Advanced Aikido. Phong Thong Dang

to maintain order. The universe, Mother Nature, and humanity are not separate entities but a single body. Humanity's role is to accept this unity, harmonize, and love all creatures with a sincere heart.

      The spiritual truths of Omoto ask everyone, including today's advanced aikido practitioners, to align harmoniously with others, to receive personal understanding and insight, to understand repetitive patterns in all things, and to become more creative.

      To align harmoniously with life and the universe requires the advanced aikido practitioner to take responsibility for his or her interaction with others. Resistance is not harmonious; it is discordant. Nonresistance provides the means to enter and blend with others by joining and aligning ourselves. Those of the Omoto belief established, supported, and attended many international interfaith conferences to demonstrate this need to align harmoniously with others. What those of the Omoto belief practice philosophically in coordination and alignment with other faiths and organizations, the advanced aikido practitioner practices in training and discipline with the dojo by aligning harmoniously with their uke, or training partner.

      The Omoto teaches us to receive personal understanding, insight, and the revelation of celestial truths and its lessons. This is to make an honest and genuine commitment of intent and intensity to train until one gains and owns the perceptions, concepts, and techniques of the Omoto belief or aikido. Knowledge is the accumulation of knowledge presented by others and still belonging to them because it does not come from one's own experience. To truly know something, not just the knowledge of it, is to pursue the training and discipline necessary until those understandings and insights are the product of the continued validation of one's own personal experience. Knowledge can be gained from others as the reporting of facts as they perceived them. Wisdom is the understanding and insight one can only get from one's self. The Omoto belief and aikido encourage each of us to proceed with our training until we receive personal understanding, insight, and enlightenment.

      To understand the repetitive innate patterns of the behavior of man, society, and the cosmos is to accept all things for what they are. Sequentially, the present comes after the past and before the future. Past, present, and future become a repetitive pattern because the present will soon become the past and the future will become the present moment. Each season leads to the next in a repetitive pattern of the year. Day follows night, and vice versa, in a repetitive pattern. The repetitive pattern of life suggests that nothing is permanent, that there is a sequential cause-and-effect relationship in observable and knowable operations, and that we are all creatures of habits with predictable repetitive patterns of thinking and behaving.

      Creativity is the basis to respond spontaneously and with an instinctual drive. Creativity provides hope for new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Creativity is a means to move beyond our habitual repetitive patterns and to search our own personal experience of understanding and insight to find new ways to align harmoniously with others in peace. Creativity means to accept that many of our old ways of behaving and interacting that have consistently led to fear, hatred, and war need to be abandoned and new ways found. Creativity challenges the established ways and institutions. To be effective and efficient in all aspects of life, we must learn to be creative and resourceful. Training and discipline in aikido basics teaches us the repetitive patterns of entering, connecting, blending, and aligning harmoniously with others. Advanced aikido practitioners will creatively begin to apply the concepts and principles of aikido to their movement and spontaneously execute the appropriate response or technique, takemusu-aiki.

      To do this, one follows the four principles. One must train the body and mind for purity and purification. One must maintain optimism by believing in the goodness of the divine will. One must strive progressively for social improvement. Finally, one must unify rather than separate all things by reconciling all dichotomies. These are very wise aspirations for us all, worthy of dedication regardless of where they originated.

      This harmonious inclusive philosophy is practiced in the tenshin-nage waza (the heaven and Earth throwing technique) in which one hand is held high, representing heaven, and the other hand is held low, representing the Earth. Tenshinkai, meaning the organization of heaven on Earth, is the name given by aikido founder O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba to a uniquely fluid and powerful style of aikido and the Sensei and federation that oversees it. Overcoming, integrating, and utilizing dualism demonstrates the harmonious congruence in aikido conceptually, philosophically, and in its practical application. These are the basic universal truths represented in aikido application and training. Aikido is the way of harmony and peace in the midst of conflict and aggression.

      The concept of divinity, or God, in the Omoto faith is inclusive of all three concepts of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism. Omoto worships the one ultimate original spirit of God, while acknowledging the same character of spirit of God in many and all things.

      SPIRITUAL PRACTICES

      For most people, the practicing of spiritual truth is isolated to specific places and times. Aikido encourages its advanced practitioners to maintain these spiritual truths in their hearts and minds because the practice of the techniques is designed to deal with aggression and conflict in a nonresistant, nonviolent, noncompetitive way. It has long been held that the benefits of spiritual truths are apparent when they are practiced and applied in daily life and interaction.

      If one wants to go beyond the physical practice of techniques, one can follow some more spiritually based exercises.

      Kotodama: Spirit Sounds

      Similar to chanting, Kotodama is the belief that every sound has some spiritual property and power. Kotodama is a Shinto practice of intoning various sounds to produce mystical or spiritual states. Sounds have a specific vibration or rhythm. They synchronize the brain wave rhythms by repetition. The seventy-five sounds of Kotodama form words that purify the universe and teach the way of aiki as deigned by the universe. The sounds of the kotodama are ka-ko-ku-ke-ki and saso-su-se-si. Notice that these consist of the common denominators and most used aspects of even the English language, the vowels a-e-i-o-u. Words in language have a sound, a voice, a rhythm, and a literal, as well as a deeper, meaning. The air and breath give life to these sounds and words. This type of practice is very common in most religious rituals.

      O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba performed Kotodama as part of his daily spiritual and martial practice. He believed that out of stillness comes the resonance of heaven and Earth. This resonance or sound, when chanted, helps one become aligned, harmonized, and at one with the vibratory resonance of the universe. Human beings are a microcosm of the universe. By developing awareness of the connectedness of human nature, one begins to hear Kotodama.

      The vibratory resonance of Kotodama makes and moves everything. The Omoto explanation of the origin of the universe suggests that an ever-increasing density and explosion, similar to the Big Bang theory, created the universe. The subsequent birth and movement of Kotodama generated the material and spiritual world. All things first exist in the spirit world before a latent causative predisposition transfers them to the material world, just as all physical behavior comes from thought.

      The actual practice of Kotodama may be too esoteric for most aikido students. Further investigation, study, and training should only be done under guidance and supervision.

      Chink-Kishin

      Chink-kishin refers to the meditative or mind-calming techniques of the Omoto faith. One of the aspects that drew O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba to the Omoto belief is the methods used to calm the mind. These techniques are referred to as chink-kishin. Very little detailed information is readily available about the specifics of these techniques unique to the Omoto faith. They do tend to follow the generic patterns of mental training and meditation as presented and discussed in Chapter 3: Training the Mind. Calming the mind is very important in any spiritual or psychological progress and evolution. Holding the concept that nature is spiritual, it is often our internal mental consciousness that blocks and prevents a direct experience of understanding, insight, and enlightenment. By learning to calm the learned ego identity of the mind, advanced practitioners will find their training and technique becoming more spontaneous and directed by natural causes. These causes may be attributed to advanced levels of training leading to takemusu-aiki, or a feeling that they are divinely directed, as described by O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba. It is beyond this book and