I'm going to jump into Morty Youshiba country here. He's the guy everybody tries to figure out, even though he's dead and gone. So I might as well be writing about George Washington, here. But since Morty is a modern guy, a lot of people documented what the guy could do and say, and at least 10% of them aren't full of shit.
It seems Morty had that shinto back to nature mentality. If morty took a learning style test he would probably rate high in the naturalist intelligence category and the body-kinesthetic category. He also would have rated high in the math intelligence category because he went to a math school where they calculated things on that abacus contraption. Young morty almost took a job being the tax man because of his math skills. He learned math through the fingers, through the body, by whizzing those little disks around, which goes back to his body-kinesthetic intelligence. He got the feel for numbers.
A number on an abacus has a definite shape, feel, and time and space signature. subtraction had a feel. addition had a feel. In fact, he attributed his quick thinking/reflexes to his school work, not to his martial training. ( but you don't see a lot of people down at the aikikai dojo doing abacus work after bowing to their 19.95 framed picture of morty. )
My point here, to give focus to my rambling, is that there are several intelligences, or what they call learning styles. My take is that they are all environmentally based, and that the only real intelligence, is what they call body-kinesthetic. That's seeing the world in terms of movement, our own movement relative to everything else that moves. Its a learn by feel. We are born with it, and either develop it or we don't.
Cave men were this intelligence.
Probably sometime in here between fire and counting we developed a interpersonal intelligence. We learned to work together, not piss people off, and go with the flow.
Then some of em developed the naturalist intelligence. This is seeing the world as a whole, and everything is related to every thing else, and dependent on everything else. Morty used to say that body, the inner world, was just a smaller model of the outer world.
Coming in close to naturalist, is the visual spacial intelligence, mapping, modeling, figuring out where you are in space relative to everything else.
There are other intelligences out there, that we developed. One of the latest on the scene is verbal-word based intelligences. You can get a lot out of reading shit, and explaining shit. Its all evaluation and judgement, and do this, don't do that. The modern school system trains this intelligence over everything else. People leave school and think they know something, and usually by the time they hit their thirties they figure out that they dont.
The ones who don't get to this point are called assholes.
Much of martial arts training is leaving the verbal based intelligence behind, or at least at the door in your shoes.
But it always shows back up, it drifts out of the shoes and on to the mat.
On a mess up, miscue, instead of another shot,or twelve, at it. A guy stops everything and trys to explain what you did wrong, or rationalize why they moved the way they did. The real benefit of the martial arts is understanding the limitation of this kind of intelligence. There are things that can be felt, and not explained, or labeled. And sometime the label screws everything up for a long damn time. Like the word, "throw." Or, "aiki."
Anyway, let's look at the math angle here
Why in the hell did ancient man back in the cradle of civilization days go from not counting jackshit to counting things in base sixty? Don't you figure they would have counted fingers and toes? Why the jump to sixty? Why sixty minutes in an hour? 360 degrees in a damned circle? Ask any math teacher, or google it, you'll get a math teachers explanation. you'll get it filtered through a mathmatical/verbal intelligence. We take their explanations as the truth because society has deemed folks who can do math as smart. But it doesn't satisfy the original question: how did folks one step away from living in cave make that leap to sixty?
Look at your hand. Flex your fingers. Look at it in terms of motion and how it moves. Look at the joints. You have three moveable joints on each finger and thumb. count em and you got 15. People used to relate to the world in terms of motion, not as a series of objects, or material. They counted the things on their hand that moved. Count the moving parts on both hands you get 30.
Counting by the fingers, to ten, is seeing objects. Not motion.
Look at the sky long enough and you'll see that joints in your hand closely reflect the motion of the moon from going to full and empty (28 days). 30 days in a month, right? probably just a coincidence, right?
stick your right hand out in front(say facing north) of you level with your shoulder, move it right, in hand spans till you reach "90 degrees" (or pointing east) now count your finger joints in each hand span position. you'll get pretty close to 90. go in a circle you'll get 360. look at how things move in the sky and you'll get that 360 approximates a year.
You have four limbs. And there are four cardinal directions. north, south, east, west.
The human body is linked to the outer world of movement. People figured that shit out while they were living in caves. Counting to sixty was as easy as turning over your hands. Four hands in an hour, right?
I bring this up because math teachers haven't figured it out. They haven't rediscovered the obvious. They see knowledge is an object. That is what they are good at. Just know that there are 360 degrees in a circle. You don't need to know why. If you stop your brain and wonder why you get behind and have homework. The kids that can get all their math done in class are geniuses right?
Memorize it and make it an object that only relates to itself and applies only to human communication. You enter the realm of understanding what the boss wants and getting it for him quicker than anything else. It manifests itself as the belt/ranking system.
Objectified knowledge makes more money, and builds a better microwave burrito, but that's about it. If you like money, then making the world into objects, and machines, and the notion of building more machines to solve the the world's problems lets you sleep at night.
Its a lot easier way to live than changing your relationship to the problem. When you see the world and people as objects, then you can keep on doing what you are doing, you can poison the ground water to turn a buck, because somewhere somebody is going to make a machine to clean up the mess.
Company policy is just a way to turn a human into a machine. That machine can be C3P0 or it can be a Terminator. Beware of the man who sees company policy and religion as the same thing, because this system builds terminators.
Anyway, I have written about how what we really do is separated judo. It isnt Aikido. The mental objects line up with aikido. But the understanding of motion doesn't. In main line aikido, the movements are objects too. What we do is look at the how things move, we acknowledge the world in terms of movement and how much space there is. We are okay with any amount of movement and if we come to terms with our judo heritiage then we are okay with any amount of space.
We change our relationship to the problem, instead of making a machine(fighting system) to deal with the problem.
The first three atemi waza are basically footsweeps with out the feet. Combine the sweep with atemi waza and you get an illegal judo throw. This guy doesnt show gyaku gamae ate specifically, but if he moved his hand to the head its there as well. The last two atemi waza are in koshiki kata, so they are from judo as well. So basically, the first five techniques have more to do with judo, than aikido. uki waza are lifted from judo. movement 8 seems to be a Tomiki aikido movement that you dont see in other aikido styles, but you can see the positioning in this video. Its judo as well.
When you take Tomiki techniques and make them objects then you can relate them to Aikido. But if you look at them in terms of motion, they relate to something else. So when some one calls foul, and says you can't footsweep in aikido, or you cant standing elbow lock a guy in judo they are thinking in terms of objects, and machines, and systems. They are thinking sport. They are thinking competition.
They aren't looking at the changing their relationship to the problem. They just want to calibrate the machine. Calibrating the machine is what makes aikido look like a joke. Aikido players walk into the joke when they don't understand their relationship with space and motion.
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