Levels of knowledge

The following game of thought portrayed and the characters and incidents herein are fictitious and any similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional. - or something similar. The main idea is that I was simply playing around with an idea but some people might think it is about them. So no, it is not, it's my own game of thought.

I was thinking about what we can see with different levels of expertise, either in aikido or anywhere else. As discussed before, I believe (following many other cultures and people) that to master something we go through a three-stage learning process: Shu, ha and ri (since that I have a new, 4 stage process in mind, but I'll write about it later). Now let's see how we might see others depending on how much we know.

With a certain (lower) level of knowledge, we might see something or someone above us as perfect. We don't know what their imperfections are so we can easily believe that they don't have any! A football can seem perfect if you have just started learning to play the game but you might not know whether the air pressure in it is perfect or not (and you might not even know about the significance of air pressure at all). Another example is when you can not see the mistakes a 3rd kyu makes when it is your first training.

When your level of expertise increases you will see things from a different angle. You might have thought that there was nothing behind the (perhaps fictional) wall but as you grow (and if the wall is not too high) you will realise that there is another world behind it. The wall is not everything, the ball's air pressure is not perfect. In this growing process, you might realise that you can't tolerate the imperfections of the ball any longer, you can't just accept that you are surrounded by a wall. Now that you know that there is something (even greener) behind the wall you might want to experience it. It might also be possible that the ball you idolized before is of pretty bad quality...

A garden and a wall

However, it's not a good thing to just see the imperfections and focus on them, i.e. to emphasize only the negatives once you know about them. If you believe that the garden behind the wall is indeed greener, don't just say that your own garden is not good enough, don't just stay there and moan. Knowing what's good and doing what's good for you indicate different levels of development. Knowing (i.e. realising imperfections, seeing better things elsewhere) is the first step which should be followed by doing (i.e. going to the other garden, throwing away the low quality ball). You can see that there is a tree with delicious-looking apples in the garden behind the wall but to taste them you have to climb the wall, leave your garden and go to the other one which looks promising. Once there, you might not be able to return to the old garden; once thrown away you might not play with the old ball again. Are you ready to leave what's believed to be imperfect but stable and predictable? That requires another level, perhaps a good push from someone in your own garden.

I will talk about levels of knowledge in a new post some time later, and there will be something very similar in our soon-out new e-book about Aikido Grading Basics (with respect to kyu grades). So if you are a beginner, it might be useful to check out our Featured section regularly.