The imagination is often used to point the inexperienced, that is to say, “the person who has had not experientially felt the given psycho-physical state," toward what is being sought through training. Man has used this discursive technology for perhaps nearly all of his/her existence. It is the same technology, poetics, that he uses to share the experience of the mountain top or the press of her lover’s lips upon her own. In all cases, though there is a type of shared experience made possible through empathy, as it has been said, the map remains not the territory. For this reason, the ancients used poetics in conjunction with physical practices whereby any and all empathetic deviation was accounted for and corrected. Today, Modern Aikidoka misunderstand the technology of poetics, and they have robbed themselves of those practices the ancients used to correct for empathetic deviation. As a result, in some sort of bizarre irony, Modern Aikidoka have afforded their imagination some sort of superstitious talismanic power, renaming it, “intention,” and coming to consider it infallible; that is to say, incapable of deviation. Today, you can merely think extension, or harmony, or connection, or relaxation, and these things, as if by magic, are considered to be present in one’s technique. In truth, the ancient problem of empathetic deviation still exists, making extension, tension; harmony, clashing; connection, collusion, and relaxation, the absence of organizational integrity.
