The connection with real experience, with acceptance of genuine emotions and desires, is invalidated by those ideas which have dominated Western culture right from the beginning. The art of human movement. Ed. by Seymour Kleinman. The essence of aikido lies in its philosophy of movement and philosophy of life. To learn aikido is to learn to move in correct response and balance to the physical laws of nature.
Techniques work because the physical laws of moving bodies and motion work.
Aikido's principles of movement are in agreement with the laws of nature. Ed. by Seymour Kleinman. That is, of course, important, but the real goal of aikido practice is to learn how to learn. The real goal, we might say, in learning to not only inhabit ourself, it is to form ourself in that interactive space between mind and world, thought and action, self and other, self and self. It is not that there is no being behind the self, but, paradoxically, that being comes into existence by the very process of the self's engagement of the world.