Part 4 - Ego, competition, grading

What do you think about the role of ego in aikido?

The person you really want to ask this question to is Miles Kessler sensei of Tel Aviv who's spent a lot longer than I have meditating, and he is versed in Buddhism and Integral theory, he's the person you really want to ask that to. The word ego is a tricky one because it means different things in common language and also in Freudian psychology and in Buddhism, these three are completely different things. So if you are talking about arrogance and inflated sense of self esteem, aikido gives you that and aikido takes that away. So aikido people as a group psychologically suffer from problems of arrogance, myself included. It's a major issue in aikido, and the way to deal with it is to take ukemi. Gordon Jones Shihan of the organisation I'm affiliated with at the moment keeps taking ukemi, and I think that keeps him ego-free. A sixth dan from the UKA which he heads missed a class to give me a lift to the station last Summer School even though I’m just a shodan, would that happen everywhere, I think not? Psychologically what's happening in aikido is you are being powerful when you are nage feeling dominance and power and then, as uke, feeling vulnerability and what it's like to follow, to be of service rather than leadership. If those two things are in balance you grow as a person. If they go out of balance then you even get the kind of like abused uke syndrome who is just really submissive and jumps when he's told and says 'how high' or you get the big ego proposterone filled sensei syndrome which we all know. And that's a real seduction. I had it myself teaching in Ethiopia when seduction comes in. So that's ego in that sense. Ego in the Buddhist sense is a bit more complicated, and we will leave the Freudian one because my mum’s not here [smiles].

Coming back to ego a bit, if you have competition, for example, in Formula One, that helps the world somehow because they compete, they develop new technology which eventually goes public and the world moves forward, but in general, there is no competition in aikido. How do you see that?

First of all, most aikidoka that I've seen and I've experienced around the world are competing with each other. ...aikido means there isn't any trophies so people who are competing but not even getting a trophy which is even dumber. People compete, the organisations are competing, they are competing with themselves just to improve, this is a mindset of self-competition. So are we competing or not? To completely let go of that, to completely let go of ego in the Western sense and in the Buddhist sense of letting go of that, that's a massive challenge. How does aikido improve, is a question, without competition. Competition can actually destroy ego because most people lose, and only one person wins, right? So that can actually destroy ego as well as build it, obviously, being the champ of the big trophy and all the badges. Yeah, that's a really difficult one for aikido, how do we stop aikido from, over the years, degrading and everyone's students' being like photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, and bringing the spirit of radical questioning and innovation which is really not a Japanese concept in many ways is one, and bringing the very Japanese concept of kaizen - continuous improvement - is another one. I don't have the answer to that, how do we stop aikido from degrading, because I see aikido today in a state of degradation in many places but not everywhere.

And what do you think about gradings? Are they necessary? Did you want to go for a black belt or hakama or anything like that? Because, for example, when I started my main goal was to have hakama...

I think there are better qualified people to answer these question than me. My view on it, for what it's worth, is that it provides some structure to people, and what then happens is that often people start so interested in the structure they forget what was the reason they were doing that in the first place, so you've got people chasing grades right up to high levels and titles and it just adds the ego and isn't constructive, but without that people aren't necessarily as focused. Chiba sensei has some interesting stuff to say on this, that without the life and death element to keep you focused gradings become a way of creating pressure. I've seen people really raised to the pressure and really grow as people because of gradings. I'm not that interested in myself any more. The main reason I got a black belt after ten years of doing aikido was that people kept saying 'are you a black belt to me?' - who didn't know anything about aikido and it was just easier to say yes and shut them up than to try and explain that I wasn't, even after ten years of training and serious study. So I don't have that much to say about grading, you know. Don't take it too seriously, if you are doing it, do it.