Taomeow

I said, "personally, I believe..." -- which means my statement is based on "my experience" and "my understanding," which always and for all purposes suffice for "me" to have and express a "my opinion." I didn't present is as an "authoritative" opinion, and while I may or may not be entitled to an authoritative opinion, I am, at all times, entitled to "my opinion," and if I don't fail to specify it's "my opinion," I believe I'm off the hook. However, if you mean to ask what exactly my experience is that causes me to have such an opinion: for some three years in the past, I worked with clients who have been physically, emotionally, and/or mentally damaged by all manner of new age endeavours. I have seen the damage, have listened to stories of how it came about, and have helped people undo the damage. Maybe. Here in Southern California, I see more people who, at one point or another in their lives, or currently, did or do this or that type of meditation, than anywhere else. However, after having lived on three continents, I submit they are "en masse" the most shallow, superficial, and spiritually fast-asleep bunch I've ever encountered anywhere. Maybe. Taoists (or at least those who don't belie the name) believe in the absolute relevance, every step of the way, of something I call developmental history, both personal and universal. Buddhists may or may not believe that their "self is entirely false," but I know for a fact that eliminating from consciousness things you don't know about yourself (by separating your "self" from some purported "non-self" that is bigger-better and throwing it into some universal garbage bin for "discarded selves" -- which I am yet to understand where they put exactly in their cosmology) is a ubiquitous defense mechanism , and it doesn't matter whether people resorting to it call themselves Buddhists or Christians or atheists or taoists -- in every case, the only "entirely false" identity or non-identity, self or non-self, is one put together by means of defensive ideation. The motivation for "discarding the self without knowing it" may seem philosophically wise or morally noble, but the true reason for the denial of "self" is mortal fear of knowing how exactly one's developmental history has shaped one into what one is or "isn't" today. The Way is the way of courage though, not of escapist denial, not of running scared from who you are on the basis of this entity's "unreality." "Know thyself" is a call for courage, not for self-aggrandation. Tao Te Ching is "The Way of Power," and true power needs no props from self-aggrandation of a "false self" -- but it is the powerful way of courageous self-knowledge, not the escape route to some blissful self-ignorance. At least that's what I've been able to discern so far.

I recommend the book by Deng Ming-Dao titled The Wandering Taoist. The protagonist's early years in a traditional setting of a rigorous monastic taoist school could give you an idea of "what to do when" in your own cultivation. He is shown being trained in physical, martial, and academic disciplines for several years, getting his body and his mind in a strong and supple shape before he is allowed to undertake his first-ever meditation. Personally, I believe it is the only right way to go about it. Meditation is a high level cultivation skill which has been sold to the public only recently as something simple and available to everyone at any time. Most people who think they mediate are really using various "relaxation techniques," which is not a bad thing of course but is just about as relevant for true meditation (that can only happen to a prepared, healed and strengthened bodymind) as being able to climb a flight of stairs is to being able to climb Mount Everest. Meditation is this level of skill; mistaking it for a relaxing stroll into "a peaceful mind" is common, and overwhelmingly irrelevant. For some reason, people who would never think they can scale Mount Everest without years of thorough preparation of the body and the mind often believe they are perfectly ready to scale a much higher summit, that of spiritual "otherworldliness," "enlightenment," "perfection-nondecay-immortality" anytime they have a few minutes to spare. Far out. So my advice, should you care to consider it, would be to concentrate your every effort on procuring an impeccably healthy, strong, supple body and an academically unsurpassed, competent mind at this time in your life, and forget all about other kinds of cultivation -- these are for later, when your will and your inner strength have been seasoned to a truly meditation-worthy shape. Do not sacrifice sleep; try to make the healthiest nutritional choices you can under the circumstances; temper your yi (reality-shaping intent) and learn to be guided by conscious intent in everything you do, focusing it on exactly the thing you are doing. Don't try to tie down your mind, something a great martial hero of 16th century Japan, Munenori, likened to "chaining a cat, a most horrible thing to do." Let it roam free... there's things for it to explore, the main one being yourself. Know thyself. Know who you are before you set out to modify this entity, know who you really are before attempting to become someone else. Good luck!

Hear hear! 'tis the truth. This is exactly why Laoists (and all "real," not pop, taoists are ideologically Laoists, Tao Te Ching being the ONLY taoist source of "ideological correctness" equally recognized and revered by ALL taoist schools and sects) -- this is exactly why they start out by recognizing the existence of this ancient imbalance already all-pervasive in the human "civilized" world, and focus on ways to correct it. "Know the male but keep the female." "I nourish at the Great Mother's breast" (not the Father In Heaven's barren nipple that nourishes Indo-European yang-skewed religions and ideologies). Our pop taoists are mostly Christians gone bad, but not so bad as to abandon the false-yang ideation they sucked in as infants with Father's imaginary "ideal," aka male, milk. Authentic taoism was, for millennia, the only ideology that had nothing bad to say about the woman and didn't discriminate against her either in ideation or in application. A taoist abbess who invented the martial art known today as Wing Chun or a taoist immortal female Sun Bu-er who invented dantien breathing are every bit as revered today by "real taoists" as they are ignored by "pop taoists" (who actually still haven't outgrown Father In Heaven's tit if you ask me...)

Pietro, if you want recipes, start a thread, I'll contribute. And no, I don't feel attacked, anymore than when I stub my toe chancing upon a brick in the dark alley. Nor do I feel like attacking, although a brief temptation was there... attacking not you, of course! -- but the demon of dumbing-down, heart-removing, penis-softening old-fashioned misogynistic machismo that possesses a few perfectly nice guys stuck in a loving embrace with him in a closet -- wherefrom I would liberate them by meticulously tearing the demon limb from twitching limb and leaving the cold demonic corpse behind in the dark abandoned closet where it belongs while letting the poor imprisoned guy out into the light -- if I had the time. Which alas I don't, so I'll have to leave it all at the recipes level, see you there!

Um... I'm sure men, being all-around superior, can cook on the internet, but my poor lil' dumb-redhead Mensa IQ is not enough to figure out how. If only I had those extra 4 points Vortex says could be mine if I was a man! Sigh... Oh, and I thought I was only supposed to have penis envy, I forgot about the IQ envy! Now with the penis it's really easy, all I need to do is remember to envy about 50% of earth's population who are all blessed with one while the other 50% to which I shamefully belong are cursed with none. This one is a no-brainer, even for a dumb redhead. But the IQ thing is crushing my neocortex! Let's see... if I score in the top 0.2% of the earth's population, am a woman, and am therefore supposed to score lower than 50% of the said population... no, it's reeeeeally too much for my inferior cognitive abilities. Help, O ye mighty Knights In Shining Armor! Damsel in distress!! Then again, I can send you a sample of a non-perishable culinary masterpiece via snail mail -- do you like Glass Strawberries? the ones that retain their shape but turn into luminous rubies in a preserve I learned to make from... oh no, from my grandmother, a woman! no, this won't work, because if you find it's really good you'll probably say a man cooked it and I'm lying to you that I did. So... no snail mail either... Now what am I to do?.. Maybe I can transmit my Wild Mushrooms-stuffed potatoes via my Fragrance-Emitting Qigong in the form of pure qi, can you open your meridians to receive it? I'll be sending a few items down the Stomach meridian, one up the Heart meridian, one up the Lungs meridian and one to circle the Spleen, and please let me know if you want a warming, cooling, neutral, or fiery-hot version. This will only work if you set your Digestive Fire on "high" and align the mingmen point with the North Pole Star and offer a bite to the Jade Emperor. If the Jade Emperor can taste my cooking and approves of it, he will nod three times, and then you will be able to taste it too. OK... if he doesn't nod... what am I gonna do?.. Go down in history as a TV dinner eater and a liar. Mercy me!

Vortex, how come out of the One Thousand Wealthiest People in the USA, 999 are men and 1 (Oprah) is a woman? "Abuse" is not what you see on TV for which the solution offered is "shelters for battered women." Your mother and grandmother were treated very well. Great. Mine had to live through wars unleashed by men, lose husbands and children to concentration camps that were men's business ventures and men's political work; drop out of med school because of pregnancy (grandmother), throw away the "most talented mathematician I've met in all of my career" (a letter to my mother from her old math professor) and work as "something or other now pregnant and later wiping snotty noses instead of working" (my mother's boss a couple years later), work night shifts with infants at home, and no, they weren't shelter-worthy abused... they were abused by default by the set-up offered by society from the start. A man-made set-up, not a woman-made one. What's your take on Chinese women with crippled legs -- bound feet -- the practice existed for about a thousand years, and it was supposedly the "mothers" who did it to the daughters -- ever wondered why? When asked, they responded, oh, but the girl won't be able to marry if her legs aren't bound. OK. Won't be able to marry, what's the big deal? The big deal is, it just so happened that for a thousand years, you could be either a peasant girl working eighteen hours a day every day, or a member of the aristocracy having no access to any income of your own other than through your husband. And the husband won't take you if you're not crippled. It was considered 'lowly and unfeminine' to have natural feet. For a thousand years. Femininity as defined by men, insane men at that. Anyway... it's not a short-post kind of a conversation, so I better quit while I'm ahead. Just don't you even think of slapping me with the label you think of as defining something despicable -- a "feminist" -- 'cause my single most favorite human being in the world is my son, my nail polish is blood red, my martial skills are modest but far from nonexistent, my cooking skills are bordering on sublime, and I've studied quantum mechanics and can knit too, and I am a heterosexual female with zero interest in being any other way, and whether any of the above or all of the above make me a "feminist" I don't know, but surely the world has been yang-skewed long enough for me to notice, 'cause I am very VERY aware of the kind of world I'm looking at.

A mother can do a lot of damage. A miserable woman (whether she's aware of her misery or not) will make her son miserable whether she wants to or not. Misery is transmitted through the umbilical cord, and if she's carrying you AND the ages-old, billions-of-tons-heavy burden of "the way 'civilized' society treats women" in her belly simultaneously, you get your share of the burden on autopilot. Once you're born, you'll get more of it -- she doesn't have to "do it to you," it has been done, by, ahem, men in charge. That's why ages-old abuse of women is the everlasting source of miserable men. The only proof that women are not being abused, exploited, mistreated and physically and spiritually demolished would be happy, healthy, balanced men everywhere. The sons of the happy, healthy, balanced mothers. If that's who you meet every step of the way when you walk out the door, then we're all in tip-top shape.

If you were to think of it in Western terms (something even most people in the "East" have been trained to do in the past century), the difference would be between "inherited genetic information" and "acquired life experience." You are born a mammal rather than an insect, a homo sapiens rather than a chimp, a male rather than a female, with blue eyes rather than brown, with siblings before you rather than being the first-born child, with a grandmother who was starving in a disastrous famine at the time she conceived your father, with blood type O positive that was interacting with your pregnant mother's B positive blood type (giving you, among other things, twice the odds to develop diabetes later in life compared to an O type child of an O type mother or a B type child of a B type mother), with white skin and a gene that makes it possible for you to transmit hemophilia to your male grandchild rather than black skin and a gene for possible sickle-sell anemia, and so on. All of it is jing, is written in the stars, is reality's memory (tao's memory is the way I think about it), and constitutes about 60 percent of the overall possibilities and impossibilities of your life which neither you, nor anyone else, can change. Now the remaining 40 percent is under control (from the start of your postnatal existence) by your parents, doctors, circumstances, and later (and contingent on what the former have already done for you or to you early in your development), your own. Taking "what they did for you or to you early on" as another 20 percent of the equasion, we arrive at the classic Chinese astrology's very realistic number: your own control extends to about 20 percent of everything that will ever happen to you. This 20% playing field of space-time events is your personal qi-shen territory. So to answer the original question -- do qigong parents have healthier kids? -- I would say, they have a 20% chance to have kids about 10% healthier than average, but this isn't guaranteed. By the way, childhood vaccinations is one thing that interferes with jing, since the antibodies artificially created in the parents have been found to be inheritable even in the third generation. So your child and your grandchild can both develop a "genetic disease" because of the shots you received. All prenatal procedures common today -- ultrasonic diagnostics, epidurals, hormonal interventions during pregnancy and labor, etc. -- interfere with jing. A male child of a woman who has received a course of female hormones during pregnancy (something often done to prevent a spontaneous abortion) may fail to identify himself as distinctly male later in life, and will believe, e.g., that being gay is something natural for him, and indeed it will be, in the sense that the "choice" has been made prenatally... but because it came in fact from a pill bottle given to his pregnant mother, it's not, strictly speaking, quite as natural as if the pill bottle was absent from the picture. This is jing territory encroaching on one's future qi-shen territory. It happens a lot these days, and more with more mindless erratic man-made interventions into nature. I'd say our power over that 20% of space-time events we are theoretically capable of controlling and shaping is shrinking with every new and "improved" generation.

Nature is complex. Complexity is neither good nor bad; it is nature's modus operandi. Any method that ignores nature's method, whether by being more complex than the latter, or less, is a bad method far as I'm concerned. Sometimes bad, and more often horrible. Here's from the page I'm currently on: "Man is emphatically not part of the nature he objectively describes; he dominates it from the outside. (,,,) The debasement of nature is parallel to the glorification of all that eludes it: God and man." -- Ilya Prigogine (of the Nobel Prize in physics) The "general" taoist method is ganying, harmonious resonance with nature's process. It is not prescriptive as to its simplicity or complexity; its requirement instead is to neither overcomplicate nor oversimplify -- whatever the process, it is what it is, the method has to match the complexity or simplicity of its challenge. Can you simplify prenatal development, e.g.? Can you put together a chicken egg "intuitively?" Another one of my favorite quotes: "Man creates gods by the dozen but has never succeeded in creating a worm..." -- Rousseau So a method simplified enough to create a worm would be the first-ever event I would consider when someone (anyone) would suggest to simplify the method for creating a "realized sage" -- or just a healthy Joe Schmo for that matter.

Because there's no "someone else." Because "someone else" is you. Because we're all slip-sliding on the same huge banana peel, generation after generation. If mom and dad can't do it for one kid, that's too bad for this one kid. But if all moms and dads of the world are unable to do it for every respective kid, and his or her kid is unable to do it for his or her kid, and the next... for thousands of years... that's "the human condition." Who's exempt? Nobody. Tao hasn't been destroyed on Bethelgeuse? Good for them. How does it help a human child whose tao has been destroyed by the human condition of mom and dad whose tao has been destroyed by the human condition of their mom and dad whose tao... ad nauseam? Oh... ideology to the rescue. Every kid can't have food, shelter, safety, freedom, love, but every kid can be taught how to say "tao cannot be destroyed." Or, alternatively, "Jesus saves." Or maybe "Allah akbar." Or maybe "Amitaba, Amitaba." Or maybe "Om mani padme." Or maybe "Shema Isroel." Or maybe "Hare Krishna, hare Rama." Or maybe... ...Or maybe there's a kid who grows up stubborn enough to want to say "screw that, where's food, shelter, safety, freedom, love for the human child, for the human being?" instead. (That would be me.) We've been getting by on this ability to avoid calling a spade a spade since time immemorial courtesy of ideological constructs whose main purpose is to teach us how to look at a broken spade and declare it's not broken without batting an eyelid. I prefer to mend the broken spade instead. I believe being able to actually see a broken spade for a broken spade and stop looking at it through a make-believe "mending" lens of ideology -- any ideology -- is the prerequisite to its first and only chance to ever become whole. Also sprach Taomeow.

My list of the normal human needs goes, food, shelter, safety, freedom, love. This explains why we are "dissatisfied" -- most children start their lives without some, one or several, or all, of these normal natural needs ever being met. So they grow up to keep trying to get "now" what they didn't get "then" in this or that shape or form. The shape or form these attempts invariably take, and have been for the past fifteen thousand years or so, is religion, ideology, slavery, and war. What's there to be dissatisfied with? Oh... only "the human condition." Only what the sages of old called "in the human world, tao has been destroyed." The only practice that makes sense to me starts out with the premise of abnormality of the human condition in general and one's own abnormal developmental history in particular. (What biologist Konrad Lorenz once called "the abnormal and pathological process of domestication of humans.") Whenever anyone tells me things are mighty fine as is, I am always compelled to ask them to show me one child to whom they've managed to give food, shelter, safety, freedom, and love. So far, no takers.

Far as I know, they speak Cantonese in Shaolin (which they pronounce Siu Lum Kuen) and in Chen Village. Shaolin is a Buddhist monastery in the Mahayana tradition... not that they will shoo a taoist away with a Plum Blossom Shaft or anything, but just in case... Chen Village is a place involved in some political turmoil or other lately, so I've heard. They used to be dirt poor... a local proverb went, "When dead, the worst is the devil under the earth, when alive, the worst is the fields of Chen Village." With new prosperity came modern-style corruption, so I'm not sure what you will find. I'd be curious to know. They speak Mandarin in Beijing and Taiwan. Wudang monastery -- which one? There used to be many (hundreds), do you know what the situation is today? Since they appointed Communist Party officials to serve as taoist priests, the latter are likely to speak Mandarin...

:)

Um... back to the original question? "Non-ordinary and real" experiences I had caused me to start looking for an "ordinary and rational" explanation. I found it in taoism and was ever so happy when I did. I danced and danced! The non-ordinary thingie turned out to have a name -- qi. It turned out to have properties, qualities, directions, behaviors well explored and documented thousands of years before I was born. I danced when I discovered that! Before I did, I was trying to document and analyze my experiences the left-brain way (the way I was trained to) -- drawing diagrams, arrows pointing here, arrows pointing there, words struggling to express perceptions, words like "incoming force" and "outgoing acceptance" and "sideways rejection" and "cyclic flare-ups" -- and pictures of numbers coming alive, a zero compressed on both sides turning into a 1, a 1 pushed sideways by a "right-left interaction" turning into a 2, a 2 turned upside down by the "upside-downing force" giving a 5... I had pages and pages of these attempts to reinvent taoist sciences of yin-yang, qi, wuxing, bagua, ganying... and then I discovered it's all been done, I don't have to do it from scratch, it's there, it's real, non-ordinary and well-explored by the "non-ordinarinauts" who went before. Oh boy. I was soooo happy.

Hi Pat, I once had a chance to ask a very amazing FS master, a traditionalist who doesn't write books, has trained only a total of ten students in thirty years, and makes her living as a FS adviser to Asian governments, the same question -- what's the most important aspect to maintain? She said, Unclutter and keep your house clean. The colors you mentioned are the least of your concerns. This year, place a piece of red paper in the NW corner of your house, and that's as far as you need to go with color remedies. If you want to research FS from books, try avoiding Lilian Too, Lin Yun, Sarah Rossbach and all their clones and anyone who calls their feng shui Black Hat Buddhist or Black Sect Buddhist. There's no buddhists aware of such a sect, and definitely no genuine FS masters. However, these guys are the ones who brought "instant McFeng Shui" to the West, and since the West always falls for the get-rich-fast, get-enlightened-faster scams while having no patience with the real thing, that's what 95% of all "feng shui" out there is about. Caveat emptor. Eva Wong has written a good FS guide but it is rather dry and may be somewhat difficult for a beginner. An unexpectedly decent source under a sadly lousy name, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feng Shui," second edition, by Elizabeth Moran and Val Biktashev, would be a good start. Val Biktashev, my Altai compatriot, is one of those Asian Russians who look Chinese but are actually descendants of the Siberian peoples the Chinese are descended from. Far as I can tell, his knowledge may be from some ancient lineage, it feels solid...

The universe is fussy. Feng shui emulates that. Here's a true story for you to ponder. My husband was looking for a new job. He got three offers. The financially best one was someplace where I figured, with my FS calculations, it would be absolutely disastrous. I placed some FS remedies in his room, against his disbelief and resistance. The best-offer people suddenly lost their enthusiasm to have him and started dragging their feet. So instead of going to work with them, he took another, "second-best" offer. The first-choice place was located on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center, and the events took place a few days before 9-11. "Real" FS is very complicated, pop FS is not worth bothering with, since it is quite completely bogus and useless. Since real FS deals in space-time aspects of qi, I view it as the rocket science of taoism -- something it's not worth having "opinions" about. Either study it (making damn sure you haven't been saddled with one of the pop FS versions, which sadly but predictably constitute 95% of "everything out there"), or don't -- but approach it as something that merits an opinion roughly to the same extent quantum mechanics merits an opinion: i.e. you don't ask an accountant or a lawyer, or your hairdresser, or a random pedestrian in the street. You ask a physicist, preferably one who's been tweaking with it for a few decades. And then if you don't believe what she tells you, study it yourself to see whether she's right or wrong. You either take the expert's word, or become one yourself -- either one would be the only reason for having an opinion on the subject. That's the deal with FS too, far as I've been able to discern.

No, no, no! You didn't! The ones who remain stuck with the illusion of an accomplishment, of "having arrived," are the only ones who fail. Rethinking your path is the step in the right direction -- having the honesty and courage to abandon it despite "all the hard work" if it proved to be a dead end is another one -- and it happened to the best, I am not aware of even one true sage who didn't have his or her moments, days, months, years of doubt and disillusionment. On a smaller-than-true-sage scale, my humble experience has been exactly the same. You can't begin to imagine how many times I was utterly convinced of "the way" only to exclaim, a few years down the road, "what an idiot I have been!" Long as you can do that, you never fail. Tao smiles and shows you... a hint, a clue... she gives none to the "I'm good enough no matter what I do and no matter what I believe" folks, only to the ones who go, "where did I go wrong?" 'cause, you know, if one is satisfied "as is," she won't bother helping, it's the NEED FOR TRUTH that resonates (ganying) with tao's offering of same... not this very second, usually, not "on demand" -- but eventually... she does. At least that's what she typically did for me sometime after another "what an idiot I was" entry I'd file in her database for kind consideration... She would go, "yeah, that's exactly right, you were an idiot..." ...and help.

Am not. You quoted my feng shui entry in its entirety and responded to that, didn't you? This looked for every purpose like a standard forum way to juxtapose approaches. Was it not? Not even a question mark, huh? U sure I'm "defensive?" I prefer to call my attitude "informed and opinionated." Here's why: if there's anyone or anything I was defending, it's Chinese culture, the art and science of feng shui in particular, and taoist practices in general. This doesn't make me "defensive," since the meaning of the word, aside from being only usable either in a professional psychotherapeutic setting or in a passive-aggressive attack, is not "defending what you respect when someone fails or refuses to see its merits" at all. Fu sheng wu liang tianzun. (May you be blessed without measure by the countless taoist deities.)

Yeah, apparently poor unsteady taoist masters had to make do with whatever their lil' unsteady minds had learned from their uncentered immortal sages, while real wisdom was centered altogether elsewhere. Some call it cultural colonialism. I do, for one. What's your name for "feeling a priori superior to a complex system of traditional knowledge you don't bother to learn?"

Nice. So... classic feng shui is six thousand years of useless pursuits by the uncentered and the unsteady?

I use the form/compass feng shui. Assessing a landscape, a building, or a room for all its energies instantly and precisely (down to the "killer lines" which are only half a degree wide) is a no-brainer if you know your gua, have a luopan, remember what Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch we're currently in, know the Pillars of the month, day and hour, the current Flying Stars, the whereabouts of the Grand Duke Jupiter and what kind of a ruler he is this year... and have studied and practiced for a minimum of a bunch of years, which has scratched the surface of it ever so slightly. I meet the above requirements and therefore I usually know the best spot to pick, whether for taiji or at a restaurant or on the face of the Earth... provided it's available. Now a higher skill is to "make it available" -- but by then one might be a realized enough being to just give it to someone else...

I would start out by getting a superior quality steak. If you've been abstaining from meat all these years, take just a little bit of it for starters, take it with some proteolytic digestive enzymes, and keep doing it till your body remembers how to produce them again. You will feel enlightened in a week -- or in an hour if that's in your destiny. I've seen it happen. I've MADE it happen. I'd love to do it for you too. Don't fast, the time is not right -- you shouldn't do it in late spring, only early spring. Find out what taoist alchemy really is. I recommend to start from scratch by studying the works of Joseph Needham, the most trustworthy authority on the subject of Chinese civilization the English-speaking world has ever produced. Don't do anything "someone told you to do" -- except for the steak! Good luck!

No, it's not the same conditions, ever. Birth is the greatest learning experience of a lifetime, and even twins (like my son and daughter) had different-conditions births. Since it's the first, and most important, life-and-death event that systemically teaches the whole person how to survive an extreme life-and-death stress, the very process that succeeded, whatever it was, will be imprinted as THE response to any future stressful events. In emergency, or in what is subjectively perceived as an emergency, the brain is designed to scan its own history for a solution, for a successful "been there done that, survived it this way, so this way is the way to do it again." (That's the reason people have "all their lives flash before their eyes" in an extreme life-threatening situation.) So whatever one's birth was like will be re-interpreted by "higher" consciousness later but the model, the blueprint, will remain intact, the rest will morph itself to this pattern. So no two children in the same family are ever "like that for no reason" -- there's always a reason. Karma is reality's memory. And reality, no matter what else can be said about it, has never suffered from amnesia -- unlike proponents of assorted ideologies who seem to unconsciously believe they have started existing only at some later date, later than their birth, infancy, and early childhood... perhaps they were made already grown up and "a certain way for no reason" on some assembly line on Mars and launched to Earth in this condition? -- or else how can they possibly explain their flat refusal to seek answers to their assorted existential questions in their own developmental history?..

OfStrangeEons, I really enjoyed your take -- and I think you're one of the few people among those I know to have seen the movie who got the same idea of "choice" out of it that I did. I play with "loopy time" all the time... and every time I do this, I get to a bifurcated place no matter where I go, a place from which there's this but not that way to proceed, or that but not this -- a Choice looming large, you have to make it... and once you've made it, what happens to the other side of the fork in the road, the one you haven't taken? Once you start thinking about it, you realize that you create and destroy worlds this way every moment, or at least often, way often. I have a niece who, the second she graduated from high school, married a Native American she met on the internet, who currently takes good care of their two cats... and this whole arrangement is a house of cards I inadvertently put together, for the niece exists only because once upon a time I introduced my high school girlfriend to my boyfriend's brother... and what would happen to those two Oklahoma kittens if I didn't throw that party many moons ago, thousands of miles away?.. Thanks for noticing! The first three are classics, I didn't make them up. The fourth is my creation, the idea came in a dream...

I would if I could, but I only use a mental image of it now -- however, it helps to have been there done that to get the image right... I had two muddy encounters in the past, one, getting lost in the Bryansk Forest, Belarus, and somehow surrounding myself with a swamp in every direction and spending some six hours there. As a Paul Simon song goes, "I should be depressed, my life is a mess, but I'm having a good time..." -- that's how I felt. The second one, I have pictures of, covered with Dead Sea mud head to toe and wearing nothing but... too bad I had too decent an upbringing to post them! Outdoors without a tent, I wouldn't recommend, not in the wilderness in any event. If you're in the wilderness, there's animals, nocturnal hunters... and mosquitoes... and primordial urge for shelter. I've slept in a tent in the wilderness many times, but never had the desire to abandon it... this would be bad feng shui, far as I know. Of course if someone is after being shaken up in some unexpected and possibly scary way, this could be the way to go.