WHAT IS AIKIDO FOR?
The meaning of aikido is old but new, simple yet profound. It is: find your inner world! You have the universe within you now. Aikido is for realising that fascinating fact. By "inner world" I don't mean the thinking world of reason and logic. I don't mean the inner world of the intellect. The inner world I mean has nothing to do with the mental skills of the conscious sort that we use in the scientific study of the cosmos. That's a world we already know quite a lot about. It's the one we enter while reading a book like this. The inner world I'm talking about is a non-conscious and non-cognitive one. It's the world of our intuitions, for example. It's a world we tend to know much less about, though, like the intellectual, conscious world, it's a world of thinking too. The thinking done by this part of the mind is fuller and richer and more encompassing than the thinking done by the intellect. And the "knowing" it provides is a knowing without doubts or questions. We are all conditioned these days by the need to consciously, intellectually, analyse. Contemporary education teaches us to think that our future lies in what we learn and how much we come to "know" in this way. We are fed a lot of information and we are coached in the analytic skills on which our modern scientific and commercial culture is based. This is part of the story. It's the part that many people think is the most important too. But then they "think" too much. That's the problem. The other part of the story is about the non-analytic mind. It's about the intuitive world of the non- conscious. It's a world that's accessed by developing a sense of the natural energy flow of the universe. When you "know" something this way there is no need to analyse. The "knowing" is "being". You embody the knowledge. You experience it in the "heart" as well as the "head". This sort of awareness is hardly likely to drop out of the sky. Getting access to it is very rarely a straight-forward affair. This is where aikido comes in. Aikido can take us to there. Aikido is one way to go looking for knowing of this profound and experiential sort. Aikido is one way to relax, one way to loosen the grip of the conscious mind, and of the "ego" that the conscious mind helps define and defend. Aikido's caring gestures open both the heart and the mind. They lead quite naturally, without force or fuss, to deeper levels of awareness. Aikido is one way, in other words, to develop better intuition. It is one way to access our most comprehensive capacities for understanding, and like those capacities, it is both mysterious and fascinating. It has a magic all of its own. Aikido gets more mundane as you train longer and as you get to know more about it. But the mystery and the magic of aikido never completely disappear. Later, if you train harder still, if you train well, if you train, in other words, in a way that is natural and open and free, the art opens into another realm. This realm is not mundane. It is truly cosmic. Then the mystery and 10
