View Single Post
Old 07-08-2012, 07:01 AM   #140
OwlMatt
 
OwlMatt's Avatar
Dojo: Milwaukee Aikikai
Location: Wisconsin
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 401
United_States
Offline
Re: Ki to the Highway

Quote:
Marc Abrams wrote: View Post
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
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?

  Reply With Quote