Taomeow

Thanks for the link, Sean, looks pretty cool. I know this stuff, although I'm no stranger to that "scratching the surface" feeling, it seems to be inevitable with all those taoist goodies... the more you know, the better you understand how little you know! Below I will post a list of fairly reliable resources -- good luck exploring! I occasionally do the Four Pillars professionally, but have never advertised and all my clients have been word-of-mouth referred. Please PM your info if interested. Cat, I'll be happy to do yours too. Now then... Master Peter Leung http://www.fengshuisos.com/ Director of the Toronto-based Feng Shui Association of Canada, Master Leung is a TCM (Tradition Chinese Medicine) practitioner specializing in the treatment of cancer and chronic diseases. Also, he is a master of and on-line instructor in TCM, feng shui, divination, astrology, and palm and face reading. Master Raymond Lo http://www.raymond-lo.com/ Master Lo offers worldwide professional training courses in feng shui and The Four Pillars of Destiny, a method of Chinese astrology. Lo is the author of seven feng shui books in English and in Chinese. Master Joseph Yu http://www.astro-fengshui.com/ Founder of the Feng Shui Research Center in Toronto, Canada, Master Yu offers on-line and worldwide in-class training courses in feng shui, Chinese astrology (The Four Pillars of Destiny and Zi Wei Dou Shu), and the Yijing. He is the co-author of the second edition to The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feng Shui (Alpha Books, 2002), and has co-authored The Complete Idiot's Guide to the I Ching (Alpha Books, 2001) with Elizabeth Moran. Articles and Software: Feng Shui Living http://www.FengShuiLiving.com The "doorway to feng shui" presents seminars, articles, Four Pillar readings, and feng shui consultations by the most respected feng shui masters worldwide. Maintained by Nancy Pond-Smith, the site offers books, luopans, and many other unique feng shui products. http://www.geocities.com/heluoarticles Serious students of classical feng shui visit his site regularly to download free articles about Xuan Kong feng shui, The Four Pillars of Destiny, and Nine Star Ki. Chinese Astrology Moderated by Ray Langley, this discussion group focuses on Chinese astrology and classical feng shui. Although beginners are welcome, this list is mainly geared toward those with a solid foundation of the aforementioned traditions. Ray offers an extensive archive with many translations of Chinese texts. For more information and to subscribe, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chineseastrology. Fourpillars-Fengshui Moderated by Peter Leung and Nina Wilson, this forum provides instruction and support for students interested in feng shui and The Four Pillars of Destiny. For more information and to subscribe, go to http://yahoo.com/group/fourpillars-fengshui. I Ching Yijing Moderated by Ray Langley, this group encourages discussion about the Yijing. For more information and to subscribe, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IChing_YiJing. Recommended Reading: Classical Five Elements Chinese Astrology Made Easy, by David Twicken. Iuniverse.com, 2000. Feng Shui: The Pillars of Destiny, Master Raymond Lo. Times Books International, Singapore, 1994-2000. Can only be purchased at FengShuiLiving.com. Four Pillars and Oriental Medicine: Celestial Stems, Terrestrial Branches and Five Elements For Heaven, by David Twicken. iuniverse.com, 2000.

Thank you! I just had my nails done...

The hour of birth info is crucial. Even the most basic Four Pillars reading has to take into account four, not three, Pillars of Destiny. Imagine Destiny as a building designed to rest on four pillars... then imagine removing one of the pillars... that's what the Four Pillars reading looks like without the Hour Pillar. It's not just "incomplete" -- it simply crumbles, it has no structural integrity and can't be interpreted correctly. So I can present raw facts but no reading: Oct 26 1960 means the year Pillar is Yang Metal Rat, the month Pillar is Yang Fire Dog, the day Pillar is Yin Fire Pig. Each Pillar is comprised of a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch. The stems in this incomplete reading are predominantly yang; phases of qi predominantly Fire-Metal. The overall Wuxing (Five Phases) picture can't be put together. What else... oh, one more thing I can tell: of the known animals, Rat, Pig and Dog neither form a harmonious relationship with each other nor oppose each other as enemies. They simply coexist in the subject's personality without helping or hindering each other. However, the fourth, unknown, animal might be horse, e.g., rat's enemy sign, or monkey or dragon, rat's friend/ally sign; or it might be snake, pig's enemy, or sheep or rabbit, pig's friend; and so on. Again, the complete picture can't be seen without the Hour Pillar.

It won't load for me... ...however, I found this:

In a dream, everything is also "now." It might be a nice experience to feel as though your experience is "now," but not a good criterion to tell what's real from what's an illusion. I used to windsurf years ago; now I will occasionally have a dream where I'm windsurfing "now." While the dream is going on I can't tell it's not the real "now." (Unless I've been trained to be able to tell, in a dream, that it's a dream.) Moreover. You wake up "now," your heart is pounding, you're drenched in sweat, you're shaking with deep overwhelming emotion (fear? compassion? despair? the thrill of adventure?) -- and you don't know what it is because you had an experience in a dream (not "now," but while you were sleeping!) and now your mind knows not what it was all about, can't remember the dream -- while your body does, and lives in "back then" still, your heart is still pounding like crazy from a "back then" dream, not from sitting in your bed awake and safe "now." Your blood pressure is high, you can measure it with a machine if you like to confirm that your blood is stuck in "back then" and behaves accordingly even if your mind is already in the "now." The blood knows better. There is no "now." The best criterion I know of for telling real experiences from symbolic ones is not based on their subjective immediacy, intensity, or confirmation of their reality by peer review. No. It is one's ability to trace the continuity of an experience to its source and systemically (body too, not just the mind) get to the place where you felt what you're feeling "now" for the very first time. As for the techniques, it's a separate issue, before exploring the techniques one would have to believe that the past and the present are a unity, not of unreal-real but of real-unreal. Your past is real; accepting that is the prerequisite for mastering the difference between real and unreal in the present. So these techniques would be wasted on anyone who thinks of anything their mind, separately from the body, doesn't remember happening as an irrelevance. To the body, as well as to the subtle spirits, it's not an irrelevance, not an illusion, and not even the past. It's current reality. "Back then" is "now" and "always." The world, however, is overwhelmingly inhabited by people whose whole life's story is about disowning their own developmental history, their own past. Both ontogenically and philogenically. For someone invested like this, nothing real is really available no matter how immediate, intense, sanctimonial, or peer-reviewed and accepted as "reality" it might be.

Right. Also men's farts don't stink, they communicate.

Add my didgeridoo to the band. I suck, but I keep trying. Used to play the piano, still can but seldom do. I used to not suck at it, but... years and years without practice... now I do. Bongos. Like to use as percussion instruments anything on hand -- chopsticks against a jar of sake at a Japanese restaurant is one of my favorites. Own two tambourines, a pair of Spanish castagnettes, some bamboo flutes, some gourd rattles... Occasionally play my son's drums when no one is listening.

Sean, maybe when men chat it appears deeper to you than when women do, and more about "something" (cars? electronic toys? baseball?) than when women talk about this or that "nothing" of their choosing? Statistically, men chat way more on the phone and online, don't know about any statistics for in-person small talk, but have personally observed many chatterbox men and many silent women, so I guess your mileage may vary with this criterion. By the way, small talk is propelled by yang energy, not yin, in either sex. Yin is silent and deep to yang's noise and surface manifestations. The left brain hemisphere that uses spoken language is yang in both men and women (it also controls the right side of the body, which is the yang side in charge of most outer-world action in most people), the right brain that communicates in images and responds to nonverbal sound (music and the sounds of nature) and is yin, governing the left side of the body, doesn't even understand spoken language. You're right (and eloquent at that) about small talk often serving the purpose of connecting hearts rather than minds, but there's also other kinds -- quite a few small talkers who aren't interested in either. They chat the way a hen lays eggs, they simply have to do it to let off the pressure of themselves on themselves and disperse it onto other people. This behavior, talk for talk's sake, I've seen closely in both men and women, and it doesn't have the goal of communication behind it, intellectual or emotional or physical; it's self-serving, and other people are merely used as receptacles for the release of this "vaporware," this "word steam." As a sage or a comedian (don't remember which) put it, "A wise man talks because he has something to say; a fool talks because he has to say something." Though people who talk because they "have to" aren't necessarily fools, it's just that they are powered by a surplus of uncultivated and disorganized energy they have little control over or awareness of.

(blush) thank you! Now I feel confident enough to ask you a personal question: what does affenbrot mean?

I had a friend who was always starved for deep and meaningful human contact, something he had been deprived of in his formative years. He used to ask strangers, three minutes into the conversation, "So, what's your biggest passion in life?" Amazingly enough, most people immediately responded in all seriousness, grateful that someone is actually interested. (The trick is to be genuinely interested, and my friend really wanted to know -- wanted to know people, he studied people the way a small child studies butterflies -- in awe and fascination and towards no goal whatsoever). A more common (alas) scenario: you reveal something deep and personal about yourself, thereby creating an "opening," thereby making yourself vulnerable. The other party happens to be one of those people who simply can't resist. He or she puts the information, thoughts, feelings you offered through a mechanically chewing meat grinder of a mind, and then spits out in your face a deformed, mangled version with some ugly label attached to it, declaring triumphantly: "Aha, now I know! This is who you are!" (Just had this happen to me in another thread, for the umptieth time. God how thrilled I am to meet another one of those meat grinders! so rare and precious! ) Wary of them, I never, ever reveal any of my "biggest passion in life" to anyone. Worst come to worst, I prefer small talk, which, if it's too small to interest me at all, I mentally translate into a language I'm learning, which turns a meaningless exchange of platitudes into a useful practice.

"I can rejoice over this perfection and bear witness to it with a clear conscience, for it was not I who invented it or even discovered it. The laws of mathematics are not merely human inventions or creations. Long before there were men on this globe, all the crystals grew within the earth's crust. Then came a day when, for the very first time, a human being perceived one of these glittering fragments of regularity; or maybe he struck against it with his stone ax; it broke away and fell at his feet; then he picked it up and gazed at it lying there in his open hand. And he marveled. There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they simply are; they exist quite independently of us. The most that any man can do is to become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them." -- M.C. Escher

Nice! I do tea meditations regularly.

Oh, and about predicting four children... that's BS. Astrology is a probabilistic science and it deals in odds and chances. Just like the universe it is patterned on. It can predict that you're capable of having four children though, or that you are unlikely to father any. It can predict how you will relate to your children. It can predict whether they will struggle or thrive. And it can teach you how to correct some of the imbalances, while others will be accepted when you see the whole picture, and will no longer upset you. After all, if I dislike being controlled by Metal but find out I have no other source of Water (which Wood direly needs) than what Metal will generate, I will learn to value Metal people in my life who used to aggravate me, because I will know they can't stop trying to control me anymore than they can stop making money!

Joseph Needham, "Civilization and Science in China." Jesus tap-dancing Christ. Elite? Well, you're elite to me if you can write a computer program then, or fix the toilet, 'cause I can't. Your criterion for "elevating to elite class status" seems to be "knowing something" and "being able to do something" that "I" don't know and can't do. Last I checked, knowing something and being able to do something better than the random next guy/gal didn't make anyone into that, but it did make him or her into someone different in that respect from anyone who doesn't know and can't do. Should it aggravate anyone, it is easily (or not so easily) remedied by learning whatever it is. And by no other method. Accusing knowledge of elitism is not gonna turn an honest seeker into a self-aggrandizing fake, nor a defensive ignoramus into an honest seeker. Seek and you shall find, it ain't elitist, it just requires honest work and a divine spark of curiosity -- like everything else.

Sorry, you can't get a good astrological reading if you don't know the time of your birth. The first sign of a good astrologer will be that he or she will refuse to do it. However, as Mal rightfully stated, there's many other methods that are as accurate in gifted AND trained hands. You can get a face reading from a descendant of face readers. Ask for lineage proof. You can get a back reading from a Dragon Gate taoist. This used to be considered the most precise method but one of the emperors ordered confiscation and destruction of all back-reading maps (as well as, at different points in history, a few more of them, I mean emperors, mandated, under penalty of death for disobedience, confiscation and destruction of all taoist books on geography, navigation, biology, physics, biophysics, math, agriculture, astronomy and, yes, astrology -- which is why much of the body of knowledge, the single biggest ever in existence on earth even if only written documents are counted, known as taoist sciences, was taken out of circulation and only remained as secret lineage knowledge preserved by those few who managed to take it and run.) You can get your pulse, tongue, nails, breath, smell, sound of your voice, posture, demeanor, earlobes, irises, bathroom habits, etc., analyzed by a very good OMD who will tell you as much as a good astrologer, more in some areas, less in others. A "very good one" is a rarity, all good things are rare. Look for one trained primarily in TCM (not an MD with TCM on the side and not a "licensed acupuncturist"). Look for one who will be able to tell you at a glance whether you can or cannot sit in full lotus, and whether there's mold in your basement, and whether your bathroom drain is slow, and whether windows in your home are dusty, stuff like that, stuff that will convince you that he or she really sees YOU, not a Rorchard ink blot. I can do some of it, not all of it. I can tell how someone was born, e.g., but not when. A more experienced astrologer than me can figure that out too, but you are not likely to just meet one in Chinatown.

I might be in NJ at the time, and NYC is my old stomping ground... but whatcha gonna do about I feel like teaching you instead of learning from you? By the way, do you speak Cantonese or Mandarin? If Mandarin, I'd love to keep learning that, that's one thing I know I'm fit to learn more than teach. If someone was to create some immersion-learning environment, I'd love that. And also someone to check on my pronunciation -- my first tutor, a Chinese guy who wasn't really a teacher, much less a phonetics expert, would simply roll on the floor laughing from time to time in response to the way I pronounced this or that word, but couldn't quite explain what it is I'm supposed to do in order to get it right.

Well... for starters, I would steer clear of pop astrology of any denomination. Most books you'll find on the subject in, e.g., Barnes & Noble, are full of BS. There's two ways to go about it: learn from a true lineage master, is one; the other one is to learn the whole (or as close to the whole as you can get) of a given ancient system of philosophy-cosmology-practice, be it Chinese or vedic or Mayan, whose part astrology always is, and it will fall into place by itself after a number of years. (Or both. ) One reason I don't want to learn Western astrology is that its cosmology-philosophy has long been disconnected from practice, and besides is a secondary derivative (with many omissions and many parts lost) of the taoist system (sic! -- Romans via Greeks via Egyptians who, via the Great Silk Road, learned it from the Chinese! -- there's not a single Greek philosopher whose name you've heard who didn't study at the university of Alexandria in Egypt, where philosophy and cosmology were often taught by taoists!) Vedic I don't use because "you can't travel the river in two boats by placing one foot in each" (a Chinese proverb). So the system I learned is Chinese astrology, and what convinced me was... 1. Congruency. It naturally and smoothly flows out of the whole taoist body of knowledge, and doesn't conflict with their overall cognitive system -- with their anatomy/physiology, medical science, moral values, empirical practices, the arts, and so on. In other words, a taoist can't reject taoist astrology and still consider herself a taoist anymore than a Christian can reject Jesus Christ and still consider herself a Christian. It's a package, you can take it or leave it, but you can't take some and leave some, you can't leave Jesus out of Christianity and you can't leave taoist astrology out of taoism, it will simply make no sense. 2. Like another poster stated, dead accuracy, to a scary extent. And not because it is based on generalities that would as easily apply to someone else -- no, the opposite: a Chinese astrological reading the real deal is specific enough for you to know it concerns only you and is not applicable to anyone else. Example: my personal 4P revealed to me which Wuxing phases are destined to be those of my other family members. I then calculated theirs -- doing a separate reading for each not predicated on mine in any way -- and it all matched. I got exactly the family my chart says I was destined to get -- not in terms of any psychological wishy-washy descriptions, but in terms of the precise phases of qi they would manifest -- Yin Fire, Yang Fire, Yin Metal, and so on. So, I'm told (by my reading) that since I'm Timely Wood, my children will be Fire. I do my children's charts, and yes, they are. I'm told my husband will be Yin Metal, which means he will always try to control me (Metal controls Wood) but won't really succeed (because it's weak metal against strong wood, in this scenario, like trying to cut down a tree not with an ax but with a pocket knife.) And so on. In other words, there's ways to check the accuracy of the reading by an independent third party -- you can do it in a double-blind controlled way if you like and it will still be kosher. Now of course when it comes to interpreting the results... the true art... this, like any true art, depends on the mastery of the artist. A recipe for fried chicken is not the fried chicken. The kind of chicken you'll get is dependent on the cook, the appetite of the moment, even your personal values (e.g. if you're a vegetarian the cook's art might be lost on you with that chicken), but if you accept that the chicken is real and the recipe is real and it is indeed possible to combine the two to get something real for dinner as a result, you understand the relationship between the method of astrology and its actual application. (A bad cook can ruin it anytime, a great cook might create a memorable masterpiece... with many possible in-betweens.) 3. When I had the time, I did many readings for many people. The beauty of Chinese astrology is that it is pragmatic and prescriptive -- do this, don't do that, it's not just information, it's know-how. In other words, free will is not thrown out the window, it's just applied in a balanced and productive way (gives one the courage to change things she can change and wisdom to leave things she cannot change alone, and so on). In every single case, when I said, your reading tells you do this don't do that, the response was either, "yes, I've felt this for a long time and am already doing it," or "yes, I've felt this for a long time and now I will do it," or, "yes, I've felt this for a long time but it's too late to do it now." It always made deep personal sense -- and I was never "general," i.e. I could tell one person "stop drinking" and another, "have wine with your dinner," or I could tell one person "move to Seattle" and another, "get the hell out of Seattle." And it always made dead accurate sense to the recipient of the reading.

Intolerant of intolerance of intolerance? Well I'm your gal to intolerate then. I'm completely intolerant of racism, e.g., which is an intolerance toward people of other skin shades and/or cultures. I am completely intolerant of anti-semitism, an intolerance of Jews -- do you extend your intolerance of intolerance toward intolerance of anti-anti-semites? I am intolerant of a lot of intolerances ingrained in our society. Also of condescending attitudes toward "otherness" and especially those coming form socially up toward socially down, from the dominant baboon toward the disenfranchised, disempowered, marginalized, not-to-reckon-with, socially weaker party. Also, of opinions not based on personal investigation. E.g., when someone has thoroughly investigated, diligently studied, practiced for an extended period of time, and rejected because found without merit, any system, be it astrology or the art of slicing soup, I respect that with all my heart. However, if one rejects it without such investigation... then I say he or she is repeating what others, usually also repeaters rather than investigators and empirical users, have said. It upset you that I said people who "don't believe in astrology" are repeaters? Well, if I made a mistake, if you studied it, practiced it, and found without merit, I would have to apologize to you personally. Most people I've met who repeat it didn't though. They are just what I said they are -- repeaters -- so no apology is due. Calling a spade a spade is only insulting to a spade that believes it's a space shuttle.

Cool! I can deliberately change the direction of the Dancing Girl's rotation as many times as I like. (I am willing to reveal the trick but first I want to give everybody a chance to discover it for themselves... It's a neat trick with far-reaching implications...)

Poor you! Then again, the kind of family I come from could not only ridicule you to death but send you to your room with no dinner for the kind of math mistake I made -- so normally I don't freakin' make them, I was never allowed to. (I sent myself to my room with no cheesecake voluntarily when you did what my father always did... just a knee-jerk response. Now I think I'm gonna go ahead and eat it. WTF, you're not my father! ) All right... you're Metal of the West, trigram 7, Dui. In the Later Heaven arrangement, this places you directly against the 3-Zhen of the East, meaning that's your natural balancing force. So feeling that you benefit strongly from your 3-Zhen practice (which is what it is when stripped down to the basics) is fully justified -- indeed, you do; likewise, your pull towards things Eastern is a pull of an opposite that holds a reliable promise of balance for you personally. The remaining 99% of what Chinese astrology knows about you I will save for later. "Whoever knows the tao of the changes and transformations, knows the actions of the gods." -- Ta Chuan

Um... several things. 1. A few people are likely to be shocked by this statement but I'll say it anyway. "Evolved" in the sense "superior" is a meaningless and artificial concept. Every live creature that thrives in its environment long-term (for hundreds of millions of years some of them) is every bit as evolved as it needs to be. Long-term survival, and nothing else, is proof of evolutionary competence -- and even perfection -- if you accept that perfection is whatever requires no further improvements in order to successfully exist on a reliable, durable basis. Evolving is something species do when their environment changes and they find themselves no longer capable of adapting to the change unless they change themselves in order to match the new conditions and meet the new challenges. Is all it is. The glorified evolution of human imagination understood as an inevitable linear progression from "lower" to "higher," from "dumb" to "smart," from "mere beast" to "crown of creation" (meaning "geared towards creating ME, so that I can watch TV") is a modern myth with no basis in reality. Taoists don't buy it; neither do I. 2. Being cold-blooded is neither better nor worse than being warm-blooded. What's worse is to be cold-blooded in an environment that is not friendly to cold-bloodedness (e.g., there's no cold-blooded polar animals -- for a good reason), or to be warm-blooded in an environment that is not friendly to warm-bloodedness (e.g., in the desert, although a few warm-blooded species manage to make their living there -- e.g. by being nocturnal). But of course for purposes of our reptilian thread, the worst thing that can happen is when a cold-blooded species lords over a warm-blooded one. Really sucks for the warm-blooded ones. The opposite scenario, of course, sucks for the cold-blooded ones. But we don't really need to imagine things -- ask all the displaced, hunted to extinction, poisoned, eliminated species removed from existence by us humans (about 150 daily, according to what 85% of biologists believe to be happening) what it's like to be ruled by an alien race that has complete disregard for "inferior" life forms. If reptilians are here to do the same thing to us it would only serve us right, methinks. Of course there's some who assert we only are as lousy as we are in how we treat other species because big bad reptilians have hypnotized us into doing their bidding for them. This might also be true, for all I know. Reptiles do use hypnosis against their victims (know about snakes and mice, or pythons and rabbits?) But in any event, it's a mighty ill-adapted species, homo sapiens of today, and whatever it does to correct the mismatch between its survival goals and its deadly reality, it better come up with fast -- I for one am not sitting there with bated breath in anticipation of a superior civilization that will come rescue us from ourselves, nor the year 2012 when everybody will be upgraded to golden age on autopilot (for what kind of merits, exactly?), nor the kind of old-fashioned buddhist-style enlightenment that will solve all our problems by miraculously turning all of our history "unreal." Yeah. We wish. But I'm not buying any of this... what I am buying is personal responsibility to not get hypnotized... by reptilians, or by the media, or by religious leaders, or by science, technology, "progress," you name it... but I digress from the original question. Sorry.

Um... sorry, that was sloppy of me. I can do basic math. I wasn't doing it though, I looked up the formula on a page dense with numbers and used "whichever" number -- then decided to change it (to simplify the example) and forgot to change the sum. I wouldn't do that if I was doing the real reading, I would double-check the arithmetics of course. However, since "anything I say can't be trusted" because of that, and I'm supposed to "concentrate on enlightenment instead" anyway, and astrology is "mostly a waste of time" in addition -- please disregard.

Oh, I don't disagree at all, athletic is great -- but athletic the way, e.g., I remember being that at age, say, 7 or 8, when running all day, climbing trees, biking, swimming, just having no reason in my bones to sit still didn't harm me one bit. That's because athleticism that comes from the spontaneous joy of movement is never spending more than you can afford to spend. It is quite naturally and smoothly regulated by your internal "coaches" -- your feelings, senses, emotions, or in TCM terms, your Po. Not so when one decides in the head to work towards accomplishing an athletic goal -- e.g., running a marathon, doing cardio towards the latest medical fad's idea of health or mass media's, of beauty. This is the kind of decision that doesn't come from the spontaneous joy of movement, and the internal coaches are summarily fired, people just ignore what their bodies are telling them and are forcing the latter to do what the head has decided, "it's for your own good, body, so why don't you just shut up and obey!" Of course if one's resources of qi and jing are sufficient, either because they are backed up by specific good practice or because one got plenty at birth and hasn't yet lived long and hard enough to dip into them too deeply, there's no harm in doing things athletic towards any other goal than the sheer purposeless joy of movement of a healthy child (and an adult of any age who managed to preserve it.) Also, someone who hasn't moved in a long time will benefit from giving himself/herself any kind of kick to get going -- but this kick is going to have to come from yi anyway! Athletes with an ax to grind, with a goal, an agenda (that is coming from other sources than one's own body asking for the pleasure of movement and competence in that and a sense of suppleness), also have to give themselves a willpower kick to do what they do -- and that's zhi, the kind of will that depletes the Kidneys (and jing...) when used as the source of momentum to get going. In other words, what I'm trying to say is, the inner meaning of movement is the ultimate deciding factor in whether it's going to benefit or harm, you can't judge by external behavior only. Qi is interesting in that it is not unconscious and not meaningless. Qi is the medium and messenger of meaningful change. Changing the size of one's biceps or accommodating the latest fads implanted in one's head by pop culture is seldom meaningful enough for qi to get involved in any useful way... It will resist -- and if one overcomes this resistance with li, it will dwindle. But, by the same token, if it is guided by yi toward a goal qi itself finds meaningful -- then of course it's a different story. As the classics put it, "use the mind of tao, not the human mind" -- and you'll be fine no matter what you do. Qi uses the mind of tao...