EdwinStearns.com

I always have a hard time reading Nev Sagiba’s post very challenging because he presents so many ideas, but there is always at least one idea that catches my attention. In his recent post that idea is:

> Two men in a ring with rules, whilst athletic, skilled and courageous, prove nothing more than that their minds are trapped by rules. On the other hand, those having killed, the ultimate of true violence, unless mentally ill, seldom feel good about it. And if not behind bars, are usually tormented souls. Or both. > A true warrior understands clearly that SERVICE TO LIFE means that he may be sacrificed for the success of the campaign at hand; and lives is hope that he is indeed serving the greater good. HAVE NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT THAT! Otherwise he wastes his life as well.

Except for the unnecessary use of upper case, I wished I said that. It is so easy to get caught up in a fantasy of using martial techniques to effortlessly defeat an assailant who clearly deserves whatever injuries befall him (you know he deserves it because of the music that started playing as he entered the scene).

As part of the service at UUCA this past Sunday, a video interview was played with a witness to civil rights era. The predecessor congregation had joint youth meetings with Ebenezer Baptist and they were threatened by the KKK. The fathers walked the perimeter to protect the youth inside. No violence took place, but in the early 1960′s in Atlanta, there was a reasonable expectation that something bad could happen to an racially integrated meeting. Walking the perimeter when violence is imminent is what warriors do. If violence occurred, these fathers would be the first to be hurt and they knew it. They would have died trying to stop their children from being hurt and there was no illusions about their chances against a determined attack. What they counted on was the cowardice of the potential attackers, and based on the number of cars that slowly passed the building the night they were right. What we must prepare for in martial training is the ability to enter (irimi) violent circumstances without regard for the outcome. Of course we want to survive and come out on top, but we must be prepared for death.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an entertaining and disturbing book. It covers the investigations into New Age/occult/psychic ideas by the US Army with the intention of creating super soldiers. These investigations take some members of the Army in very strange directions that have repercussions in the current war on terror. Jon Ronson starts with a rumor that there was a site at Fort Bragg where people attempted (and in some versions of the rumor succeeded) to kill a goat by looking at it. Whether this really happened or not depends on who is asked, but it does seem that some people took this idea very seriously.

While investigating this rumor, the author learns about the “First Earth Battalion” (see the manual here), an apparently serious attempt to apply the ideas of 1970′s human potential movement to the military. As unlikely as it seems, this was taken seriously and the Army started to experiment with teaching soldiers yoga and meditation. Somehow these ideas were extended to psychic abilities and there was hope that soldiers could, if their minds were trained correctly, walk through walls, become invisible (convince the viewer that you weren’t there, not let light pass through you) and kill without touching. These abilities would make the soldiers like jedi knights (this was in 1979, so this was a natural analogy). The author doesn’t mention it, but I thought of the book In Search of the Warrior Spirit by Richard Strozzi Heckler where the author describes his experience teaching Aikido to Green Berets. This is a relatively benign expression of the ideas that were floating around.

Jon Ronson suggests that there is a straight line between the First Earth Battalion and some of the more disturbing aspects on the war on terror: blaring loud music and sexual humiliation to break terror suspects. He also tells the story of the Heaven’s Gate tragedy that he claims has links to the secret psychic training programs in the Army. I found these connections tenuous, there are always crazies in and out of military and these ideas could have come from the general culture event without the First Earth Battalion Field Manual. George Clooney is turning this book into a movie that, based on the trailer, treats the whole story as a comedy. The trailer includes many episodes that I don’t remember from the book and I don’t see how they can get away with calling it a true story.

I just read this, which is Joel Riggs account of the Atlanta Friendship Seminar.  I am so used to Yamada Sensei’s teaching that it is always surprising to me to see how others respond to it.  There are such different expectations of how training should go between different instructors.  I feel great frustration when the class is to much about the instructor talking and imparting wisdom and not enough training.  My personal experience is that the kind of instructor that offers extensive dialog, discussion, question and answer, exploration of any philosophy or attitudinal adjustment behind the movements, and examination of the relationship of mind to body do not produce better students than those that simply demonstrate the principles physically and expect the students to figure things out for themselves.

I have taken classes with some students of Yamada Sensei that presumably had very similar training sessions with him that I have had and had extremely strong and subtle technique that I admired greatly, but were not effectively passing down their   knowledge to their students.  My opinion is that the difference is in the instructional method; to achieve the same results, the training must be presented in the same way.  Yamada Sensei’s method is to present mostly basic techniques preformed in a vigorous way and allow the students to find their own way to recreate the technique.  This is sometimes referred to as the “steal my technique” method, that is if you want to do what I do you must put in the effort to find your own way of understanding it.  Many other teachers present, along with vigorous demonstrations, many analogies and “spiritual” discussions on how Aikido training works on the student.  While I have found the demonstrations and discussions from these teachers sometimes very inspiring, the students that are attracted to this method are of no better quality than those of Yamada Sensei.  The historical record indicates that O Sensei in general followed the “steal my technique” approach, but he could also present very difficult esoteric explanations that demanded extensive knowledge from the audience.  He certainly didn’t make it easy on the students.  In my opinion, this is why his students were often of so high quality, but all very different.  The demands were not from the student on the instructor to present the information in a clearer format, but demands by the instructor on the student to work hard and come up with their own answers.

Mr. Riggs ends his post with:

I met several wonderful people from dojos around the South, and look forward to visiting and training with them again in the future.  I  also found that I felt more deeply connected to my own teacher’s approach to the art and felt more committed to the directions of training and teaching that I have begun in my own dojo.

I am glad that he enjoyed meeting and training with our guests, and I enjoyed meeting him (I didn’t get a chance to train with him, maybe next time). Having read his comments about Yamada Sensei, I also feel even more deeply connected to my teacher’s approach.

Bonk, the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex is a very entertaining light read about how scientists have investigated human sexuality.  Ms. Roach has more of an eye for the amusing detail about the work of the scientists involved than a desire to explain what is really known, but this may be because so little is really known. What is clear from this book is that there is a significant problem in doing serious scientific work on human sexuality and that is the scientists are humans with their very personal experience of sex. Kinsey, for example, overestimates the prevalence of homosexuality because of a selection bias in his choosing subjects for his interviews. Bias is always a problem in science, but normally there are enough scientists investigating a topic to eliminate this problem over time. With sex, very few people are brave enough to face the humiliating experience of serious study about sex.

Overall the book is more amusing than informative. While having a first hand account of participating in a sex study (the Ms. Roach and her husband volunteered for a study involving medical imaging of intercourse) is interesting because it suggests the limits of this kind of study, the episode feels more like (fun) gossip rather than serious science. The book isn’t arousing, exactly, but it in general has the feeling of naught fun that doesn’t help the image problem that the profiled scientists face on a regular basis.

As a warning to male readers, chapter 8 has many more details about medically slicing and dicing the penis than I had stomach for. Aside from that I can recommend Bonk as good clean fun.