...having considered your article, another potential line of investigation occurs to me. Consider; a lot of the martial arts practitioners, the ones talking about ki flow, are still managing to achieve good physical posture, even if they’re talking about it in terms of ki. So, consider how this began; presumably, (I’m doing a lot of guessing here) the earliest practitioners of akido didn’t really think in terms of leverage and forces and anatomy, they thought in terms of ki. And they noticed what worked and what didn’t.
Not why it did or didn’t work—merely what did or didn’t work.
Now, consider the idea of finding out how not to fall when pushed. It seems to me that the easiest way to learn what to do to accomplish this without learning why it works is simply to try a lot of things and see what sticks. For example, getting a friend to try to push you over several times, while you try not to fall; sooner or later, you’ll start figuring out what works.
In an analogous manner, getting mentally pushed a lot of times may help you to find a better way to hold on to your mental stability. Joining a local debate club might help for this; or just find a friend, pick an issue with some ambiguity to it, and then (this is important) toss a coin to decide which side of the issue each of you will argue (this way you’ll often have to defend a position you do not hold); perhaps take a few days to do some research; and then each try to persuade each other of the correctness of the side you randomly elected to defend.
Hmmm. You may have a point.
...having considered your article, another potential line of investigation occurs to me. Consider; a lot of the martial arts practitioners, the ones talking about ki flow, are still managing to achieve good physical posture, even if they’re talking about it in terms of ki. So, consider how this began; presumably, (I’m doing a lot of guessing here) the earliest practitioners of akido didn’t really think in terms of leverage and forces and anatomy, they thought in terms of ki. And they noticed what worked and what didn’t.
Not why it did or didn’t work—merely what did or didn’t work.
Now, consider the idea of finding out how not to fall when pushed. It seems to me that the easiest way to learn what to do to accomplish this without learning why it works is simply to try a lot of things and see what sticks. For example, getting a friend to try to push you over several times, while you try not to fall; sooner or later, you’ll start figuring out what works.
In an analogous manner, getting mentally pushed a lot of times may help you to find a better way to hold on to your mental stability. Joining a local debate club might help for this; or just find a friend, pick an issue with some ambiguity to it, and then (this is important) toss a coin to decide which side of the issue each of you will argue (this way you’ll often have to defend a position you do not hold); perhaps take a few days to do some research; and then each try to persuade each other of the correctness of the side you randomly elected to defend.