Why some people play with sharp knives...

By talking to a couple of people who have practiced Krav Maga for quite a while I heard of an interesting trend: at some point people tend to start practicing with sharp, real knives. I talked about this with other people and most of them held the view that it is incredibly stupid to do something like that as the probability of something bad happening in the form of an unintentional accident increases dramatically. However, reading a paper by Chet Richards had an interesting quote from Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, which actually sheds some light on this:

Most warriors only perform tricks … In order to understand life and death, you must actually be in a situation where the possibility of death exists ... Through constant practice, you become free of your own ideas of what and how things should work

It actually makes sense...