UESHIBA is a master who has comprehended the highest limit of the martial art.

A true samurai – a valiant soldier and a master of martial arts – all his life dreamed of abolishing wars and teaching humanity to live without violence.

He saw a bullet that would fly…

It was 1903. The Japanese Empire was preparing to fight and young Morihei Ueshiba was eager to join the army, but he was rejected: small in stature! The boy was stubborn: he went into the forest, into the mountains and hung on the branches of trees, tying a load to his feet as long as his hands could endure. To become stronger, he joined a fishing gang and pulled heavy nets from the sea, turned logs in the port dock. Perseverance was rewarded: Morihei was enlisted in the regiment.

Running unusually fast, he came first on the march, despite the satchels that he took from lagging comrades. Officers on horseback could not always keep up with him…

Even before the service, he hardened the bones of his skull with special exercises in order to succeed in sumo and jiu-jitsu wrestling. Fellow-haters who tried to somehow arrange a "dark" for him, then treated the knuckles of his fingers, broken on the skull of Morihei just the same granite fortress.

He got to the front as a corporal.

... The rifle fire was accurate, and Ueshiba's unit noticeably thinned after the next attack, but he himself, as in previous days, returned to the shelter intact.

– How is it that not a single bullet takes you? – fellow soldiers asked in amazement.

–And I see them," Morihei smiled back. – Rather, a beam of fire or a white beam flying in my direction. Where it is directed, there will be an enemy shot. Dodging him, I dodge the bullet, which will fly in a moment.

In his part, Ueshiba became a legend. He was also strong in bayonet combat, as he managed to practice kendo, Japanese sword fighting, on the "citizen". A short, thin young man possessed such strength that he juggled heavy kernels, broke bamboo sticks, knotted iron rods. During the days of calm at the front, he managed to study jiu-jitsu. His fellow soldiers did not call him anything other than "soldier's god".

Everyone saw him as an officer, and then as a general. But his father begged Morihei to return home – things were going very badly on the farm after the ruinous war.

The son who became a hero did not mind at all.He would later write in his memoirs: "I have always subconsciously felt that war as such does not solve problems. War is primarily death and destruction, which hardly anyone likes."

The Lord of Shirataka

In 1912, the Japanese government announced a project to settle the island of Hokkaido in the very north of the country. Morihei, like many war veterans dissatisfied with life, was eager to serve the motherland once again. He led a detachment of 54 families of future colonists.
Hokkaido welcomed visitors with winter storms, the harsh cold land did not promise generous harvests. The Japanese lived on almost one fish from reservoirs. A sudden fire destroyed the built village.

But, backed up by the frantic energy of Morihei, the colonists restored everything, cultivated virgin land and built farms. During the uprooting of the forest, Ueshiba felled up to five hundred trees a year, and made himself an axe three times heavier than usual. Short and thin, he has developed a truly fabulous strength. He uprooted stumps with his bare hands, broke thick branches on his back, measured strength with dray horses. There is a known case when the britzka of passing travelers moved into a ravine and Morikhei dragged her out of there along with the coachman, the riders and their belongings.

The colonists were often attacked by robbers – most often hungry workers who escaped from their masters. Ueshiba pitied them, but he was too impudent with kendo and jiu-jitsu techniques. And once he completely amazed his comrades. Lost in the mountains, until the snow came down, he lived in a cave with a whole family of Hokkaido bears, caught fish for them and himself in a mountain river and tamed the animals so that they then accompanied him to the village.

After that, the colonists gave Morihei the nickname Lord of Shirataka.

During this time, he studied daito-ryu, the legendary samurai wrestling, and yaga-ryu, a special fencing school. The highest degree of skill in them was considered the ability to cope with the enemy not by techniques, but by the ability to influence his consciousness. "Aerobatics" was the ability to unite with the rhythms of the universe. These higher levels of skill were called "Aiki", and Morihei dreamed of comprehending them.

The abilities of the Lord of Sirataka increased tenfold. Repeatedly, a double of himself appeared to him and fenced with him, without giving the slightest indulgence. When Morihei managed to beat off the sword of the double, he disappeared and did not appear again.

Satori

The Shinto movement, of which Morihei was a parishioner, taught that a person can achieve enlightenment through a combination of meditation, farming and martial arts, since there is an undoubted kinship between all these – both are designed to nurture and cherish life, protect and purify it. Having mastered daito-ryu and fencing, Ueshiba dreamed of creating his own martial art, based not only on deadly technique, but mainly on the unity of soul and body, capable of enlightening the mind.

In 1924, he and the monks went on a pilgrimage to Manchuria with the desire to establish a spiritual center for the worldwide unification of people of all races. The pilgrims were attacked by a detachment of the local Chinese ruler. Bullets whistled from all sides, but Morihei, as in war, dodged, seeing the clots of energy that preceded the bullet's flight. Amazed by his abilities, the Chinese left the monks alive…

Morihei felt for himself that the world is overflowing with violence and insoluble contradictions between friend and enemy, good and evil, oppressor and oppressed. People who seem to be intelligent beings use violence to suppress, break, destroy a person, and having achieved this goal, they are only looking for a new opponent. How to stop the wheel of violence? How to overcome the terrible contradictions that divide people? Where is the power that will destroy pain and suffering?

Some time after returning from captivity, Morihei had a quarrel with a Japanese naval officer, a master of swordsmanship. Ueshiba came to the fight unarmed and asked the enemy to attack without hesitation. He again saw flashes of light and rays that stretched to where the katana blade was supposed to hit, and dodged any blow a moment before it was struck.

In the end, the officer got tired, sheathed his sword and left, and Morihei was seized with an inexplicably blissful state. Streams of golden light poured from the sky, penetrated into it and illuminated it from the inside. To cool himself, he plunged into a pond with a waterfall. The jets of cold water added to the bliss a feeling of purity of mind and body, as if he had completely changed and was born again. It was satori – a divine illumination, a transition to a new level of consciousness.

"In the present Budo there are neither opponents nor enemies. The real Budo is the desire to move to the center of the universe, to connect with it..." That's what Ueshiba realized. He had comprehended Aiki, the ultimate limit of martial art.

He realized that the higher energy that gives satori can be materialized using his body as a tool. It can be developed by practicing circular movements of the body with a clearly fixed center. The energy of the body will begin to rotate with a huge internal potential, and if the opponent touches it, it will instantly turn into a centrifugal force that throws the opponent away (there were cases – 10 meters). Similar principles work in Chinese Taijiquan. Ueshiba called this movement sumikiri – invincible inner peace, and the art itself – aikibudo, the martial art of Aiki, or, later, aikido, the way of Aiki.

Invincible and clairvoyant

Omoto-kyo's followers swore by all the saints that after Morihei's enlightenment, they repeatedly saw an unusual glow emanating from the teacher's body, that he could overcome enormous distances in one leap, make predictions about the future, read the thoughts of students. Besides, there was no opponent for him that he would not defeat. He achieved this by supersensible vision of the partner's future actions in a duel.

The master spoke of the Second World War as the greatest madness of mankind. He said that the Japanese lost because they used dark ideas of racism, evil and violence. The path of war should be forever replaced by the path of love, and the true goal of Aikido is the harmonization of the world, the connection of people with heavenly energies. "I'm not teaching you martial arts in the literal sense. I teach you how to bring your opponent to peace."

On December 14, 1940, the messenger of the god Saruta-hiko, who leads people on the path of virtue, appeared to Ueshiba and announced that he was now Amenomurakumo–kuki-samuhara Ryuo, which stands for the totality of universal energy, time and space. Simply put, the master became a conductor of power capable, according to the beliefs of Shintoists, to eradicate all evil and restore harmony and tranquility in the world.

Psychic abilities served as a great help in the fight, but in everyday life they were often very much in the way. Morihei absolutely could not ride in electric trains, because the strong tension caused him unbearable headaches. He could not visit public baths and swimming pools, because through the water he felt the thoughts and character of the people who entered the water before him.

By the age of 85, it was already difficult for him to walk, he was suffering from stomach pains, but in the dojo he was transformed. The students were still bringing wooden bokken swords to strike, and Ueshiba was already laughing behind their backs. The students did not see the movement itself, they only felt the pressure of energy, like a whirlwind. When asked how he does it, the master replied: "It can't be done often, it takes years of life."

A way to heal the world

Aikido, in fact, is more than a fight. By doing it, a person expresses through himself the state of the universe. If the cosmic order is observed by an individual practitioner, skills, strength and health come to him by themselves. If the whole society starts living according to these laws, crime will disappear, wars and conflicts will stop. People will become one family.