I got rear-ended a few weeks ago, in an extremely clear-cut (I thought) case. I was turning left and had to slow down because a huge truck veered into my lane; then, wham! We pulled into the nearest parking lot, and the guy who rear-ended me came out yelling at me that I had stopped too abruptly and that it was my fault. I was totally taken aback and it made me question the rightness of my position. It was only after talking to a bunch of people that I could rest more comfortably in the conclusion that he was just being a righteous asshole.

Fortunately, with no persuasion, his insurance company agreed with me, and cut me a check for damages.

Sometimes it’s not quite so simple. Someone in a discussion forum recently posted about being outwardly successful and attractive, yet inwardly apathetic or discouraged to the point of entertaining suicide. Yet they described themselves as being “ridiculously well-adjusted.” I was curious about the internal mental and emotional linkages between feeling that satisfied with her life and feeling that suicidal, and asked a few questions to explore that, only to have her bite at me.

I usually don’t go around looking to help people who don’t want to be helped. But it does hurt when I put a little bit of effort into trying just to relate to someone and they totally twist it into something toward their own ends … without even acknowledging that they’re doing it.

David: Do you experience anything that doesn’t fit in with anybody’s description of you and is difficult to articulate? What parts of your internal experience fall through the cracks, so to speak?

SuicideGirl: You mean people that know me? Some people think I’m shy, but I’m not at all. I think it’s more that I don’t really feel the need to put myself out there to impress other people (or something) because I like the way I am and other people like me too. So it’s sort of like I let others live their lives around me, and I live mine around them, but they expect that I should be interjecting myself into their lives more. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

David: No, I mean more that if there’s a disparity between how you’re viewed and your internal experience, I’m wondering what is in there, in your internal experience of yourself, that you usually don’t give voice to because it doesn’t ‘fit.’

SuicideGirl: Oh. No. I know what you’re talking about. I really don’t have a lot of that going on.
        I mean, besides this whole situation here, I’m kind of ridiculously well-adjusted. It’s that other people aren’t that boggles my mind.

David: Ah … Well, enough to be suicidal, it seems … ?

SuicideGirl: Now, there is a possibility that I have OTHER things going on.

David: Such as?

SuicideGirl: I’m bummed out.

David: This is not particularly descriptive.

SuicideGirl: You were being rather condescending, so I didn’t think it was worth conjuring up a great description. Also, you could read the rest of this thread and find out quite a bit.

David: Asking questions is condescending?

SuicideGirl: Asking condescending questions is condescending.

David: Which question(s) did you interpret as condescending? I’m honestly curious.

SuicideGirl: “Ah … Well, enough to be suicidal, it seems … ?”
        I know myself, my response to your questions about the disparities within me was accurate. That is not a source of my bad feelings, and since you don’t know me I don’t think you should keep pushing for that explanation. Maybe it’s more indicative of your own issues. But I don’t know you, so I won’t assume that.

David: Fair enough. I’ll concede that it was perhaps poorly worded. But it was an honest question to ask what internal logic leads someone who self-describes as “ridiculously well-adjusted” to think of suicide.
        As far as pushing for explanation goes: ok, I won’t ask anymore; although I would suggest that you invite probing questions due to the nature of this forum. If just the act of asking the question offends you, then I don’t know what to say.

SuicideGirl: I already answered the question, though. The nature of asking the question wasn’t offensive. I thought it was a totally relevant question, the first time. But you had my answer and were pushing me to change my mind? reevaluate my response? I’m not sure what your intention was, but I gave you a very honest answer.

David: The disparity between these comments made me ask.

“I’m wondering what is in there, in your internal experience of yourself, that you usually don’t give voice to because it doesn’t ‘fit.’”

Oh. No. I know what you’re talking about. I really don’t have a lot of that going on.

“What do you hope to achieve by this post? Advice on how to deal with it? Confirmation of the goodness of people? Confirmation of the badness of people?”

It’s something that’s been inside of me that I haven’t been able to share with others, now it’s out there. That’s all.

Clarification was my intention, and it seems perfectly justified given the circumstances. It seemed value- and agenda-neutral to me, except with an intention to explore in a friendly manner. The interpretation of that prompt as hostility or condescension is your own.

SuicideGirl: I don’t have anything within me that doesn’t ‘fit.’ What I was letting out was the fact that I have these negative feelings. Those two aren’t related. That’s all.

David: Ok, well, as I said I’m not interested in asking more, per your request. But “I haven’t been able to share with others” and “doesn’t fit” can be seen as pretty equivalent. Just saying. Better perhaps if you reflect on others’ intentions or, better yet, have a clarifying interaction before slapping them with a negative label over honest questioning.
        Best of luck to you. 

In the end I’m not even sure what happened. Just that she wasn’t interested in talking.

Probably she misunderstood the original question; I should’ve made it as simple as, “Do you ever feel things that you can’t tell other people?” (But then I felt that that would’ve seemed condescending, because she pretty much said exactly that earlier.)

That she took a follow-up question as condescension was telling.

I felt like she was creating her own narrative of our interaction and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Even when I explained where I was coming from, she just wasn’t interested anymore.

And that’s her right, of course. Her psyche is really her business.

For me, it just hurts to try to reach out and have my words and intentions distorted and used against me, particularly when I thought I was just being a friendly ear. Totally unexpected.

Yes. I’m a sensitive dude. It can have its drawbacks.

Brief recap: I started learning qigong from a book by Ken Cohen in my Teaching Drum days. I took Reiki, experimented with Robert Bruce’s methods, did some other miscellaneous stuff.

When I went to acupuncture school, I had my first direct training in high-quality qigong via a Shaolin school. It was my first exposure to qigong that actually felt real. I practiced it daily. My health had been deteriorating since Teaching Drum, and it finally started turning around, and I attribute a lot of that to the qigong.

At the same time I was working on myself in a lot of ways spiritually, and I began having periods where I shifted into states of much deeper sensitivity, what I came to call the Great Mystery. It was intense at times, like every little detail was so fragile and beautiful and also too “loud.” At a few points I “opened” myself too much psychically and invited in some negative energy, which manifested as someone trying to steal my moped and my credit card number being hacked.

Accompanying that whole thing was a pseudo-physical experience that felt like a tingling or buzzing all over my body. It was basically qi, but qi that kinda just hung out and wouldn’t go away. I’ve mentioned it here and there as a feeling of being “overcharged.”

Over the years I’ve gained more control over that state of sensitivity, but the buzzing feeling was the one thing that continued to cause problems. And the problem increased. I started learning from other qigong teachers, and found that if I didn’t feel qi flow then I knew the practice was not that great; but if I did, then it would tend to make me buzz.

The buzzing in and of itself wasn’t a bad thing, but the problem was that I didn’t know how to make it go away, except to stop practicing qigong. It would sometimes linger for days, and when it did that it was like someone was constantly running a low-level electrical charge through me. It became really exhausting and would start fucking with the ordinary bioelectricity in my body, like my heart rhythm. It got really uncomfortable. Plus I would be very very restless in sleep and would wake up very tired no matter how many hours I slept, because of the constant energy.

The only thing that seemed to help was when Abigail would rub my feet (she said she could sometimes feel a “whoosh” of energy drain out of my feet when she pressed on the soles, at Kidney-1).

Last year I decided to go for broke and bought this expensive DVD course from a qigong master I’d met online, which was basically a supercharge-yourself kind of thing. I was dubious but willing to entertain the notion that I needed to break through some wall by cramming a lot of qi into my body. So I practiced that for four months before realizing how much poorer my health felt, and stopped.

(This was, it turned out, that fraud Elijah Wilson, who I wrote about recently.)

Also last year, I attended a qigong workshop on a practice called jing dong gong or Stillness-Movement. The instructor focused on teaching qigong and on training people to heal using qi. I really wanted to sign up for his 3-year certification course but needed to be able to do the qigong practice for an hour a day. Well I came home and I found that if I did it any more than ten minutes a day, I started buzzing, and even sometimes less than that. So that hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’ve kept starting and stopping energy work, experimenting with different methods and approaches, all to no avail. No one I asked, including knowledgeable masters, knew what to do about my condition.

It’s affected my life in two ways. First of all, my health has stopped improving and even started backsliding. I eat very well by Western standards but one major thing that I could do better is movement and exercise. But it’s a chicken or egg thing for me; doing much aerobic or anaerobic exercise wipes me out too badly. What Sifu Wong writes pretty much applies to me:

The traditional Chinese martial art way is first strengthen yourself, including all your internal organs and life-function systems. Then, as the result of strengthening you can perform any exercise better, including push-ups, jogging and sit-ups. The Chinese martial art way pays great importance to gradual progress; it is utmost important not to over-train yourself.

The western approach is reverse. You do the exercise first, and hope that by doing the exercise you strengthen yourself. Chinese masters call this “confusing branch and root”, or confusing effect and cause. In western terms, it is putting the cart before the horse. Strengthening yourself is the cause; being able to do exercise well is the effect. The western approach has reversed cause and effect. Consequently the western approach gives only an appearance of fitness.

I’ve had bad experiences in the past of pushing through fatigue in physical exertion. For awhile, qigong was my exercise. But the qigong road was closed to me so by default or apathy or whatever, I’ve been very sedentary for a long time and my health has suffered.

I would like ultimately to revisit that old primitivist ideal of going around in the woods barefoot and barely-clothed, running long distances carrying heavy loads with minimal effort. I doubt I will ever be a pure primitivist again … but just having the option would be nice.

The other way it’s affected me is that I want to progress professionally and as a healer. I want to build enough qi in my body to be able to send into my patients and heal them of their illnesses. And I can’t, because I can’t cultivate my own qi, let alone use it to heal others. When I do use it to heal others, it takes something out of me.

I’ve accumulated enough knowledge and techniques to know that if I ever regained the ability to do qigong, that I could become a real powerhouse. But it’s been stalemate for years.

Sometimes I would start buzzing even though I hadn’t done qigong. Or sometimes I would buzz from trying to access my qi more deeply while treating people. A few times I started buzzing just because I opened my perception and saw things more powerfully in that spiritually sensitive, Great Mystery way. It was frustrating.

That changed just a week ago.

I’m not sure what it was. The approaches I’ve tried have included all sorts of mental gymnastics and reasoning and step-by-step approaches. This was none of those. It basically felt like Divine intervention. All I know is that I was lying in bed, buzzing, feeling really restless and knowing that I’d be having one of those nights, when I started pondering the meaning of the energy. I don’t know if that’s what did it, or what, but all of a sudden I felt all of that energy sinking into my bones. And suddenly things felt really quiet. And I fell asleep in minutes!

So I had to know if this would really work. I started practicing qigong again, and I really pushed it this time. I practiced longer, till I built up a good buzz, and then I would try to reenact the sensation I’d felt, and draw the energy into my bones. And it kept working, so I kept upping the amount of time and the intensity of my practice.

Today was the most intense, I was buzzing really hard, and in the past that would’ve meant buzzing all day and having trouble sleeping at night. I’m buzzing a tiny bit now just thinking about it, but most of it’s gone.

So this is really a huge breakthrough for me for the two reasons I mentioned above. I need to get healthier, and I need to build my qi to a point where I can project it and affect other people. And I haven’t been able to. It’s been a terrible dilemma, finding that I have a talent for cultivating qi, and a blockage preventing me from storing it.

Suddenly, the roads are open, and I’m free to go.

Who knows what’s next?

The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary.

Weber studied the structures of societies. He used his concept of charisma to explain the genesis of authority structures in societies, and explored how the pure, charismatic form of authority developed into and interacted with other, more routinized and structured forms of authority and control. Jesus and the Buddha were charismatic individuals who held authority by force of personality; Christianity and Buddhism are institutions that grew from their contributions, and not necessarily by following their examples.

Anyway, most of that actually sounds a bit boring. But Hansen’s work was about exploring the limits to what most of us accept as real. Things like paranormal phenomena exist on the fringes of consensus reality, in a liminal state. This is exactly the place from which Weber’s charismatic authorities draw their power.

Pure charisma, like liminality, is directly linked with the supernatural. It is “guaranteed by what is held to be a proof, originally always a miracle.” The leader “gains and retains it solely by proving his powers in practice. He must work miracles, if he wants to be a prophet.” The role of altered states of consciousness was also recognized as critical, and Weber mentions “the ecstatic states which are viewed, in accordance with primitive experience, as the pre-conditions for producing certain effects in meteorology, healing, divination, and telepathy … We shall henceforth employ the term ‘charisma’ for such extraordinary powers.”

This is essentially the same “realm” that I have been calling the Great Mystery.

So Hansen was using Weber’s work on charisma to bolster his exploration of paranormal phenomena in our society. Weber himself used the concept of charisma to study power structures in society.

I’m an opportunistic reader, meaning that I’ll mercilessly pluck ideas from respected authors and subvert them for my own ends whether I’m doing justice to their work or not. My aims are personal, so I’m co-opting this whole discussion by shrinking it into a microcosmic realm. I’d like to explore charisma and its effect on power structures as a feature of the personal landscape.

I’ve heard it said that one would expect that the more people there are, the harder it is to predict their actions; but in fact the opposite is true. This is because the uniqueness of each individual, their ineffable essence if you will, can often confound the observer. But joined into a mass of other people confining and influencing them, and people will react in more predictable ways, or at least a statistically significant number of them will.

Weber’s ideas about charisma boils down to individuals. Charismatic authority was the individual authority, and charisma is unique to individuals. These individuals are not beholden to any larger human system; they draw their power from something beyond the known, the ordinary, the safe. They are different. They stand out. The buck the system.

Weber writes, in On Charisma and Institution Building,

As a permanent structure with a system of rational rules, bureaucracy is fashioned to meet calculable and recurrent needs by means of a normal routine.

The provisioning of all demands that go beyond those of everyday routine has had, in principle, an entirely heterogeneous, namely, a charismatic, foundation; the further back we look in history, the more we find this to be the case. This means that the “natural” leaders—in times of psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, political distress—have been neither officeholders nor incumbents of an “occupation” in the present sense of the word, that is, men who have acquired expert knowledge and who serve for remuneration. The natural leaders in distress have been holders of specific gifts of the body and spirit; and these gifts have been believed to be supernatural, not accessible to everybody.

So the seed of power and change is the individual—specifically, an individual that is awakened to a higher degree, in one dimension or another.

However, the nature of this accumulated power, this charisma, is highly unstable.

By its very nature, the existence of charismatic authority is specifically unstable. The holder may forego his charisma; he may feel “forsaken by his God,” as Jesus did on the cross; he may prove to his followers that “virtue is gone out of him.” …

The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority solely by proving his strength in life. If he wants to be a prophet, he must perform miracles; if he wants to be a war lord, he must perform heroic deeds. Above all, however, his divine mission must “prove” itself in that those who faithfully surrender to him must fare well. If they do not fare well, he is obviously not the master sent by the gods.

The instability of charisma makes it unsuitable for administering the nuts and bolts of a stable society.

It is the fate of charisma, whenever it comes into the permanent institutions of a community, to give way to powers of tradition or of rational socialization.

In essence, charismatic authority is like a flame that must constantly be fed or quickly die out. Structures are set up to manage and channel the flame, but this disperses the flame until it no longer has the same qualities.

I write about all of this because I feel this process occurred in me a long time ago and I’m trying to retrace my footsteps, to reclaim what was lost.

On such a small scale as a single life, charisma obviously can’t mean anything like leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. But it can mean commanding the positive regard of others, being attractive and socially influential, feeling free to speak one’s mind and have one’s ideas respected, not just intellectually but emotionally too.

I have not, as a general rule, felt particularly charismatic in much of my life. This is a seeming paradox, though, because I have always felt at least the hint of the quality of otherworldliness hovering around me. But why didn’t this translate into charismatic authority, if charisma is indeed based in that experience of the Great Mystery?

Here again we see the translation problem that I’ve discussed in previous posts. It’s one thing to drink from a river; it’s another to bring that water back to your camp. It’s one thing to experience a certain state of consciousness, it’s quite another to translate that into effective action in human society.

Charisma and charismatic authority are a centerpiece of Weber’s discussion, but they are only a subset of the consequences of mystical experience.

Charisma is the result of the decision to take mystical experience and use or express it in order to directly or indirectly gain worldly power. Mystical experience can also take one in the opposite direction, for instance, immersion in eternal bliss while meditating in a cave. It’s all in the direction that you choose to channel it.

So the question for me is, what has blocked my development of charismatic authority?

Some of it has to do with that collision with the “permanent institutions of a community,” with the hierarchical structures that dominate our lives here in modern civilization. The expression of mystical experience is only encouraged in limited sanctioned ways by society, and this is further supported or suppressed according to individual circumstances and relationships, like finances, like family and peer relationships.

But on a deeper level, I think the reason is that dabbling in charisma makes you vulnerable to those same forces, forces that threaten to subvert and seduce. And, being a charismatic authority makes you subject to the instability of being that hungry flame, and vulnerable to being taken over by a monstrous hierarchical structure, or becoming one yourself. I think I was inculcated with a sense of fear and distrust for those dark forces and their consequences and so stayed well away from them.

I think it’s no longer so healthy to stay well away from them.

Fixating on the identities gives them power and allows them to place demands that eventually come to define my experience, instead of vice versa. It traps my energy and my power in the identity. I become controlled by the puppet, forgetting that it is my own hand that animates the puppet.

Incidentally, I sometimes wonder how I would handle worldly power. I used to want to be President. I wonder now, given that kind of power, how I could possibly resist corruption. Having power on that scale isn’t just about the ability to have or do things. Worldly power is always wedded with a particular identity; step outside the bounds of that identity and you risk losing that power.

Ultimately, the identity begins to own you, because you accept the vulnerabilities of that identity—that which threatens to topple you from power—as the vulnerabilities of your very soul. Lost in identification, you make devil’s bargains to keep power, justifying it by telling yourself that only by staying in power, maintaining political capital, and retaining a strong upper hand can you be in a position to generate positive change.

So the rot begins.

This is easily seen in politics, but in a sense most human relationships have a political aspect to them, because we are all invested in maintaining a certain sense of power. And for most of us, that power resides in the identities we inhabit.

So when I look at those diagrams, I see a number of identities that I’ve sought to inhabit, some successfully, some less so. But the underlying assumption behind that view is that identities are important.

I miss the forest for the trees, I think.

I think part of me grew up a little too fast. Under various influences I blossomed intellectually and was socially ostracized. I wanted to be older so that I could escape. The rungs of the ladder toward escape were success, and the academic was the first identity I inhabited that gave me the success I needed. From that I learned that identification yielded rewards. So every time I ran into a wall, I looked for another identity to try on.

I think what I never learned was how to be natural and spontaneous as a child—free from the restrictions of a particular identity, free to draw like shit and play sports without following rules and fuck up bad and have all my injuries taken care of. Not that I didn’t have that as a child … but, I think, not enough. The lessons didn’t keep.

The spontaneity of the child is at the root of much that is good about those identities I profess I want to succeed in. Seth says, “All true work is done in play.” So many of the things I’ve done of that were of lasting personal importance have had more of an exploratory quality than a goal-oriented one. So much for reaching some numerical goal or attaining some particular grade. What about the freedom to be whole and to experience the goodness and strangeness of life in its many varieties?

It’s not more identities I need. I think I’ve got plenty. What I need is the freedom to discover what lies in between identities.

I had three months off to travel the world.You get this in Oz if you work seven years for same company, its called long service leave.

I go to London and on first day I went to Big Ben. I want to get the standard tourist shot – me and BB (cheesy but I am an Australian and it is the other side of the world!). Was about to ask this guy to take my photo and he lay down on the grass and shut his eyes.

I turned to the nearest person. It was a girl reading a paper and asked her to take my photo. Got talking to her. Her first day in London too. We decided to have a look around and got lost as both of us have terrible sense of direction, spent the day immersed in laughter and saw Lloyds building about 10 times unintentionally. She was Quebecois and spoke hardly English. Never the less had a blast.

Agreed to meet at Big Ben next day. Next day, I’m standing there and thinking, “who is that beautiful girl waving at me”… Turned out to be the girl from the day before. To be honest the first day I hadn’t really thought much about her looks as I was jet lagged to hell and thought it was just a few hour wander around London before we went our separate ways.

She’d come to London to learn English, ended up running away with me and we travelled all over Europe, living in a tent and surviving on pancakes and cheap wine. After three months of sunshine and adventure, we parted as she had to go back to Quebec to study and finish her degree. I had career and masters to finish on other side of the world. I had never had three months of my life that were filled with so much happiness and felt very lucky to have shared this time together with someone so special.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get her off my mind. All my friends said ‘forget it, just a holiday romance – it would never work in real life’. I talked to others who’d tried to rekindle these sorts of romances and it had failed. The time had been so great that I didn’t want to spoil it with some clumsy attempt to recapture the magic. After all 9-5 is very different to hanging out in France and Spain.

About a year later I got a lump in my side. I was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. I remember sitting in the doctors surgery and thinking ‘this cant be happening – I haven’t finished my masters yet!’. I was trying to joke with the doctor and he wouldn’t smile and he told me that if it had got into my system I probably had one more year. This was a very dark period, but also it made me think very deeply about life, my priorities and how precious time is.

I had to go into hospital and have the thing cut out immediately. Lay in bed afterwards and vowed that if I made it through I would track the girl down and ask for her hand in marriage. Long story short, I made it through.

So I sent a postcard to an old address she gave me. Someone read the back of it and realised it might be important and got it to her.

Well, she said “Yes.”

We have now been together for ten years, still the most amazing woman in the world and as beautiful as when I first met her. We still have no sense of direction and as a result have got wonderfully lost all over the world together.

I don’t know why it is that some get the chance to meet someone so special. I wish it could happen to everyone.

Having walked through the dark valley and also having won the hand of the woman I loved, I value every single day.

“The training was brutal, beyond what practitioners are willing to endure today. If you fought, your life was on the line, you could be crippled or killed. Now-a-days it doesn’t matter how skilled you are, you can’t defend yourself against a bullet. Today practitioners compete for prizes, first places and better health, the reality and training is very different than if your life depended on it.”

Mr. Yueng, being in the Opera, had the opportunity to study with many martial artists and has learned many styles. Tai Chi, Pa Kua, Wing Chun, several Mantis systems, Crane, Monkey and many more (he practiced with Sun Lu Tang’s students and also played the part of the Monkey King in the Opera).

I asked him if there was one instructor that stood out above the rest that he looked up to, or was a model for him.

Mr. Yueng: “All my teachers were very good, each had their own unique gifts and talents. I wasn’t taught that one style was better than the other, each was useful. However, I didn’t idolize the teachers, or want to be like them, since the life of a kung fu teacher was not a good life. A kung fu teacher’s life was very difficult and sometimes sad. In those days if your skill wasn’t of high quality you didn’t eat, it was survival. If your kung fu wasn’t any good you didn’t work, no one would hire you.

“To start with, few kung fu teachers had families, they had to continually train hard so their skill was high in order to stay alive and be successful. If you were a kung fu teacher anyone could come up and challenge you, injuries and possible death could result. Running a school meant you were responsible for all your students and their actions. If a student hurt someone or was quarrelsome it was the sifu’s fault. The sifu had to train and instill a sense of responsibility in all students, continuously. The life of a kung fu sifu was not a peaceful one. When you accept students it’s your responsibility to look after them, take care of them, educate them. Even if their health wasn’t good the sifu must guide them back to better health.”

I’ve tried any number of exercises and energy manipulations, to no avail. What I return to is that any energy issue is at root an issue of character development. So the question is, where am I imbalanced on a level of character, morals, or beliefs?

For the purposes of solving this problem, the answer requires thinking of my “self” as more than the property of me, the individual. It’s a matter of understanding the process by which this “self” interacts with my environment, i.e. what keeps my qi compressed close to my body on the one hand and evacuated from its surroundings on the other.

Actually, when I look at it, this sort of division is in keeping with the pervasive division and specialization I see all around me. It exists to such a depth that few people really see it.

I’ll simplify the types of specializations that pertain to my experience into four:

• Internal
• External
• Natural, or Non-human
• Civilized, or Human

These are opposites on two different axes. Here’s my representation of the primary archetypes that have influenced my life, and where they fall on these two axes:

I like this organization. It explains some things about my life.

It explains why I had a hard time at Teaching Drum, a school for primitive skills that forced me to be external; even when focused on things that were purportedly internal, the dominance of the external was everpresent. (Note that I could find no archetype to occupy the Internal, Natural corner.)

It describes how tilted toward the bottom right corner—Internal and Civilized—I was when I was younger (i.e. in high school), and perhaps why I decided to compensate by engaging in activities of the opposite corner, martial arts and primitive skills.

And now I’m primarily engaged in activities of the External, Civilized corner—healing and business—and yet that, too, strikes me as unbalanced.

The thing is, no single archetype or dimension can capture who I really am. But in most every situation in my life, I have felt restricted to a limited range of possibilities. At Teaching Drum there was pressure to get rid of the books; there goes the Scholar part of me. When I’m hanging around in a suburb, practicing nature awareness naturally draws my attention into people’s yards, and I get cops called on me—there goes the Primitive Skills part of me. When I’m immersed in a business setting, I can’t very well slip into an experience of appreciation for the Divine Beauty of things—there goes the Mystic part of me.

This makes for a very dissociated experience of life.

Just for fun, let me associate these with the Four Elements.

This helps illustrate some of the deeper imbalances.

I certainly learned a lot.

See the whole series at ChrisMartenson.com.

From: Gary J. Clyman
Subject: Is this YOU?

Is this from you? GJC

http://www.edgeofgrace.net/2010/06/19/qigong-quacks-frauds-and-dangerous-egos/

From: David
Subject: Re: Is this YOU?

Yes. I was very disappointed that you chose to CC my e-mail to Elijah. At this point I don’t need or want anything more from him or from you. You can feel free to provide a rebuttal or set me straight on those secondhand stories I excerpted about you; at least you have not shown yourself to be engaged in illegal activity like Elijah.

From: Gary J. Clyman
Subject: Re: Is this YOU?

I’m the “real thing” and you’re an ass hole. All the other Wilson Victims, I made happy with my programs because I take my responsibility as Master very seriously. I know Wilson sent you a jumbled version of my Chi Kung Program since someone sent it to me. It was going to be yours for FREE, but…

I don’t do chat rooms because all the boys want to do is “challenge” me. I’ve got many stories because I’ve been volunteering at other teachers demos since the mid 1970s.

Comparing me to Elijah was a bad thing for you to do. It has cost you dearly… Stick with Wong Kiew Kit. Yeah, I’ve got a story about him too, but others have already heard this one. All you had to do was call me…

Good luck! You’re cut off…. Gary J. Clyman

On reflection, I could start to see how my depiction of him was perhaps unfair and sensationalistic. I could agree that some of that was “asshole”-ish.

I wonder why I felt motivated to include criticism of him in my post. It did seem somewhat extraneous to my story.

I think I’m reacting to a growing sense of feeling stifled at censorship, self-imposed or otherwise. There is much I don’t say and would like to. I feel constrained for any number of reasons. One notable place where I was distinctly open about stuff was my critique of Teaching Drum, but that was more the exception than the rule.

Maybe what it comes down to is a sense of being tired of people who don’t take criticism well, who react to it in a volatile way, and on a superficial level. Instead, I feel that criticism, done with integrity, has the potential to open dialogue and deepen relationship faster than courteous talk. In intense conflict, authenticity rises to the foreground.

I have very rarely been able to have such productive conflict. I treasure immensely those relationships in which I can. In so many other places, I see people react out of fear or anger or some other ego response. This saddens me.

And ultimately, if I can’t criticize with the intention of opening dialogue and deepening relationship, then I would like to at least be able to criticize with the intention of having it be an expression of who I am and what I’ve experienced. There is plenty of ugliness in the world, and while I would prefer not to be one of the mindless Internet masses that freely yells insults at anything just because I can, I would still like to have the freedom to express my sense that aggression, oppression, or injustice has occurred. I suppose that doing so makes me a lightning rod, though.

I think there is more than a seed of truth in Clyman’s criticism of me; I reported an unflattering story of him that was unnecessary to my narrative. Nonetheless, it was an attempt to express something I felt in this character who had become part of the whole experience. He took offense and cut me off, as is his right. But it remains my right to disclose my sense of people I encounter. This seems a difficult boundary to navigate. When does personal expression veer into libelous attack?

In the end, for me this is but a side drama in the many other more important things happening in my life. But it can maybe serve as a minor illustration of the risks and rewards of speaking out on sensitive topics.

Update 6/26/2010: Though I was ready to let him have the last word, I eventually decided that, whatever else I might feel about Clyman, the fact that I had said negative things about him without real cause (more from petty spite) was not an honorable thing to have done, so I wrote to him, apologizing and asking for nothing more.

I was expecting him to receive my apology as an “Oh, now that I know you were offering something for free, I’m going to kiss your ass” kind of note, which it honestly wasn’t. To my surprise, he quickly forgave me. We spoke on the phone, and the first thing he did was to apologize to me about Elijah’s behavior. When I then tried to apologize to him again, he brushed it aside and said that I had already apologized, water under the bridge. Then he sent me a copy of his chi kung DVD, for free, which I just received.

So I reverse course on my previous statements about Clyman. I still don’t know too much about him, but that lack of knowledge should be reason enough not to open fire on him. And he showed class and generosity in his handling of my apology.

So, to balance out previous excerpts, here are a couple of more positive opinions about the man.

Master Gary Clyman has been nothing but kind and very helpful to me in every conversation I’ve ever had with him. He’s really ramped up energetically but I think I would say that’s he’s just extremely passionate about his system, like on fire passionate. I would never ever describe him as being an asshole.

Before saying anyone is fake you should either meet them in person first or at the very least try the system with diligence and determination. Fake is another word I would never use to describe him.

Gary Clyman’s reputation is well-earned, I understand; abrasive, egotistical, unrefined. Maybe my age is permitting me to put things in perspective (I’m almost 50), but I don’t seem to be bothered by that as much as unabashed, mindless violence. Clyman doesn’t go there. I’ve met people all over the world who, because of different patterns of environmental conditioning and genetic predisposition, come off loud and boisterous, but when I’ve been around them long enough, I can appreciate qualities of exuberance that were not visible before, i.e., having to share barracks with people from New York!

I am also painfully aware of how much of an ass I have been over the years, and yet I still manage to have friends and family who love me. It seems to me that beneath every good man is a scoundrel who finally got it and evolved.

I only have the advantage of Clyman’s books and DVD’s, and they have simplified so much technique with regard to breathing and Microcosmic Orbit material that I was able to have a dramatic MO experience with relatively little time. I was practicing Master Chu’s Nei Kung regularly for two years before I started with Clyman, and I’m in awfully good shape as a personal trainer.

I have met people who are extraordinarily proficient at what they do and they often have little time for people who make light of subject matter. “Short Jewish kid from Chicago” with an attitude; somehow that just doesn’t astonish me that much, and I can detect his sense of humor beneath all the attitude. My guess is, the sum total of what he contributes to the world in terms of easily understood, efficacious, demystified chi harnessing is vastly greater than the negativity that he ultimately brings with his ego.

So I don’t hold it against him that some think he’s a dick. Because I’ve been one too, big time. I am grateful that his info enabled me to sense the upward flow of the MO and the challenges of completing the circuit. If I win Mega Millions Lottery tomorrow, I’m booking a flight for Chicago on Wednesday.

Last year I mentioned that I practiced a nei gong system for a few months. I think it’s time I talk about how I started it, why I abandoned it, and the sordid details about it that I’ve discovered recently. It makes for an interesting little drama. This really hasn’t constituted very much of my time or energy lately, in fact there are so many other important and complicated things happening right now; but maybe that’s why this makes for a simpler and more amusing thing to write about as a blog post. So, enjoy.

I hadn’t named names before; now I will. I was browsing on a Shaolin discussion forum a couple of years ago when this guy started posting, who called himself Wu Jing. His real name is Elijah Wilson, and he was purportedly the lineage holder of the “Thunder Mind” school. He had the most incredible stories about what he could do with his qi, and made me curious. I contacted him and he said that he’d be willing to train me by sending me a DVD and giving me assistance by phone, but that the first level would cost several hundred dollars.

At first I had contacted him on a lark, but as I considered the possibility of gaining a lot of power and health in a short period of time, I got seduced by the idea.

Kind of reminds me of a spam letter I got recently:

Anyway, so I decided to send Mr. Wilson a down payment, and waited eagerly for the DVD. And waited. And waited. And waited. Months went by. I kept e-mailing him every month, and sometimes it was weeks before I would hear back from him, only to have him say that the DVD was delayed.

Finally he got in touch with me, several months after I had sent him money (and the whole time I was wondering if I just got scammed). We talked on the phone and he spent a while asking me indirect questions about previous training I’d had. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at until finally he came out and said that he had been waiting for me to contact him to admit that I had previously trained under the Shaolin group, that my honesty was a test of character.

I found this bizarre considering that I had made that clear at the very beginning, and that that was how I found out him in the first place, which I had also made clear.

In fact, a number of things about him struck me as very weird. He talked a lot, and grandiosely, about his system and the wonders it could do. He said that his teacher taught him things before he went to Vietnam, things which saved his life by allowing him to speed up his reactions and slow down time. He said his teacher had challenged luminaries of the internal martial arts, like taijiquan master William C.C. Chen, and beat them.

I did not trust him from the beginning, but still I thought I would see what he had to give, because I was at the point where having power was that seductive.

So finally he sent me the DVD. It was basically a DVD of a bunch of exercises performed by some guy. The guy’s voice did not sound like the voice I talked to on the phone, and the picture did not look like the fuzzy photo he had posted on the Shaolin forum. I questioned him about it and he laughed and said that one of his students had made the DVD.

I practiced pretty intensively for awhile. The type of practice was a lot of accumulation of energy and a good deal of trying to speed it up and cause it to vibrate. After awhile I started to feel buzzed all the time. From the outset I had been concerned about this, because one of my problems in terms of energy cultivation has been feeling rapidly overcharged. This began happening quickly but, trusting that the practice would correct the situation, I pressed forward, despite the fact that it was beginning to have deleterious effects on my health.

The last time I talked to him was via chat. We had been in contact intermittently and he had made suggestions as far as dealing with the overcharging problem, none of which worked. This last time he strongly suggested that I take Miracle Mineral Supplement, some sort of fad product.

It was at this point that I finally decided that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing with me, and I quit practicing his system. It was several weeks before I shook off the effects of four months of intensive overcharging.

I forgot about him for awhile. Then, last month, I came across a forum post that referred to the website of qigong teacher Gary Clyman, on which this was written:

Warning! Watch out for Elijah (Eli) Wilson, “Wu Jing,” The Thundermind School. It’s all made up and most it is MY story from phone conversations. He ordered my Nei Kung Program and never paid me since 2007 (3 bad checks). He has been caught TWICE selling illegally copied and scrambled versions of my DVDs. This is not only copyright infringement and theft, but he says he is MY teacher. He’s stolen my character and acts like he’s special. He sucks money out of people and “acts” like he knows something. O.K., he followed my DVDs and had many phone calls with me. But he’s faking everything. Watch out! Contact me if you have had contact with him. It will help in his prosecution. If you are communicating with him, you are already in over your head. Copying is NOT the best form of flattery, it’s criminal.

So I went, huh. Somehow it doesn’t surprise me. I saw the picture of the guy, and it was the guy in the DVD I was sent, who was supposedly Elijah’s student!

Moreover, I found the account on Clyman’s website of his encounter with William C.C. Chen, which Elijah had said happened to his teacher.

A brief story about the well-known Tai Chi Grandmaster William C.C. Chen from NYC and myself. I was invited to a seminar he was doing in 2008. The short story is, I was asked to attend by my classmate from the mid 1970’s, Tom Wykle. Tom made me promise 2 things… I would not “up-stage or embarrass” William C.C. Chen. I gave my word and one of my 20 years students and I went to the seminar.

The back story… in 1980, William C.C. Chen screwed me when I went to study with him for 10 days in NYC. He sent me away broken hearted. I decided I would “get him” someday for stranding me in NYC for 10 days with nothing to do. Update… 28 years later here comes my opportunity. He did not recognize or remember me.

Immediately I saw he had NOTHING I wanted to learn, so I practiced by myself. About 4 hours into the seminar, Chen decided to demonstrate on ALL the participants there, including me.

I was the 6th person he got to. When he touched me to send me “flying,” he went flying instead. He did yell out, “Oh my God, you’re got more internal power than I do.” All this happened in front of everyone and without me doing anything but what came “natural.” That means, no planning, no set-up, no preparation, no getting ready, no projecting, no tensing, no nothing…

He just felt my JOLT, instead of me feeling his. O.K., he’s 74, but what would have happened when he was 46 and I was 29? We’ll never know. I can only guess…

So it’s pretty obvious at this point that Elijah Wilson is a fraud. I am still on the fence as to whether or not he has real skills. It’s quite possible that he does and did, after all, having genuine power and being an ethical person are not correlated except at the higher levels, and higher levels is definitely not what we’re talking about here.

Now, the interesting thing is, Clyman himself doesn’t seem like the straightest arrow either.

He emanates a lot of the same aggressive energy, arrogance, and grandiosity that Elijah did. His story about William C.C. Chen is a case in point. I don’t know that he’s ineffective as a teacher, in fact it sounds like his methods have a lot of power; again, though, moral development and genuine power do not go hand in hand.

I most recently e-mailed both Wilson and Clyman. Elijah tried to both apologize and sell me on more, audaciously enough; when I insisted I wanted nothing more than a refund, he stopped responding.

To Clyman I wrote what I had assumed would be a confidential e-mail. He replied asking for more details and then I saw that he had included Elijah in the CC! It was, essentially, a manipulation, using me to pressure Elijah, without my consent. I didn’t like that.

Add to that many of the derogatory statements he makes on his site, and his aggressive responses to criticism via comments on his Youtube videos, and I get a sense of a person who both takes and gives a lot of crap.

Here’s a story about Clyman on the Kung Fu Magazine forum. It’s the Internet, of course, so who knows what’s true, but it seems consistent with things others have said about him.

It was in 1998 or so I was competing in the Wing Lam Great Lakes Invitational. (which I won san Shou btw)

Anyway, Gary Clyman was the RUDEST DUDE! He was talkin’ smack about my sifu…none other than Wing Lam himself at his very own function.

I don’t care if it’s behind my back or over the internet, but do it to my face and we have a problem.

Gary Clyman was scheduled to do a demo as part of the masters exhibition…I’m pretty sure he was planning to do some sort of Iron Body and Chi Gong demo.

About mid way through the tourney, I see a crowd of people gathered around him and he is inviting ANYONE to strike him directly in the Middle TORSO area. (No neck or groin) Just a straight up body shot. People were volunteering to hit him. Most were unskilled types seemed like.

But Gary was being a jerk and taunting Pan Ching Fu (Mr Iron Fist of China) and his top female student (sorry I forgot her name) was there too.

To me that’s just messed up, trying to pick on Pan sifu that way. Pan is cool man, he’s got a great energy that he brings into the martial arts world. It would be boring w/o him. Plus, Pan has actually killed someone with his bare hands. I doubt Gary can say that, so he should have given him some face…man he’s rude.

He kept saying everyone at the tourney had nothing on him and he was trying to get Pan Ching Fu to hit him all day. He was really rude man.

Anyway, I wasn’t a sifu at the time so I stepped up and said, “Can I hit you”?
…Sure he said

So I did a little warm up and jazzed my energy and he braced himself for the hit. At the last second he could see that I was serious and he stopped me at the last second…”Hold it” he said. Then he REALLY set up for the hit.

Man I thought that was cheesy, I should have popped him right there. But I wanted to be fair since HE was the guy takin’ the shot.

Anyway, he kinda had a good size chi belly. So a basic reverse punch I threw and landed solid and he let out a LOUD “OOuuuII”. He smiled and said not bad.

I smiled and said, Not bad but you cheated. Then he got ****ed saying “no”. I said “you moved to absorb my energy”.

Then I described to him as an example of good Iron Body how SHI GUO LIN doesn’t move prior to someone hitting him. He just sits there calmly and takes it.

For a guy who claims to be an iron body expert and saying how crap my sifu’s knowledge of Iron skills was…he was not on PAR.

I told him, it was good kung fu to dissipate my energy, but that it was NOT WHAT HE WAS ADVERTISING he could do. That being the best Iron Body guy in the house.

Even Pan Ching Fu and his student (who were watching) stepped up and said yeah ..”You moved”

So he was not happy. And I really wanted another shot. So he said ok.

Man it was ON LIKE DONKEY KONG now.

So I decided to try to send chi directly into the top area (almost his solar plexus) of that Belly of his…albeit I did it a little differently from my school that is. I used an open palm specifically for this.

This time there was a big crowd of people watching.

Bang, I did the shot and he didn’t move, he took it. He yelled very loud again…”OouuuII”!

Outwardly I said, “Well, you got me, you’re ok man”

Inwardly I was thinking, “**** I wish I had more skill to drop him with just one shot”

Gary said after my hit, “I’ve been hit all day long by people, and I’ll give you this, yours was the best one”

Then we all separated to do our own thing and the people dispersed.

NOW FOR THE CRUX OF THIS LONG POST

Gary was scheduled to do a Iron Chi Gong Demo correct?

I didn’t know this until after, but my big brother Gene Ching was also at the tourney working his usually business and schmoozing (chuckle) and Gene comes up to me 20 mins later and said,

“Hey I just saw that Clyman guy you popped leaving out the door and he didn’t look too good, he seemed ****ed”

End result…Gary didn’t do his demo

Well, I may have not been able to Kung Fu him movie style with blood coming out of his mouth and dying a slow death…but it’s nice to know I was good enough to rattle his cage.

I took the time to write this about him because he was being a real A-HOLE. Normally I wouldn’t say stuff like this about anybody. But the dude is rude man…I don’t like him.

Elijah and Gary seem like two birds of a feather.

Recently, I was reading about this general type of qigong in Bruce Kumar Frantzis’ Opening the Energy Gates of the Body, and it gave some context to this general category of what he calls “vibratory” practices.

In many Chi Gung systems … there is a technique that deliberately tries to vibrate chi in the body. The breath oscillates rapidly, and chi is vibrated inside bones, tissues, brain, and so forth.

This type of practice may have a number of unpleasant side effects. It can make a person absolutely uncaring, and, as the vibrations get stronger, it can bring on a kind of megalomania, or other mental illnesses. It can also cause physical hallucinations, where sensations of shaking, opening, and closing continue after practice has stopped. And if these practices are continued long enough, they can cause problems in the internal organs. The lungs and liver are the most vulnerable, but the other organs are susceptible as well.

It is quite common in these practices for the chi to be incompletely or irregularly circulated, rather than fully awakened and circulated. When I first saw these vibrating practices in Beijing, it was very obvious that the way they were forcing chi was causing what in India would be called irregularly awakened kundalini.

My medical Chi Gung teacher in Beijing informed me that these types of vibratory practices historically had a high casualty rate. She had worked with cancer patients who had brought their symptoms under control with Chi Gung and then begun vibratory practices, which brought their cancer out of remission, and they returned to the hospital to die. The strong sense of power makes these practices addictive, and like crack, when the crash comes, it is too late.

When I was 21 I was taught a “secret” technique. I was told it was the Chi Gung that was the power behind Tai Chi. I practiced this technique diligently, two hours a day, until I was able to break bones with one slap simply by vibrating my energy. At the same time, I noticed an incredibly seductive feeling of energy in my head, and I began to realize that I was becoming psychotic. The stronger this chi got, the stranger my mind became, and hotter my body felt.

In a particularly raucous martial art incident in Japan, I found I was breaking bones left and right, and was almost unable to stop myself. At this point, I realized this practice was making me crazy, removing compassion from my makeup, and I stopped. When I later returned to Taiwan a few years later, I found I had been practicing the Tsung He form of Fukien White Crane, and that some of the practitioners of this art were either subtly or obviously psychotic. Many of the most humble-seeming masters of this Chi Gung were actually the most dangerous. Power replaced compassion, and while they might use their power for healing, it would be of little concern to them if they accidentally caused damage instead.

So, long story short, qigong seems as prone to quacks, frauds, posturing, and collision of egos as anything else out there. And, the type of qigong that is practiced seems to either attract certain types of people, or create them. Either way, if you look at your teacher and don’t really like what you see, maybe that’s a warning sign.

I dove in to something I knew from the outset was iffy, but I set my concerns aside hoping to get something out of it, only to later have them justified. Ultimately, it wasn’t even the contact with Elijah that made the practice not work for me—I followed the DVD religiously, and it was Clyman’s practices that threw me off.

And in doing the practice, I could see the beginnings of what Frantzis, in the above excerpt, described: power at the cost of compassion.

No thanks. I’m glad to be rid of all of that. Elijah Wilson and Gary Clyman deserve each other. Or at the very least, I have nothing to do with them now.

Still, it was an amusing episode, only made sour by the fact of the loss of a few hundred bucks. But sometimes that’s the price you have to pay for a valuable lesson.