Mary, I will try: What I mean is that it seems evident to me that Morihei Ueshiba was strongly, if not decisively, motivated by religious motives, occasionally culminating in important mystic (for lack of a better word) experiences - one with the universe and the like. At least in his later years, they seem to have been his primary motivation, and they definitely seem to have been a major turning point and legitimation in his own narrative about his art.

Now I often find that people who are exclusively interested in the martial in the first place will argue that that motivation of his, and the corresponding practices, are somewhat not relevant for his fighting skills and his art.

Almost regardless of what he himself said about it (there are a couple of contradictory standard quotes that can be inserted here), I think it is incorrect, in the attempt to reconstruct the product of the life of the man, to just parcel out the things one likes and is interested in (often: his fighting skills), and leave out the ones that one is less comfortable with (e.g. his mysticism). As if a person's life could be split up like that.