Ralph Pettman
Going For A Walk In The World
AFTERWORD The book above was written fifteen years ago. It was written by mistake, at the behest of my teacher, Yoshinobu Takeda, because I misunderstood a request he made to write about the approach that his teacher - SeigoYamaguchi - took to aikido. I thought Takeda-sensei wanted me to write about his own approach. No wonder he seemed a bit puzzled when, after six months work, I showed him what I had written! Once I discovered my mistake, I did what he initially requested, and wrote a separate essay on Yamaguchi-sensei’s aikido. The text of this essay is available, along with others, at www.theaikiacademy.com. Meanwhile, my account of Going for a Walk in the World went on to have a life of its own. It may have been an inadvertent life, but it was a life nevertheless. After this little book was written I continued to practice and to research aikido, and to ask myself what the art means. I recently re-read the text I originally wrote and was surprised to find that I was able to stand by all that I had to say then. However, I now think I did not go far enough. I want to add a brief “Afterword”, therefore, to show how I think the story needs to be taken a step further. It is time to put what I wrote originally in the larger context I see aikido in now. I did not appreciate this context when I wrote this book first, but I do now. I still think that what I wrote remains valid. It really only scratches the surface, though. Aikido research is truly educative. It leads out. It reveals new realms of understanding the further one goes. At least, this has been the case for me. I would therefore like to add a brief account of where my research went to after I compiled the above. Going for a Walk in the World is built around the idea that there are three different dimensions to aikido. The art is one art, but its practitioners give it a physical, a mental and a spiritual facet. Different students of the founder of aikido highlight different aspects of what they think O-sensei was doing. Their students do the same, and as a consequence, many styles of aikido develop. There is nothing odd about this. It is as it should be, since all teachers of the art develop their own understanding of what they do, and as they train they develop their own ways of doing so. Meanwhile, we await the next grand synthesizer, that is, the next O-sensei, to come along and give us the next new art, just as Morihei Uyeshiba gave us aikido based on his idea of what his teachers had showed him. Meanwhile, however, we have aikido in three main dimensions. The three dimensions to aikido are only the beginning, however. They constitute a continuum, but the principles they represent, and the ways these principles are practised, have all at some point to be thrown away. As we train, we find our minds becoming more pure, and our awareness becoming more clear. We begin to resonate with a higher reality. We begin to understand that the four dimensions to our work-a-day world (up, down, across, depth, and duration) are really the boundary conditions of a five dimensional world that we know about - in scientific terms - as quantum mechanics, but that we can also know - in experiential terms - as aikido.
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