Obi-Wan called it the Force.
Seriously though, many many years ago I was walking rather briskly up a steep hill one day and started to develop of very painful side stitch under my lower ribcage. For no particular reason that I can remember, rather than stopping to rest I decided to try a breathing and visualization exercise that I had read about in some wellbeing magazine somewhere. I started breathing more slowly and more deeply. On each inhale I imagined that I was breathing in a brilliant radiating light that permeated my entire body (and my chest in particular) and on each exhale I imagined that I was expelling darker negative energy. To my surprise I cured my side stitch in what seemed to be less than a minute and continued charging up the hill with a renewed fervour.
Now, I have always been a very scientific thinker with an insatiable curiosity about how things really work and what they really are, so I was naturally intrigued with why this breathing exercise had been so effective. The answer, as almost every fitness enthusiast on these boards will no doubt be already aware, is that shallow breathing while engaging in certain types of exercise (particularly running) tends to stress the ligaments that connect the diaphragm to the liver. Deeper breathing allows those connective ligaments to relax and can therefore prevent or cure a side stitch. The visualization part of my breathing exercise was irrelevant. As an acquaintance of mine once said when I told him this story,
"Science wins again".
The moral of my little story should be pretty obvious. Had I been a less scientifically minded and less curious person, I probably would have gone on with the rest of my life believing that it was the wonderful "radiating light" that had cured my side stitch and would no doubt have embraced it as something that was legitimately "real". I would have shared my little anecdote with everyone who cared to listen and I'm sure others would have shared similar anecdotes with me. I would have also tracked down that "wellbeing" magazine, purchased a subscription, and lived happily ever after. And there wouldn't have been anything in particular that was wrong with any of that.
To relate this back to the topic at hand more specifically, I believe that during those situations where some people feel that they are channeling Qi, they are simply in a place that almost all of us have been in before. They are in "The Zone", or as modern psychology terms it, "Flow" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)). To quote from the linked WikiPedia article,
"In an extreme state of being in the zone, time slows down and unusually higher physical performance may be achieved".
Rather than cut and paste any further quotes, which I feel inclined to do so because I believe that so much of it is relevant to this discussion, I will simply encourage all interested parties to have a good read.
During my own experiences with martial arts training, I was able to experience "Flow" quite easily as the nature of such training is very conducive to achieving such a state. After all it typically demands an intense focus on achieving perfect technique through repetition. Almost always during a particularly intense session I would at some point feel a rush of endorphins and andrenaline. Flow, combined with Adrenaline, combined with endorphins (which help you maintain the focus and control that adrenaline tends to disrupt) literally made me feel as if I could punch through a brick wall with absolute perfect precision. The reality, although a little less impressive than that opiate induced fantasy, was superior striking power through enhanced strength, focus and technique.
"Science wins again."
Just talking about those experiences has put me in the zone right now. I think I'm going to go outside now, stare at the night sky, and bring some Flow to bear on the deepest mysteries of the universe.
I realize now I took what you said a little too literally.