Quote:
Marc Abrams wrote:
Henry:
People can focus as intensely on stupid training as they can on useful training. I think that it is so sad that people can take some meaningful construct (such as "ki") and find a way to muck it up so bad, that reasonable people will look at a video clip like that and dismiss the construct outright. It is kind of like washing a hand-blown, crystal wine glass with a hammer and as a result of that experience, believe that hammers are useless....
Regards,
Marc Abrams
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Marc, my disbelief in
ki isn't because of the wackjob outliers. I bring them up in the post as one of four reasons why I don't mess with
ki, but only one of four. The fact that something is often misused is not reason enough, in and of itself, to dismiss it outright. I question the usefulness of
ki because I've never seen a need for it. My instructors who use
ki as an explanation are no better than those who don't, and I've never seen anything in the dojo that can't be explained without
ki. So what do I need
ki for?
Let me revise your analogy. Say you've seen the hammer misused with the wine glass, and you've seen the claw end of the hammer used for jobs a crowbar could do just as well or better, but you've never seen any evidence that nails really exist. What usefulness would you find in that hammer then?