Elements that don't exist

Well, so, I thought I'd have a follow-up to the last post on spirituality, but... not quite yet. But I've been doing some not unrelated thinking, recently, about the ways in which people get things wrong. A friend of mine pointed out an attempt at "scientifically explaining" ki that was pretty much gibberish, but it got me thinking about how the concept of ki functions .

There's a pretty common kind of thinking that goes like this: people notice that various things seem to have some quality in common, so they imagine that there must be some sort of elemental substance possessing or conferring that quality. Objects with the quality must contain some of the substance; objects without must not; and varying degrees of the quality must correspond to varying amounts of the substance. This isn't obviously a fallacy because some things really do work this way. For example, salt. Food that is salty, in general, contains salt in proportion to its saltiness. One can take a non-salty dish and add salt to it, thus making it salty.

And then there are things that only sort of work that way. Like color. When we're building something like, say, a table, if it isn't red enough we can add red paint to make it redder. But it's not such a good idea to do this with a chicken sandwich.

And many, many things don't work this way at all. Like fire. Medieval European alchemists thought it did. They imagined that flammable objects must all contain some sort of substance of flammability. They called it "phlogiston." They were completely wrong. Nothing like that exists. Chemistry is much too complicated--burning is a chemical reaction that some substances can undergo and some can't, but you can't take something out of flammable substances to make them non-flammable. And even if you cover something non-flammable with oil and then burn it, it's still just the oil burning.

This is about abstractions. The world is terribly (wonderfully?) complicated, so we--our brains, our minds--deal with it by organizing it into simpler, abstract quantities. But the map is not the territory, and the world is not directly made up of abstractions. When we try to reason from abstractions back to the world, sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong.

Here's where this ties in to the previous post about spirituality. We make these abstractions almost without thinking, and then we look at the world and we don't see them. We don't see anything that corresponds directly to our concept of "justice". We see some events that seem just, and some that seem unjust, but we don't find quantities of pure justice. And the religious response to this is often to imagine that such entities exist, somewhere, but somewhere that we can't see directly. In this way theology makes reasoning about these abstractions--in this example, trying to figure out what justice really means by analyzing the experiences we identify with it--into a sort of spiritual naturalism. We look at our experience and decide that "justice" can refer to action and reaction on a long time scale, and we imagine that our divine avatar of justice (a god, an angel, whatever) possessing a long memory or a good filing system. As metaphors, these ways of thinking can be helpful. As literal descriptions of the world, they can be very wrong and misleading.

And here's where this relates to ki: Ki seems to be a classic example of one of these phantom elements. People have noticed that certain kinds of movement have more effect than others--some punches hit harder, some people's bodies are more stable, etc.--and have built an abstraction of physical power. They have tried to determine what sorts of movements have this power, and what practices produce people who can make those movements. All of this is reasonable thinking. To assume that power, ki, must have some sort of physical substance that is built up by practice and expended by movement is completely unnecessary and almost certainly nonsense.

Some thoughts on the question of spirituality

I want to start what will probably be a series of posts about the spiritual or mental side of aikido practice (and probably other things as well). This is a pretty tangled subject, and it's related, I think, to questions about the role of culture in this kind of practice--so, as a starting point, I want to write a bit about theology. (Of course, "theology" is itself a fairly culturally-based term for the subject, but thinking in that way makes it impossible to begin to say anything)

Right now, especially in America, there is a cultural conflict between "science" and "religion." As in many other matters, this conflict is also about what the words "science" and "religion", in themselves, mean. "Science", in this debate, stands in for a particularly intellectual mode of thought--but it is also used to signify acceptance of certain scientific discoveries, independent of the thought process that produced them. The fact that these two things (the thought-process and the discoveries) may not be necessarily identical, or that the one may not necessarily produce the other, is entirely relevant to this conflict.

On the other side, "religion" is also used to refer to both a mode of thinking and a set of thoughts. By "religion" people tend to mean a sort of non-intellectual thinking, whether mystical, traditional, or just wrong (depending on which side is making the argument); but people also mean the particular teachings and traditions of Christianity in particular and other faiths in general. Again, the thought process called "religion" and the thoughts of various religions are not necessarily related.

(In both cases the difference comes partly from the fact that the terms "religion" and "science" get defined both by their supporters and by their opponents, and partly from the fact that words rarely do an entirely accurate job of dividing up experience)

Very, very broadly speaking, the argument for "science" seems to say that "religion" says little or nothing that is correct; and the argument for "religion" is that "science" says little or nothing that is valuable. This ignores both the extreme positions that consider their opponents actively malicious, and nuanced positions of many varieties, but is not I think a wrong characterization. Right now I am concerned with how the first part of this gets religion wrong.

What, at its core, is religion? That is to ask, not what various cultural traditions say, but what religion or spirituality or mysticism or theology is trying to accomplish, as an intellectual discipline. We don't often think of theology in these terms. (Those on the side of "science" don't really see theology as an intellectual exercise at all; and those on the side of "religion" tend to see their particular tradition as a given.) I think that theology (or religion, or spirituality, etc.) is an attempt to resolve the tension between our thoughts about the world, and our experience of the world.

I (as a generic human being, not as I, myself, Clayton) find that I have some ideas like justice, permanence, and so on that are abstractions; but when I look at the world, when I examine my experience of the world, I don't seem to find these concepts anywhere. Regarding justice, I may find some examples of people and events that seem mostly just, or partly just, or tremendously unjust, but I don't see pure justice anywhere. Similarly, I may see things like mountains that seem to last a long time, but more evidence points to the fact that they don't really last forever. So, what does this mean? Why, how, do I have concepts in my head that don't match up with anything in the world? Except that they do--I experience those concepts whenever I think about them, and I meet other people who seem to have those same concepts. (And then, of course, this raises the whole question of what my mind is, and why it is different from other things I see and experience)

Those kinds of thought that are called "religion" seem to me (now I'm back to speaking as Clayton) to be attempts to resolve this tension. Many kinds of thought have started from the premise that our abstract thoughts are somehow real--that they correspond to real entities somewhere that we don't normally experience; that they are elements of a true reality of which our daily experiences are only imperfect reflections; that the external world deviates from the ideals because of the actions of some other entities. Beliefs about god or gods are the result of these kinds of resolutions. But if we have explained our ideal thoughts, we then have to explain why our experiences are not so ideal. And as with all forms of human thought, we keep asking questions, and keep trying to analyze deeper. Sometimes we find that all of our thinking and analyzing has led us to a contradiction, or has resulted in making a claim about the world that later turns out to be strictly false. This is what makes the partisans of "science" ridicule theology and religion. But the enterprise of trying to understand the external world in terms of our internal experience is not an invalid one. After all, we live most directly in our thoughts, our feelings, our abstractions. It makes a lot of sense to try and explain how these thoughts will make us experience the world.

Internal Power and Bad Explanations

Recently I've become quite interested in the idea of "internal power" in aikido. (I just read Ellis Amdur's Hidden In Plain Sight and found it fascinating). But it's very difficult to read and think about this because "internal power" is "ki stuff" and there's a lot of very mystical thinking about that.

I don't believe in mystical thinking. This is a strong thing to say, and potentially offensive, but the position I take is less severe than it sounds--with some explanation. When dealing with things like ki and internal power, the mystical thinking I'm talking about takes the form of "well, ki is this kind of energy in the body that's totally unknown to western (or modern) science." Well, you can't do that. You can't say that. You can't get away with making ki this sort of extra-scientific thing.

Why not? People are used to putting all sorts of things outside of science. The big one is religion, and that's a big thorny issue which I'll mostly avoid. But not entirely. Within religion, the most common sort of extra-scientific claim is about what happens after death. And when someone says "after I die, something that is somehow 'me' will go on existing somewhere else," there's not much you can say about that from a scientific perspective. You can say it doesn't seem likely, that we can't figure out how it could be, that we haven't really seen it happen to anyone else; but what they're talking about is by definition unobservable to anyone alive, so that won't convince them. Ok, fine. But ki? Internal power? Now we're talking about punching and getting punched. That's pretty observable.

And you can't do the western science/eastern knowledge or modern science/ancient knowledge thing either. Science doesn't work like that. Anatomy doesn't work like that. The history of science, though, is divided into west and east. You can claim that something was discovered or invented in one place or another, but you can't say that it only exists in one place or another. And science understands the body pretty well. There just isn't room for some sort of energy flowing through the body. We haven't seen it; we haven't seen anywhere for it to flow.

What there is room for is a method of moving the body different from our usual understanding of strength. Maybe.

What leaves room for some kind of actual internal power is the fact that an explanation for a phenomenon can be completely wrong without the phenomenon itself being imaginary. Europeans believed in phlogiston for at least a hundred years--but they still managed to burn things. It is entirely possible that people practicing internal training could have genuine skills but no understanding of the basis of those skills. How could that work? Let me try to give an example. Imagine that nobody knows how to swim. Except me. I've figured it out, somehow, even though I don't really understand buoyancy or fluid dynamics or anything. So I show you this new skill, and you ask me how I do it. And I say, "there are lots of little invisible demons in the water that want to grab you and drag you to the bottom. That's why people who fall in sink and drown, you know. But if you push the demons away, you can stay afloat. The thing is, they're tricky, and they always try to get behind you. That's why I kick my legs like that--because the demons are sneaking up behind me." (sorry; it's not a very good bad explanation of swimming) This explanation is utter nonsense. But if you imitate exactly what I'm doing, you can learn to swim too. And then you can tell people how you do it, and they can learn also--but we'll all have this crazy belief about what we're doing. And, since our theory is wrong, it's very hard for us to improve on the method. Carrying big heavy holy implements to scare the demons? Seems like a good idea; not going to work. Creativity is unlikely to help, so we emphasize exact imitation and repetition as a learning method.

I think this may be very close to the traditional state of knowledge about internal training.

What does aikido look like?

A few weeks ago somebody asked me if I'd ever "used my aikido for real." Now, of course that question really means "did you ever get attacked and then kick the guy's ass?" to which the answer is no. But the answer I gave was that I use it every time I have to walk through crowds on the subway (and elsewhere. Hong Kong has a lot of crowds). I don't think my friend was terribly satisfied by that answer, and I'll admit it sounds a bit cute. But I wasn't trying to be cute when I said it, and I think it's not as stupid as it sounds.

I talked in my last post about the idea that aikido is a very different kind of thing from martial arts like karate or sports like judo. One of the big differences, on the technical level, is that aikido scales naturally with the intensity of the attack. If somebody grabs and pushes hard, they're setting themselves up for a big throw. If they're not holding or pushing as hard, they can be lowered to the ground pretty gently. And if somebody who isn't paying attention just happens to walk into you, well, you know how to use tenkan and other movements to just get out of the way. No need for violence.

So what does "real aikido" really look like?

There are a lot of people who say that, if you're really under attack, your aikido techniques should become more vicious, with additional strikes and more violent application of joint locks. But I don't think that's true. I think that the techniques of aikido are entirely capable of dealing with serious attacks. What they're not so good at dealing with is unserious attacks. We can see this in practice all the time with partners that don't seem to want to attack. Partners whose strikes miss by inches if not feet, who grab a wrist but don't really want to do anything with it, who don't turn and reorient after their initial attack misses--these people are difficult to throw. (And that makes it easy to imagine that a real attacker will be harder to throw) But, of course, these are precisely those situations which don't require us to throw our partner. If somebody walks up to you and punches you in the face, that's something you have to deal with. If somebody walks up to you and swings their arm near your face, that's a different sort of thing entirely. Irritating, sure. Definitely rude. Probably something to be concerned about. But as long as that's all they're doing, we're still in "irritating little brother" territory and not "terrifying murderer."

We all have a picture in our heads when we practice of what our aikido should look like. Usually that's the kata we practice: a grab, a body movement, a throw, and a roll or breakfall. But when your partner doesn't attack fully, what you end up with looks quite different. I think it's useful to stop and look at what does happen, rather than forcing a throw awkwardly. Sometimes your technique just winds to a halt. You turn, your partner doesn't and you stand there awkwardly holding onto your partner at some weird angle. But that's fine! He's not doing anything to you, after all. Not throwing someone who doesn't need to be thrown is just the same as "not thinking of defeating an opponent." Of course, as nice as that is, it's not a good way to learn throws. This is why it's important for the attacker role to be taken seriously--not because it makes the techniques look better, but because otherwise they make no sense at all.

One of the things I really enjoy when I watch Endo sensei demonstrate is that it always feels like he's calming the interaction. His partner might attack quite seriously, but as the technique progresses there seems to be less and less energy on both sides. Finally, somebody falls down, but it's not a big deal. That's wonderful. Imagine all of the arguments that you've been in that started over something small and ended up with a lot of screaming. Now imagine those other arguments where you both calmed down and ended up in a more or less relaxed discussion. Which was better? With aikido, it seems like physical interactions--fights--can be treated the same way.

This is not for hurting people

For a long time all sorts of karate and taekwondo schools in America and elsewhere (not to mention more syncretistic or utterly made-up styles) have advertised themselves as for "self-defense only" and not for beating people up. This is a good thing insofar as beating people up is a bad and should not be encouraged, but there's a big problem. Karate and taekwondo and most other martial arts (that term is a big hint) are for beating people up. Yes, they are. The martial arts are techniques of war--designed to injure and kill. And even things like karate that may not descend from battlefield techniques are fighting skills nonetheless, designed to hurt people that don't want to be hurt (whether they want to hurt you is a side issue). So when you're neighborhood karate school tells you that their techniques are "only for self defense", they mean something like this: "We'll teach you how to hurt someone, and then tell you that's not a nice thing to do."

And then along comes aikido, which says "our techniques are not for hurting people," and what does everyone think? They think this is the same kind of thing as karate: a technical curriculum that inflicts real damage, and a philosophical teaching that says not to do this (unless you really need to). Add to this that the founder had a reputation as a more-or-less invincible fighter, and that aikido is known to derive from traditional fighting techniques. So most practitioners wind up with the idea that aikido techniques are nice when you want them to be, and very much not nice if that's what you want.

The problem is that's not true. Most of the available evidence really does seem to suggest that the founder really did design a curriculum that was less violent than its technical precursors. Nor does it seem as though that's just the outward form of techniques that are secretly for killing. And this is borne out by the techniques. Aikido is mostly a way of taking somebody who's put themselves out of balance, and more or less getting out of the way. Or it could be. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to want to practice a sort of Ueshiba-style Aiki-jujutsu.

Yesterday's practice also had me thinking about kata. Aikido has sort of a weird relationship with kata: the founder reportedly barely used any in his teaching--every technique a dynamic expression of aiki, and never the same twice--but most of the second generation seemed to settle on and mostly standardize kata for teaching. A lot of people outside Japan don't seem to recognize what they're doing as kata at all, since they think that's only those long sequences that they do in karate or chinese styles. And, in any case, the history of aikido is too short for us to really find a successful pedagogy.

But, so, kata: I think most people's understanding of kata in aikido is something like this: Each kata is a fixed attack and a fixed throw, and then we further break the throw into omote and ura versions. So if we're doing shomen uchi ikkyo, uke will attack shomen, and then nage will do ikkyo, and... there's the kata. done. But there's a lot of confusion over what uke does while nage is doing ikkyo. There are three categories of behavior that I've seen: After nage connects to uke's arm,

1. uke just kind of goes limp and gets pulled through the rest of the throw.
   
2. uke decides they don't want to be thrown (or that a "realistic attacker" wouldn't want to) and goes rigid or starts trying to pull away.
3. uke continues to push toward nage, maintaining the connection.
   

Now, I like choice (3) best, both as uke and as nage, because it makes the practice go smoothly, and, I think, teaches nage what sort of attacking energy "fits" with the technique. (2) often gets presented as the most realistic because it's not compliant, but that's weird, too: who grabs somebody's arm with the sole objective of not getting thrown? That's a pretty passive-aggressive way to start a fight. And (1) is clearly not so good--nage gets the experience of seeing somebody go clattering to the ground, but not much else. The problem is that most techniques (other than kokyu-ho and kokyu-nage) are more complicated than just an attack and response; uke also responds to nage's technique. So when we tell people "this kata is shomen uchi ikkyo", everybody comes up with a different idea of what to do.

So, how can we use kata better?

A few other thoughts:

• The traditional style of kata makes uchidachi the teaching rule and shidachi the learning role. the uchidachi side is set up so that uchidachi's strikes are the natural response. There's also a lot of back-and-forth (I was just watching videos of Katori Shinto-ryu kenjutsu, and their katas are fifteen or twenty strikes long).
• The founder (maybe following Daito-Ryu) inverted the usual kata relationship: in aikido, the teacher takes nage and the student uke.
  

It strikes me that many of our kata in aikido can be broken into several steps. My teacher often talks about how each technique involves sabaki (body movement), kuzushi (balance-taking), and then the throw or pin. And if we think of it like this, both nage and uke have standardized actions at each step. I noticed this particularly yesterday when we were practicing a kind of yokomen uchi kokyu-nage where nage pulls uke's balance forward and then throws with a sudden push back--sort of like sumi otoshi, but not quite. I'm going to try to break this down as a multi-step kata, with nage giving actions for uke to respond to.

1. Nage presents yokomen as a target.
   Uke strikes yokomen
2. Nage steps in with atemi/block [sabaki]
   Uke continues the attack
3. Nage shifts back slightly and pulls uke's balance forward [kuzushi]
   Uke maintains the connection and extends toward nage's center
4. Nage suddenly pushes back and outward on uke's arm [nage]
   Uke falls. (Backward fall, forward roll, or breakfall, depending on the speed)
   

That's a description of the kata, for sure, but are the separate steps really separate? I think so--look at what happens if uke doesn't respond in each step.

1. There's no attack and no technique. This, too, is aikido (of a particularly easy or subtly sort).
   
2. If uke is stopped by the atemi or thinks better of his attack, there's no reason to continue. Nage is undefeated, and hopefully (depending on your preferences in atemi) uke is unhurt.
   
3. If uke doesn't maintain a strong push toward nage, he's just going to fall. The technique is the more standard sort of yokomen uchi kokyu-nage. Only a connection directly toward nage's center demands any response at all.
   
4. Of course, if uke doesn't take a good fall he's going to take a bad one. So this response is also pretty important for the completion of the kata.
   

Notice also that uke is learning something at every step:

1. How to see an opening. I notice that when my teacher is demonstrating, sometimes he has to physically grab uke and guide them into the correct attack; sometimes he just has to tell them which one to do; and sometimes his uke can figure it out from his positioning.
   Also, how to attack properly. A weak or poorly-aimed strike doesn't need a response.
2. How to reorient after the attack. If uke doesn't turn to face nage, there's no need to pull him off balance, because there's no attack any more.
3. How to feel a connection and move forward with it. If the connection is lost, maybe nage didn't do a good job with kuzushi, but in any case it doesn't matter since the engagement is over.
4. How to fall.
   

I'm far from learning actual counters or henka-waza, but even at my level this sort of breakdown seems quite useful. I'm going to try to think about other kata in the same way.

Practicing without falls

I'm still suffering from a sprained neck (a big forward ukemi that sort of got away from me) and so last night I tried to practice without taking any falls. It was a very interesting style of practice for a few reasons, and I think has some lessons that are worth applying even once I'm falling again. As goofy as it is, it actually makes sense to break this into uke and nage parts.

Uke: The first thing I noticed was that if I did want to fall, I had to make sure I wasn't going to fall--but I didn't want to start tensing up and resisting and otherwise interfering with everyone else's practice. Usually I'm pretty unconcerned about falls, so I try not to anticipate the technique and just get thrown. Last night I wanted to be sure I could catch myself on my partner if he didn't stop in time, so I found myself following along much more consciously. So, for example, iriminage: after being pulled forward and off balance, very consciously push toward nage, try to stand up, wait for it... ok, he's got my balance, GRAB ON! Actually, all of my partners were good and pulled their throws after taking my balance, but it was quite interesting to follow along and see whether I needed their help. Sometimes I felt that I still had my own balance and could resist successfully.

Usually as uke I concentrate on providing a strong connection to nage--a sort of "always attacking" energy that generally makes the technique go smoothly and is I think pretty important for kata practice, especially in the kyu grades. But this means that there are often times when I give away my balance, or at least let it be taken quite easily. I'm sure this is a matter of making poor attacks, but perhaps not unrealistically: the spirit of attacking is to effect the opponent, which means a connection (and there's certainly anecdotal evidence floating around that real attacks are easier to deal with than some practice ones, because attackers aren't expecting to be thrown). But one thing Endo sensei talks about is generating a connection from *nage*'s side, and really taking uke's balance. And last night it was interesting to see when that was happening, and when it wasn't, when I could have disengaged and when I couldn't.

Nage: I only sat out one week, and I came and watched anyway, so I didn't feel out of touch rejoining the class. But one of my partners surprised me with much stronger technique than I had seen from him even the previous class. We talked about it afterward, and he suggested that maybe it was because he wasn't concentrating so much on the throw as on the balance-taking. That's pretty plausible, and it was something I had sort of noticed as well. I had been trying to throw softly myself--it's too weird to be flinging people around and then refusing to fall--and it's interesting to think about the technique ending before uke falls. After all, the last bit is usually what we think of. Another time, I might try to have my partners not fall at all, as an experiment to see whether I feel like I've taken their balance or are just muscling them down.