and remorse, until we forget (the actual event) what has happened.
Anyway, there is a huge difference, of course, between the magnitude of gassing people in a concentration camp, and throwing them in an unfriendly way on the tatami. However, the difference lies in the quantity, not in the quality. And we were merely lucky enough to not end up as one of those. We did nothing to deserve the better situation. We just put our hand in the bag, the moment we came to this world, and we happened to not become Josef Mengele.
So it is quite apparent why this kind of study is useful. What if we are a Josef Mengele, and we don’t know? I mean he probably thought that he was a good guy, right? The spiritual part of our study is to find out, at every moment, and receive the three Treasures.
So both Humbleness and Compassion also have the common trap that we have to accept whatever is wrong in the world. And of course we should not accept what is wrong. We have to heal the parts which is broken. However, to fix it, we first have to understand how it became like that, how the mechanics works, and see all the consequences of any act.
To take it to the extreme: even if we kill all the “Bad Guys”, they will be replaced by new “Bad Guys”. As Eckhart Tolle so elegantly puts it: “Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” And it seems to me to fit very well with the history of the world.
So if we are an aikido teacher and we walk around in the dojo observing the class, we might see something which draws our attention in the keiko. The question is what are we drawn to, and which part is drawn to it. We should be aware that any beginner can point to a flaw in a technique, and after a few months, and by looking at the pictures in a book from a high level practitioner, anybody can say, it should be done like that. Yes, it might very well be that it should be done like that, but there lies about forty of fifty years of keiko in between the level of the aikidoka in that book and the student in front of us. Maybe our only attraction to say something is the same as the people commenting on YouTube videos. They can only say that it is wrong, and nothing more, and it is not useful for anybody, because we don’t have an understanding for how to get from, what is, to that image in the book, if that is what we are limiting our goals to.
And even if we ourselves can do what is shown in the picture, and maybe even we are the person in the picture (or rather we were the person in the picture some years ago)? Can we help the person in front of us go from their current state, to the next one, leading forward on the aiki road.
And if we know how to proceed, we would refrain from using humor at the cost of the one who made the mistake, right? Because it is an effective way to make the mistake clear, and make sure everybody remembers it. However, it is not kind. Guilt, shame and remorse are drawing us further into the realm of the mind, making it difficult to proceed to the outside.
In the second treasure, economy, we mentioned integrity. This is a very interesting concept in aikido, I think, because we are striving both for uke and tori to have full integrity, at all times. In economy it fits, because the cogs needs their integrity for the machine to work. If the cogs are broken the machine will not function properly.
However, in the first treasure, compassion, it is even more interesting, because the one being thrown will be given integrity in the throw. I guess that is why it feels so great to experience aikido throws, compared to being exposed to martial arts focusing on breaking the posture of the one being thrown? Because we are falling with our integrity intact. Maybe, I do not know?
And this concept is even more fascinating in real life. If we have an interaction, or even when we have a conflict, both partners should receive a feeling of integrity of their values and position during the interaction. So in dealing with people around us, we should not only not use violence against them, but also take care of their mental state. It is a great challenge. And it starts with our own mental state; With our awareness.
When we ourselves are conscious about our thoughts and emotions; in constant observation of them; always questioning the sanity of our mind. From that point we might be able to make a positive change in the world. Presence breeds presence. Reactiveness triggers more reactiveness in those around us. If we want somebody else to change their ways, they should not change out of fear of us. They should change because they themselves wakes up and realizes what is right and what is wrong. However, there are no easy solutions for the complex problems of the world.
Presence
Like I mentioned earlier, I see that all these treasures actually can be summed up as only one, in this thematic. There are of course a lot more to this part of Tao Te Ching, but for the parts which inspired me in my study.
In my opinion chasing after virtues just because of an idea of the mind will not work. Being economical for the purpose of gaining more and to become powerful. Being humble to become respected and in secret hope to be made a leader. Or being friendly and treat people nicely, just because we expect kindness in return, or so that we can tell ourselves that we are a “Good Guy”.
It will be the same with our aikido and our life. However, in aikido we will clean such stupid ideas away quite quickly. We will not really find economy, because this economy is hidden. Our humbleness is not real, and it will be revealed easily because we hold on to each other and study deeply, so nobody will follow us, no matter how humble an act we would put on. And being kind just because we expect kindness in return. Well, guess, what? After meeting a few people, that balloon will rapture and the air will go out. Not everybody will be kind in return.
However, presence gives all of these treasures naturally. Not because we are seeking them. By seeking them, we are almost certainly pushing them away. By quiet observation of ourselves during the keiko, we gain the ability to observe ourselves during more complex situations in the real world. There are no simple solutions to most of the problems out there, but at least we are better prepared for whatever is coming if we have the inside awareness.
I would like to add a part, just in case. I express myself about a lot of things which I know very little about, out of necessity, to express some things which I do know a few things about, so if anybody would actually read this, please take my words at that level. The stuff I am studying is difficult to put into words (it is easier to express through the grab). This is just a public extension of my personal note book from the keiko. I am absolutely not suggesting to anybody what they should be doing, or should not be doing. These are my thoughts from the keiko, today. Tomorrow I will have moved on, to something similar, or something entirely different. However the road is always the same.
Also, the “happiness” I speak of in the statement: “Aikido makes people happy” is not just merely positive emotions. I call it happiness, but it could just as easily be called “serenity”, “peace”, “love”, or “presence”. But it does not sound as cool.
“A man of consequence though he travels all day Will not let himself be separated from his baggage-wagon, However magnificent the view, he sits quiet and dispassionate.”
Tao Te Ching Chapter 26 by Lao Tzu Translation by Arthur Waley
Endo sensei had a single advice for me over many years which was totally mystical for me. And I must admit I did not pay much attention to it, because it did not seem relevant for me.
He asked me to refrain from laughing during keiko. I believe it was a the one advice he kept repeating every time we met. And I could not understand. I had fun, so I was laughing. I had no idea what he meant, because he clearly did not mean that we should not have positive feelings in the keiko. And I thought laughing was connected with that.
Also, I thought that chapter 26 in Tao Te Ching was ancient advice for traveling with luggage. And it is good advice. However I missed the deeper meaning of it.
I am of course not stating that I now understand what Endo sensei’s advice means, or that I understand Tao Te Ching. But I did find a new level to explore from these two pointers, or road signs, which they gave me.
In my opinion aikido is something which should benefit life outside the dojo. Not only with the benefits of doing physical exercise, and by doing something social, and doing something which is enjoyable. All of the above are clearly beneficial for life outside the actual keiko, but aikido are one of those magical things opening portals into stuff we might not even be interested in initially. We don’t have to read a single book, or sit in meditation to arrive at this state. Without any effort we are suddenly at the doorstep to achieving a heightened sense of presence.
So what is presence? It is a word that could have a lot of different meanings, I guess, like all other words.
By presence I mean to have attention to our own thoughts and emotions. Those two parts of our mind are connected, and are constantly affecting each other. Triggering each other, back and forth. Most of the time, in almost everybody this pretty much goes on below our level of awareness. Thus we end up getting upset, hurt, angry, aggressive and so on, causing un-peaceful behaviour in the world.
When we see something inside, if our mind is reacting to what it can see, we are missing this reaction to our reaction (what we saw in the first place). Even if we see something, as long as there is a reaction to it, it is not presence. We need to get to the bottom of that well to have our back to something solid, and have an observation without judgement about what we see.
So what does this have to do with aikido? Well, first of all, aikido has the potential to give us this quality, without ever having to pay the bill for it. And of course, if we have an ambition to achieve a beautiful and powerful waza, this state would of course naturally improve the level of our skills in our art. However, this is just a relatively irrelevant bonus effect. And once we achieve this state, our ambition is not that important any more.
What really does make a difference in the world is that, in this state, we avoid all the suffering caused by the mind, which is probably more than 90 % of the suffering happening in our daily lives. We will experience peace, love and serenity. Another word for this, which I prefer, is happiness. Although I should probably clarify that I do not mean the happiness derived from the sensation of pleasure.
This not something we can explain to somebody. The tao you can tell somebody is not tao at all. Neither is the aikido you can explain to somebody aikido.
There is a difference between feeling the emotion of happiness, and experiencing the peace of being outside the mercy of the emotions. And there is no contradiction between having positive emotions and having this state. However, if we are expressing our pleasant emotions outwardly in an unconscious way, and have no attention to what is happening, we are at the mercy of whatever emotion should appear inside. It will control how we act, and how we behave towards people we interact with.
To have freedom of choice, we need presence. Without presence there is no choice.
Of course if we assume that we are our mind, then it is, but there is no choice there. The choice was made by genetics and history, and there is no difference between our choices and the choices of a rapist, a murderer, or Adolf Hitler (those are just labels, by the way, it is not who they are). With presence there is a choice. However, that is a high level, and nobody can be expected to act on a higher level that what one has at the time when we make a choice. The rest is left to chance and luck.
Aikido turns monsters into people. We turns into people ourselves, the practitioner. In the same transformation it changes how we see the people around us as well. And this is just two consequences of the same process. The thing is, if we see everybody around us as monsters, we will be a monster ourselves as well.
The classic world view of humans are that we are the the one hero in a world of villains. Us against the “bad guys”. So we are each other’s “bad guys”. This view of the world will of course result in violence and wars.
So by gaining awareness about the activity of our own mind we will shift the nature of the world around us.
Some may object that aikido is not such an utopia. Just look at what is happening in the aikido world, right? Of course, the aikido world is a world in miniature, consisting of all kinds of people. All kinds.
So if we by aikido mean the aikido society, the way the world has shaped it, yes. The world is like the world is. The mind is in charge, outside the dojo, and in the dojo.
There are many roads towards presence. Aikido is one of them. One suiting well for those who want an effortless and fun road towards a better world. Maybe?
Does it require something? Not really. We just keep on practising, every day, and eventually we achieve a higher and higher awareness about ourselves.
And laughing is still good. It is far preferable to being lost inside our own mind by having a conversation with our training partner. It is always a challenge not becoming identified with our our opinions at the time when we are stating them for somebody with an opposing mental position.
From the positon, or state, of laughing, we are at least relieved from tensions, both in the body and the mind. The next level however is to be steady at the peaceful state even if we are experiencing joy. That is when we are always keeping track of our luggage. No matter what happens.
I mean, it is easier to start studying these things when everything is pleasant, joyful and friendly. It becomes useful when the mind is dark, when there is fear, and when we encounter somebody else with dark emotions and violent thoughts. The founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, called his art “the Art of Peace”.
We should keep our mental positions, our opinions, but we should not worship them. We should keep our thoughts, and express them whenever it is useful, but we should not be engulfed in them. We should value our emotions, but rather than allowing ourselves to drift around randomly in them, we should stay anchored in something beyond their level. We are sitting on the heavy luggage cart. Observing everything. Everything!
We could call it serenity. We could call it peace. We could call it happiness. I call it happiness.
Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things arise from being.
Being arises from not being.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 40
Lao Tzu, translated by Gia-Fu Feng
As a kid I used to have an extremely annoying addiction which I was very ashamed of, but struggled with getting rid of. For some reason I could not see at that time I had an extreme need to shake my hands intensively. To add weight to my arms I were holding on to some small sticks. I could be stuck deep in my mind for an hour or so, shaking the sticks, while my mind were chewing on some kind of unconscious pattern.
What was going on in my mind could be anything I were normally thinking anyway, but by letting out the energy by shaking the sticks around I could be submerged deeper. Not allowing myself to physically express the thoughts were a torment beyond imagination, so I spent an hour in my room every day, shaking the sticks.
Katate dori tai no tenkan with Claes on the roof of Casa Milà in Barcelona in August 2013. Photo by Katarina Gullberg.
I might possibly have found drumming a natural road to take, but instead I found fitness training. From around the age of twelve, pushups and running were replacing the shaking, and I think it was my first step, unknowingly at the time, to get into a road to gain freedom from my mind. During my training sessions I thought less, and had a deeper sense of joy, not knowing why, but I was naturally changing to a way which made me feel better in daily life.
I saw a commercial for some kind of education on the metro the other day saying: “You decide who you will become”. It almost cut me in the heart how cold, and wrong in my mind, the common point of view is for who a person is. I believe that we are, and nothing can either add or subtract from that, regardless of what we do, or don’t do, in life. Our achievements can of course be an expression of something, but it should never be mistaken for who we are, in my opinion.
Who am I? This is a subject I have touched a few times (actually a lot of times) in the past, in my posts, and it intrigues me. In my case, I am driven by an urge to solve a problem/sickness within myself, so naturally I tend to focus on this part, hoping to find some kind of solution.
The Saku Dojo seminar in May 2012 (I was not there). Photo by Tomáš Švec.
In Tao the manifested and the unmanifested are often mentioned as connected opposites. During keiko we often get an idea of what this means, but it is difficult to put into words, somehow. I am not sure if this is a correct way of using Yin and Yang, but in my mind these are behaving in a way that is described by that theory. Yin and Yang is like the sunny side and the shade side of a hill. If we have one, we always have the other. We can’t really increase one and diminish the other, because they rise and fall together.
The manifested is the easy part, because we can easily interact with it. It is physically there. Our body belongs to this realm, and even our mind, representing the hardware and the software of the mind-body system. However, what is the unmanifested? It is something which we normally don’t notice. However, our real Self, not derived from our own mind, the presence behind the thoughts and emotions, who we are in the deepest meaning of the that word (the part that the Ego very often usurps), comes from the realm of unmanifested, in my opinion.
Like I said, these are things I have difficulty with putting into words, because I have a sensation of how it is connected, but only from experiences, mostly on the tatami, and sometimes, during challenging times in life outside the dojo.
From the 10 year anniversary of Aikido im Hof Duisburg, Johan’s class. Photo by Aikido im Hof Duisburg.
Jiddu Krishnamurti said in one of his talks: “When there is attention, there is no centre from which you’re attending“. I found this quote a very neat way to define the difference in state between an Ego-trapped situation, and the free situation where you are able to observe what happens. The observer is not attached to any specific point in the system, and thus we are able to see the whole. So we are from the realm of the unmanifested somehow, while we have a manifested body (and mind). Some teachers use the words dimensions to describe this, but for me that does not fit, as it is something else in mathematics and in physics (where my vocabulary comes from), so I am at a loss for words for it.
This is all very abstract, I know. But how should we approach this practically in the keiko? In the practice we very often have situations where we start moving our free parts, not connected to our partner if the parts connected to the partner is stuck. This could be a situation where we are trapped in the desire to throw the partner, and the very desire is preventing us from succeeding. The movement of our free parts, very often the head (or the hip or shoulder), at a moment when the grabbed part is stuck, is a very clear symptom of this “disease” caused by the Ego.
Keiko at Sjøholt with Marius in December 2017.
Let’s assume we are doing morote dori (katate ryote dori) kokyu ho with a very firm grab. Our first movement in the role of tori is to raise our arms, both tori’s held arm and the two arms of uke, holding on. Assuming that we are in the situation of tori in this case, naturally we would not be able (without using leverage, or without being twice as strong as our partner) to move our partner’s two arms with our single arm. That is where normally our head will move, in an unconscious way, during our attempt to lift something heavy by muscle. This is what I would believe the Tao would define as action.
I think the first step, which is extremely fundamental to solving this problem, is to realise this situation. Without a mirror, or a video of ourselves, we might not notice that our free parts are in a involuntary “symptom-showing” movement. What we do notice, however, is that some partners will stay, and we will have to depend on leverage and strength to be able to raise our arm.
The system is quite complex, if we start to analyze it in the way I described above. Uke and tori are both a Yin and Yang system by themselves, with manifested and unmanifested parts. At the same time uke and tori are a Yin and Yang system together. Each of these four parts needs to be able to flow freely for any “correct” shift to be possible. If these are blocked in anyway, anywhere in the system, all we can do is mechanically push and pull each other around on the tatami.
Like I said in a previous post, this might not necessarily be a problem, as we still get the physical exercise, building our posture, and learning about using leverage to make the structure of the physical form of the kata.
Keiko with Martin at Aikido Karlin in Prague during the seminar with Seishiro Endo sensei in December 2009. Photo by Pavel Novak.
If we are ready to move on from that part, however, we can find something more profound from this. And there are steps. All we have to do is to find them, and be willing to climb them.
0. Is there a hidden fear for failure?
Yes, it is not a typo, it is step number zero.
So our arm is stuck. Is that a problem for us? Are we suffering because your buddy is fixating our arm to help us study? Does it cause us any physical pain to stand there doing nothing while our friend is holding our arm? If our partner is hurting us we could always communicate to the partner, in a friendly way, that we would prefer a non painful grab in this situation.
If we still struggle with the situation, then we have to search inside ourselves what we want and what is the reason we want that. We could let our partner hold on, and stay for a few minutes, studying our emotions and thoughts during these minutes. We could let our partner hold on firmly while we slowly move our legs sensing the neutral extension and slacking of the muscles in our upper body caused by the shifting of distance to the fixed point. We should notice if our muscles becomes active during any point of this exercise.
To make the situation more extreme we could ask our partner to lift our arm firmly upwards and hold it in a steady position, and we do the same things as before, walking around sensing our body, our mind and our emotions. During this time, can we get some kind of idea of which parts of us are manifested and the unmanifested? The manifested being the body, the mind, our emotions, our ideas for the future, our past, and so on. The unmanifested being the presence behind all the manifested stuff, the awareness which is us in the deepest sense of the word
We could also change the situation so that uke moves around while holding, or even moves tori around (gently) while holding on firmly. Very often it is easier to perceive subtle things when we are not ourselves active. Where do our manifested parts stop, and where do our unmanifested parts continue? We should try to keep our posture, and always stay straight, while letting go of all tension, both in our body, our mind, and beyond. Very often we can see in a person’s eyes if this has happened or not.
The partner holding should of course likewise (as always) observe what is happening inside his/her system during this time, so that we study the situation from both sides.
Are we comfortable with not being able to move our arm? If so, we might go to the next step.
Post keiko with Andrea in Lillsved in July 2015. Photo by Katarina Gullberg.
1. Adding a temporary movement
Very often we can’t solve a problem directly, so we have to separate it into different parts. One idea is to add a movement to the form, which is not really there in the final kata, but it will help us reach some kind of idea which will be helpful to make the movement required in the “clean” kata.
One of these additions, is already in the previous point, where we added the lifting part, by uke, to make our stress more visible for us. By being aware of our fear, we can transcend it.
Now we could again ask our partner to lift our arm up, and we make the kata (not the basic one but an newly invented one) only to lower our arms until they are hanging straight down. Our idea is to be able to just extending our arm to our hips. The position should be static. Nothing is physically moving, except of course our internal movements inside, which always will be there as long as we are alive.
From the seminar with Franck Noël sensei in Prague in October 2014. Photo by Aikido Praha Vinohrady.
We could now add 4 different movements to create flow in the static system:
Stepping away from the partner
Stepping into the partner
Turning from side to side
Sitting down
All of these are now building on the state reached in the previous step, where we have no problem or fear whatsoever with being stuck. If we are still afraid to fail, our Yin and Yang system are stuck, so none of these movements will cause dynamic in our system, because we are clinging on and preventing the turning of the wheels. There is no hole in the middle of the wheel so it is totally fixed to the wagon. Nothing rolls. We are just pushing the wagon around in the mud.
However, if we are free, the partner will also be free, or at least we can affect the partner in a tremendous way towards freedom, because flow on one part causes flow in the other part, just as the sun on one part of the hill will cause a shade on the opposite part of the hill. That is of course also why it is such a huge help to have as many training partners as possible, and to study both in the role as uke and as tori, to “steal” each other’s freedom.
These ways of creating dynamics in the system is also very educational in ushiro ryote dori. However, in the case of ushiro I would exchange number four with leaning forward until the hips and wrists are on the same axis, fixating that axis, and rising again.
This is of course a continuous study of our own system, locating stress, fear and similar emotions caused by our thoughts. By bringing them into the light of our consciousness, we will first of all accept that they are there, and by continuing our repetitions with awareness we will clean up the system so that our “machine” works without any parts stuck in sand.
In my opinion we should be perfectly comfortable with doing this with the added movements before we move on to the next step.
From the Saku Dojo seminar in May 2012 (I was not there). Photo by Tomáš Švec.
2. Removing the temporary movement and moving from stillness
As Christian Tissier sensei sometimes says: “What is a solution on one level, becomes a problem on the next“. We now added movement, where there was not. Breaking our own rules, we used leverage to free ourselves from the idea and fear of being stuck. It is a way to present some kind of steps leading in the right direction, avoiding the pitfall of competing and struggling with our partner with strength, to push and pull each other to the floor.
We should now do exactly the same as these four movements, only we do them in the unmanifested, not the manifested world. At first it could work to do it not physically, but only in the mind. However, if the partner is awake, they would not let us move neither with our body nor with our mind. That is kind of the definition of stuck. However, the unmanifested is always free. WE are always free. The only way WE could be stuck is if we believe we are the manifested.
My suggestion is that we try to do the same exercise of lowering the arm without moving our body or our mind, but using the experience and dynamic achieved in the previous point. At first we can use the memory from the four different movements, and trying to find out what is common in all of them, beyond the fact that they all increase or decrease the physical distance to the point where we meet the partner. If we are present we can perceive the movements of our emotions and thoughts as well as our bodily movements.
From the seminar with Fabrice and Helene at Vanadis Aikidoklubb September 2018. Photo by Mattias Bäck.
We keep our axis, our posture and our physical position. A mirror is very helpful, or a third partner who puts a finger on the parts we tend to move, usually the hips and the head. It is also nice if we look at our own eyes in the mirror and check our state of consciousness. Or we ask a partner to let us know when our “eyes stiffens”. That usually indicates that our Yin and Yang system is locked, the cog wheels are not turning because they are stuck in the “sand of the Ego” which tends to stop the mechanism.
From this situation we should check if we can get a sensation of dynamic in the stillness. Usually it happens once we give up. As long as we try to do something we are lost, but once we stop, everything starts.
If we are unable to do this, I would suggest spending more time with the previous steps, or focusing on other aspects of aikdo for a while and return at a later time. It does require a bit of awareness, but every hour spent on the tatami brings us closer to this no matter how we are spending our time. In my opinion there is no wrong way to practice (as long as we don’t get hurt or hurt our partner, or quit, or take a break from aikido). All roads leads to higher awareness.
Post keiko with Julia, Timofej and Ion at Lillsved in July 2016. Photo by Alexander Minidis.
3. Returning to the kata
So returning to morote dori kokyu ho with a basic grab (without lifting and without movement), we should now use our experience in lowering the arm to elevate our arm in exactly the same way.
In Yin and Yang there is never a struggle between good and bad. The sunny side of the hill is neither better nor worse than the shade on the other side. It is just two opposites. It is important to remember this when we are working with our partner. Neither of us is the good guy, and neither of us are the bad. We are just representing opposite sides of the kata.
If we have the dynamic of our own Yin and Yang system, we will inevitably have created a dynamic in our friend’s system, and we will also have a dynamic in our common system. I believe we either have none, or all.
The challenge is of course that when we want to elevate our arms, we will easily associate it with lifting. And in lifting we will put our mind up. We are doing, with our mind, even if we are not physically lifting (because we learned many years ago that it is a mistake) we are still lifting in our mind. The solution is actionless.
Tai no tenkan with Jorma 5 seconds after waking up in the morning, in Berlin September 2019. Photo by Sara Wang.
Very, very often we have a partner who indicates some kind of direction, if not in the body, they are pointing the way with their mind. Very often because they expect an action of some sort. Knowing which kata we are practising, they are holding harder, or softer in that direction, depending on the psyche of that partner. Remember that this is not who our partner is. Our partner is beyond the body and the mind. Both the body and the mind are the form, but it is not who the person is. If we have a direction, we could use it. It would be exactly like using timing to make a movement. It is like flowing with the current.
Still, if we have a very aware partner, who is also observing their mind and emotions, the grab will be neutral. I believe this is the best situation for this study, because we can’t use any momentum which is already there to make our movement effortlessly. We could start in any direction, and it will be just as hard, or just as easy.
Another stepping stone which I found useful in the past was to remind myself that it is always a circle. So for something to go up, something else needs to go down. The image of water flowing down on my back side helps me imagine a turning point inside and a elevation in my front, something flowing in under the partner and he/seems to rise by himself/herself. However, one should be careful with these images, because they are in the mind, and it is easy to get stuck in there if we don’t keep at least part of our awareness outside, and staying present in the body, noticing if the grab changes in nature during the path of the form (we are searching for grab conservation throughout the movement).
There is also the idea of starting out in the opposite direction of where you are going, but it is again a limitation by changing the original kata. Any movement needs to starts somewhere, and if we need help with the first movement, we are still stuck. In addition it needs to turn somewhere into the correct direction, and this turning requires another circular motion. So there is a lot of doing, and we are adding things which we have to subtract again at the next level.
Sandakällan in Nacka April 2020.
All of these stepping stones are nice to use as portals into a new understanding, or level, but I believe that once we are there, we have to let go of them to look around and see what the situation is around us in the new environment. It is easy to get stuck with strong ideas which was helpful in the past. In the end all of them are actions, which we are seeking to eliminate. And all of them are from the mind, so they are trapping us inside. So all of what I have written here is a product of the mind. We should all beware of it’s pitfalls. The keiko will show us the way.
I believe that what we are looking for in aikido, described in a very simple way, is cooperation. We would like to learn to cooperate with our partner. Our partner might want to compete with us, but we should be able to cooperate with them nonetheless. The partner should receive the satisfaction they were seeking in the competition, but we will be doing the kata with their full cooperation. Both partners should experience joy, in my opinion.
Actually we are not doing the kata. The kata happens as a consequence of a returning movement which was always there, long before tori, uke, the dojo, or the world, existed.
Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return.
Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity.
If you don’t realise the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realise where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 16
By Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Irimi nage at the seminar with Christian Tissier sensei at Awase Aikido Helsinki in March 2020. Photo by Nadezda Boltaca.
This is a continuation of my previous post regarding our study of action which is actionless. This time I will mainly focus on mental noise pollution in our mind, caused by our identification with thought forms. This pollution triggers us to act, not only actionlessly, but also unwisely.
Humans have the ability of abstract thinking. Most animals can’t do this. It is both a blessing and a curse haunting man kind. Maybe it is more of a curse than a blessing, as it is going to kill us all if we do not evolve as a species beyond the identification with our mind.
Of course, it is a great tool, to be able to think, and it can be used to solve problems, which makes our lives easier. After all, to get to the next evolutionary step, we first have to be at our current one. The mind is a tool. However, this tool is kind of scary, because when we don’t need it, it takes us over as a person, and it goes around masquerading as us making us do insane things. Ironically you could call it acting like a mindless robot, although it is a mind-full robot, and therein lies the problem. The person is asleep and the tool has taken over the controls.
Keiko at Dachoyama Aikido in Straussberg in April 2018 during a seminar with Jorma. Photo by Dachoyama Aikido.
Some nights we experience insomnia. At least I do. We are perfectly comfortable in a nice bed, and we have perfect conditions for sleeping, and we are tired after a hard day; and yet we are wide awake, unable to sleep. To our knowledge no thinking is happening (most of the time). Did you ever experience this? Did you ever wonder why you can’t sleep?
I recently noticed during these periods of insomnia that the “palms of my feet” are twitching ever so slightly. All kinds of involuntary movement, tapping of fingers, nail biting, quivering of the leg (and other stuff we usually do when we are impatient or bored), are usually representing some kind of thought process happening below our level of awareness. It is a bodily manifestation of us wishing to be somewhere else, but are stuck right where we are.
So I looked at the movements visually, and even put my fingertips on the area where the movements appeared, searching for the thoughts which were hiding from my attention. After a while, I realised that I was worried, at unease and had some kind of anguish. My mind was, even though I was not in on it, going through some past mistakes and partly also planning my future. All of this, without my consent.
I had no choice but to accept the activity of my mind, and my body, and eventually the twitching of the muscles stopped. Not because I could stop it, but by directing my awareness to focus on it helped it dissolve all by itself. The silence and sense of serenity which came as a result was an extremely nice experience, even though I could not immediately fall asleep after this discovery. The whole body changed state and relaxed in a different way from before, melting more into the bed instead of lying stiffly there as I had before.
The kitchen of Vanadis Aikido Club prior to the reconstruction in 2020. I have my breakfasts standing at this bar desk. Half my Craniosacral Biodynamics practice treatments were done on the table to the far left of the picture. This is the most important place in my life, second only to the tatami upstairs, of course.
I believe that the only cure to this kind of “static noise” in our mind is awareness and acceptance, because any hostile reaction to these emotions and thoughts will only disturb the peace more by adding more disarray and agitation inside. However, by treating the entity inside our mind with respect and care, by observing it, without adding any energy to it by participating, it will eventually run out of energy and dissipate naturally.
Our normal problem would be that we identify with these processes, and from the inside they are invisible, because we are moving along with their movement, and there is no points of reference. This is kind of how I define the Ego: The unawareness of our inner mental processes. Because we are identifying with them we are unable to detect their existence. It is kind of like when we are dreaming. We are not aware that we are dreaming. We are blindly following the drama created inside our mind, and we have no choice in the matter. We think, we feel, and we act merely as a puppet run by different mental programs.
The mental programs are different entities with an own will to survive implemented in “their programming”. These entities are often interacting with each other, arguing with each other, or speaking alone in a monologue, commenting on what happens around us, and inside of us. They need to be powered by our energy, or they will run out after their reserve is consumed. So they need us to participate by identification, and thereby they can feed on our energy, sustaining themselves.
The most famous of these entities is probably The Pain Body, quite extensively covered by Eckhart Tolle. An entity consisting of built up suffering from our past, feeding on negative energy, from us, or from people in our immediate vicinity. After the feeding is complete it goes back to it’s dormant stage, until the next time it gets hungry, or if it gets triggered.
The sauna at Vanadis Aikido Club prior to the reconstruction in 2020.
Our mind traps us with identification. We take the point of view centered in the thinker. From this state it appears as we are the origin of the thoughts that appear. Our emotions and our mental positions are us. We identify with nationality, gender, age, profession, social group, political view, religion, skin colour, etc, which are all a variety of mental forms. The Ego creates a separation of Our Team, to have an opposition to The Others (the Enemies). Sometimes we are the only one on our team, sometimes it is a group.
Very often we are unaware and not present even when we are alone. So when we are interacting with somebody else, being aware very often becomes even more difficult, as there are more stuff to keep track of. Especially if the person with whom we are speaking is having a different opinion from us about the theme of our conversation.
If we have a discussion, and our conversation partner happen to disagree with what we are suggesting, we could easily fall into a position of defensiveness. The Ego is totally identified with the idea, “MY IDEA”, “ME”. Thus, if somebody is threatening the mental position, our idea, the Ego feels the threat of death. Naturally we are fighting for our lives to defeat the one who threatens our very existence, although our friend merely suggested a different idea to us? He or she presented a different point of view. Nothing serious, right?
A reflection of the tatami of Vanadis Aikido Club in Janne’s blueberry. Prior to the reconstruction in 2020.
Throughout the history of our world these “small disagreements” has caused ruined friendships, breakups and divorces, physical violence and murder, wars, justification for horrible acts of unimaginable character. And it all starts with our identification with our mind. And our mind will think, regardless of what we wish, because it does what it does, just as our digestion system. There is food, it will be digested. It is not something we as a person does. It is the basic function of that organ. As Eckhart Tolle so elegantly puts it: “you don’t think: Thinking happens to you”.
With awareness and presence we can observe our mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the memories/projections of the past to the future. In a present or aware, state we can see the reflex-like reaction of the Ego, going into defensiveness. I believe we should never fight that reaction, but we need to accept it, say “hello” to it like to an old friend who we now see from a different perspective. This time, however, we get to choose, instead of blindly follow the impulse like a robot on a program.
Were we to deny to ourselves that the reaction is there, because we insist that we have a higher level of awareness now, and we are beyond that kind of embarrassing reactions, the Ego would get the better of us again and are still controlling us on the next level.
Vanadis Aikido Club prior to the reconstruction in 2020.
So, the reaction of the mind, the thoughts and the emotions, are there, but we can see them, because we are observing ourselves from a reference point outside. The mind movements are only visible to us when we have a reference point which are not moving itself. We are not proud of it (being able to observe it), nor are we ashamed of it (embarrassed by what we see), but we are just observing that this is the current situation, which is neither good, nor bad. It is just a result of our current experiment. The observer is never judging. If it is, we are still trapped inside our mind and we don’t know what is going on.
But do we really want to get out of the identification with the mind? Maybe we are happy with our dream? Sometimes the drama of the mind feels really good, right? Let’s say that we are angry about something. It is like being on a high. Our Pain Body is feeding on the negative energy from our thought processes. The rage is making us feel powerful, even invincible. Nothing can stop our fury!
Maybe we notice what has happened at this point, and we “wake up”. We disidentify from the battling entities in the mind. At this moment we might feel exactly how I can imagine a dog feels when the owner takes away their tasty bone. The jaws are twitching, slaver is running. It misses the feeling of sinking their teeth into that juicy and tasty bone! This is the emotion of the Ego at the moment when we become aware again, but we can still feel the Ego, at this moment. Both worlds are momentarily there in front of us.
After a special keiko with some good friends, Anders, Jerry and Janne at Vanadis Aikido Club in February 2020. Photo by Aikidoinfo.se.
When we are upset our mind goes into a zone. The different entities in our mind are triggering each other in a cycle, feeding each other. We are trapped inside, being a prisoner of our own mind, and we are enjoying it. We do not want to be free! We want to continue to be upset and angry! Because it feels good!
Even self hate is enjoyable at some level. Very often we hear about people with big Ego as those with positive self thought. Usually those will meet a bit of resistance from the world, causing some problems. They are easily identified because they constantly crash with others of the same problem.
However, that is only one part of the Ego. The Ego is also the negative self thought. It is less obvious for people around us to detect, but it is the same disease. However, these people will meet their resistance inside, sabotaging everything they try to do, even before resistance will be met from the outside world. So why would anybody accept this situation? It is just stupid, right? But we want to know who we are. The Ego trips us into believing that it is incredibly important to know who we are. We wish to define ourselves. Even being a loser is better than not knowing who we are.
My left bicep is twitching when I re-live my most shameful and embarrassing moments of my life. I hate and despise myself beyond words, so there are no verbal thoughts, just emotions, and that violent twitch of my left bicep is a physical manifestation of those emotions. The twitches in that specific location is my reminder (my alarm clock) to wake up from my wide awake nightmare.
The hate is suddenly and abruptly taken away from me, and I get that feeling of that of a dog who’s bone has been taken away. This bone causes me suffering and unhappiness though. And I realise it a few moments later. But the first couple of seconds I feel lost. The bone I was chewing on is gone. Poison or not be damned, I loved that bone! It is an addiction.
After the keiko with Maren, Rachel, Tor Magnus and Marius in Trondheim Aikido Club in January 2020. Photo by Tor Magnus Nortun.
For me it is a twitch in the left bicep, but I guess it is different in all of us. However, I do believe we all have some kind of bodily reaction to our mind’s activity. Sometimes we can use our body as a detector to reveal what we are unaware of in our mind. If we see it physically, it is only a matter of time before we see the cause of it.
So when I do wake up from one of those nightmares, I look around, and see the real world around me. I can hear the birds singing. I can feel the Sun and rain on my face. I can smell the flowers, or freshly cut grass. For the first time in a long while am aware of my senses again. Maybe I was eating, and I could neither taste the food nor what I were drinking, because I was trapped in my mind, identifying with the entities in there. In fact one might call them demons, and it would not be far from the truth.
Of course if we hear about this, or read about this, prior to having some kind of awareness of it from personal experience, we would think, or say, that there are no entities in our mind. “This is only you. I am not like that! You are crazy!” “My mind is my own!” “There is nobody else here, except me!” OK. Good for you!
However, how do we know? If we are not aware we do not notice, and the words we are saying (or thinking) are not anything but a defensive reaction, which are not even our own, you know? And, if we get upset about it, well then I guess we know the answer, otherwise we would not be upset, would we?
Cimitero Acattolico di Roma in October 2019.
Let’s get back to the actual keiko. So in quite many words I have written that we often identify with mental positions, thought forms, and are unconsciously trapped in this identification, leading us to a un-free, reactive, state where we have no choices of our own. I believe that we can use the connection between our mental states, and the state of our physical body through connection with a partner, to “exorcise” ourselves, mutually, of our “inner demons” (these entities within our mind).
How about our kata/waza? These are also kind of mental thought forms which we could very easily fall into identification with. Do we identify with our technique? Just as with a statement we put into words, an opinion of ours, our technique, being a physical movement of the body, is often even more strongly connected to our sense of who we are than mere words, right? And just as with the mental position, the Ego will fight for it’s survival out of fear for death if any resistance should happen at any point.
In this state, during keiko, if we are tori, it is totally unacceptable for us if the partner does not go down when we are trying to throw them. The same happens if we are uke when it appears a problem with our ukemi. Especially if our partner points it out to us! The Ego goes to war! We would fight for our very survival, in fear of death. “Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry” as James Hetfield says in For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Post keiko tai no tenkan at Vanadis Aikido Club with Jerry in February 2018. Photo by Enzo Ivan Molina.
On the other hand, if we are not identified with our waza, we are free, and we can see the situation and any inner perturbation of the mind. This way we can make our own choices, without being triggered by reactions we do not control. This is the only way I see how we can have any freedom of choice.
Our waza are usually shaped by our history. We are projecting our experience of what has been, on to what will be, in an attempt to use the past to create the future. The Ego can only see the past and the future. It fears the present moment, because it is totally powerless here. However, the present moment is all there is in reality. All past events happened when they were in the present moment, and all future events will happen when that will be the present moment. In one way we could say that time is a mentally constructed concept.
Of course we should not dismiss past experience of similar situations, such as if we are practicing a kata. However, if we identify with the idea from the past we will be trapped. It could be our own idea, collected from past experience; or it could be an idea we received from one of our teachers, which we have adapted as our own. If we identify with our idea, physical or mental, the Ego will defend it as if it were a life and death situation. We will be having all kinds of disturbance in our mind.
Escalator tai no tenkan with Radoslav at Slussen metro station in Stockholm in February 2020. Photo by Jacqueline von Arb.
Sometimes when I practice with my seniors who has like forty years of experience more than me, any mental image, technical tricks, or economically constructed physical movements, are totally useless. They have been there, done that, and are (far) beyond it. Even if they are my dear friends, and they would do everything within their power to help me, it is too physical for them, at this point, and their system will reject it. It feels like a slight violation for them. As long as I am free I will use this situation to observe what happens and find a present situation solution to the problem, rather than stiffly defend on my more primitive ideas, which of course worked perfectly in the past with partners of more or less equal, or less experience, than myself.
It is a different kind of learning. It is rather a continuous relinquishing of stuff, rather than an adding of stuff, which is the kind we are used to from school. The time from having an idea to putting it into action have to be zero. We are going into the situation without prior judgement, and with open eyes. I heard Jiddu Krishnamurti speak of this kind of learning in a public talk from Madras in India in 1978 (a video on youtube). It described pretty much this thing, but maybe he was speaking of something entirely different. What do I know?
Non defensiveness is not an easy subject. Eckhart Tolle often tells a story of a zen master who were accused by a family of being the father of the unborn child of a girl of sixteen. She said so when she was interrogated by her family to find out who was the father. The Master only replied: “Is that so?” When the child was born the family brought the baby to him, demanding that he take care of the child. He replied: “Is that so?” He took lovingly care of the child for a year. Nobody came to see him anyway, because his reputation was totally ruined. Nobody was not a problem for him, and he took care of the child. After a year the girl admitted that it was the butcher’s son, next door, who were the father of the child. The family ran to the zen master demanding that he hand over the child, because they wanted it back. The Master replied, as you might have guessed: “Is that so?” And he handed the child back to them.
“May Peace Prevail On Earth” artwork by Motomichi Anno sensei. A gift to Vanadis Aikido Club from Linda Holiday sensei.
I really like that story. It is an extreme example of an individual who is totally free from the inner drama we create for ourselves, causing misery for both ourselves, the one’s around us.
Aikido is The Art of Peace, according to the founder, Morihei Ueshiba. I believe this might be a piece of the puzzle, helping us achieve peace, both inside ourselves, in our relation to our partners on the tatami, in our family and work place, and in the world. It is a continuous study, because we might be present and aware at one moment, and fall back into a lower level of awareness the next. However, the process is non reversible. We wake up, and then we fail, but we will wake up again and be able see what happened. The next time we will be a little bit better prepared.
Nobody can tell us how to do this stuff. We all have to find it for ourselves. The practice invites us out of our “mind dream” and confronts us the present moment, and we have to deal with it. If it turns into a non-action kind of manner or something else remains secret until we try for ourselves, however, with the mental static noise gone, we are a little bit closer to non-action at least.
Once you have disidentified from your mind,
whether you are right or wrong makes no difference
to your sense of self at all,
so the forcefully compulsive
and deeply unconscious need to be right,
which is a form of violence,
will no longer be there.
Eckhard Tolle – The Power Of Now
Rolle’s 74th birthday, November 2019. Daito Ryu Aiki Jiu Jitsu Roppokai in Björkhagen. Photo by Jan Lien.
In aikido we have two parts we “play” together, kind of like a performance. Very similar to two actors performing a play at the theatre, or in front of the cameras, doing their best to make it the perfect scene; or two musicians playing two different instruments together stretching their skills to make it perfect. In both situations they are striving together to reach perfection technically, and to transmit emotions, both between each other, and to the people who are listening to their music, or watching the scene in the movie or at the theatre.
In aikido we might most of the time be less concerned about the transmission of emotional content to the spectators, but otherwise our performance of the parts are very similar. The technical stuff we are focusing on is of course different in the three situations, but the main idea remains, we work together with the partner to further our skills and try to reach higher and higher level together.
The special part about aikido is that after four repetitions, we change the roles with each other, performing the opposite part than the one we did before, and we continue changing roles every four times. In addition we change partners every seven or eight minutes or so, performing the same “piece” with as many people as possible.
Keiko with Rachel and Tor Magnus at Trondheim Aikidoklubb in August 2019.
This is one of the most difficult concepts to explain to people who never did aikido before, because for most people the word “martial arts” or “budo” is equivalent with self defence, fighting, or competition, or all three at once. And it is just takes a look at a comment section at a YouTube video on the subject to know that the misconception that the practitioners are fighting each other is a very, very common one. “It does not work on the streets”, “it is fake”, “the attacker is not making resistance so it is worthless”. There are countless statements of this nature.
Well, you don’t see so often that people complain about the musicians lack of effort in trying to sabotage the music for each other when they perform a song together (so it is fake music, right?), or two actors not trying hard enough to make the other look bad. It is a rather unusual comment about music and about actors in a movie, but about the exact same situation, with aikido, these are quite common comments when somebody unfamiliar with aikido is watching.
The human mind is always trying to label and categorise everything we perceive, diminishing and simplifying it down to a simple combination of vowels and consonants (a word), and throwing away everything else about what we perceive. It is perfectly natural that people who never did aikido will compare it to other things which look similar for them, putting aikido in the same category.
Tai no tenkan at home, in the kitchen, with Anders in January 2018.
Even, some people doing aikido, and have been practicing for some time, are still stuck in this way of thinking, just because they have been trapped by a word. A combination of vowels and consonants are defining their opinion about what aikido is. I strongly believe the biggest problem for aikido in the world today is due to this misconception of what aikido is. Because we are labeled in a category that does not describe what we are doing, at all, we are competing for our members in our clubs, with the arts who are really doing the stuff which is the mental conception of the man, woman and child in the street of what aikido is. Which, in my opinion, it is not.
Anyway, it was a slightly different subject I was planning to write about today. It is a ting which is easier seen when it happens to somebody else than when it happens to ourselves.
When we identify with our mental position we are in a way walking in a dangerous territory, because we will have the fear of death associated with being wrong. I find that by taking ukemi we are performing an exercise in letting go of our mental position. In my opinion, the word “attack” is very misleading in modern aikido, as it is leading our mind into labelling the situation as fighting. However, in the lack of a more suitable word we are using it.
Keiko with Silje at Trodheim Aikidoklubb in January 2019.
So when we are attacking, our intention is to initiate the interaction with our partner, which is the beginning of the kata which we are practising together. If we are at all associating the ukemi with loosing, or defeat, or death, we will maybe even without knowing it, fall back into competition with our partner.
In an argument we can state clearly what our opinion is, and present how we perceive the situation, and our logical reasoning for our opinion. The usual problem is that we are so identified with our mind, emotions and mental position that we are trapped into a set of conditioned mental reflexes, and start fighting for our life. For the Ego (the mind made fake identity), the loss of the argument is equivalent with death, and we are suddenly in a conflict, with our friend. If the conflict is on a small scale, there might be hurt feelings, or even physical violence amongst the parts; on a larger scale there could be a war, and millions could die.
Keiko at Stockholm Aikikai in February 2019. Photo by Jacqueline von Arb.
I think ukemi is a great exercise to practice letting go of the attachment to our mental position, and find a sense of self which is rooted deeper inside of us. Something more solid, which is not a mentally constructed fake self, but our real identity. We grab, or strike, or whatever the kata requires from our part, and try to make the best possible performance of that part, to make the whole perfect for just that situation, with that partner, at that time.
If we get stuck in our idea that we should try to “win” in the situation as uke, we have fallen into the trap of identification with a mental position. It can happen very easily in our life outside the dojo, it is more difficult there, but it can even happen during our keiko. In that case we are not really making any choices any more, but merely acting out primitive mental reactions.
Once we realise this we are “waking up”, into a new level of consciousness. However, we are usually to far submerged in the situation as it happens to see anything. If we have a high level of awareness we realise it after, if we analyse the situation. If we are totally unaware of our mental reactions we might never realise this.
Post keiko moment after practice with Dominika and Rado at Aikido Kobukan Bratislava in December 2019. Photo by Radoslav Tmak.
I believe that our keiko should be an exercise in being able to get to a higher level of consciousness also outside the tatami. The challenges will be harder there, much harder, because there are not only two roles, and we are doing much more diverse things in our interactions with other people than the few katas we are practicing in the keiko, but the idea is the same.
And it really does not mean that we will have less of a chance to present our mental position in a way that makes sense to the other. Quite the contrary in fact. Once we have become free of the identification with our mental position, and are free of the triggered reactions and reflexes dictating to us how to act. We can see the mental position of the other, and find a way to explain our way of thinking in a way that makes sense to them. You know, instead of labelling them “the enemy”, and trying to get rid of them in any way we can. Kill them if we are able to, and can get away with it.
Keiko with Rachel at Vanadis Aikidoklubb in June 2019.
Why are all of these things so hard? Why do we keep identifying with our thoughts, emotions and mental positions, even after we know that it makes us act like fools when we do?
The Ego need us to identify with something (anything) to have any power over us, and the entity which we call the Ego have a strong will to protect itself to survive. The power of the Ego is depending on our lack of awareness and presence. Once we are aware, we can see clearly what is going on inside of ourselves, and in the situation outside. However, we will continuously fall back into what Eckhard Tolle calls “unconsciousness”, where we are mindlessly (ironic expression as we are actually totally identified with our mind in this state) following the conditioned reflexes of our mind.
Sometimes we practise with people who have injuries; sometimes we practise with people with a rather far advanced age; sometimes we practise with pregnant women. In many cases we might have a partner who can’t take ukemi physically, and there are times we are the one who can’t perform the fall. After some years of practice I think we all will experience this, at some point in our lives. However, I don’t think this matters at all.
There is a huge difference between somebody who can’t go down, for whatever real reason, and somebody who is trapped in a mentally constructed prison of ideas. In one case we can just modify the physical form of the practice, in the other it turns into a conflict no matter how we adjust the outer form. In both cases it is impossible to change from the position of the tori. However, it can act as an inspiration to not fall into the same trap ourselves. We will not as easily see it when it happens to us, so it is great to be able to observe it happening in our partners, to gather information and check for warning signs of any defensiveness and aggression connected to our position.
Tai no tenkan with Mark in Berlin in April 2019. Photo by Daniel Jonasson.
Of course this goes for the role of tori as well. Very often the defensiveness of one is triggered by the aggressivity of the other, and this could happen in any role of the interaction. I just focused on the uke part just now, because it brings out the idea more clearly. However, it can be applied to both roles in the keiko.
To stay present, and be aware of the activity of our mind is actually a prerequisite for enjoying the keiko, I think. If we don’t, it can actually lead to some serious conflicts, which causes fear, anger, resentment and hostility, but in that case, in my opinion, it is no longer aikido, but merely something much less developed and refined, more primitive in nature: fighting.
Enjoy your time on the tatami! Aikido makes people happy!
Through cracked, blackened memories
of unit dispersal
I face the impregnable wall
Dissident Aggressor
Sin after Sin (1978)
Tipton/Halford/Downing
Aikido makes people happy, right? Why do I say that? What is happiness? What kind of state could we experience as happiness? What separates the state we find ourselves in during, and after the keiko, from the undeniably good feelings we get from most other things in the world? And why would I define the one happiness and the others not?
I believe that inside our mind we have a prison made of three impregnable walls.
Memories/History/Ideas
Emotions/Feelings
Thoughts
A: Memories/History/Ideas; B: Emotions/Feelings; C: Thoughts. Image of the eye by WikiHow.com
I would define this triangle prison as the Ego. From inside this cell the Ego appears to be our person. We identify ourselves as those walls, because it is all we can see. From the inside, everything outside does not exist. We identify with our ideas, our memories and our history. We have our plans for the future built on that structure.
We have our head in the washing machine, and feel all the emotions without a reference point, and there is no choice in anything, because one function is triggering the next, and so on. We feel, we act by reflex triggered by these feelings, and we build our ideas from our history of earlier automated responsens of our own system. We have no perspective of the stuff outside our triangle prison. We identify with our emotions, because we believe our emotions are us.
The thoughts which appears in our head, with a rate of about ten times as many words as we can speak pr minute, we naturally identify as our thoughts. In my case there often are at least two speakers, or maybe more. And they are constantly arguing, more or less loudly, in my mind (maybe it is just me who is crazy?).
The prison cell of Nelson Mandela. Photo by Elaine and Steve McDuff.
These three sides of the triangular prison of our mind are triggering each other, in all directions, and we will continuously be busy inside, with a constant activity, which is totally out of our control. We initially identify ourselves with these parts, because it is all we know. It is all we can see, at first. And all our “choices” are reflexes triggered by other reflexes, so we have no choice at all. We are a prisoner of this system, and we can’t get out.
One example could be something like a memory (from our history) giving us some emotion (guilt, shame, fear, anxiety and so on), which again triggers thoughts (arguments of how why we were doing what we were doing and why it ended up wrong), which leads us to new emotions. And from the new emotions we are maybe reminded of some other memories. And the circle goes on.
The situation could be completely different, but with the exact same constituents involved, although it has a different form. In a different scenario we have some idea of what we wish to do. The situation is the situation (which we can’t see in our current state), and there might be a challenge for our idea, and there usually is in life, and this gives rise to some emotions (frustration, anger, stress), which in their turn triggers some kind of thought process (putting the blame on somebody, telling ourselves how useless we are). New emotions finds fertile ground, and gives us a new objective/goal based on this history of “non choices”. And again we are stuck in an endless circle (or triangle) of misery.
Picture from Nepal by The National Trust for Nature Conservation.
The Prison Walls, History, Emotion and Thought can activate each other in any direction and they are extremely sneaky in going beyond our consciousness, having a disturbing, quite depressing activity, even when we think that we are asleep, destroying what could have been a blissful rest.
A friend of mine recently asked me about the aikido study. I did it pretty much every day for eighteen years, which is for most people considered a rather extensive education for any subject. However in aikido this is only the beginning. Some of my good friends have been on this road for fifty five years. She was wondering if there still are more to learn? For the ones on the aiki road it is obvious, but it is difficult to help somebody who is not doing aikido to relate to it, because most things in our daily life we learn for a specific goal. Most of all, to make money. We learn something, then we use it to make money. It is far in between the things which does not follow this nature. Aikido is one of those rare exceptions from this nature. The road itself becomes the goal. And the subject of the study is life itself, kind of, so there is always more to explore. Life is limitless.
However, thanks to my friend’s question, what was already obvious for me in an unconscious way, became clarified by, not so much the explanation I gave, which were very minimalistic, but by my curiosity and awareness finding it’s way into new areas where I had not put so much attention before.
The process of studying brings us in touch with the present moment. It might take many years to recognise it, but it is there in the keiko all the time. The present moment allows us to see the “little ants” crawling around on our little triangle in our mind. We see our memories, emotions, and thoughts, and their endless chatter, and mayhem, and drama, and misery, from the outside. We can see it as an outside observer. For a short time. Until we realise what has happened, and we are triggered to be proud of our achievement, which is an emotion, and before we know it, we felt that emotion and were immediately teleported inside the prison walls again. The feeling triggers thoughts, which triggers memories, which triggers other feelings, and so on.
Image from thewallpaper.co
We never have to stop the constant activity inside our triangle. Actually we can’t, and neither should we try (the more we try the more activity we will trigger). It is always there. However, we do not have to stick our head into that washing machine. At least we can take our head out sometimes, to experience the peace and tranquility, and serenity which exists outside.
This is a state which aikidokeiko brings about, all the time, I think. At first we have no perception to notice what is happening. We do not only feel good. We do not only feel feel happy, like the emotion happy with our head in the bucket. We feel a blissful state of togetherness with our friends, and a state of beauty and peace, which is difficult to achieve in any other situation that I have experienced.
My theory is that one of the reasons why aikido makes people happy is that it gives us these little glimpses of the world outside our little prison cell. We have a small taster of the freedom. It does not only feel good. It also feels good inside our triangle of course, because our inner and outer worlds are naturally connected. We see the Universe. It makes us not only feel happy. It makes us happy!