We all have to reconcile fear

The interview was published in CEDIT 18: space for conflict.

What shifted you from an academic career to starting an Aikido dojo?

In 1986, I started studying East Asian religious traditions at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I got my bachelor's degree and my master's degree. I passed my doctorate exams and became ABD – all but dissertation. I was in the process of finishing my dissertation and had a promising academic career on the horizon.

But along the way, I started to notice that everything in the university setting was about the intellect, and it was very distant from practice and the body. And because the body was taken off the table there, I felt that I could never, in that setting, pursue the truth of things.

In that time, I had an interest in conflict. But the university setting avoids conflict through luxury and privilege. We prefer to live in gated communities, and we hide all kinds of things from ourselves. To me, it is the default setting of the modern human mind. One of its aspects is to be prone to fear, as I say, and as a result, we fluctuate between avoidance / retreating / disengaging or attempting to overpower the other. We're either running from conflict or engaging in conflict. But there's a whole other truth that I discovered through my academic pursuits into these pre-modern religious traditions: The truth of reconciling dichotomies; the truth of deconstructing the dichotomous mind and thus of deconstructing our dichotomous experience of the world.

So, I pulled out of my academic program and became a law enforcement officer. I went right into the heart of conflicts and became a Deputy Sheriff. Santa Barbara is a resort town. It's just idyllic: the ocean is on one side, and the mountains are on the other side. The weather here is amazing. You're driving through these towns, and you believe that it is a kind of Disneyland. But when you put on the badge and you respond to people calling for emergency services, you realize that underneath the surface, there are dark things happening – the Darkness is everywhere. It reminds me of the opening scene from Blue Velvet by David Lynch. Everything on the surface looks beautiful, but underneath there's this whole seedy side. It concentrically echoes our own individual persona. On the outside, we're presented one way, but inside, there's all this turmoil and conflict.

But becoming a peace officer, a police officer, you're now in it. And I think I took my academic pursuits to a whole other level than I ever could have inside the university, almost in a way, the university was going to stifle me, almost control me like any institution: Institutions are just out to repeat themselves through time, to continue their ongoing re-birth, you know, and I just could see the manipulation and the stifling in the pursuit of truth inside Academia. On the street, the world turned to chaos, and in that chaos I could choose how things could be ordered; I could therefore order them differently – brining reconciliation and communion to dichotomy.

So, becoming a policeman, how to deal with conflict became a real question for you, not a theoretical one, right? 

When you get to law enforcement, there's just the raw truth, and it hits you in the face emotionally and sometimes physically. There's just no way around it. Yes, it's a theoretical question no more. There are real, dire, and often irreversible consequences to the decisions you make and to who you are as a person.

And from there, not tasked with the dissertation, I went on to start my own dojo. I could run conflict experiments there, and under a more controlled environment, to come up with theories and ideas of things, and then put them into law enforcement incidents and go back and forth between the dojo and the street. It's very scientific. Like we're going to, let's see how this idea works inside a controlled environment of the dojo. OK, let's go put that in this real-life incident and see if it played out, and then back in the dojo, back on the street, and so on.

That's really evolved into what today I call Senshin Aikido. And I also teach at our regional Law Enforcement Academy, so next to the dojo, I also work with the next generation of peace officers in the state of California. They are all benefitting from these insights.

Could you describe what is special about the Senshin Aikido? You call it a historical Aikido. How is your approach to Aikido different from commonly practiced Aikido?

Using Foucault's idea, I call my Aikido a technology of the self. It is a way of working on yourself for the betterment of what makes you human. I avoid using the word traditional. Today, a lot of schools would say they're a traditional school. But they're not following pre-modern technologies of self, pre-modern practices, and pre-modern epistemology. They're doing something that arose around the beginning of the 20th century. My methodology goes back to 500 BCE, so it is rather historical than traditional. I also wish to distinguish my approach from commercial Aikido schools, which are working within and for the production of capital. Either they're trying to make money, or they're trying to pass down a martial arts system through time, for the sake of making money.

So, we don't do any of that. You have to try out for our school. To take on these pre-modern practices, you have to be in a certain place in your life, in your personal history. A huge part of these practices is that you're going to experiment with vulnerability, and that makes it more important that we don't just let anybody in. We can't have people who are taking advantage of other people while they're making themselves vulnerable. So, it's very difficult to start from scratch. And that’s why you can't just take anybody. We haven't had a new adult student since 2013, and in that sense, it is very different from modern and contemporary martial arts schools.

What do you mean by modern and pre-modern epistemology?

Pre-modern technologies of self are based on entirely different theories of knowledge. For lack of a better word, let’s say, we use scientific epistemology in modernity. Something is either A or something is B, and the law of excluded middle prevents them from being anything else: This is at the heart of the modern mind and of conflict. But pre-modern epistemology sees it differently. Some will refer to it as sympathetic logic or correspondence logic; I landed on the phrase concentric logic.

We may refer here to Nagarjuna, a buddhist philosopher from 2.–3. century, who is not working with the excluded middle. Modern epistemology says, A is A, B is B, and it stops there. But Nagarjuna goes on and says, something can be both A and B, and something can also be neither A nor B. And there's a lot of truth in this notion. It is a more accurate description of how we experience the world, how we experience ourselves, how we deal with conflict, how we deal with our humanity, and how we deal with relationships in our lives. 
The actor on the stage, for example, is the person, but it is also the character of the play. And some actors, when they are really good actors, we are going to see that they are not only both A (person) and B (character), but they are neither. They transcended it all. And that’s where we get the greatest performance. If we can tell: “You're the actor, you're not the character,” we would know that's not a good performance. But when an actor transcends self and character, if they're neither A nor B, it emanates outward, and the audience feels the experience. We are immersed in this neither-nor as the actor is in the moment.

And how does this pre-modern epistemology work when applied in martial arts?

Modern martial arts are often seen as body techniques. But in pre-modern epistemology, you can't separate mind and body. Actually, we're both mind and body. And when these things commune, then we're neither mind nor body, because something else has taken over. Modern martial arts, including modern Aikido, claim to be spiritual or claim to work on the heart-mind aspect of human beings, but there's no practices that are actually addressing it. You're just doing body movements, and you're mostly learning different techniques there. Like in the university, where everything was just mind; in the modern dojo, everything is just body. Where is the heart-mind? Where is the spirit? Where is the most real part of who we are? Where is being?

Let's say you learn a technique for a wrist grab. The technique is considered a response to what to do when someone grabs your wrist. I call this the what-if modality of practice. And it sounds good in theory, just like the academic discourse sounds good in theory. But when you actually go try to live this, you realize that your mind cannot calculate through all the possibilities that may come as a response to a wrist grab. This kind of training cannot function in real life because it never addresses the spiritual problem of human v. human violence from the point of view of the participant. It does not address the true effect of stress on the intellect and nor does it address the real way in which we come to move and live (or die) in response to violence.

Pre-modern people knew this was the problem. That is the ultimate problem of practice: How do you train in a form without becoming attached to the form such that you could apply the art in a spontaneous way? By cultivating your body-mind through art.

So, you see aikido and martial arts as a technology of self. What does it mean?

We have all these various religious traditions: different types of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. And Michel Foucault developed the term technology of self to talk about all of them without being an apologist for each tradition or an advocate for one or the other. The term includes almost any praxis where you are attempting to take your current state of being and, through self-cultivation and transformation, go to a desired or “higher” place. And among these practices, one may count Budo, which is the use of the martial arts to cultivate oneself. Aikido is a Budo, that’s what I mean.

How does the dojo following these ideas work? Would you describe it as a temple or a monastery?

We are trying to take these pre-modern discourses and practices and make them usable by the modern person. We may speak about the temple, but we are not it. In pre-modern temples, you would leave your family, shave your head, change your name, and go reside in the temple 24/7. We can't do that today. People have jobs and families. We are slightly modernized. We don’t have those prescriptions, but the assumptions are still there. So, while you don't live at the dojo, you are expected to practice the practice of the dojo 24/7. At the level of the heart-mind, the commitment remains the same.

How does this actually work for you? How is it possible to bring your practice to everyday life? Is it not becoming a kind of religious practice then?

We all have a religion: We all have a belief system around which we organize ourselves and our experience of the world. This is true even if it is not this or that established religion and/or even if we do not call it a religion. When we're trying to do these pre-modern practices, and we're trying to make them palatable for the modern ear and mind, we address our own history of mystical traditions and how we dealt with them. That is what one could say we are talking about, a revivalism of mysticism, as long as one is understanding this is a reconciliation of dichotomy and a deconstruction of the dichotomous mind. However, we also have to understand that we are both heirs of the corruption of European Christianity, the rise of Protestantism, of the Enlightenment and its attack on pre-modern technologies of self, and then ultimately of secularization. As a result, in the US, we are now in the era of consumerism: The common religion today is not made up of Catholics or Buddhists, etc. – it is made up of customers. That’s our dominant modern religion: Consumerism - materialism. Life is geared around the purchasing of things and the production of capital to produce things: That is the central belief system. 

It is hard to say what our dominant religion in Czechia is, but we are definitely devoted to consumerism too.

So, when we are dealing with these pre-modern mystical traditions, we also need to understand our history of dealing with religion

Historically, we've always had these mystical traditions where you are working on the body-mind problem and the transcendence of body-mind. But we also had institutional efforts to reel in the mystic. For example, we had Christian mystics at certain points in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and through the institutionalization of Christianity, the mystic was controlled: He or she was reeled in the institution because the person that does not have a dichotomous mind cannot really be controlled by others. He or she is always a political threat in that regard. Then, as our history continued, eventually, our religious traditions became ultimately political traditions. And that became part of our history too, just as later movements for free thought and secularization – the separation church and state – also became part of our history. However, it is not a mere matter of an evolution of thought like we are told by the winners in these political battles: It is about power. It is about who is controlling the most people and by the most efficient means, and the most efficient means is be determining “truth.” That is what our history is about when it comes to pre-modern technologies of self and our present cultural disdain for them.

So, as modern today, we're on the other side. We don't like to talk about God and religion outside of it being understood as a way of controlling people, as something we should liberate ourselves from. Because the critique of religion as a tool for controlling the masses is part of our history.

But when we adopt these pre-modern technologies of self, we're going back to before these processes and the institutionalization – before all these political battles where “truth” was used like a queen on a chess board – to the time of the mystic practices. There, we focus on the innate ability of humans to transcend dichotomy. People experience this in all kinds of ways: it might be through sex with a partner, dancing, music, or a sunset. It's times when our human mind is just like: “Whoa, I'm not in my normal state!” And pre-modern mystics asked: What is that state? Let's see if we can develop technology on how we are able to gain access to this state in all of our lives! How can we bring agency to this gaining of access to this transcendent state of mind. 

Why do you think that martial arts are a good way for transcendence?

The biggest obstacle to transcendence is fear. Fear triggers dichotomy, and dichotomy makes conflict innately present. In real life, you can't intellectually decide not to be in a conflict. You can't tell yourself, be brave, do not be afraid. Fear often just appears beyond all intellectual control and intervenes. When you are afraid, your fear always kicks you into conflict. The only way out is to unself. You need to undo that dichotomous experience of the world. This is what Aikido is supposed to do. In Senshin Aikido, we're developing these skills by focusing in on the human experience of fear.

When you learn to unself and reconcile fear, it is going to bring peace to your life and wisdom to your decision-making. It allows you to disseminate love into the world, not conflict, but communion. You are not being driven insane by a dichotomous experience of the world where you're constantly afraid in one way or another. That's the whole goal of Budo: To gain agency in accessing the fearless state of the unself.

How would you describe a warrior today? As I understood, it is quite a different role from a soldier, in your way of thinking.

The warrior to me is not a soldier. A soldier is someone who is allowed by the state to use its monopoly on violence.

The warrior for me, the Budoka, that's the Japanese for the Budo practitioner, is not the person who puts on a badge or a gun or puts on a uniform. A warrior is somebody who can reconcile fear. In this sense, the warrior doesn't have to be a soldier and doesn't have to engage in combat but also could.

I will give you an example. As a police officer, you receive so-called hot calls. These are very violent calls; people with a gun, domestic violence, etc. – calls where people are being murdered or seriously hurt by others. When you can’t reconcile fear, you will immediately see yourself, the good guy, coming to stop them, the bad guys. Before you know it, you're acting violently and participating in the conflict. But you will respond entirely differently in that situation if you're not being captured by fear. If you can unself, you don’t see the only single option, stop evil. But you're going to see all the other possible options you have, including the peaceful options: Where peace is needed, but everything at first is against peace, you will be able to bring that peace. To do this, you need the sanity and the order that can only come with unselfing. The pre-moderns knew this; the mystics did.

So, to me, we all need to become warriors today. In this sense, we all have to reconcile the fear that's in our lives, that's in our hearts and minds, that is functioning unconsciously and beyond our intellectual control. Then and only then do we emit love.

David M. Valadez (*1966) is Aikido instructor and a police officer in Santa Barbara, California. He studied East Asian religious traditions at the University of California. Since 1999, he has been running Aikido Dojo Senshin Center. He also publishes the senhinone YouTube channel and the Budo: Way of the Warrior Podcast. In 2023, he published a book called Budo Contemplations. He is also an author of articles on Aikido in Aikido Today Magazine, Aikido FAQ, Aikido Journal, and AikiWeb.com.