Glossary of Quantum Aikido Concepts

Aiki is the unifying principle Aikido is named for. Quoting Aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei) directly, Richard Moon teaches that Aiki "is not a technique to fight with or defeat the enemy" — it is the way to reconcile the world and make human beings one family, incompatible with treating anyone as an enemy.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026, quoting O Sensei. See also Power With / Power To.

Takemusu Aiki names technique that is created spontaneously in the moment rather than learned and repeated from fixed forms (kata). Richard Moon renders it "the martial art of divine creation," combining "take" (any functional skill, martial or otherwise) with "musu" (the realm of the divine) — creativity manifesting through a person, not planned in advance.

Source: Adventures in Aiki-land, Life in 3 Easy Lessons, and Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026.

Aiki-Dialogue is Richard Moon and Chris Thorsen's combined discipline of Aikido (physical practice) and Dialogue (verbal practice), used to reach a state of unified mind-body-spirit awareness. As the book puts it: "physical Dialogue is Aikido, and Dialogue is verbal Aikido" — two paths up the same mountain.

Source: The Endless River.

Richard Moon's condensed formula for practicing Aikido, on or off the mat, in three steps meant to happen at once rather than in sequence: feel where you are (presence), form a harmonious relationship with what's happening (harmony), and share who you are (creativity). Business-facing versions of the same three steps appear as "center, blend, lead."

Source: Adventures in Aiki-land, Life in 3 Easy Lessons, and The Business of Listening.

"Getting off the line" is an Aikido technique turned life principle: rather than standing in the direct path of an attack — physical or verbal — to block it, a person steps beside it, facing the same direction as the other person to understand their intent. Applied to conversation, it means not taking hostility personally, freeing energy for a creative response instead of a defensive one.

Source: Life in 3 Easy Lessons and The Business of Listening.

A person's "bestowed mission" is the unique purpose or contribution they are called to bring into the world — a phrase Richard Moon draws from Aikido founder O Sensei and uses to frame moments of crisis or calling as opportunities to act from deeper purpose rather than fear.

Source: Healing With Ki, Life in 3 Easy Lessons, and Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes.

Kokyu, literally "breath" or "breath power," describes the state in which spirit interpenetrates the physical, mental, and emotional dimensions of a person or group so they cohere into wholeness — the harmony felt between close friends, or between singers whose voices blend.

Source: Life in 3 Easy Lessons.

A "breath throw" that Richard Moon holds up as the ideal every Aikido technique should aspire to: a throw with no muscular force at all, arising purely from blending with and leading a partner's energy to a natural resolution.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2026.

Ukemi is commonly translated "falling," but Richard Moon treats it as a life skill: finding a positive, adaptive response precisely when you are not the one in power. He argues good ukemi is how a practitioner actually develops the skill of nage — the person who resolves an attack.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026. See also Uke and Nage.

Uke is the person receiving an attack or energy; Nage is the person who resolves it, traditionally by throwing. Richard Moon reframes the pairing as a transformation rather than fixed roles: "Uke is how one gets to be nage" — practicing receiving is the process by which a person becomes capable of resolving.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2026.

A three-stage Japanese model of mastery: in Shu, a student repeats inherited forms faithfully; in Ha, they begin to break and innovate on those forms; in Ri, they depart from form altogether and act creatively from their own understanding. Richard Moon argues O Sensei taught from Ri, while most students never train past Shu or Ha.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025.

Randori is true free-form Aikido training — free attack met with free response — as distinct from Jiyu Waza (a free response to one known attack) or fixed, cooperative kata. Richard Moon argues that without training in randori, practice never develops the ability to sense and respond to a genuinely unknown attack.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025.

Jiyu Waza is free-response technique: responding to one specific, known attack without a pre-set, memorized form. Richard Moon distinguishes it from full Randori (free attack and free response together) and treats it as the practice ground where spontaneous, unrehearsed creativity can begin to appear.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025.

Ma-ai is the trained sense of proper spacing from a training partner or attacker — practiced until it becomes an automatic warning system, comparable to a wild animal's proximity sense, that fires when someone closes inside a threatening range.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2026.

Ki is the Japanese term (cognate with Chinese "chi" and Sanskrit "prana") for universal life energy or untapped potential — the second syllable of "Ai-ki-do." Richard Moon glosses it plainly: like electricity, it is a neutral, undifferentiated force that becomes whatever it is directed toward — plug it into a blender or a lightbulb. Framed as "free energy," it is the portion of a person's available energy not bound up in muscular tension or habitual thought, and the more of it available, the greater the capacity for adaptability and creativity.

Source: The Thalamic Discourses, Life in 3 Easy Lessons, and Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes. See also Kokyu.

A phrase Richard Moon attributes to O Sensei describing how two seemingly opposed forces — masculine and feminine, individual and universal, wave and particle — unite into a single force rather than remaining two separate things added together. Moon connects it to O Sensei's answer when asked why his Aikido looked different from his own students': "because I understand yin and Yang and you don't."

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026.

Richard Moon's reframing of the physics term "wave-particle duality": "it's not a wave particle duality, it's a wave particle unity." Rather than two separate, competing descriptions of reality, he argues Aikido trains the direct experience that opposites — self and universe, form and flow, yin and yang — resolve into one on the mat and in life.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026.

Ame no Uki Hashi, a phrase from O Sensei that Richard Moon treats as the central and least understood concept in Aikido: a state of connection in which opposing forces — the "ki of fire and water," mind and body — are united rather than merely balanced. "If you do not stand on the floating bridge of heaven, Aiki will not come forth." He argues most teachers who carried Aikido abroad never located this state and taught only its outward forms.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025, quoting O Sensei.

Richard Moon's model for how action arises: the manifest (physical) realm, where movement is visible, is produced by the hidden (energetic/neural) realm, which is itself set in motion by intent originating in the divine (creative) realm. He argues most Aikido training only addresses the manifest realm, leaving the other two untrained.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025–2026.

A discontinuous, order-of-magnitude leap in a person's or a system's state of being — not gradual improvement, but a jump to an entirely new scale, the way a "ten" on one scale becomes "one" on a new, larger one. Applied to social or economic change, Richard Moon compares it to dry tinder: a system that has resisted change for a long time can transform all at once when a small trigger meets the right conditions.

Source: Ten to the Tenth and Accounting For Your Life.

The state in which the body's instinctive reactions, the mind's thinking, and the emotions' feeling all operate together in harmony rather than competing for dominance — both a neurological metaphor for whole-brain integration and a spiritual one for harmony with "the movement of the universe." Richard Moon treats reaching it as the practical goal of Aikido practice, and extends the same logic to economics: a mature accounting system "holds both [self-interest and cooperation] as forces in a unified field," rather than treating them as opposites.

Source: The Thalamic Discourses and Accounting For Your Life.

A metaphor for why creativity costs more energy than habit: connecting two brain pathways that already have an established connection takes very little charge, while forging a brand-new connection requires a far larger buildup of free energy (Ki). Richard Moon uses it to explain why people default to familiar patterns under pressure — they lack the free energy to "jump the spark" to something new.

Source: The Thalamic Discourses.

Kami translates as divine spirit. Richard Moon's phrase for the subtle, easily-missed intuitive impressions that become perceptible when a person is quiet, present, and attentive enough — likened to a faint radio signal drowned out by louder, reactive thinking unless one deliberately listens for it. He treats it as the source of O Sensei's spontaneous, unrehearsed technique, whether or not one takes its divine origin literally.

Source: The Thalamic Discourses, Life in 3 Easy Lessons, and The Endless River.

A term coined by physicist David Bohm, adopted by Richard Moon and Chris Thorsen, describing what happens in a state of dialogue or harmony when "what is relevant elevates into consciousness" — new, coherent meaning arising spontaneously rather than being forced or reasoned out.

Source: The Endless River.

Richard Moon contrasts a "Newtonian mentality," which looks for discrete levers of cause and effect to pull, with a "quantum mentality," which asks how to influence the whole field at once — his model for economics shifting, like physics, from seeing separate actions to seeing interdependent relationships.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

Richard Moon's term for the compound, self-reinforcing momentum of collective thought, feeling, and monetary exchange that drives an economy — "a unified field, a dynamic field of energy, not a thing," comparable to a hurricane gathering strength. It can spin toward trust and shared wealth, or toward fear, greed, and collapse; he frames conscious intent as the means to direct it rather than being its victim.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

An awareness practice that trains a person to notice, locate on a 1-to-10 scale, and intentionally shift their state of being toward a more effective place. Once a practitioner reaches ten, that level becomes "one" on a new, exponentially larger scale, and the process repeats — "to the tenth" power.

Source: Ten to the Tenth.

Richard Moon's term for the combined package of a person's emotions, thoughts, and actions at a given moment — the underlying condition that determines how effectively someone can think, feel, and act. He argues it is mutable and can be consciously chosen rather than passively suffered.

Source: Ten to the Tenth.

The practice of tuning into the body's own feeling-based communication as a source of self-knowledge, rather than relying only on intellectual analysis. Richard Moon attributes the term to psychologist Eugene Gendlin and uses it as the entry point for locating one's state of being.

Source: Ten to the Tenth.

Also called the Semantic Pause: a deliberate pause taken before accepting one's first, instinctive interpretation of an event, giving the brain's feeling and thinking centers time to weigh in alongside the fast, reactive thalamus. Richard Moon credits linguist Alfred Korzybski with the underlying idea and applies it to Aikido and dialogue to reduce reactive misunderstanding — a close cousin of this site's own Quantum Pause teaching.

Source: The Thalamic Discourses.

The capacity to see oneself participating in a larger context while acting — noticing one's own reactive or defensive behavior in real time, rather than only after the fact, and adjusting accordingly. Richard Moon compares it to a pilot's instrument panel, letting a person correct course instead of being carried away by unconscious reaction.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening and The Endless River.

The practice of aligning mind, body, and spirit into present-moment awareness — the first step of the Three Easy Lessons and the prerequisite for centering and effective response under pressure. Richard Moon pairs it with a physical exercise (rocking to find bodily center), quoting Aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba: "I get off center as frequently as you do. I simply recognize it sooner and get back faster."

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening and Life in 3 Easy Lessons.

Relaxing so that weight and attention connect down through the body into the earth — a felt recognition of being part of a larger, supporting system rather than an isolated self. Richard Moon pairs it with centering as a first step toward presence, and with the "sink" half of the "sink-open" practice of dropping down while staying receptive.

Source: Life in 3 Easy Lessons and The Endless River.

Being fully present in the current moment in a way that lets a person sense the likely unfolding of near-future events — Richard Moon glosses it as "pre-sensing the unfolding of experience," paired with a shift from an anxious, scattered mental state to a calmer, more intuitive one.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

A listening practice of releasing fixed opinions, tension, and mental "fullness" so new information can be received — illustrated by the Zen teacup story: "if you wish to learn you must first empty your cup." Richard Moon teaches specific breathing and visualization exercises for emptying reactivity from the body before or during a conversation.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

A two-mode distinction: "Looking" or "going out" is effortful, fragmenting attention that scans for pieces of information, like a flashlight; "Receiving" or "centering" is relaxed, holistic attention that lets meaning assemble on its own, like a candle filling a room. Richard Moon argues receiving produces faster, more accurate understanding than effortful analysis.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

Shorthand for the trained alternative to the body's automatic threat responses: rather than fighting, freezing, or fleeing when confronted, Aikido practice cultivates flowing with the incoming force.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2025.

Richard Moon's core teaching term for a quality of attention that goes far beyond hearing words — consciously receiving content, tone, body language, and one's own and another's reactivity as part of a single field of meaning. "Listening does not just happen. Reactivity just happens. Listening is an act of intent." Moon holds it as the foundation of learning, creativity, conflict transformation, and the creation of wealth, and as his English translation of the Japanese concept of Zanshin.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening, The Business of Listening, The Endless River, and Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes.

A Japanese Aikido term Richard Moon translates as "ongoing attentiveness, learning without end" — sustained, never-finished attention to what is happening. He named his own school Zanshin Ryu, then adopted Extraordinary Listening as a more accessible English rendering of the same idea.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening, The Business of Listening, and The Endless River.

Richard Moon's stated central principle: listening does not happen automatically the way reactivity does — it must be consciously chosen. Not listening is also an act of intent, usually unconscious; choosing to listen is a discipline that transforms reactivity into usable intelligence.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

The automatic, pre-conscious mind-body response — neurological, chemical, muscular, and emotional — that every stimulus triggers, rooted in survival instinct. Richard Moon treats reactivity as inevitable and not itself a problem: the problem is unconsciously "listening through" it, letting it distort communication, rather than "listening to" it as information, which de-escalates defensiveness.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening and The Business of Listening.

Richard Moon's taxonomy of the basic reasons people talk to each other: conversations for action, learning, creativity, connection, acknowledgement, validation, and distraction. A single conversation can serve several of these at once, and it "completes" only once the relevant need is satisfied.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

A technique, drawing on Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, for translating statements of blame or judgment into statements of unmet need — so the underlying interest becomes visible and addressable rather than triggering defensiveness. Richard Moon presents it as one of the simplest and most powerful tools in his listening work.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

Richard Moon's adaptation of the U.S. military's "defense condition" alert levels into a personal awareness tool — a 1-to-5 scale, from calm, open dialogue down to full escalation, for noticing and naming one's own rising defensiveness in a conversation so it can be consciously lowered.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening and The Business of Listening.

One of three founding guidelines for Dialogue, drawn from Bill Isaacs of the MIT Dialogue Project: holding one's assumptions up for open inspection rather than defending them, so hidden fixed positions become visible and available for inquiry. "Suspension" here doesn't mean stopping — it means hanging an assumption out where it can be examined.

Source: The Endless River.

The second of Bill Isaacs' Dialogue guidelines: treating participants as colleagues in a shared learning process rather than opponents in a debate, lowering defensive friction the way a superconductor reduces electrical resistance — letting collective intelligence flow into inquiry instead of into being right.

Source: The Endless River.

Richard Moon's metaphor for two basic human needs served by being listened to: the "tribal roster" (being counted — one's welfare considered, one's presence recognized as part of the group) and the "tribal council" (having a voice — one's input actually heard in group decisions). Being denied either, he argues, drives frustration, apathy, and in extreme cases violence.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening.

"What Is Really Going On" — the practice of sensing beneath a surface story to what's actually happening: the physical, emotional, cognitive, energetic, and systemic layers driving a situation simultaneously. It's active inquiry, not passive observation — starting with your own reactivity before turning to another person's.

Source: this site's own WIGO: What Is Really Going On.

The interval between stimulus and response — the space in which freedom and choice live. Rather than reacting automatically to what's said or done, the Quantum Pause is the deliberate gap that lets a person respond from center instead.

Source: this site's own The Quantum Pause. Closely related to the book-sourced Thalamic Pause.

Richard Moon's proposed alternative to conventional ("ordinary") economic accounting — a way of calculating value that includes whole-system costs, human fulfillment, trust, respect, and appreciation, not just dollars and short-term profit. He calls today's system "a calculator with not enough keys," and frames Extraordinary Accounting as the tool for replacing Business as War with Business as Love.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

An economic mindset in which competitors are treated as honored partners striving together for mutual excellence, and wealth is built by increasing others' benefit — the opposite of "Business as War," where an accounting system that measures only dollars and market share treats competitors as enemies to be defeated at any cost.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

Richard Moon's central metaphor for society's present value system: "a calculator with not enough keys," able to register dollars and profit but with no keys for sustainability, fulfillment, respect, trust, or long-term cost — so every value calculation it produces is an incomplete approximation.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

A metaphor for the trading environment of business: the container of trust, law, and stability within which raw contribution is purified into usable wealth, the way a metallurgical crucible purifies ore into gold. Richard Moon calls the specific failures that let people extract wealth without contributing — greed, exploitable loopholes, isolation — "cracks in the crucible," through which trust and wealth leak out together.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

The shared pool of wealth created specifically because people agree to share space and work together — distinct from wealth any one individual could create alone. Richard Moon illustrates it with four workers building five houses instead of four: the "extra house" is the commonwealth generated by cooperation.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

Richard Moon's name for a shift beyond the information age: since information is now overwhelmingly abundant, the decisive skill is no longer accessing data but discerning what data is actually valuable — cultivating the quality of attention that decides what gets noticed and what gets discarded.

Source: The Power of Extraordinary Listening and Accounting For Your Life.

Richard Moon's term for the many non-monetary things people actually exchange value through — services, treatment, inclusion, kindness, respect, cooperation, understanding, generosity — which he argues a functioning accounting system must recognize alongside money. "Trust is a medium of currency," and, he argues, probably the most significant one in any system of commerce.

Source: Accounting For Your Life.

A leadership heuristic, credited to Jim Dixon, for deciding when to let a team member make their own call versus stepping in: an "above the waterline" decision could genuinely sink the larger enterprise if it fails and may warrant intervention, while a "below the waterline" mistake is recoverable and is better left to the person making it, so they build ownership.

Source: The Business of Listening.

Drawing on the Latin root of "power" (posse, to be able), Richard Moon distinguishes Aikido's effect of increasing one's own capability and connection — "power with" others, "power to" act — from the domination-based "power over" others that he associates with conquest and destructive conflict.

Source: Richard Moon's Aiki Dialogues study notes, 2026.