From Altar Boy to T’ai Chi Chih Instructor, with major detours in between, Jim Hecker has come a long way

Interview with James Hecker

James Hecker has been in New Mexico for several months now. Originally he planned to stay until after the Conference and then return to Florida, but now, along with his companion Govind, is considering making New Mexico home. He has taken on responsibilities at the T’ai Chi Chih Center and has begun classes there as well. He has also just begun the formidable task of managing the Vital Force database. Recently he was hired as assistant manager for a business where he can manifest another of his passions: motorcycles. James has unique experience with the power of the Chi, which he reveals here. We sat down with James at the Center in advance of a Saturday noon practice, which he would be leading.

VFJ: Where were you born, James? Let’s start right with little babyhood.

James: I was born in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland in 1948.

VFJ: So, are you a brat?

James: No, my father was a World War II veteran, so he had access to the naval hospital. And then, when I was about three years old, we moved to Wisconsin and that’s where I grew up — in a little town called Sheboygan. I was a farm boy, way out there in the country. I went to a parochial school, grades 1 through 8. This was a two-room school with eight classes in it, with two nuns teaching the eight classes. I don’t know how many times they moved my desk down into the hall [laughing].

VFJ: Why was that?

James: I don’t remember being that disruptive in class, but evidently I was.

VFJ: How many kids all together?

James: Probably around 40 or 50 kids, about 25 in each classroom.

VFJ: Were those formative years for you? Did they influence your being today?

James: Well, how can you be in a parochial school without having an influence on the way that you think? They have ways of ingraining truths in you that probably the CIA would want to learn [laughs].

VFJ: Are there a couple of those that stayed with you that you had to deprogram yourself, or that were good?

James: All the boys were altar boys, and they belonged to a club called The Knights of the Altar. At some point in my eighth grade year, the nuns decided I wasn’t programming correctly. I had this tendency to ask questions that were out of the catechism. If you ask questions that are not contained in the Baltimore Catechism, then it’s a problem. One day I went into the Knights of the Altar meeting Sr. Grace said, “You’re no longer a member of the Knights of the Altar. You have to go out onto the playground with the girls.” I had never been on the playground with just the girls because for all those years I’d been in Knights of the Altar. I left the classroom and went out to the playground with the girls, and you know what, they liked me out there [laughs]. That was a real eye-opener for an eighth grade boy who was brought up in the country.

VFJ: So why did they like you out there?

James: I don’t know. I was taught manners as most country boys are, so I would hold the water fountain for them, and open the doors for them, and when we played games, I always treated them like girls because they were just a little softer than guys.

VFJ: And you were the only boy among all these girls?

James: Right.

VFJ: You were the only one who got banished to the playground with the girls?

James: Yes.

VFJ: …because you were questioning the authority or the wisdom of the catechism?

James: Not necessarily the wisdom of the catechism… I was questioning the general way that things went. I didn’t succumb to the normal punishments that happened. Once they caught me catching flies and so I had to catch 100 flies around the school and put them piles of 10 on my desk before I could go home.

VFJ: That’s unusual. What were you supposed to learn from that?

James: Not to catch flies, and to pay attention to everything the teacher says.

VFJ: So it wasn’t a matter of killing a sentient being, but rather you weren’t paying attention to their words. You went on to high school then?

James: I went to a public school for high school. I was there till I was a junior, and then we moved to Virginia where I finished up high school.

VFJ: Was that disruptive to your psyche, or were you the type who made friends easily?

James: Actually I’ve always been kind of a loner. I had one friend. The community I moved into was outside Washington, D.C. It was the land of rich people, white board fences, chestnut horses, and grassy knolls.

VFJ: Were you a normal kid in high school?

James: I was very bored with high school.

VFJ: Were you smart?

James: Let’s just say that if you want to go by the tests that they give, yeah I’m smart. But when it comes to blending in with society I’m not so smart. I have a tendency to think beyond the line. It got me in trouble in parochial school and it got me in trouble in high school. In Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, which was very Mid-West, you went to work at Koller Company making sinks, or you went to work on a farm. So I got bored with high school very quickly. When I started asking, “Why do I have to learn algebra? Why should I learn it?” The algebra teacher told me, “Just learn it.” Not good enough for me, I needed to know why, so I didn’t learn it.

VFJ: Were you the only one asking these questions?

James: Yes. This is Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. So again, I was a loner.

VFJ: Why were you the only one?

James: When you are three years old and you start asking why, parents have things to do and they can’t sit down and answer all these questions for children and so they have various ways of telling them to stop asking questions. It’s reinforced by the church, the government, schools, and the society in general. Kids learn to stop asking by the time they’re five years old. I never learned that.

VFJ: So this answer derives from my previous question, were you smart, and you said yeah you were smart with the books, you were bored, but when it came to social integration, you were not smart, and that derived from your always going beyond the line. So you were being socially challenged as a result of your questioning of the social structure…

James: … which is translated as, “Questioning Authority.” In any society, questioning authority is a dangerous thing to do.

VFJ: But then, you joined the Navy. You joined after high school?

James: I joined the Navy while I was in high school.

VFJ: That’s a perfect position to question authority.

James: [laughs] Boot camp will certainly teach you that.

VFJ: There’s a disconnect there. You didn’t actually relate your questioning of authority to how you fit into society. You joined the Navy.

James: I joined the Navy because I come from a family of military men. My family is very proud of the fact that there have been military men in the family since the Revolutionary War. They even have Civil War uniforms and gear and weapons from the old wars. I would spend hours going through war souvenirs that were stored in closets. And I learned how important it was to the family that the men spend time in the military. In 1966 the Vietnam War was really kicking off, and so I went into the Navy.

VFJ: Were you all right with that? I mean, were did you consider going to Canada, or… ?

James: Oh, no, I always thought that the peace sign—the circle with the Y in it—was actually the footprint of the chickens of America.

VFJ: So you were a brave soldier.

James: I went down to join the Marine Corps with three of my friends. I was down in the basement of the courthouse where they did the recruiting, and the four of us were going to join the Marine Corps and go to war together. The Marine Corps guy was sitting there with a real tight-necked tie, and he was sweating because it was probably around 110 degrees before air-conditioning—this was the South—and his armpits were sweating all the way through his tight Marine Corps jacket. Then I looked across the way and here was a Navy guy sitting there with his feet up on the desk in undress whites with a fan blowing on him, and I said I think I’ll go over and check the Navy out. So, I signed up to be a hospital corpsman with the Navy. I also understood that Navy corpsmen went with the Marines, so there was the opportunity to be there where my buddies were going to be, too.

VFJ: And then?

James: I would be going to boot camp the next August instead of starting school so I went back to Wisconsin for those three months. I worked in a cannery, probably the stinkiest job in Sheboygan. My job was to chip hides. I would run a sponge over them and put a buff color on that brought out the grain of the leather. I did that for eight hours and then I went to work as a dishwasher. I got paid but I also got to eat. That was 16 hours a day.

VFJ: Your parents were proud of you for joining the military?

James: I don’t know. My father was probably worried because of the war, and my mother was probably relieved.

VFJ: Duh?

James: She married a Navy man, so it was a connection with what may work.

VFJ: You have siblings?

James: Yes, I have two sisters and brother. I’m the oldest.

VFJ: Did you have to be a model for the younger ones?

James: My father joined the circus when he was nine years old. It was during the Depression. He made the mistake of running away from home, and when he got in contact with them, they told him he should stay away because he had eight brothers and sisters. So at nine years old, he traveled to California and joined the circus. He was a tight-wire walker until he went into the military at 17. So he had actually no experience in family life at all. He didn’t know how to raise kids. He only knew how to work.

VFJ: So, would you say you didn’t have a father figure? Or did you admire the sort of person he was? Or, was he out of the picture?

James: Well, the things that I do and the way that I do them very much reflect the way that I was brought up by him.

VFJ: Well, it sounds like you weren’t brought up by him in the sense that he was clueless.

James: He was clueless as to how to raise children. He had a tendency to treat me like a man when I was very young. He expected me to be a man at about nine years old like he was.

VFJ: Was that all right with you?

James: [Long pause. Then burst out laughing.] I was a nine-year-old boy. Nine-year-old boys don’t want to be men yet.

VFJ: How did he expect you to be a man? Lordy, how many people in the world walk tight ropes when they are children?

James: Not many, probably.

VFJ: Sounds like your childhood was…

James: I learned to work hard.

VFJ: Then the military…

James: I was very strong in boot camp because I was a farm boy. I went to corps school right after boot camp and learned how to be a hospital foreman—a medic. I did really well in that school. It made sense. When I asked them questions, they answered. I did so well that they decided to send me to urology school. I learned to be a lab tech, an x-ray tech, an OR tech, EKG tech and all those other things it takes to work at a hospital as a Navy man.

VFJ: Did you get to practice all those things?

James: Yes. I worked while at school, but the war was not going well, and they needed medics, and so they sent me to Camp Pendleton, CA, for field medical service school where I learned how to be a Marine Corps corpsman. It didn’t make much sense to me. They were teaching me to charge machine guns, hand-to-hand combat and trench warfare. I said this does not make sense; there’s a better way to do it. Of course the drill instructors wouldn’t listen to me; they had years of military training and they knew about how infantries worked. And so I came out of my little tent one night and tied up all the men on watch who had machine guns, and then I set up machine gun nests over the command post. Then I went down and told them, this is the way you do it, you go out at night when they’re not looking and you take their guns and train them on their command post and then nobody has to die. They didn’t like that much. They said we’ve got a place for you and they sent me to Special Forces.

VFJ: …which allowed you to express some of these radical ideas, or which was the punishment for expressing radical ideas.

James: Well, in Special Forces, probably anything that you do that keeps you alive is okay.

VFJ: You had different training there, too?

James: Yeah. [pause] I really don’t want to talk about it. …. After that, I worked at Balboa hospital at the urology clinic in San Diego. I did that for three years and then I got out of the military.

VFJ: How did you NOT go to Vietnam?

James: I had a wife who went nuts and they sent me back home on emergency leave, and then gave me a choice—you can go to Nam, or you can get out and take care of your wife, and I elected to take two years taking care of her. And then I went back in the Navy. I had to pay all the debts and get her set up in a place—she’d been living in a car. For the rest of my time in the military, I always made sure that I took her wherever I was at. I took her to Japan, but I did it with my own money. I was stationed at Okinawa for four years. In 1974 after the war had ended, I was angry because I hadn’t had a chance.

VFJ: So you wanted to go?

James: Well, of course.

VFJ: You’re a strange person, James.

James: Why am I strange? My whole family was warrior. They got their land during the Civil War when they got out. That was their pay, two acres and a mule. Next the men had been in World War II and then the Korean War, and Vietnam was next. That was mine.

VFJ: And so you got out. Seems like there was a lot of confusion right around this time in your life.

James: Well, there was. I wasn’t thinking correctly. I was messed up in the head. I was on a cycle where … most guys when they go to war, they go for for a year and come home. I would go to war for six weeks and come home and I did that for four years.

VFJ: So you couldn’t have readjustment time between these six-week cycles. Were you among people who were doing the same thing?

James: Yes.

VFJ: Were you together doing the same thing?

James: Yes.

VFJ: Did that make it better?

James: What it did was make us an exclusive group. We did everything together.

VFJ: Were they all screwed up in the head like you were all screwed up in the head?

James: Pretty much.

VFJ: Is the human psyche set up to deal with this?

James: No, the human psyche is not set up to deal with that. When you go to a place like Afghanistan, for instance, the whole society is designed to survive in war. And then you come to the United States, people are just walking around the streets, riding on their big wheels. Nobody has any clue what’s going on, so … It separates you from the human race.

VFJ: Are both of these things reality? Afghanistan and goin’ around the United States on your big wheels?

James: For me, the reality was war. And this place, the United States, people don’t understand the reality of the world.

VFJ: I’ve never been in a war, but in this place, I also don’t think is a reality. There’s something really weird about walking around in the U.S.—the kids riding around on their big wheels.

James: It’s different from the whole rest of the world. It is a false reality. And it’s created by the fact that Americans use about 60 percent of the world’s resources and the rest of the world starves with the remainder. So you have a very small part of the world using most of the world’s resources, creating this false reality, and the American people won’t accept it any other way.

VFJ: But doesn’t it drive us crazy?

James: It’s the reason that I teach T’ai Chi Chih, and why I’m so adamant about teaching T’ai Chi Chih. I understand that T’ai Chi Chih is actually an island in the midst of a false reality. And what happens in T’ai Chi Chih classes and TCC students is … the One Reality is energy. At the atomic, at the physical level it doesn’t matter, it’s the one reality that’s standard no matter where you go or what it is you are doing. The level that the Chi or vital force vibrates at is the only real thing. Now think about the level of vibration that happens in warfare. War and violence is a very low level vibrational activity. Low level human vibrational activity is almost the same, no matter what language, country, whether you are rich or poor, low level vibratory activity is almost identical throughout the cultures. T’ai Chi Chih, just with the simple movements that any human can do, your level of energy can be raised so that you can experience and feel the Real. Higher level vibration activity is healthy for human beings, healthy for their mental state, and healthy for their body. So, when I’m teaching T’ai Chi Chih, what I am actually doing is pulling people out of whatever illusion that they are in that has to do with a lower level of vibration and raising it so that they can understand the Real—how energy really works in them, in the world, in the universe. What Justin says, “Man’s voice pervades the universe.” At an energetic level, at a t’ai chi chih level, every human being is connected. If you want one tuning fork to make another tuning fork operate, it has to be a tuning fork of an equal vibrational level. So if you raise people’s vibration and they start taking part in higher vibrational level activities, it affects the entire human race. Even those people in Afghanistan and Iraq—the soldiers, the people in Japan, the zen masters, each time a class does T’ai Chi Chih, a master will know it. They’ll feel it, because it changes the energy.

VFJ: That’s profound—going from the unreal to the real through T’ai Chi Chih. Where did you get that breakthrough?

James: I found this out in prison. I was programmed, as you know, by the military, and so when somebody pulled a gun on me, I did what was natural. And the guy died. So I went to prison for second-degree murder. In California there’s no tolerance as far as murder goes. While I was in prison, I sat in the chow hall. I would always sit down at a table and I would watch the line of men coming in, trying to find a common denominator. Why do men come to prison? I know why I came to prison. You’re allowed to do it over there as long as it’s not over here. They will separate you, which they did. And the fact was that when I got into prison, I found out that I had a lot of Special Forces buddies in there. Force Recon is a very exclusive unit. There were guys from the Second World War, from the OSS— Office of Strategic Services. There were Force Recon guys from the Korean War, from the Vietnam War and there were Force Recon guys from Desert Storm.

VFJ: This is…

James: … the way it is in this reality. I knew the common denominator between me and the guys, but there were rich people, people of every race, there were poor people. In prison, there is a cross-cut of society. It’s only one percent of society, but in that one percent contains everyone in society from mobsters to business moguls, all together. And I watched them come through the line. Literally for 10 years I watched this, and wondered what the common denominator was. Then one day out of nowhere it occurred to me. There was this new thing called quantum physics. I was reading all the books I could find on everything. I got my first lesson in physics because I had a reason why, at last [belly laugh]. The reason that people come to prison is because of their level of energy vibration. It’s the lowest in society. And it makes no difference who you are, what it is that you are doing, where you are in the United States, if you vibrate at that level, like any other energy, you are going to be drawn to that vibration. And that vibration is prison.

VFJ: Is that to say that lowest one per cent belongs in prison? Or that’s the only option in a society such as ours?

James: Primarily mothers have decided that people who take part in the behavior at the lowest vibration are a danger to society. So there’s a program set up, and has been since the tribal culture, to separate those people from the tribe, from society, so that society can be safe. So people who are in prison are separated. At a tribal level they were killed or pointed at by a medicine man with a bone and they dropped dead on the spot. And the tribe went on and the tribe was safe.

VFJ: Is the vibrational level predetermined? Or is it some flaw in cultures?

James: Everybody thought the world was flat at one time, and they went on with their lives and they did the best they could. I said if all this that I’ve been practicing for 10 years after I realized it was energy, I started doing experiments with energy with groups of men. Meditation, T’ai Chi Chih was a huge experiment, life skills, changing the life view, Cognitive Reality Restructuring, all together to change perception, and it worked. Along with meditation and t’ai chih chih—unbeatable. Over seven years, I did a thousand men a year, put them through various courses. I could literally feel their energy rise. When they got out of prison, they did not come back. Their energy was too high. They could not come back. Weird things would happen, they would suddenly be thrown out of prison. Early outs, or the courts would change a decision.

VFJ: Out of the blue?

James: Out of the blue. They would be snatched out their cell and they would be out on the street.

VFJ: That’s bizarre.

James: I can’t substantiate this. I couldn’t keep the numbers when I was on the inside, they don’t allow it. I did have a doctor, Dr. Shrum, who did a small study on T’ai Chi Chih. His study showed that the recidivism rate for prisons is on average between 75 and 80 percent. They re-offend or violate their parole and come back in. They display low level energy behavior and they end up back in prison. When the energy was raised, the recidivism rate was only six percent. What’s working here? What I am thinking must be reality. We did 7,000 men and essentially the result was the same every time. What I was saying was, when my energy level gets to a point where I’m above the lowest one percent of society, if I’m vibrating with a critical mass of 11 percent, I’ll walk up to that gate and the gate will open and I will walk out. If that gate doesn’t open, I would walk through it. And if I don’t walk through that gate, the wall will fall down and I’ll walk over it, but I guarantee you I will not be in here if I’m vibrating at a higher level. That’s what I told the men in T’ai Chi Chih, meditation, and life skills. I said I know this is so, I’ve seen 7,000 men go through this. I know this works. Decide where you want to be. Decide. And then they’d start working. Then it would happen. Then I said the one final test would be me, because I was doing life without the possibility of parole. I was the shooter, I’d actually shot the guy. Essentially the guys were saying to me, “Show me. You’re so sure you can get out, do it. Go through the gate.” I had seen it over and over — Higher level vibration, out of prison. Lower level vibration, in prison. How simple can you get? But it’s got to work across the board. If it doesn’t work across the board, it doesn’t work. Then it’s not real. It’s illusion.

VFJ: Not always. There are parole boards that…

James: That’s what you think, and that’s the illusion. Energy is the Real. It’s the only Real. It’s the particle that we’re all made up. It’s what the universe is made of. It’s the Real, and it vibrates through everything. Either it’s real and it’s energy, or it’s not. So I started doing abnormal amounts of meditation and T’ai Chi Chih. I went to raise my energy level in a system designed to keep your energy level low. They suck every bit of hope out of you and that lowers your energy. If you raise it, you start to no longer fit there. All hell breaks loose. You don’t fit. Now, I know about being a loner, but not fitting energetically can be very dangerous. People vibrating at a lower energy level want you to stay there. Everybody wants to vibrate like a tuning fork. They all want to vibrate together. That’s why we get in circle and we do T’ai Chi Chih, and we all vibrate at the same level. However, people who are not vibrating at that level, it literally repels them. They can’t come through the door. They’re extremely uncomfortable. Justin says, “I define spirituality as identification with the Real.”

VFJ: Did you feel fear?

James: Fear is primary in prison. It’s a way of life in prison. However, vibrating higher brings a lack of fear. People who are victims are vibrating low; they draw in their own circumstances. People who are vibrating higher in prison; people don’t like them around, but in a way you are incredibly safe. I’ve walked through prison riots and didn’t even know it. One time in particular, I was walking to a meditation class and I walked right through the riot and the sergeant pulled me aside after the riot had been quieted and said, did you know you walked right through the center of that? I said right through the center of what? Then one day I found myself standing out in the parking lot. They’d put me on parole. As soon as I got out, the first thing I started doing was T’ai Chi Chih. Then the court said release him from parole. This is the power of the energy. So I wrote the guys on the inside and said why don’t you come out here. Raise your energy. Do your TCC, do your meditation, and you’ll be out here.

VFJ: Because you are a hands-on kind of guy, and you’ve been in environments—military, post-military, prison—low vibrational, have you thought about how TCC might assist people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

James: When I was on the inside I worked with the vets where PTSD is a primary concern, but everybody has a type of post-traumatic stress. It’s ultimate low energy. People have different ways of dealing with it. They buy a lot of stuff. All you have to do is look at all the storage areas that people have for junk that they are not using and never will use. They find ways to chemically suppress the stress of society. They use mind-altering activities to control the traumatic stress that has to do with society. One of those is television. People think they’re normal, but you can see it–their bodies are suffering, organs are shutting down, minds are shutting down. And it’s because of low energy activities, no matter how much money we have. Anybody in society who would do even basic Tai Chi Chih is treating the stress from society. You are going to start healing your body. You’re going to start healing your mind. Do Tai Chi Chih and learn how to identify with the Real.

VFJ: Well, James, I hope you don’t think you’re alone in this huge task.

James: The T’ai Chi Chih community has been supportive right from the beginning. Last year I went to the St. Louis conference. I had only been out for a couple months. The entire community welcomed me in with open arms, which was amazing to me. It made me understand that this is a community of people who put their actions where their mouth is and actually do something.

VFJ: Well, that’s some compliment for us to live up to. It’s been a pleasure, James. Are we done?

James: We’re done. Let’s practice.