Chapter 28: Aikido Revelations

Thursday, April 7, 2005 (Continued)

I had to wait for Mom and Donna to come get me, so I walked back to my seat with the books. As I was sitting down I remembered to think about whether I was centered: nope, I wasn't. So I centered myself again, shaking my head to myself over how slippery keeping center is.

#1: <Guys, this having to recenter ourselves over and over is going to get tedious. Can we improve on how we do it somehow?>

#2: <Distractions are what ruins it every time. We need to find a way to stop distractions being so distracting, which doesn't sound easy.>

#3: <I've been thinking about it. We can either practice like Sensei said, or take advantage of our having multiple minds. We could assign just one mind to the job of being centered. The other three of us run the body, make all the decisions, etc. The first mind does nothing except concentrate on being centered. Maybe it can cut itself off from receiving any sensory input, or maybe it just has to get meditative the way Sensei suggested.>

#2: <Interesting, but the centering mind would be missing out on whatever was going on, which would be a pain. It'd also slow down our rate of learning Aikido if we took turns at being the centering mind during training.>

#4: <Let's read the books first. They might give us some good ideas.>

#3: <So our mental list of things to think about is getting longer: running without tiring, preparing things to talk about for next déjà vu, relationship with the Williams family, our educational structure, whatever this new sense is, and how to keep center for more than a few seconds at a time.>

#4: <I'm also curious about what Sensei was saying about "projecting ki". He made it sound like a big deal and very important to Aikido, but so far all the ki flashes we've seen have been intended body movements. He can't be talking about how critically important it is to intend to move your body, so he's obviously meant something else.>

#3: <He said he projected ki out of his hand when he did that "No Touch Throw" on us. The trouble is I can't remember it very well because something weird happened to our minds during that technique. I think I remember a lot of ki flashing out, but I'm not sure.>

#2: <Let's see if we can project ki the way that he said. Send a flow of ki out of our hand without intending to move it. We've lost center yet again, so I'll center and one of you try it.>

We felt the subtle sensation being centered causes. One of us raised our hand, our sensing the flashes from it confirming that we were centered.

#1: <How do you mean? Like pretending to poke one of the books with an imaginary finger?>

#1 had closed our hand in to a fist, holding it stationary with one finger extended to point at the books we'd dropped onto the seat next to us. We all sensed a lump of ki (presumably) appear in front of the top book and then poke it, sliding the book a few inches away from us.

#4: <WHAT THE HELL!> | #1: <FUCK! Did I do that?> | #3: <Christ! That's telekinesis!>

#2: <STOP! Let's not draw attention to ourselves.>

We all sensed ourselves lose center from the shock. The lump of ki and the flashes from our hand as we were yanking in back disappeared from our awareness.

#2: <That is NOT what I'd thought about us doing! What on Earth did you do #1?>

#1: <I didn't plan anything; I just imagined a finger and poked with it. You said you wanted to project ki without intending to move any part of our body. We have to move our body to flash ki, so I thought you meant to move something imaginary. I imagined a finger and used that. Isn't that what you intended?>

#2: <No, not at all. I like what you did though. Was that really telekinesis?>

#3: <It looked that way to me. Do it again, #1, only don't target a book. If anyone sees that they're going to get far too curious. Poke the top of our thigh instead, so we can feel it.>

#1: <Good idea. Someone needs to be centered because I want to concentrate on trying to reproduce what I did last time.>

#2: <I'll do it again.>

#2 centered himself/us.

#1: <Umm. All I did was point with our left hand, then imagine a finger poking the book. If I point at our knee instead, then imagine a finger poking it lightly... >

We all sensed, with whatever the new sense is, the lump of ki come into existence, then felt it poke against our knee, about as hard as a real finger would.

#1: <Wow! That's easy.>

#3: <Not to mention rather interesting. It's hard to tell, but I believe I could feel what the imaginary finger was feeling. Can we try poking something else that isn't our body so we can tell if anything we feel is definitely from the magical fingertip?>

#1: <Umm. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now. I'm a bit freaked out by this. What should I poke, and how do we turn these things off?>

#4: <Why do you want to turn it off?>

#1: <So I can make a new one wherever it is that you want me to poke next.>

#4: <Why not try moving it?>

#1: <I feel silly waving our pointing finger around.>

#3: <I'm guessing you don't need our real hand. This is some sort of mental power, so I can't see that the hand makes any real difference except as a visualization crutch. You shouldn't need it because it's easy to imagine fingers. Try to keep poking our knee while I put the real hand in our pocket. Don't think about our real hand, only about the poking action.>

#1: <Okay, I'll try that.>

We all felt the pressure on our knee while our hand went into our pocket.

#1: <It was no problem at all.>

#3: <If you can poke on and off the way you've done a couple of times now, then the fingertip has to be moveable. Try moving it to the edge of the mat and poking that. Don't poke it hard, just enough that we can see the edge move and find out if we can feel it.>

#1: <Okay. I'll give it a try. I'll try to visualize the finger floating down to the edge of the mat.>

We all sensed the finger float over the top of our knee and diagonally down to the edge of the mat. Actually, it was more like a fingertip than a finger, as it was a rod about half an inch in diameter and an inch long. It poked the edge of the mat. We all sensed the lump moving, saw the mat's edge move, and all felt what we probably would've felt had we poked it with a real finger.

#4: <I expected the finger to disappear when it got three feet from our center. It's just ki isn't it? So how come we can sense its existence when it's about five feet away?>

#1: <I don't know. I didn't think about that. I'm too busy trying to make sure I hold the image of a finger in my mind and move it the way I want.>

#4: <I guess the question doesn't matter because it obviously hasn't disappeared. I'm very curious to know how hard we can push. #1, have you got enough control of it to push against our knee and slowly increase the force, so you can stop if it gets painful?>

#1: <Sure. It seems to fly under my control so that should be easy. I might not have precise control of it, but I can certainly pull back easy enough.>

It floated up to our knee again, where it started pushing with a steadily increasing force.

#1: <That seems to be the hardest it can push.>

#3: <That doesn't feel like very much.>

#4: <No, that's light. We can weigh it on a set of scales later. I've got a couple of questions. First, does it work behind us like the new sense does? Can you try to push the back of our neck, please #1?>

#1: <That's going to be a bit weird but I'll try.>

Flying the fingertip around had previously involved two senses: sight, as #1 had to know where the edge of the mat was to fly the fingertip there; and the new sense because that's the only sense the fingertip 'appeared' in, as ki is invisible to ordinary sight. Flying it behind our neck meant navigating by the new sense alone. [[It also involved understanding where our body is, which is the sense of proprioception.]]

#1 did it quickly and easily.

Right after he finished we lost center again.

#2: <Sorry, my bad. I just had the idea that we might be able to carry things through the air, and I got excited imagining that. It'd be like you see on TV sometimes. How cool would that be!>

#1: <How about someone else try to create one.>

Over the next few minutes we discovered some VERY interesting things:

• Our body had to be centered to create them, which required just one mind. [[More accurately, it's the brain that needs to be centered. Any one mind thinking of having its consciousness in our center causes part of our brain to go in to a specific "altered state of consciousness" which is similar to, but not quite the same, as a meditative state. The important difference being that it better syncs our brain to the Universe's Consciousness, permitting ki abilities such as sensing the flashes and using magical fingertips.]]

• All four of us could create the 'fingertips'.

• Each of us could create up to four of them at once, so sixteen in total.

• We could poke indentations in drapes hanging on the far side of the room, so they could be used a long way from us. Even at that distance we sensed the location of the fingertip, far farther than the previous three-foot ki-sensing limit we thought we had.

• The maximum force each fingertip could exert reduced what felt like linearly when the controlling mind created two, three or four fingertip, but doesn't reduce if other minds create fingertips.

• We all had the same maximum force, maximum number of fingertips, could move them at the same speed, etc.

• We can't control each other's fingertips or know which one of us created them, although we sense where they are and feel what they touch. That's consistent with most of what we do: we can't tell who does something with our body, but we can all sense it happening as all our senses - the traditional ones and the new one - are shared.

• We could create a 'fingertip' inside our mouth with the mouth shut.

• The fingertips can move very quickly through the air, essentially as fast as our eyes can traverse across the room.

• If they went out of sight they sometimes automatically ceased to exist even though we were still centered and still concentrating correctly. Sometimes they stayed active, such as when in our mouth. We didn't have time to find out what determined whether they stayed or canceled before Mom arrived.

• We could make them cease to exist just by willing it.

• They were invisible, but we could feel them with our hands. We moved a 'fingertip' so it was in front of us, then we pinched it between two real fingers. It was solid and could be squeezed so its shape was distorted. It immediately returned to its 'natural' shape when the squeezing was relaxed. Strangely, when it was squeezed in one direction, it didn't bulge in the others; all that happened was that the squeezed axis got narrower.

• A little naughtily, I tapped one of the next class's newly arrived students on the shoulder. He immediately looked, and was very puzzled by no one being near him.

• I moved a fingertip so it was hovering in front of Sensei, who showed no awareness at all of it.

#2: <This being centered business is VERY important! We have to practice that as much as we can. Let's hope we get better at it because it's a real pain getting distracted all the time.>

#1, #3, #4: <Agreed.>

During the experimentation we had the following little discussion, #3: <I'm getting tired of saying "Whatever the new sense is." I think we give the honor of naming that sense to #1, in return for his discovering these new fingertips. He should name them too.>

#2, #4: <Agreed.>

#1: <The fingertips are obviously telekinesis, but it seems silly to call them anything other than "fingertips" because that's how I invented them and how they behave. Maybe "TK-fingertips" if we need to differentiate them from our real fingers. We're already saying "fingertips" comfortably so let's stick with that. The new sense definitely needs a name though. I've been thinking that it's pretty clear that everybody is giving off ki whenever they intend to move, which is pretty much all the time, but we can sense it only when they're in our proximity, so let's call it our "Proximity" sense.>

#3: <Strange name, but it's a very strange sense. I thought you would've chosen something else. The name I had in mind seemed obvious.>

#1: <What name?>

#3: <Let's stick with yours. I might tell you my idea later, but I'd rather stick with your name. There's not much we can do to reward each other for doing something clever, but giving them naming rights is one thing.>

#1: <I didn't discover TK-fingertips by being clever. I just didn't understand what #2 meant and took a stab at it.>

#4: <So you were lucky then. From what we've read about early scientists, they seemed to make most of their discoveries through luck as much as anything. "Proximity" it is. And what do we call the act of sensing something with our proximity sense? "Proximating" is too clumsy. How about the verb tenses are: "We proxied him", "We're proxing him," and "Let's proxy him"?>

#2: <I think we should get #4 to do all our English homework from now on.>

#1, #3: <Agreed.>

#4: <Hey! I object. I was being clever. I thought we rewarded people for being clever?>

#2: <Not when we're looking for an excuse to unload English on someone. Let's get back to our experiments.>

[[The obvious alternative name for "proximity" that #3 had expected was either "ki-dar" or "kidar", contractions of "ki-radar", and not to be confused with "gaydar". We got used to "proximity" and that's what it remained. By the way, we were teasing #4 about English. Partly because we didn't adopt his verb forms anyway, but mostly because it would've been unfair to inflict all the reading and writing crap we have to do for English on one mind.]]

Mom and Donna arrived before I could do any more experimenting. Donna rushed up to me, very excited over having, "The BEST time at Karate." She enthused all the way back to the car, and was still enthusing on the way home. Meanwhile I'd been intrigued by watching Mom's and Donna's ki. It functioned the same as everyone else's that I'd experienced, but was still fascinated me because it was from my mother and sister. As everyone else's had, theirs had an individual 'color' too.

When Mom got a chance to get a word in, she asked, "Mark, how was Aikido?" Donna realized she wanted to hear the answer to this too, so she quieted down.

"It's UNBELIEVABLY good. I am seriously, SERIOUSLY interested in pursuing Aikido. I think it's going to be important in my life."

I put my hand on Donna's shoulder, she'd beaten me back to the car so she was in the front. "Thank you very, VERY much, Donna. You've done me a huge favor noticing how Aikido people moved in that video and taking the trouble to show it to me. I think there are some very important connections between Aikido and me. I've only just started learning how or why, but I'm extremely happy that you noticed and cared enough to bring it to my attention. You did a VERY good thing for me."

Donna basked in my praise, very pleased to have helped me.

Then I realized that I wasn't centered. I recentered, grumbling to myselves about how difficult it was.

#3: <I've been thinking about why the fingertips sometimes cancel when they're out of sight. I think there must be some sort of mental connection between us and them, so we can control them and they can send tactile feedback to us. I think we lose that connection if they're out of sight and we're not EXACTLY sure where they are - like in our mouth - and a lost connection causes them to cancel.>

We discussed that back and forth for a little while. It seemed reasonable, but we held off experimenting until I was alone in my bedroom because that'd be easier than in the conversation-filled car.

When we got home, I told Mom and Dad that I had some stuff to do in my room.

#1: <I wonder if we could turn the page of a book by getting under a page and pushing up, even though there's only a fraction of an inch between that page and the one it is lying on? The fingertip is too large, but it might be able to push the pages apart to create the gap it needs. Let's try that.>

That was an easy test to try. I could lift the cover of the top book because it had an edge that projected out from the pages, giving me a lip to push against, but I couldn't turn individual pages because I couldn't create the TK-fingertip inside the microscopic gap between them.

[[It occurs far too fast for me to detect, but what happens is that fingertips are created from an extremely rapidly expanding point source. Pushing the air molecules out of the way as it expands to its fingertip size is easy, and pushing pages out of the way would also be easy if all the pushing was vertical, but it's in all directions. Trying to push paper molecules horizontally (straight into other paper molecules bound in a solid) required far more force than the fingertip could exert, which meant the fingertip couldn't come into existence.]]

#3: <Another test I want to do is if we can stack the fingertips to combine their force. Each of us creates just one fingertip. We put one of them on our knee, another one directly on top of it, then the third and fourth on top of those. If they all push down at the same time, we should be able to push with the accumulated force.>

#2: <Okay, but let's start with a very gentle push and slowly ramp it up. We don't want to smash our knee if the force increases geometrically rather than arithmetically.>

We couldn't see how the forces could do anything other than accumulate arithmetically, but we didn't have a clue how all this stuff worked anyway, so we all agreed that caution would be an excellent idea.

We slowly and carefully performed the test. We had no trouble doing it with one, two and then three minds contributing a fingertip each to the stack, and those tests felt like the forces added together arithmetically. Four minds would be even more conclusive, as any increasing non-linear function would be maximized then. We tried using four, but that was trickier as the fourth mind was also concentrating on being centered. The first time we assembled a stack of four fingertips, the fourth mind concentrated on it too much and lost center. He recentered and we started again. After a couple of practices we were able to do the simple experiment while we all concentrated on retaining center. Whatever force one mind could generate, four minds stacking their fingertips generated four times as much total push.

Each mind could create four fingertips, and we were pretty sure that the force they generated reduced proportionately. We tried it with a stack of sixteen fingertips to make sure, and after some decentering problems were overcome, it felt like the force was the same as from a stack created with one fingertip from each mind

#4: <Here's a nice idea. Next time we're having sex with Julia in the doggy position, we can play with her asshole using a TK-fingertip. We'll get sensory feedback, as will Julia, and we won't need to wash our finger afterward. Isn't self-discovery a wonderful thing? We must remember to thank Donna for finding Aikido for us, haha. Oh! I've just had another thought. Remember how I said we'd need a job before we could merge again? I've just thought of the perfect job for us.>

#1: <After your talking about assholes, I'm scared to ask, but I'll bite. What?>

#4: <Professional Roulette Player!>

#2: <Oh, that's WICKED! A small problem with our being several years too young to get into a casino, but other than that, it's wicked!>

#4: <We don't need to be the person placing the bets. We just need to be within sight of the wheel to make whoever places the bets for us win. Not Mom though, because she'd have our guts for garters if we asked her to gamble for us. It seriously might be doable if we can find a casino that has a public viewing area like a balcony or something similar.>

#2: <Wow. That's something to think about.>

#1: <Here's something else pretty major that I thought of while we were stacking up our push. I pity the next bully who takes us on. Provided one of us can stay centered during the attack, we could create a three-mind maximum-force push into one of the bully's eyeballs. It's not much force, but eyeballs are weak so would probably burst. We could do the other eyeball half a second later too, if we wanted to. Total overkill and damned hard to explain afterward, but you get the idea.>

#2: <FAR too vicious. How about a TK-punch in the balls? Could we do that hard enough to be effective? We might want to practice coordinating our minds for something like that.>

#4: <What a pity we need line of sight. Otherwise not only could we squeeze Julia's nipples under her clothes, but we could squeeze a bully's balls just as easily.>

#1: <Or his heart.>

#3: <Um, yeah. Maybe it's just as well we can't do that then, because I REALLY don't like bullies.>

#2: <I don't think Sensei would be happy. Our first lesson at his gentle martial art and he'd have taught us how to give someone a fatal heart attack from fifty feet away. Bursting someone's eyeballs is probably bad enough for the first lesson.>

#1: <Let's get into reading the books. They're both about ki, so they should be very interesting reading. They could save us endless trials and errors, or give us ideas to try that we never would've thought of otherwise.>

#2: <Okay, but notice we're not centered again. It doesn't need all of us to read the books, so I'd like to try allocating one mind to do nothing else except concentrate on keeping centered. Having four of us thinking about it is failing far more often than it's working because we're all open to distractions and whatever distracts one of us probably distracts all of us. If the one mind that's doing the job ignores everything that's happening, it should be able to keep us centered for much longer than the pathetic periods we've been achieving so far. It'll have to trust the other three minds to handle everything in its 'absence', but that shouldn't be a problem.>

#4: <Yeah, if we can't trust us to look after Mark Anderson, who can we trust?>

#1: <I have a feeling there won't be anything useful in the books. The stuff we're doing is too radical. The books will probably be similar to the stuff Sensei was saying at the end of the class, which sounded like it needed a great deal of diligent practice to become capable of doing something Sensei has to concentrate hard to detect the subtle signs of. That's not what we've discovered.>

#4: <We'll soon find out.>

We agreed to rotate the "Keeping Centered Duty" on an hourly basis, with #1 getting first turn. The three of us not on centering duty could easily do spot checks for our being centered just by moving any part of our body. If it didn't flash, we'd remind the mind on duty. (The light-bodied sensation was too subtle to be a reliable indicator, especially if there were distracting things going on.) If we lost center, we knew who was solely to blame, which should encourage him to do better.

We grabbed the top Aikido book and opened it.

#1: <I was very curious about these books too. Now I'm stuck down here at the center and can't think about it what you're reading.>

#2: <You have to stop thinking about things like that, #1. If we read anything good we'll tell you about it when you come off duty. Learning how to keep center is just too important for all of us to do everything all of the time.>

#4: <You think you're missing out! What about the poor guy who's on duty next time we're having sex with Julia?>