If I may and ever so humbly, I'd like to offer the above as, hopefully a trully un-intentional insult.

It's an aikido forum, and the chance exists that at least one of thousands of users here might find the above insulting.

The funny thing to me here is that I enjoy all of these threads on what you and people like Dan Harden, Robert John are training in. I have an interest in knowing what my body is doing (I'm one of those "myriads of people who train in pure aikido"), and what it could be doing (like "someone who trained in internal training")

I also enjoy Erick's postings, they're excellent grist for the mill that is my brain. I like to think of myself as a deep reader, but even I sometimes have to pull my chair back from the machine after getting through a particular heady vintage of Mead. That's a joke.
The point is that I'm a word nerd, I'm an engineer. I started aikido training with a group of physicists, nano-material scientists, gurus of radar and RF communications.
They all saw their training from the context of their lives. We all base our understanding and process of learning out of our past experiences.

We (everyone) can't walk the gaussian surface of, say, a magnetic field, but we can understand it as a concept, and work with it at a distance, and achieve results verifiable through other more concrete means. This reasoning ability lets us(everyone) talk when it's impossible to walk. It's impossible for me to walk with you, you're in Colorado, I can't physically experience what you're doing, so I have to ask stupid, probably under-informed questions that are based in my own experiences.

When it comes to discussing something like the development internal skills, most aikidoka, Erick, myself, among so many others can only talk about it, and hope to first have some understanding of how, why, and to what degree it differs from our aikido experience.

Now it makes perfect sense to be able to demand that someone walk the walk if or before they talk the talk. But, the internet being what it is, all talk, we must either not bring it up, or deal with it until we can all go for a walk together.

I've got to say I've not had the fire in my gut to sustain me through every (or perhaps even one) thread that these internal training topics have come up in, because it seems that in every one
of them a wick gets lit and sparks fly, drowning out the signal.

The signal. Actual information instead of Bark - Hiss! There is at least something that can be conveyed here, be it physical metaphor, an agreement of word convention, or at least something like "well, no, I disagree, let's meet on the mat in a month and see how this works in body-language, since words aren't cutting it"

Even these possibilities often seem to be set aside in favor of "calling someone out" as if one could simply will another into admitting they're the worst kind of loser in the history of the internet.

Ah, oh well. May I ask the next time there may be a workshop on internal training in the maryland/delaware/phili south jersey region?