The Soul Spark, Creativity and Imagination

In preparing for an upcoming class at the Shuharikan, I've cited some of the wonderful quotes I'll be using to support the lecture as it relates to the use of imagination and creativity in developing and finding your Aikido.

The Soul Spark
“The world comes with shapes, colors, atmospheres, textures-a display of self-presenting forms. All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature to be read for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to their presence: “Look, here we are.” They regard us beyond how we may regard them, our perspectives, what we intend with them, and how we dispose of them. This imaginative claim on attention bespeaks a world ensouled. More-our imaginative recognition, the childlike act of imagining the world, animates the world and returns it to soul…”
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, pgs. 101-102, 118, 128-129

“For Merleau-Ponty, all of the creativity and free-ranging mobility that we have come to associate with the human intellect is, in truth, an elaboration, or recapitulation, of a profound creativity already underway at the most immediate level of sensory perception. The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world. The body’s actions and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting. If the body were truly a set of closed or predetermined mechanisms, it could never come into genuine contact with anything outside of itself, could never perceive anything really new, could never be genuinely startled or surprised. All of its experiences, and all its responses, would already have been anticipated from the beginning, already programmed, as it were, into the machine. But could we even, then, call them experiences? For is not experience, or more precisely, perception, the constant thwarting of such closure?”
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Discipline at the Core, Creativity at the Edge

I came across this quote some time ago while watching a business presentation hosted by the University of Washington. It featured Robert Herbold, a former Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft Corporation, who discussed how profitability and agility can be achieved when businesses balance discipline with creativity.

The quote stayed with me more than what the presenter had to say in that it perfectly described the use of Kamae, Kihon Dosa and Kihon Waza as the basis for one's ability to study and further reveal a deeper understanding of the Aikido techniques in the Yoshinkan style.

It also struck a cord as to why a musician plays the scales to warm up or a painter starts with a color wheel, each using a core discipline to create their works of art. A solid foundation provides the basis for one to grow.

Often times I find returning to the core reveals the excitement of why I continue my study and training in Aikido; I realize I'll never fully know everything about Aikido or life, but that is the fun and challenge of enjoying what you do and continuing to learn and grow. As Carlos Castaneda said "you need to know if it is a path with heart. If it is, follow it."