The Relationship
Me pretending I understand physics
I recently encountered David Bohm’s concept of the undivided whole while reading a Substack called Fragments of Coherence.
As I read, I wasn’t thinking, This explains Aikido.
Instead, I found myself thinking, This gives language to something I have been struggling to put words to on the mat for decades.
To me, the magic of Aikido has always been “us.”
We appear to practice as two separate people:
nage and uke
attacker and defender
winner and loser
self and other
These distinctions are useful. We need them to describe what we are doing. But they also create division.
Perhaps they are only abstractions.
Bohm argued that we naturally divide reality into separate parts and then mistake those divisions for reality itself. The distinctions help us talk about the world, but they do not necessarily describe the deeper nature of what is happening.
I wonder if something similar happens in Aikido.
The movement does not really belong to nage.
Nor does it belong to uke.
It belongs to the relationship.
The relationship is not something that happens after the movement. It is what gives rise to the movement.
The more coherent the relationship, the less the movement belongs to either of us.
When I force a technique, I create a different relationship.
When uke resists simply to resist, the relationship changes again.
What I have spent decades trying to understand is not how to become a better nage or a better uke.
I have been trying to understand the “us” that exists before we call one person nage and the other uke.
Us is what coherence feels like.
Not agreement.
Not sameness.
Not the loss of individuality.
Rather, the experience that the relationship itself is primary, and that both people are participating in something larger than either one alone.
David Bohm did not teach me something new.
He simply gave me a language for something Aikido had already taught my body.
Great job Scott. You've taken a great cut at explaining the unexplainable.
This resonates with me Scott.
One of the things I have come to appreciate is that
Yes,
-the body often learns these truths before the mind finds words for them.
And Long Before We
can explain what is happening, -we can sometimes feel that the movement is no longer coming from either person, but through the relationship between them.
Who leads, who fallows?
This reminds me of
The psychologist
-James J. Gibson’s idea of “Affordances”.
He suggested that perception is not simply about objects, but about the relationship between an organism and its environment.
In that sense, action is not located entirely in either the person or the world—it emerges from the interaction between them.
As martial arts go,
Aikido points toward something similar.
Nage and Uke are useful distinctions,
but they are not the deepest reality.
The technique seems to emerge from the
“shared field”created by two people in relationship.
When that relationship becomes “coherent”/organized,
movement feels less like something one person does to another
and more like something both are participating in together.
Yes,
Bohm’s “undivided whole” provides a beautiful language for that experience.