The force will protect you.
[Luke:] I can’t believe it.
[Yoda:] That is why you fail.
Erm. What I mean to say, is all you have to do is believe.
hat tip Pharyngula.
From Neurotopia:
Woo also permeates the martial arts. If one's chi is properly aligned, supposedly the practitioner can make their body do amazing things such as selectively exploding an opponent's internal organs when struck, or sometimes inducing a time-delayed killing sickness. My old kung fu instructor even tried to demonstrate that chi existed by having us hold our hands right up next to a mirror after a workout, supposedly when our chi is flowing maximally. He claimed you could see the visible effects of chi which manifested as a mist traveling up the mirror away from our hands. He was right: the mirror did fog over. I imagine it had more to do with the mirror being at a significantly lower temperature than our hands, which were sweaty and radiating heat, which caused condensation to appear on the mirror and radiate upward away from our hands with our body heat. Oh well.
2 comments:
Monty sez:
normally my dojo's master is pretty good about this sort of stuff, but very seldom he brings up this sort of woo to the class. Once we were talking abou qi and reiki and stuff and I asked if this was basically a placebo and he sorta danced around the question for a minute or so.
I did Tai Chi for a few years when I was younger. It's a pretty fun exercise (and low impact). But many of the folks who practice Tai Chi have some pretty crazy belief systems...
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