lbb

Well, Joep, you are the one who said, "If it is fundamental to physical waza then you have no choice but to dismiss what a lot of other folks are doing." Is that true if you've never seen them practice?

FWIW, I don't know or care if the "skill A", or any other skill, is fundamental to aikido. I came to aikido as a beginner, without the experience and knowledge to judge what is and isn't "fundamental". I practice what I practice because it's worthwhile for me to practice it, for my own reasons and not to meet some arbitrary "standard" that may not even exist. I think of aikido today like any practice that's been passed on for decades -- as being like the result of a game of telephone, where one person whispers something to another, who passes it on to a third, and so on around the circle...and what comes out the end has great potential to be very different from what originated. That being the case, I take modern-day claims about what aikido is and isn't with a large grain of salt. I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we thought that there was a "pure" aikido today (and then there's the additional question of whether that's even a desirable goal...but I digress).

So you see, with regard to the question of internal skills, what they are, and what their proper place is in aikido, I'm not an atheist...but I'm very much an agnostic. I don't know, and I know that I don't know. That bothers some people, but I really can't be held responsible for that.