Jacob (a long time member of the dojo) and his wife Sophia have been blessed with a new baby boy named Joshua. Joshua was born on June 18th at 4:31 PM and was 9 lbs.
Congratulations!
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There is an old Japanese proverb, "Nete ite koronda tameshi nashi," which translates as while you are sleeping don't fall down while trying to do something. This statement applies best to the dojo on the weekends. So many times we stay out late or don't get a good night's rest and find ourselves a little out of "it" when we come to practice on the weekends. This is one of those things Sensei used to admonish us for a lot when I was a student. It still applies today.
Anytime you are in the dojo you must be hyper aware. The noren or curtain that hangs over the entrance bears the sickle or kama, the symbol for peace and the Japanese word for peace is wa and the Japanese character ぬ or nu. It is a pun that together means kamawanu or beware. In the olden days, students were judged by their conduct at every moment while they were in the dojo. Therefore they had to be en garde at all times or in other words awake.
Today nobody is that strict anymore so the atmosphere is more relaxed and students can have fun at the dojo. That is fine and I guess the way of the world today. But, wouldn't it be nice to have your feet firmly rooted in the present while keeping an eye on the past? Please approach your training with both eyes wide open so that you can be aware of everything you are doing.
Thank God it's Friday! Ever had one of those weeks? Sometimes I read things like this to help me regain my perspective...
The Awakening (Author unknown)
A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.
This is your awakening.
You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.
You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.
You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.
You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.
Your stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.
You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and everything isn’t always about you.
So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself…and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.
You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties…and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.
You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.
You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.
You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for you next fix.
You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.
You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not you job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.
Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.
You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.
You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.
You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drinking more water, and take more time to exercise.
You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.
You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.
More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.
You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.
You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.
You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people…and you lean not to always take it personally.
You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.
You lean that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.
You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.
Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than you heart’s desire.
You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.
You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.
Finally, with courage in you heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can. Source: http://www.elise.com/q/webwisdom/awakening.htm
There you go enjoy the weekend!
"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could, some blunders and absurdities have crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
When we are young, we dream about the future and worry about what we don't have and what will be. When we get older we reminisce about the past and lament about what we don't have and what was. Both of these stages in life have one thing in common- both are not living in moment. I know, easy to say, but hard to do. Here is a video that might help illustrate that for us...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq8loZlpa_8
Please enjoy this video... http://vimeo.com/22439234
Be Rebuked,Stand Corrected, and Learn
This is a scroll that tea master Soshitsu Sen writes about in Tea Life, Tea Mind. It is one of those things that has stuck with me ever since I read that book.
When tragedy strikes we often hear people say, "Don't let it define you." I try not to think about it that way. The way I look at it is that the bad things that happen to us are the things that define us. Whenever something bad happens, I always try and see the lesson. The hard part for people to comprehend or accept is that everything that happens to you plays a part in your future for your benefit. You just don't know how or when it will benefit you right now. That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt or isn't embarrassing right now. It means that this is the way it is supposed to go and this is the fodder for growth. After the pain subsides, "What did I learn?" is the only question that needs to be asked. Just as medicine is sometimes bitter, the bad things that happen in life are necessary for you to see yourself truthfully and grow. From there...
Be Rebuked, Stand Corrected, and Learn
Happy Father's Day! The older I get and presumably wiser, the more I realize what I don't know. Life then becomes more about what I can learn rather than what I don't know. When we are young we are afraid of what we don't know and we doubt ourselves and our abilities. When we get older, hopefully, fear gives way to curiosity as we realize that we don't, can't or don't need to know everything. Curiosity is what enables us to learn things that in the past we might have though impossible. You might have heard the old self-defeating adage, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." Fortunately we aren't beasts. We are humans and humans have the uncanny ability for change. Supposedly, every six years every cell in our bodies is replaced and when you couple that with the fact that our brains are constantly adapting to the changes in life which is called neuroplasticity - human beings can change. One of the hardest lessons in life is that nothing is permanent. But what that impermance really leads to is an open door to something different. Change is seldom good or bad or right or wrong - those are judgements. Change is about learning more about yourself but that can only happen if we can humbly realize what we don't know, accept change and don't attempt to control it.
Jibun ga ki ga tsuku made wakatte kurenai which means a student will not understand it until he understands it for himself. From the Daily Message October 9, 2003. Getting good at either Aikido or Iaido is primarily within your own power. You may think it is due to the strength or prowess of the teacher but you are sorely mistaken. There is an old Chinese proverb which best illustrates that, "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”
Telling you involves hearing and a sometimes seeing, but those are only effective if you are an auditory and visual learner. But, this is limited by life experiences in order to relate and language skills. On a side note, currently the US military is experimenting with smell signals because it's supposed to be quickest in terms of cognitive recognition.
Showing you also involves hearing and seeing which are supposed to be the most effective senses in learning since the learner can see exactly what is needed to be done. However in a physical sense, if the learner has poor kinesthetic awareness or proprioception then re-creation is limited.
Hands on learning or kinesthetic learning involves using almost all of your senses with the exception of taste (unless someone sweats into your mouth...it has happened to me). Its called learn by doing.
Only within this century in the West has success at the hands of the teacher come into popularity. Learning by doing has for centuries been the preferred way to learn. So its up to you to make you good and of course successful in any endeavor.
Have a great Friday!
You might often hear me say that, "There is no walking backwards in Aikido." For the most part that is true but sometimes it is nice to go backwards a little bit. Lets go back to February 5, 2005 and Sensei's common sense list of student hints.
Sensei's Own 10 Favorite Household Hints:
1. To get a whiter Keiko-gi - practice more and wash it more.
2. To get a nice shine and polish to your bokken, do more suburi.
3. To prevent injuries and pain to the wrist and arms, try stop being a jerk on the mats.
4. To make practice on time, leave the bars at 11:00pm instead of 2:00am the night before.
5. To get a better sheen on the teacher's apple, polish it with hundred dollar bills. (JUST kidding!)
6. To prevent your partner from winching in practice, try more soap and water before practice.
7. To get your wife to approve your Aikido practice, hire a good looking, buff swimming pool cleaner. (JUST kidding again!)
8. To get a black belt faster, try soaking your white belt daily in your sweat in practice.
9. To finance your dues more effectively and easily, try stop smoking and/or eating hot dogs.
10. To make your Sensei smile, try practicing ten times harder. (NOT kidding!)
As a martial artist, I seek only to improve myself. To that end, for years while I was in college I used to go to the library and read the Investor's Business Daily newspaper because they had this section called Leaders and Successes where they chronicled a person's success story. That story always coincided with their 10 Secrets To Success. When you want to become better at whatever it is that you do, you can either take the long road and learn it for yourself or take the short road and learn from other people's successes and failures. This is the essence of what it means to "steal" the technique in the martial arts. Here are their secrets... IBD 10 SECRETS TO SUCCESS
Investor’s Business Daily has spent years analyzing leaders and successful people in all walks of life. Most have 10 traits that, when combined, can turns dreams into reality:
1. HOW YOU THINK IS EVERYTHING: Always be positive. Think success not failure. Beware of negative environments.
2. DECIDE UPON YOUR TRUE DREAMS AND GOALS: Write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them.
3. TAKE ACTION: Goals are nothing without action. Don't be afraid to get started now. Just do it.
4. NEVER STOP LEARNING: Go back to school or read books. Get training, and acquire skills.
5. BE PERSISTENT AND WORK HARD: Success is a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up.
6. LEARN TO ANALYZE DETAILS: Get alll the facts, all the input. Learn from your mistakes.
7. FOCUS ON YOUR TIME AND MONEY: Don’t let other people or things distract you.
8. DONT BE AFRAID TO INNOVATE, BE DIFFERENT: Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.
9. DEAL AND COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE EFFECTIVELY: No person is an island. Learn to understand and motivate others.
10. BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE; TAKE RESPONSIBILITY: Otherwise Otherwise, Numbers 1 - 9 won’t matter.
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This is a wonderful FAKE quote that supposedly the Dalai Lama said. Regardless of its dubious origin, I still think it is a good reminder of what is important in life. The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, ‘Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
The fool judges something as right or wrong, good or bad. The wise man sees something of value in everything and everyone.
Are doing what you want to be doing? If not, what is holding you back? There is a Japanese term jitsuen (実演) which means, "To prove something by actually doing it." Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't - you are right." So often, we look at something and our minds instantly say, "I can't do that." This type of defeatist mentality keeps us from accomplishing the things we want in life. For me when this happens, I tell myself, "If someone can do it, so can I." Before you say, "I can't" why don't you just try to do it. You never know. You just might jitsuen it.
Please don't forget the etiquette. Our dojo has always prided itself on our etiquette. We have never had a large dojo with lots of student and we have never been a famous dojo, but what we did always have was very good etiquette. Now that Sensei has passed on I worry that the we might lose what little dignity we have. From how you enter/leave the dojo to how to use the bathroom there is an etiquette for everything in a traditional dojo. Good etiquette is simple because most of it is common sense. Say thank you, please, or excuse me, ask permission first and when in doubt bow pretty much sum it all up. All you have to do is ask yourself, "If this were my house, what would be appropriate." If your parents did a half way descent job than you probably will make very little mistakes and if you do make a mistake it will be easily correctable because you know the basic right from wrong. Since, most of us weren't raised in the wild displaying good manners shouldn't that hard.
What precludes people from displaying good manners? Usually they are making it about themselves and their egos rather than displaying good manners.
There is a saying, "Yaiba ni tsuyoki mono wa rei ni suguru" which means that great swordsman surpasses all others in decorum.
Please don't forget the etiquette.
I once read about a scroll used in Tea Ceremony that read, "Be rebuked, stand corrected and learn." This scroll always stuck with me for some reason. In learning, our biggest asset and biggest hurdle is ourselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grl9LDEtQGI
Last night I watched Sumo Spirit: A Storm From Egypt on NHK about Egyptian born sumo wrestler Osunaarashi (Great Sand Storm). There was this one poignant scene after he won his match that his stable master scolds him for pushing the other wrestler after he had already won the bout. The stable master scolds him for his bad manners and Osunaarashi tries to explain that he didn't know he had already won so he kept pushing. The stable master chides him and says, "It doesn't matter why, just say your sorry." In this case Osunaarashi wanted to be right rather than be good. In the Japanese style of manners when you make a mistake, the first thing you say is, "Sumimasen" (I am sorry). You only give the reason if you are asked, but that rarely happens. The two traits the Japanese covet over all others is humility and self-restraint. Here Osunaarashi demonstrated that he didn't understand either.
Regardless of who you are, the four hardest phrases to say are:
I am sorry.
I am wrong.
I made a mistake.
I don't know.
Be rebuked, stand corrected and learn.
Masatake Fujita Shihan passed away on May 28th. He was 77 years old.
Fujita Sensei had been friends with Sensei since the 1960s. In this picture he is seated next to Sensei as we all posed for this picture in the late 1990s.
**Reminder** We have a guest from Aikido of Cleveland coming tonight. Please come and train if you can. With all of today's modern advances, you still cannot replace integrity and character. Character is the foundation on which you stand and integrity is the trait the ensures all others. The Japanese call it ichi-gon or "to say one thing." There is a saying bushi no ichi-gon which literally translates to a warrior only says one thing, but what it really means is that the word of a warrior is paramount. This is contrary to modern life where you, "fake it till you make it" or "dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with BS." However, if you follow the Way then you mean what you say and do only what you say - there is only this one thing hence ichi-gon.
Happy Monday! I thought this might be nice since a lot of people will be graduating this month.
2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech
By David Foster Wallace
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYGaXzJGVAQ
It is my intention to bring back the Daily Message as a means to inform, educate and inspire you as Sensei's Daily Message did for me when I was a student. In this reboot of the Daily Message, I think that it is only fitting that we revisit the last scroll that Sensei put up shortly before his death. Although he still teaches me (and I hope you) everyday, it can be thought of as his last direct teaching.
It reads, "Be strong, be humble and always keep going."
Its strength is in its simplicity and it not only pertains to training, but to life as well.
Celebrating Our 40th Anniversary
Welcome to the Daily Message. Ito Sensei writes articles for your information and enjoyment. The late Reverend Kensho Furuya started this Daily Message in the late 1990s. Our dojo celebrates its 40th year in 2014 and our monthly publication, The Aiki Dojo, is now it its 30th year.
Warning: When using this website, the Daily Message, and The Aiki Dojo monthly publication, please use caution: Information and Knowledge are not the same thing. You can get information from your computer and the Internet, but you can only get knowledge when you use your mind and your body.
Protect with AI.
Grow with KI.
Never depart from DO.
I read an interesting story about Kobe Bryant that I think might have some relevance to Aikido or any martial arts training. Regardless of what you think of Kobe, his professional skills and work ethic are second to none. I am personally not a fan of his, but I was a fan a long time ago.
Kobe loves to play one-on-one and by his own admission said that, "He could be anyone one-on-one" and that he is the "Best one-on-one" player in the world. The story goes that one year a new rookie was drafted by the Lakers who was supposed to have a considerable amount of defensive prowess. As soon as Kobe found out, he made the rookie come several hours before practice to play him one-on-one. This is not much of a big deal nor is it uncommon, but the way Kobe played him was remarkable. Kobe would set all these rules for himself that would essentially handicapped him. For instance, the defender could defend him any way that was legal but Kobe would only be allowed to shoot and dribble with his non-dominant hand. Even with all these restraints, Kobe still destroyed this rookie every game.
The enemy of greatness is complacency. It happens to everyone after you have spent a certain amount of time doing the same things over and over or have attained a certain amount of skill or ability. In business, it is called "phoning it in." When complacency sets in, a stumble is not far behind and that is how great martial artists are beat by newbies. In order to reach the highest echelons of ability, we sometimes need to invent ways to confront our shortcomings. Kobe Bryant did something that some of the greatest martial artist in history used to do - he created his own hurdles.
I once read a story about Jigro Kano, the founder of Judo. He would challenge bigger or more skilled judoka to matches and when he couldn't beat them he would go home and think up a technique to use against them. He would show up the next practice day and challenge the same person to a match. When he found himself in the same predicament as the day before, he would unveil his new technique and throw this person down. Many of the judo techniques used today are a result of his perseverance and desire to overcome an opponent.
Creating our own hurdles causes us to confront our shortcomings. First, you must be aware of your shortcoming, weakness or dysfunction. Secondly, you must figure out what is the correct way (this can come from the corrections your teachers make in class). Then you set about creating a hurdle that forces you to overcome that limitation. Once that flaw or deficiency is righted, you set about looking for other inconsistencies to correct. Sensei likened it to a chain where you identify your weak link and make it your strongest and then go back and do it again and again until your entire chain becomes strong.
The monk Ryokan once said, "When you have a problem, face it; when you are sick, face it; when death stalks you, face it." Create the hurdle and face it.