I wrote a brief outline of my history with energy work last year. Here’s an update.

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.”

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Last year I read an interesting, if quirky, work called The Trickster and the Paranormal, by George P. Hansen, an exploration of the perception and reception of paranormal phenomena in Western culture. It introduced me to the work of sociologist Max Weber, and in particular, his concept of charisma.

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.

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Plotting out my identities on a graph in Part 1 helps me to see some of my strengths and weaknesses visually. But the whole concept of the diagram also illuminates some of the blind spots in the way I think about myself—namely, that I feel particularly attached to having successful identities that are clearly labeled. Thus the identities themselves become traps, because being a Healer or a Businessman ultimately means playing that role successfully, rather than engaging in the continual activity of healing or business.

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.

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Crossposted from my stories blog, This Sublime Life, just because I felt like it. It’s a beautiful story.

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.

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