I am feeding you

I never believed in energy or acupuncture or chinese medicine or anything else. I was a good little western educated boy who believed in science and technology. Anyone who said anything else was superstitious, just like the TV and my authority figures told me.

The only reason I even became involved in acupuncture was desperation and a friend. This guy at my kung fu school kept at me about how I needed acupuncture. He wouldn't leave it alone. I was rude and dismissive to him. He continued to talk about it. When my health problems became intolerable, I decided I had nothing to lose and finally went to the acupuncturist.

I owe that friend I was rude and dismissive to a debt I can never repay. His name was Mike. He was a real looney tunes kind of guy. That is what everyone thought. That is one of the reasons I was dismissive to him. Yet this looney tunes guy helped me more than any of the "respectable" people I had contact with.

I had been reading books on kung fu all along. I had read about energy and acunpuncture enough that I was familiar with the ideas. I did not understand what the books said about energy. It made no sense to me. I thought most of it was translation problems between asian languages and english.

After I started the acupuncture, I became more open to the idea of energy and grounding and that kind of stuff. By the time I left the school where I was sick, and joined Mike's class, I believed there was such a think as energy, though I didn't really know much about it in a real life hands on way.

As said many times before, Mike would talk to us at the beginning of the weekend classes for an hour or so, then we did our exercises. There were the lunches we attended as a group together and various other group meetings.

I have mentioned how many people were sheep or lemmings. They always had a reason or a problem that required Mike's attention. I had nothing but scorn for these people because they were so pathetic. They were like puppies running to their mother. I think I actually felt angry sometimes. I would get caught in the mass rush of people crowding Mike. I would not go along with the crowd because I thought their behavior was demeaning. Their desires still pulled on me hard enough that resisting them made me angry.

At some point in time, I think it is in the future of this narrative, Mike got angry with me about something or the other. I do not want to discuss the details because it gives away part of the ongoing saga.

Mike looked me square in the face and said "I am feeding you".

I got really angry. Not at what he said, but at his tone. I did not understand what he meant with the words. He did not feed me. I fed myself. I cooked my own dinner every night and ate it. All I really knew was that Mike was saying words to me with anger, derision, contempt, disregard and frustration in his voice. Naturally I felt that did not apply to me. Especially as the words themselves made no sense to me.

What Mike meant was that he was feeding me energy. He was trying to tell me that I wanted to be around him because I wanted his energy. To me, it felt like he said that I was telling lies to him in order to get close to him so I could steal something from him. I was outraged. I consider myself honest to a fault. To have Mike, whom I respected as an accomplished martial artist. A man whom I was looking to for help, to say in that awful tone of voice that I was trying to do bad things to him, was shocking.

Feeding, in essence, was what he did to the entire group. All those lemmings and sheep that always had a reason to go to Mike? It was them that were going to Mike to be fed. They were always bothering the man for foolish or senseless reasons. They were the ones that made up excuses to get close to him.

I think what must have happened was that, after years of this kind of behavior, Mike was getting cynical and unhappy. In fact I know this to be truth as other events to be described will show. Mike was cynical about helping people and cynical about their motives.

What he did is apply the actions and motivations of the majority of the group to me. He accused me of hanging around so he could feed me energy, when in reality it was about 30 of the 35 other group members. Looking back, my claims are easy to verify. You could interview any group member and ask them about me. They would say I was a loner kind of person who always hung back from people. I never crowded Mike or chased after him the way they did. I never acted like a baby bird asking the momma bird, Mike, for food.

When Mike made that accusation against me, it was one of the blocks in our deteriorating relationship. At the time, I had very bad feelings for people that judged me incorrectly. I felt it reflected their abilities. I had put Mike up on a huge pedestal because of his martial arts and chinese medicine abilities. That he could be so totally wrong in his judgement of me knocked that pedestal right out from under my respect.

I am also a person that never forgets anything. I could never forget that Mike thought I was one of the sheep, one of the lemmings, that were always bothering him. I lost trust in him that he could judge me so wrong, then make a hurtful accusation the way he did.

I am the kind of person I would never have a debt to another. If Mike had told me on the first day of class "I am going to feed you energy. That means you are in my debt. You are my slave and you owe me. You will do what I say". I would have walked away.

What I wanted was to be taught to do things on my own. I did not want to be dependent on some man who claimed to be feeding me. If he really was, that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to be taught to feed myself.

Funny thing was, Mike never taught that. Not to me anyways. He never taught me anything about energy generation or anything else. From the outside, it looked like he purposefully did not teach people to be independent, because if they were, why would they pay him?

What Mike was doing was basically peddling drugs. People would come to the class and pay him the $70 or whatever every month. Every weekend, the people would show up and Mike would give them the drugs. He would feed them energy. The people got "high" and were satisfied until the next weekend.

Teaching people to generate energy on their own would be like teaching them to get their own drugs. Or giving them their own drug connection. They would not need Mike anymore for energy.

I still get angry to this day thinking of Mike telling me he was "feeding" me like I was some animal. He was trying to make me feel guilty for something he was doing for me that I was not even aware of. From my perspecitve, even if he was feeding me, I paid good money for it. I paid him money every month. If he really was feeding me, he had nothing to be angry about. He was paid for his troubles.

Not to mention getting angry thinking that this situation was one of the first or few times I had even heard Mike mention energy. I had asked him from time to time about various things I read in books. I recall Mike specifically saying that the old masters never really talked about energy to the students.

If the masters never talk to the students about energy, how can you hold the students responsible for any of their actions? If they do not know about energy, the rules of how it works, and the etiquette for energy in human society, how can you be unhappy with these people when they break rules you never told them about?

The man repsonsible is the master. That is why he is called master. Because he publicly agrees to take on the responsiblity of the people who are under him. If the students fail in some way, it is not the students fault. The master has not fulfilled his responsibilities that he, of his own volition, agreed to accept.