Chapter 219: Aikido; External Ki Projection

Monday, May 16, 2005 (Continued)

Aikido was great, as usual. Every week I learn more techniques, which is great in itself, but its best consequence is not that I know more techniques, but that it's giving me a slowly increasing understanding of Aikido as a whole. Like someone giving me more and more pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, I'm starting to see more of the whole picture.

I don't mean to imply that there's a hidden secret that was slowly becoming clear to me, or a final revelation that I was heading toward, or anything mystical like that. The word "hidden" was especially not relevant, as Sensei was doing his utmost to explain everything as clearly as he could. The problem for teaching and learning Aikido is that it's unlike anything else in life, so there's not a good vocabulary for it, the new concepts are so foreign to the students' existing ways of thinking that they're extremely hard to grasp, etc. It's somewhat like the proverbial, "trying to teach a blind man about color."

The more I learned, the more sense I could make out of the underlying principles. For example, every week Sensei says things like, "Use uke's force against him," or, "Move in a circle." My understanding of what these mean was now FAR deeper than even just a month ago, especially now that I'd learned more about how to get the attacker's ki and mine to interact. Now I'm increasingly understanding what those expressions of Sensei's mean, how to do them well, and most importantly, why they should be done.

The fundamental aspects of Aikido are very important. Maybe not for everyone else, but I think they will be increasingly so for me because I should be able to get so much deeper into them. There are obviously some incredibly profound truths behind whatever ki is, and it's hugely satisfying to know that week by week, I'm understanding more about it. I'm sure I won't learn everything I want to from Aikido, because its masters have always been limited by being single-minded humans (I'm assuming, but there's been no indication otherwise in any of the books, websites or elsewhere), but I greatly appreciate every thing that I can learn about ki.

At the lesson's halfway point we stopped for our usual snack. I grabbed the food container from the seat I'd left it on, also taking my jacket with the money for Sensei in it. On the way to the kitchen for our snack break, Sensei commented, "I have not noticed your name in the newspaper for any new incidents this week."

"No, thank goodness. Breaking those arms last Monday seems to have served as a good deterrent so far. Remember how last week I said I'd tell you something this week which was likely to make the fighting issue even worse?"

"I remember."

"Back when you first offered to give me private lessons we talked about my paying for them. You waved that off, and I didn't make an issue out of it at the time because I couldn't afford private lessons anyway. I told you that I might have some money coming in soon, and that happened a few days ago. I'm quite wealthy now, which means there's going to be even more jealousy of me at school, so I wouldn't be surprised if more idiots try to "teach me a lesson." Also I can now easily afford to pay for these lessons. I've got some money for you in my bag."

While I was digging it out, Sensei started protesting, "I told you last time that I do not need payment. That is even more true now that I have seen how rapidly you are learning, and how advanced you already are."

"Everything I've learned about Aikido I learned from you, or I taught myself building on the foundations you'd given me. I may be learning quickly, but that learning is totally dependent on you, and there's no reason why I shouldn't pay you for it. You're teaching me, which is your job, and your students normally pay you for doing that. I can certainly afford it now, so here you go," as I placed in front of him the ten $100 notes I'd kept separate for him.

He said it was too much. I said it wasn't enough. We went back and forth several times, finally settling on a nice, round $100 per week. He insisted that the gi did not require additional payment, nor did my going to any other classes during the week, as I would be this Wednesday.

He tried to give half the money back, as I'd only had half the number of classes $1,000 paid for.

I waved that off, saying, "I can't be bothered paying week by week. I'll just give you a thousand every couple of months."

"I will count this as payment until the end of June. Thereafter $800 per two months."

"$900 and you've got a deal."

Sensei agreed to that.

He didn't know it, but I felt disappointed about paying like this. Back when I used to fantasize about all the different ways I could spend my many millions - before I started worrying running out of them - I had a fantasy about buying the building the dojo was in and letting Sensei use it for free for as long as he wanted. I can't afford that now, so I'm left with giving Sensei a paltry few hundred dollars every month.

As usual, we stopped the physical training before the end of our lesson to have a discussion about some aspect of the bigger picture. I told Sensei, "I did some thinking about our ki discussion last week, and came up with something that works well for me. In the technique we did at the end of last week, which I call the 'No Touch Fall Over Technique'. By the way, does that have a real name?"

"Not that I am aware of. It is more of a trick than a technique, but when we are discussing it, it is usually described as 'Leading Uke's Ki', because it's the easiest way to demonstrate that action. Call it however you wish."

"My name's more descriptive of what appears to happen, but yours describes the actual process better, so I'll call it the 'Leading Uke Trick'. In it you held your arm out with your hand bent under so it pointed the way you wanted to project your ki. I've developed a way which is considerably more flexible than that."

"Oh?" Sensei had a very interested expression on his face, which was a nice compliment for me.

"Let me show you."

I stood in the correct stance and extended my right arm for Sensei to grab, with my hand and fingers deliberately pointing straight down. Normally they're angled back a bit, for safety reasons, but I wanted the pointing down to be graphically clear.

Sensei reached for my wrist. I visualized a finger beside his wrist, to my right of it (so his left), and pointing much the same direction as his fingers were, so toward my hand. As he extended his hand to reach for mine, his ki emerged. I poured my ki out of my imaginary finger into his ki, then I moved my imaginary finger farther out to my right, still projecting ki into Sensei's stream. His ki was bent to my left, and his hand moved to follow. I moved my imaginary finger farther out to my right, bending his ki stream even farther left. I could've started with my ki meeting his at right angles, but I discovered that it works slightly better to get the two ki streams merged first. It takes a little more mental imagination, but it can deflect hands noticeably farther - up to a WHOLE inch more!

Naturally enough his hand reached forward but deviated to my left, so he missed the grab. He looked down in surprise, to see his hand a few inches to the side of mine.

I should explain that uke doesn't stare at my wrist when attempting to grab it as narrowing attention like that is foolish and unnecessary. Uke looks at me as a whole, which mostly means looking toward my face (our heads being on roughly the same level), but without focusing on anything in particular. He can see all of my body, even if the lower part of it is mostly in his peripheral vision. It's like shaking hands with someone, but with even less attention on the hands because Aikido is a whole-body activity. If I'd moved my wrist sideways the movement would have caught his attention. Sensei knew I hadn't moved a muscle, and that it'd been his 'fault' that he'd missed his grab.

"Try again," I invited.

He took a step back to start again. Obviously he could have grabbed me from where his hand was now, but that'd be silly. We were here to train and learn, not to 'win' by grabbing my hand sneakily.

I applied my technique in the other direction this time, because that'd demonstrate greater flexibility. Not because I thought he might try to compensate for his previous sideways drift. He wouldn't do that even unconsciously, because training requires repeating the same actions. Even if the technique was one that caused him to feel pain, which many of them briefly do, he'd repeat his 'attack' the same way every time.

Of course he missed to the other side. He looked down again, with much less surprise and with some admiration.

"VERY good! I have never seen anyone cause a sideways movement like that before. How did you do it?"

"Quite differently than what we'd discussed at the end of the last lesson. That worked under the right circumstances, but it had two problems: It required my hand to be pointing in the direction I wanted you to move, which is inflexible. And it worked by my ki starting where yours was ending, so they overlapped and I could tow yours in the desired direction. That struck me as being both inflexible in the circumstances when it could be used, and possibly quite weak too, if the overlap was small. For example, imagine you were standing to my side, and were about to stab my upper-arm with a knife. Your ki may not extend all the way to my body, because the length of the knife keeps it away, especially if the intention is only a quick in-and-out jab. Even if your ki did extend to my arm, it's difficult for me to project ki strongly from my upper-arm.

^-- "I played around with various images until I found one that worked very well for me. I find it easier to imagine ki projecting from my fingers than from anywhere else on my body, so I pretend I have a disembodied finger wherever I want it. Nothing to do with any of my natural fingers. It's an imaginary eleventh one, not that I count them at the time. For example, if I wanted your grab to miss my hand by going too low, I would imagine that my finger was floating above your wrist, pointing in the same direction as you are reaching. I don't worry about how my finger got there, I just imagine that's where it is.

^-- "When you started reaching for me, you'd be projecting ki of course. I'd project as much ki as I could from my imaginary finger into your ki stream, so our ki streams would be merging and flowing together. Then I'd imagine my finger fairly quickly rotating to point downward, deflecting the stream of your ki downward. As your ki and hand veered down I'd angle my finger down more, increasing the deflection. As you saw from the two demos, your hand ended up a few inches away from its target. I spent most of a day at school practicing that on anyone who was reaching out to touch me. I was usually able to deflect their hands an inch or two away from where they'd intended, depending on how fast they were moving, so I know the technique works for me. Maybe it'd work for you too?"

Sensei said, "I shall certainly try, once I have recovered from the shock! I have NEVER heard of anything like this before. You imagine a finger hovering in midair somewhere?"

"Yes. I started imagining a whole hand, but found I only needed a finger. My thinking about fingers started when I thought about projecting ki normally. When I project ki out of my real hand, I just visualize the projection. I don't think about where the ki is coming from; only where it is going to. Somehow the ki flows from my hand without me giving any thought to creating it. We often project ki from our wrist rather than hand or fingers, and there's the one technique where we project ki from an elbow. Plus when you did your 'Thinking Light Or Heavy' demonstration, you were projecting ki from your center. There's nothing special about fingers, hands, wrists, elbows or centers when it comes to their being good manufacturing sites for ki, so I decided that ki can be created anywhere in our bodies, and possibly anywhere NOT inside our bodies too." [[That's because ki is tapped inside our minds, and our bodies are inside our minds. Inside our proximity range being the important fact at the moment.]]

Sensei's eyes opened WIDE at my last comment!

"Ki also seems to be created without effort or thought. I don't understand how or why that is, but everyone is creating and projecting ki whenever they are intending to move their body, so it's obviously an intrinsic part of being human."

[[It is NOT created "without effort and thought." It is created WITH both of those, but subconsciously, which means we're not consciously aware of it. But I was right about it being "an intrinsic part of being human", although I didn't know why at the time. In the larger sense, it's because ki is an intrinsic part of the Universe, so it's necessarily an intrinsic part of EVERYTHING, including humans. More specifically, my definition of "mind" includes it being able to tap ki from the Universe. Humans intrinsically have minds. My saying it takes effort to create ki is simplistic. It does, but we also gain energy from the Universal ki. Most creatures aren't good enough at tapping the Universal ki, so the net result is a small energy loss (an "effort"). This was not the case with me. I had so much mind-power that I could tap sixteen times as much ki as a normal human, resulting in my having a net gain of energy, although energies involved were in different forms. I had to consume a lot of food to fuel part of my increased mentation, although the ki supply helped fuel that too. Ki also helped fuel my body's physical activities. If I kept the exercise rate below the ki supply rate (e.g., I ran below my optimal running rate), I didn't need to use chemical energy.]]

"The creation of ki seems as easy as it could possibly be, so it seems to me that the important aspect is not creating ki, but projecting it. Hands work best with ki, not because hands can create ki any better than any other part of our bodies, but because we point with our fingers all our lives, so we're mentally very comfortable with pointing and projecting, which are very similar..."

"That makes good sense."

"Yes, I thought so. It seemed to me that if I could create ki in midair, then all I needed was a way of helping me project it. Fingers are good for pointing with, so that was an obvious choice. I visualized an imaginary finger and projected ki from it, and it felt comfortable. I tested it on my classmates, and was happy to find out that it worked, as you saw from my demonstrations. Not that it's important, but I find that I have to imagine my own finger. If I imagine someone else's, it won't project ki. That's probably a self-defeating mental image rather than a scientific requirement, but just so you know."

Sensei was struggling with being excited and stunned at the same time, "I am sure I understood what you said, but this is so revolutionary that I want to double-check. You can create a stream of ki at any point in space, flowing in any direction, independent of any part of your body. Is that right?"

"Other than one restriction that I haven't mentioned yet, yes, that's right. It seems I can't do this too far from my body. I can easily imagine a finger twenty feet away, but it doesn't seem to project any ki. I don't know why, but there's a definite limit at three feet."

Sensei said, "Even with that restriction, your discovery is still absolutely amazing! It could have a PROFOUND impact on Aikido. Completely new techniques might be invented, and existing techniques modified. This could result in the largest change to Aikido since it was created."

"There's one aspect you haven't taken into account, Sensei: it's WEAK. As you know, I've got VERY strong ki, but I could only deflect your slow moving hand a few inches and I was trying as hard as I could. If you'd been moving at a natural speed and with stronger intent the result might have been so little as to be useless. The 'Leading Uke Trick' is called a trick because it only works if the conditions are perfect. My idea helps a little, but it's not a revolution. As far as I can see, it has only one use. That's in techniques where uke's ki is flowing in a direction that you want him to keep moving in, but it's difficult to get your body into position before he starts pulling back. With this technique you can reinforce his forward movement for the second or two it takes to get your hand on him to push him physically. One of the knife techniques you showed me is like that."

"Yes, I know the one you mean. Your invention may not make a critical difference to a technique Mark, but it allows the use of ki to guide uke's movements before physical contact is made with flexibility never before possible, which is a MAJOR development. It is going to create a great deal of excitement around the Aikido world..."

I interrupted, "In that case I want to make two points. First, I STRONGLY suggest you try it yourself before you mention it to anyone. It works for me, but I'm not an average aikidoka, so maybe it won't work for anyone else. I know you can do the Leading Uke Trick, but creating ki in midair is a whole different issue. The good news is that it's very easy to practice, because you can use it on all the people you come in contact with during the day.