Thread: What is "IT"?
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Old 09-30-2009, 01:41 PM   #43
David Orange
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Location: Birmingham, AL
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Re: What is "IT"?

Quote:
Matthew Gano wrote: View Post
I see (Erick Mead) as applying certain physical principles to his understanding of I.S. and then getting criticized.
Well, that's because the topic is not just wide open. The discussion concerns a very specific set of skills and the internal work that develops and allows those skills to work. Though Erick has commented extensively on many of these threads, he's said very little that compels me to think that he understands the topic at all. It's a lot like another poster recently trying to completely redefine "internal strength" to "true internal strength". Which is a lot like that guy always posting videos about "real aikido" which are just very roughly done normal aikido.

The difference between aikido and aikijujutsu is not just being more brutal and in my opinion the only difference between aikido and "real aikido" is that real aikido does contain "internal strength". And I haven't seen any evidence of that in the "real aikido" videos.

So it's the same with Erick's comments as with Buck's. They don't relate at all to the experience of the people who have trained with the top exponents of Internal Strength training and moreover give the feeling that the elaborate wording of his posts are an attempt to obscure their relative lack of meaning.

Quote:
Matthew Gano wrote: View Post
Maybe another way to put it is that it seems some folks are more interested in "debunking" Erick's notion that he understands something about I.S. than in the issue of I.S. itself.
Well, how many times can one say "That's not what we're talking about"? It's true the IS and IT threads need a lot more explication of how IS works and how IT is trained, but maybe we could get more of that if we had less unrelated commentary which draws flies who want to cling to that stuff and claim that they, too, have "IT".

I'm sure Erick is well intentioned, but after all these years of discussion, I'm not aware that he has ever made any contact with anyone widely recognized to have internal strength skills. Well, I only met Akuzawa and Dan Harden this year, myself, but I did it because I had read closely what they were saying and I recognized that I was "not" doing what they were talking about.

If Erick really believes he is doing the same things, I think he should get out there and match up with Dan or Ark and put all the speculation behind him.

Best to you.

David

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu

"Eternity forever!"

www.esotericorange.com
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