any person that has studyed the internal arts can tell you its something that needs to be experienced not explained
.
Ah yes... alas, this is eventually where all such assertions wind up: basically, in the `it just
is, you have to experience it, it's beyond explanation' drawer, right next to the `it doesn't work if you don't accept/believe/understand it' file. The fact is, (i) there is nothing remotely like even a shred of evidence under reasonably controlled conditions for the `chi-impact' phenomenon you're claiming exists; and (ii) there are stacks of studies of eyewitness behavior, subjective report reliability and other controlled investigations of the discrepancy between what people think is going on, what they think others are doing, and what they think
they're doing which make it clear that such self-reports are almost worthless.
Remember the whole Uri Geller scam from a generation ago? James Randi and other stage magicians replicated Geller's tricks, but far more spectacularly, using clever extensions of standard stage techniques, but the believers insisted that Geller had been doing something else, even though they couldn't say what it was, and even though Geller had—prior to his career as a born-again psychic—had a successful career in Israel as a...
stage magician! :lol:
People whose livelihoods depend on human gullibility are very adept at persuading us that we're experiencing things which require us to posit something Out There that defies rational explanation. And some of us are more than happy to cooperate with them. It's the bread-and-butter of con artists and purveyors of Things We Don't Understand, and people will go on believing it, regardless of the fact that no replicable demonstrations of these things under controlled conditions can be given. When Geller went on Johnny Carson to strut his stuff, he was a complete bust... because like Geller, Carson too had been a professional stage magician, and instituted a few simple precautions targeting the specific tricks that he was pretty sure, from his own knowledge of the game, that Geller was using. As Cruentus says, this stuff requires committed belief, or considerable general credulity, including the conviction that just because you can talk yourself into believing that you're experiencing something, you really are.
I think back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote an entire book arguing that fairies actually existed, that there were photographs of them that had been taken by two young girls, and who in an early filmed interview proclaimed that he knew that fairies, pixies and the like existed,
from his own experience. Of course, later photographic enhancements of the Cottingsly fairies, as they came to be called after the girls' home village, showed the fakery in brilliant detail: bits of cut-out drawing that had been attached to threads and wires. But Conan Doyle was absolutely convinced, to his dying day, that he had seen genuine photographs of fairies, and that the inability of the girls to reproduce photos of fairies when there were people present monitoring the proceedings against fraud was simply the result of the "wee folk" 's aversion to skeptics. Were he alive today and exposed to the right `martial art' circles, he'd have no problem convincing himself that he was experiencing `chi power', I'm sure!
).
