Thursday, December 01, 2005

Does the reader understand about Energy?

I have been feeling like it might be time to cover some basics. In reading over what has happened up to now, I can see that I take many things for granted. If I read the material from the viewpoint of someone happening across this blog, sometimes I get confused. The first thing I want to address is the concept of energy.

All human beings have energy. This energy behaves like the heat from a stove. It comes off of the human body and it can be felt by other people. There are many different types of energy that can be generated and received. I think the most common and familiar energy would be emotional energy.

In the Chinese Medicine view of the world, different emotions are associated with specific organs. Happiness or hate might be associated with the heart for instance. They belive that when a person is feeling one particular emotion or the other, it is as if the internal organ associated with the emotion is giving off energy, just like a stove.

Just like a stove, giving off energy requires fuel of some kind. A wood stove burns wood to produce heat energy. A gas stove burns gas to produce heat energy. Chinese Medicine says that to produce sadness or happiness or other emotions, some type of fuel is being depleted from the associated internal organ.

This idea is crucial to understanding how some Asian people think and behave. When people think about fuel, what is a usual accompanying thought? Fuel efficiency. People want the best fuel efficiency for their car or home heating so they conserve resources.

Asian people believe in not displaying emotions because they want to conserve their resources. They want to keep the emotional energy in the internal organs like storing gas in a tank. That is the one of the reasons some Asian people have a reputation for being reticent.

This applies to this blog in that Dr G was a American Asian. It was part of his heritage to repress his emotions. Then you add to his heritage the training he received from both Chinese medicine and Kung Fu and you have a person who does not believe in letting out any kind of emotion or feeling unless there is a reason for it. Every release of emotion or energy had to be justified for a very good reason.

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Now that we know that people have energy, that they can emit and receive energy, we can talk more about how that knowledge affected the happenings described in this blog.

When normal people interact, they talk to each other, they laugh or smile or interact in some way or another. No one thinks much about what they are doing. Whatever emotion or thought comes to them is what expresses itself in the conversation.

In Dr G's class, nothing was like that. Personal interactions were viewed not as words, information, actions being exchanged between people. Personal interactions were about exchanging energy of one type or another.

For instance. If one person was feeling good, that would mean they had lot's of energy for some reason. They might go around laughing and joking with people. Normal people would think they were laughing at the words of the jokes. What is really happening is that the person with extra energy is giving that energy to the other people. The influx of energy is what makes the person laugh and feel good.

The dark side of this is that a person with some kind of problem is viewed as a person that wants energy. Instead of listening to a person talk about a problem or difficulty, what was really going on was this person was asking or begging for energy. I feel dirty even writing that down.

That was the attitude of Dr G and other people in the class. I had never heard of, or been exposed to, this type of thinking in my life. The differences in world views is responsible for many of the situations that arose.

I would talk to Dr G thinking I was using words, voice inflection and gestures to communicate my needs. I felt that I was asking for a verbal response. I felt I was asking for information to fufill a need. In my mind, I honestly believed that if I had the verbal words containing the information I needed, then I would have what I wanted.

From Dr G's viewpoint, I was a person who was cajoling him or bribing him or selling him on why he should give me energy. Dr G had energy and I was a person who would do anything to get it. I was a kind of dirty person or person to be avoided because I was demanding something Dr G had.

It was very hard to miss Dr G's attitude. When you honestly believe that a person is trying to take something away from you, and you need to push them away, it is obvious what is happening. I would be saying my words asking for verbal information. Then I would see Dr G's body language and words treating me as if I as some kind of low person that he needed to get rid of. From my perpective, that attitude was rude and unwarranted. Dr G was my instructor. I was asking for verbal information. It was his duty as the instructor to try to provide me with verbal instruction.

It was not until much much later that Dr G plainly and bluntly told me to my face what I have related above. That I was a mindless kind of person who was chasing after Dr G for energy, not verbal information. My blood boils just thinking of it. Dr G was wrong. He was right, but he was wrong. I knew nothing about energy. I could have been after him for energy at one time or another. In my heart though, and in my head, I honestly believed that I wanted verbal information. If he would have replied to my questions, I would have walked away. Because he never answered my questions, I was unable to prove my innocence of the accusations he leveld against me. That I was mindlessly after his energy.

This behavior was not limited to me. Once I became aware of how Dr G acted, I could see the same type of reactions with other people. Dr G would literally run away from people, hold them at arm's length, do anything he could to redirect or distract them so they would go away. He truly believed that every person he came in contact with was trying to steal his energy.

I think you can see how this type of attitude could easily lead to paranoid behavior. Now that I am more aware of how life works, I understand Dr G's behavior. I can see why he avoided people the way he did. I can also see that he misjudged people because he did indeed become paranoid. He refused to beleive a person would have any motive to approach him other than to take his energy.

On some level, all human interactions really are like this. Dr G is correct that all human personal interactions are about some kind of energy. It was Dr G's belief that all people were malicious about this that bothered me. Mostly because he misjudged me of course. If I had understood his way of thinking, being the person I am, I would never have talked to him for the rest of our relationship. To prove that I was there to learn. Not to steal anything from him thru dishonest means.

Dr G, being the superior and arrogant kind of person he was, could not believe that he would make a mistake in judging the motives of another. This was bad from the perspective of him being a Dr. I personally took it very hard when Dr G, the guy who was supposed to help me with my health problems, a person I wanted to trust and feel close to, let me know he thought I was a person who needed to be pushed away. A person who was trying to take things that did not belong to him. An unpleasant person to be around.

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I think that is it. All people emit and receive energy. There are various kinds of energy. The most common energies are emotional energy, sadness, hate, happiness etc.

When people interact with each other, they exchange energy. The people do not have to be aware of what is happening for the energy exchange to take place. They can actively deny what is going on. It does not matter. The energy exchange is still going on.

People can maliciously or selfishishly take the energy of others without permission. People can freely and generously give their energy to others.

A person who believes that all personal relationships are energy exchanges will behave completely different from a person who has never heard of energy. The unknowing person will be confused about the motivations of the energy knowledgeable person. This confusion can lead to misjudgements and misunderstandings between both people.

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