Hikari Aikido Dojo

In my experience with the Art of Aikido I was always asked, what is the essence of your practice? This has always been of utmost scrutiny since the practice has been based on martial application and its history is immersed in some of the samurai traditions that were some of the most violent approaches to the survival of the individual on the battlefield and yet they were some of the most disciplined, honorable, and devoted practitioners of their craft.

Since most of the perspectives on the martial arts have alluded to how to defend oneself into how to kill another to save themselves or others who know nothing about these techniques and abilities, many not involved, use their vivid imagination along with the movie industry to fill in the blanks of what they think is actually being presented.

Obviously, many of the arts that are being taught with competent Sensei and Instructors have produced a varied and compelling way for humanity to bring its animal instinctual brain into a very great place of value for the possible real growth and evolution of our societies.

By disciplining this facet of inherited nature we are able to move beyond it and tap into the other levels of expression and discovery because we are no longer caught in its “default control”, we are able to see that since it was given to us by nature, we can now start to understand its power and start to learn how to use it in a more unified way to help the individual start their climb in understanding what it is we might be doing here, instead of being caught up in fight or flight as the daily existence.

Since we have at least technologically transcended the hard cycle of the earth, we have established a survival foundation that has allowed us to consider many other arenas of our existence. The martial arts can and have contributed greatly to creating a foundation for helping the fabric of societies around the planet by showing the way on spiritual, mental, emotional and physical levels ways to bring oneself into a centered, grounded, stabilized and mature condition that serves the integrity of the individual who is the fabric of culture.

As we can easily get caught up in what things mean and think that what we have created as the meaning is the absolute, this is obviously not the truth, although in our minds, our relative momentary assessment of our experience can be very compelling and limiting because we can keep being entranced by our belief in it.

Since I started this essay with the inquiry into the essence of Aikido I have now started into a divergence from the brief historical vantage into my experiential involvement that has for many years taken on a more transcendent perspective than the physical, traditional viewpoint, although our Essence is source, so it is inscribed into all dimensions of our practice and existence.
Even though there is a dynamic expression of the art, all the outer is based on the internal principles that actually allow one to transcend themselves if they can see that their default conditioning of their life experience and what nature has gifted us is really only one level of their existence.

My approach with each individual is to point to this like I am pointing to a diagram of the Tao.  As an example, the dark side representing one’s life conditioning from birth that one has not fully made conscious and the Light side, the arena of awakening to this default and programming as what one has limited themselves to as who and what they are and how this represents their own unconsciousness, as they haven’t brought these aspects out to be investigated and let go of  because they are for the most part miasmas, (obstructions, traumas, repressed pain) that we all shoved away to the dark side not wanting to face them.

In our practice of Hikari Aikido we focus on Principle.  Some of the higher more refined Principles such as non resistance, non harm, and non conflict from the beginning allow us to start to discover a way of living our lives and how we approach each other on the practice mat or the mat of the world.  Our founder, Morihei Uyeshiba, after his awakenings realized Budo as Love, not just limited to the military definition.  In other words, take care of your fellow individual, being disciplined in compassion and caring, not just bujutsu.

So, in doing this he turned bujutsu into budo or a Way Art.  This is a revolution in transforming oneself from resistance to non resistance in which a whole new balance was brought into the Light because in doing this he showed the way into the Unknown and presented an enlightened way of discovery as to how to live and use the Principles of Aikido so humanity could more effortlessly awaken.

So, in order for us to benefit from this revelation for ourselves and humanity overall we need to come into our full fruition of each of our individual spirit’s purpose for what we are truly doing here on earth and how it is to be expressed in existence.  Upon seeing that our conditioned existence from birth was survival based for the most part and not necessarily a conscious participation we can see that it had a shadow element to it in that we really didn’t know what or who we were.

As I have stated in earlier essays, most of the earlier years are mainly based in survival, whether aware of it or not.  This was given to us by Nature and was mainly based in resistance because of the fear based separation feeling that the reptilian brain keeps online as a way of approaching existence.

In our approach to our art of Aikido, we start out using the conflict survival metaphor as the basis of how we will interact with each other which is in the beginning a perfect depiction of the separation perspective of how the ego mind sees the world, all the objects separate from one another, including ourselves.  This does allow us to function here since we are born into the space time dimension, we almost automatically fall into the separation paradigm as our approach to living which seems appropriate because everyone else is doing the same thing which could be looked at as hypnosis and not fully, consciously examined.

As humanity has progressed technologically, we have not really awakened to these facets of our existence and this has left us in heavy reliance on the tech advancement but not coming into realization of our core Essence and we are still caught for the most part in this survival agenda as the underlying basis unconsciously for our purpose for being here and it is almost totally not examined because of the immense power of Nature that we inherited.

When we start to see this in our practice and our life, we can make a decision to investigate this facet of ourselves to see if it is “the whole picture”.  There are lots of rituals, practices and beliefs that seem to be able to fit the bill to fulfill this quest in the form of a search.

Once we are caught in the ego searching to make the ego extinct we are following a futile path, the ego is only a function in consciousness or our Greater Self, once we can move beyond most of the lower levels of our human nature we start to see clearly with Clarity, this allows Realization or recognition of Real Nature, otherwise survival nature will keep us in her lure.

From the platform of Principle we step into doing something totally different than one’s otherwise repetitive life of cyclic habits which can be quite numbing to our brain, body, nervous system and thus affecting our life perspective in a non awakened condition.  Once we allow ourselves to consider approaching our existence from a totally restructured, rewired alignment with a more balanced, centered and open ended vision, we can we say we are reborn, a condition less condition, that is a greater understanding of harmony and peace that was obscured by being born here and having to wade through all of the conditioning of living here.

I started this essay around the subject of the Essence of Aikido with a hint of the warrior spirit that humanity seems to align itself with in respect to being caught in the reptilian brain agenda of survival, nothing necessarily bad with it, it is like ego mind in that respect, they are great for their functional expression, but don’t need to take over one’s existence.

The Essence of Aikido from my decades of practice is based in several realizations that have come from many satori like revelations in that if Aikido is an advanced spiritual art that was designed and evolved to the point of seeing that if you harm another, you have harmed yourself because of our Essential core connection no matter what the supposed ethnicity.

We cannot see clearly until we awaken and remove the conditioned life energy obstructions that our lives tend to become.  We can then see clearer that our Essence from the Eternal is Innocence.  Sincerely, Will Gable

Art, Will Gable @ 1979