Mastery

94 MASTERY nation or are they in some way "real"? The easiest explanation derives from mechanics alone: Perhaps the image of extended fingers stroking down the attacker's spine simply provides guidance for bringing the aikidoist into the proper alignment for the application of nikkyo. It certainly does that. But many years of experience have convinced me that more than alignment is involved. My logical mind tells me I don't really have fingers three feet long that can penetrate through another person's body to his or her spine. Still, the truly effortless, seemingly miraculous applications of the technique occur only when the mental image is vividly clear and when I can somehow "feel" my fingers moving down the attacker's spine.

Which brings us to the question of what is really "real." Is consciousness a mere epiphenomenon, as behaviorist B. F. Skinner would have it? Or is the poet William Blake right in suggesting that mental things alone are real? Or, if mental constructs and the stuff of the objective world are both real, though occupying different classes of reality, then what is the nature of the interaction between the two classes?

These are large questions for a short book—even for a long one. Still, it's possible to say rather briefly (and obviously) that thought, images, feelings, and the like are quite real and that they do have a great influence on the world of matter and energy. Indeed, it's pos-