Friday, December 16, 2005

Lies

I am the kind of person that believes in straight talk. I am not much of a polite person. I don't mean I am rude. I am courteous to people. I am not polite in that I do not lie to people to make them feel better. I say whatever I think.

People who lie politely bother me. To them they are doing good. They are saying something to make you feel good. It is a lie though. The good feelings are the result of a lie. Also, so many things go wrong when people tell polite lies. They seem to snowball until the cause some real damage.

I am also an information oriented person. When talking to people, I view it as information exchange. People asking for answers and recieving them. Try doing this with someone who lies. You can't talk to them because you cannot rely on the information they provide. If they want to, they will lie without hesitation. Can you imagine what would happen if you had a calculator that gave you results based on what it thought you wanted to hear?

I have been at Ba Gua a few months by now. I never speak to Mike. After him rebuking me at the restaurant and setting me up to fight the sadist on my first day there so he could check me out, I did not trust him. From my point of view, the safest thing to do was keep my mouth shut and make myself small. Mike could not take issue with me if I never said anything and he never noticed me.

At one point George even mentioned that Mike said I never even said hello to him. It was true. I didn't. You had to know Mike. He was very authoritarian. Because he was always making people guess what he wanted, I always felt like I was on quiksand. Acting like a regular person was a sure way to earn some kind of remark meant to let you know that you were a failure.

I think I mentioned that I had breathing troubles when I joined. I wanted Mike to alleviate the problem by teaching me proper breathing exercises. He ignored my request. Multiple times. After months, I realized he was never going to respond to my request. That too affected my willingness to speak to him. Why speak to someone who ignores what you say? I don't think Mike even acknowledged my request for breathing exercises other than to say "later".

After these few months at Ba Gua, with Mike ignoring my requests for breathing exercises and I felt ignoring me, I was getting desperate. I was still deathly sick. Mike had really made no effort at all at doing anything to cure me. He had taught me some of the Ba Gua forms that everyone else learned. Really that was it. I can hardly believe I am writing that because it seems brand new to me. I can't believe I was there for months and Mike never tried to do anything about my illness.

If you spoke to Mike, he might say he was helping me. He might say he was putting good energy on me. Or he might say he was changing my energy in some way. When I say he did not help me, I mean that Mike never offered any specific exercises to help my specific problems. He did not talk to me about what it was that was wrong with me. He never said anything about seeing him as a doctor for some kind of cure.

Mike might have suggested that I go to the psychologist office. I rejected that mainly because I did not have the money. Also because I had physical health problems, not mental problems. I did not understand that the psychologist office also functioned as a front for what he really did.

There I am, still deathly sick. I still have trouble breathing. I am tense and stiff as a board. I get anxiety when I am around people. Life was truly hell. I became so desperate that I decided to approach one of the other men. I did not feel comfortable talking to Mike, so I decided I would speak to Jeff. He was the second in command. I could tell that he really knew kung fu. He was also a doctor of chinese medicine so I thought that was my best choice.

After class is over, I wait. People are hanging around and talking. I was planning on waiting till everyone cleared out, then approaching Jeff. I did not want an audience. People finally began to drift away. As luck would have it, the sheep were following Jeff. That happened alot. They would follow him to his car just to be near him. I shook my head in dismay at the mindlessness of their actions.

I had no choice. If I was going to speak to Jeff, it would have to be while some of the sheep were around him. I followed Jeff out towards his car, hoping the sheep would leave. No luck. That is when I found out they would literally follow him to his car just to be near him. I walked all the way to his car and the sheep were still there.

I just blurted out my problem. I told Jeff, "I think my other teacher Chris did something to me to make me sick".

I hate to bore people with talking about how sick I was. It is because when I have spoken to people before, they cannot understand why things happened the way they did. My energy was very strong. Becuase I was sick, it was a confused and unfocused kind of energy. When I blurted out my problem to Jeff, it was not just words. He felt the full force of my confused energy. This is a problem because confusing energy can confuse a person. It confused Jeff.

It is not exactly accurate to say confused. It is more accurate to say flustered. My energy was causing his energy to flare up like mine. He was trying to control his energy and pay attention to me simultaneously.

This is when the lie happened.

Jeff told me "Oh. I doubt if he did anything to you". Not understanding what was going on, I pressed the issue. I thought Jeff was saying I was wrong. I told Jeff that at one point in time, Chris had stuck his hand inside of me. I did not know what he did then. Now here I was sick. In my mind, I connected Chris sticking his hand inside of me with the sickness.

Chris had me doing Chi Sau with one of the Asian guys. I was doing the drills when Chris put his hand on my side. He then began to wriggle his hand back and forth. This was disconcerting. I am standing there doing Chi Sau with another person and the instructor is wriggling his hand into my side. Then I started to get scared when I realized that he had gone into or in between the muscles. It was a scary feeling. It felt as if his hand was maybe 4 inches inside of me. He had inserted his hand underneath the latisimuss muscles and worked his way in. It almost felt like he was about to touch my heart.

I explained this to Jeff, then I said, "I think when he did that to me he did something that made me sick like I am". Jeff said no. He said he doubted it. He said it was not a big deal. A massuese could do the same trick with wriggling under muscles. He said I was worried about nothing and I should forget about it.

That was another nail in the coffin of my trust for the group. Jeff was lying to me. He was using his doctor or kung fu or asian culture or whereever it came from attitude. The kind of attitude where you tell a man with cancer that everything is fine and not to worry.

I was angry. I felt Jeff had simply ignored me. Or he had made me look panicky or stupid. The sheep were standing there listening to the entire conversation. I would have respected Jeff more if he had offered some kind of detailed insight, or if he had asked me some probing questions. As it was, it felt like he said what he had to in order to get rid of me so he could get in his car and leave.

I realized as I walked away that I had rattled Jeff. He wanted to get rid of me because I rattled him. He was not frightened of me. He could beat me up easy. He was rattled because my energy was so strong and inescapable. Maybe if I say to you that being around me was like having a chainsaw running right next to you, that will give an idea of what my energy was like. A person could not be comfortable listening to the chainsaw. The chainsaw is so loud that it would be vibrating the person's body as it was operating next to them. That is what my energy does to people.

I made Mike run away from me if you can believe that. ;) 15 year Tai Chi man, 10 years or so Ba Gua and he ran away from me as fast as he could because my energy was so intense. I will have to tell you about that later.

I was disappointed. I respected Jeff as a man who had the drive and intelligence to go to college and be a Dr. To have this man glad hand me until I went away, without ever saying a meaningful word about my health problem, made me completely rethink my opinion of him. I had two choices. Either Jeff could care less about me and wanted to get rid of me. Or Jeff was a young man who did not know what was wrong with me and could not offer advice.

That is the crux of my problem with Jeff, Mike and Ba Gua. It is the reason for the title of the post. Men like Mike and Jeff will lie in order to retain their dominance, authority and status. Jeff could have told me he had no idea what Chris had done to me, or what my health problem was. If he did this, I would no longer respect him. The sheep who were listening would no longer respect him. Besides reassuring me by saying my problems were nothing, he also kept his reputation intact. He did not say "I don't have a clue what is going on with you", which is what he might have said if he was honest.

It did not matter that I was sick. It did not matter that I might have believed Jeff that nothing was wrong with me and stopped looking for a cure. The only thing that mattered was that Jeff emerged from the exchange looking like a doctor and the senior student of the class. I honestly cannot say if that was his motivation. I know my energy flustered him. I can think of no other reason for why he would tell me nothing was wrong and completely disregard everything I said if it was not to protect his own reputation.

If I was not stubborn as a mule, I might have beleived him and stopped looking for some way to alleviate my problems. I probably would have ended up dying if I had accepted his statements.

By the time this event took place, I had been in the weekend classes for months. I had heard Mike talk about dignity and pride and rightousness for week after week. How the kung fu man did what was proper and good. The difference between Mike's advice, and Jeff's lies of convenience was so strong that I blanked it from my mind. I refused to follow my thoughts to their natural conclusion.

Someone was lying. How could Ba Gua be about pride, dignity, integrity etc, when Jeff, the top student, was telling lies of convenience?

I need to say that Jeff was not a bad man. He was not a person who lied maliciously. He was like a supervisor at a company who feels it is his right to lie to the little people under him because he is the supervisor. The supervisor is probably a good man. But he thinks it is his right as supervisor to lie to other people. Jeff, being a doctor and having such high energy that people literally followed him around like sheep, had reached that spot where a person says "I can lie to other people if I want to".

It is a judgement call for the reader if they think people are justified in lying. A case can be made for supervisors or whoever need to lie. I am rational and can understand those arguments. I am also certain that no matter what is said, in the end the people are liars. Nothing they say can be trusted. There is no point in investing time and energy in a relationship with a liar. You can never tell when one of their lies could cause major problems.

I never trusted Jeff again. I talked to him and asked him questions. I never believed what he said 100%. I was always looking for the lies or what it was he was trying to hide from me.

1 Comments:

Blogger xingyiquan5 said...

Liars. They do present a problem. I guess I've told my share, as you point out, always hoping that it was for a good cause. Again, as you point out here, there are lots of reasons to tell a lie. People have insecurities, issues, deep problems that prevent them from doing their best in all situations.

I think you nailed it right, sometimes energy can scare people into acting wrong and just out of convenience.

You are really touching on a lot of the energetic and emotional issues that come up during internal martial arts training. Perhaps in the end its these things that end up being the biggest part of the practice?

-xyq

10:30 AM  

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