Panda was claiming that such claims are due to trickery by the martial arts schools' teachers. That is was all nothing but fakery.
There is certainly a lot of that going around.
While, yes, some fakers have been known to pose as martial arts instructors, that is not the case with Aikido.
Spoken by someone who studied Aikido. If you had studied Ninpo Taijutsu I'm sure you'd have said that about that martial art. There is just as much fakery in Aikido as with any other martial art. Aikido does not have some intrinsic ability to avoid it.
. If the instructor were employing fakery, then only the instructor or others complicit in that fakery could ever be able to perform the tasks that they were faking.
Yes, exactly. A bit like with faith healing. They don't have to know they are being complicit in order to be complicit. The power of suggestion can do a lot.
Indeed, from the very beginning of their training, students were being taught to do the exact same things that their instructors ("sensei", whose Kanji characters mean "previous life", meaning that your teachers had gone through what you are going through now) are able to do.
And I'm not disputing that the students were doing the same things as the instructors. I'm just saying that those things don't require Ki. And indeed some of those things only work if everybody is 'in on it' in some fashion. The Ki punch where no contact is made but the person falls over springs to mind. I don't know if your Aikido instructor ever laid claim to that kind of ability, of course.
Rolling, managing pain and all that stuff is not evidence of Ki. They are all physically explainable feats. So its either fakery, or its mundane.
And each of my instances of being able to use my Ki training were intended to demonstrate that what I had learned was not mere deceptive trickery as Panda falsely misrepresented it to be, but rather that it was something that the students were taught and which works! And hence cannot at all be the product of the instructors' "trickery" as Panda would falsely have it to be.
What works works, but that doesn't mean that Ki is making it work.
I agreed with you that you can roll to avoid injury, that you can withstand pain, I'd even believe you if you said you could lower your heartrate and stuff. All of this stuff is perfectly normal techniques that do not require that one 'extends ki' or anything of the sort.
Faith healers can be sincere, and they can teach their techniques to others who learn with utmost sincerity. It does not mean they are using the power of the Lord to heal in Jesus' name. They may argue that they aren't faking it and be technically speaking the truth. But they aren't doing anything that requires magic hands, or miraculous deities.
Whether there is indeed such a thing as "Ki" or "Qi" (depending on whether your orientation is Japanese or Chinese) is an entirely separate issue.
I don't think it's a separate issue at all, not in this thread. And not when you make the claim that Ki 'surrounds us and penetrates us. Flows through us. And with a bit of training, we can harness it and redirect it, giving us power that we cannot get from muscles alone'
I'm saying that the power comes from muscles alone, and that any influence of Ki is in your head.
As I have already allowed freely, the language of Ki is what we were taught and is the way in which we visualize what we are doing; that it could be described differently is recognized and is immaterial to my response to Panda.
As I postulated, 'Ki is just a psychological construct.' It is not immaterial that it could be described differently than you did, not if you described it wrong. If you want to concede that Ki isn't a something that you can 'harvest', that 'flows through' us and that it is instead just a way of thinking about moving - then we probably don't disagree on that.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.