bkedelen

I am in no way saying the information should be provided scientifically. That would be both boring and pedantic. What I am saying is that it is challenging for an educated person to hear hard tk swallow dogma from someone they earnestly wish to believe. Being told that you ought to study eastern orthodox christianity or collect cosmic rays in order to get to the next level then takes on a kind of hopeful metaphorical status. A struggle ensues when a rational person tries to walk the delicate balance between swallowing such things whole (what got Aikido and CMA into its current state in the first place) and discarding the advice of someone with abilities worth learning.

That seems to me to be the topic we are discussing when we try to peek behind the curtain after we have been initiated into internal training practices. Such a peek will always seem impertinent to the system's leaders because it may reveal that a subset of their instruction is actually proselytization.