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Lee Salzman wrote:
The danger might really be that anyone's characterization of "internal strength" is actually different from anyone else's, and that in our rush to be good social animals and conform to a consistent definition, we squash our understandings to fit with someone else's conception rather than embracing ambiguity and diversity in understanding and application. I would see reducing things down to a single terminology as an overall negative in terms of making us frightened of sharing, rather than free to share things that might not fit into a hivemind mentality. It may make us believe we already know things we don't by virtue of using the same term to describe very different nuances and so decrease the drive to learn new things.
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Well, and I've said this before, there's already a very consistent terminology about these skills. What's happened in the West is that there's still some idea that someone can make up their own particular take on these skills and legitimately apply the terminology to that take. I disagree with the approach in the same way that I disagree that someone can "do their own thang" and legitimately call it "Aikido" or "Taijiquan" or "Yiquan", or whatever, because the implication then becomes that the terms have no fixed meaning and worst of all, there is no incorrect way to do things. Of course there's an incorrect way to do things. Look how much time Ueshiba spent parroting the classical literature, in part as an indicator that he understood the correct way to do things (notice his use of the 4 Poles or Eight Gates, as an example).
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But should it be difficult? Shouldn't it feel so ridiculously and obviously better to apply our body in a certain way that we simply want to give up our old habitual patterns, because once having tasted another way, the old patterns just feel silly? The nuance in my question there is of actually feeling the better way subjectively, rather than just trying to mechanically mimic some pattern of movements or exercises, thus pushing the difficulty of the issue onto getting that feeling... Or is it not that way?
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I don't know for sure about "feeling" as a criterion for the simple reason that most people are neophytes and can't really differentiate between, for example, a large dollop of power done one way to them and a large dollop of power done a very different way to them. Right? But that being said, yes there should be demonstrable and 'feelable" results, *plus* there should be a statable logic that makes sense in terms of physics/physiology. If it was just opinions, it would be a waste of time. Discussion, as David and Mark and a few others are doing is a good thing. I'd encourage it, personally.
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I know I've reached a point where a lot of things have been thrust in front of me, and once having felt them, there was simply no going back, ever. They changed how I open doors, how I lift every day objects, how I walk or stand even, not even getting into what their martial applications were... And these ideas probably were not very deep on the rabbit hole scale you are implying.
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It sounds like you are talking about basic jin things. Good. Keep practicing. Do you see the logic of the fact that it takes a long time to acquire even that skill to the point where it is automatic and that if you jumped too quickly into applications, competition, etc., you really wouldn't have had sufficient time to imbue those skills so you'd be in effect practicing two different forms of movement? Ueshiba was doing the traditional thing by forbidding too-early competition, as you should easily see.
FWIW
Mike Sigman