- – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei
Something we’re going to work on this evening is this whole constellation of concepts surrounding ‘position in space’. You can say ‘ma-ai‘, and things like that, but it’s a way more beautiful, intricate thing. And something I’ve always found was the expression of the actual principles which are that physical things – in our dimension – have this nesting principle with all kinds of other stuff.
And I think of it as a way to open your awareness to ki and kokyu by experiencing these things very clearly… very definite things… and then you could understand with a certain kind of mind and spirit that any movement you make would be them.
They say there’s that shizentai concept of natural body and it just does this stuff. I think when we think ‘natural body’, at least in the United States, it’s like: “I do whatever I want to do…” “I just do this whole, sort of, whatever makes me feel free, liberated, whatever it might be…” which is not it.
That’s not ‘natural body’.
‘Natural body’ might be the simple way a farmer squats to check his rice – and it’s all these things – but his body is expressing a wholeness with the forms around him.
And I think this society in particular is so, what?… ‘voyeuristic’ might be a good word, but it’s really that detachment aspect: that we are watching life on a TV screen. So our shizentai is a slouch or a bunch of tension. So maybe these metaphors don’t match very well as far as words go. However, by training you begin to become aware of yourself again, and in a new context: because we definitely work with these natural energies and forms and flows and stuff, which aren’t what one might see on a computer – the theatre of something – they are actually built-in. And I think they’re in there just normally, but sometimes we’ve blocked off ourself. Our inculturation blocks us off from this stuff.
And it’s one of the things that O’Sensei, I think… (this is my interpretation, of course, I cannot speak for him…) he had some kind of emergent experience of the natural human, even though he was in a time where the Westernization was trying to define things really differently.
And I think, for him, I wonder if that one moment when he went from ‘budo as militarism’ to ‘budo as farming’ wasn’t the most important thing?
I think that something happened, and then that was it for him.
His aikido changed.
You start seeing all those different versions: the Tokyo dojo, the Iwama dojo…
I always think about the Osaka dojo – I kind of wonder what that would have been like – – – and up in the hills West of Osaka…. the dojo that was their main dojo before they were suppressed…
So the expression of the energies… I think maybe that he saw that they were losing that connectivity so he went back to the root of it.
And I think about Tesshu and those other guys – I have some exposure to their lineage – also, were very much about trying to keep Japanese culture from deteriorating into ours.
The swordsman understood this stuff and he could see that the office guy wasn’t even there…
And couldn’t understand the words any more…
Which I think is the shocker, because we think, ‘oh, they’d’ve figured it out’… But no. Why would they?
Anyway…
that’s my thinking…
Discovering your natural body again.
Which we’re going to play with, tonight.