karen

Hi mantis, There's a lot that could be said about blood donation from a subtle energy point of view. It can have a weakening effect on the life force, as others have noticed in their own experience. If a person has stagnation, there are safer ways of addressing the imbalance. In theory, blood donations shouldn't be necessary - there are some hospitals where they use normal saline infusions in surgery, because blood volume is all that's necessary. The body makes the rest itself. That avoids the whole problem of foreign proteins. Within 72 hours, the body replaces all the transfused blood with its own, anyway. If a person has a condition in which they have too much iron, then reducing the blood volume can correct that, but it's a very crude way of doing it, and there are better ways. Putting a needle into a vein is a shock to the body on a subtle energy level, even if the person doesn't feel it as a trauma. It's good to take homeopathic Arnica afterward, if you have blood drawn or donate blood. Also, homeopathic China is good for loss of vital fluid, if you feel drained afterward. -Karen

Hi, I had mine all removed a long time ago, by a dentist trained in Hal Huggins' protocol. But I wouldn't do it the same way again. Even though they take precautions in terms of mercury exposure, they're not factoring in the stress to your body of such an invasive procedure. And the composite fillings can be just as harmful, even when the dental materials compatibility testing shows that a person isn't having an immune reaction to them. I would first go to a practitioner who can do bioresonance testing, to see which teeth are under significant stress. For some teeth, it might be best to keep the amalgams in and take remedies to help your body handle them better. A dentist's job is that of a surgeon - even the "hollistic" ones aren't usually looking at the bigger picture of what your body needs. If you're interested in bioresonance testing, you can look for practitioners here: http://www.energy-medicine.info/core/practitioner.html#usa And the Hahnemann Clinic for Heilkunst in Ottawa does this long-distance: http://www.homeopathy.com/clinic Take care, Karen And here's a good resource for finding biological dentists: http://www.iaomt.org/

Re. Lyme, yup, and a low-level chronic form of Lyme is almost epidemic, which will never be diagnosed conventionally as such, but is Lyme nonetheless. Can be removed at any stage with potentized remedies, but requires the guidance of a skilled practitioner.

Yes! The descent of the Logos, the journey we each have to make to embody the truth within us. We can't go up to spirit without that grounding. The new age movement has a lot of people trying to go directly to spirit and getting lost in the ether . Did you see the movie Carnal Knowledge? (I saw it again recently - funny to see Jack Nicholson so young!) His character is frustrated because he can't get carnal knowledge no matter how much sex he has. He's armored, shut down, impotent in the real sense of the word. But his roommate who starts out so awkward and inhibited, ends up finding a real resonant relationship. I see Reich as the primary one to bring out the true meaning of this "cosmic superimposition" as he calls it, especially in his book Cosmic Superimposition and Ether, God and Devil. Of course he's been largely marginalized by mainstream thought. Rudolf Steiner brought it out in terms of thinking - we have to have "carnal knowledge" of ideas in order to bring an idea to life within us, to make it real. Yeah, I often get that fear reaction too, but understanding where it comes from and what it really is, helps. We're all familiar with the kind of codependent sympathy where you just vibe to everyone's frequency and take everything in. But there's a kind of compassion that comes from being connected to one's higher self (through the dynamic pole), where you can resonate with what's going on without putting up a wall of armoring to cut yourself off from the experience. But you don't take in the suffering of the other person. Then the experience is quite real - I don't think I'd feel involved in a movie if there wasn't a sense of reality to it. Some movies are flat for me because they're simply "interesting" in a cerebral way but lack a living reality. What really moves us is Life . I sometimes don't like to see sex in movies because the acting usually reminds me that they're just acting . And when a violent scene is tapping something deeply human, that draws me in. What I don't like is when a living reality is reduced down to a scene that excises out the living quality and just shows the superficial action - then it's ugly to me. -Karen

I think you were right on, asking questions about the consciousness of the observer. Modern science wants to take the observer out of the equation, to not mess up the study , so we're looking at seemingly "objective" effects of things, in a vaccuum. Doesn't make sense. It's a matter of the person's consciousness, what they bring to bear on the experience. I'd say that someone who is healthy is not going to be attracted to a Twinkie. Re. action movies, I used to not be able to watch them, because I was too "sensitive" (meaning neurotic). As I get healthier, I can watch them and "participate" the experience. Being able to participate something is a function of resonance. When you're resonant with a person or idea or experience, it's like a sexual experience where the two come together but you don't lose your individuality in the other. You become one but also two. It's the deeper meaning of what it is to "know" someone or something in the biblical sense . You go into the experience and come out enriched, not assaulted! If a person can't do this, they can feel buffeted by experiences and want to avoid certain kinds of input. Or they're just so heavily armorned that they can watch gory movies or porn without feeling very much, and get the CNS stimulation they crave. A healthy person can enter into all kinds of experience where there is a resonance. Some types of action movies don't interest me because they're not tapping an esthetic quality that resonates. But others like Fight Club get to a truth of human experience, and there's always something resonant about that. I also think that movies have become more relevant for us than they used to, because movement captures the human imagination in a certain way that books don't. Some think that we're just lazier, but I think movies feed something in our consciousness that needs feeding. -Karen

Hi Peregrino, Interesting that you use the word "dynamism," because that's what Reich is about. But the popular meaning of that has been reduced down to a very one-dimensional impulse. Most people no matter how sexually active, have lost connection with the true "dynamis" of their being, which Reich called the Genital Character. But this has to be understood within a context - the polar nature of our being. We have the upper, cosmic pole, and the lower, earth pole. The earth pole is where this dynamic function comes from, and in order to be healthy we need to be grounded there. The trap that many people fall into is activating that lower pole but then getting stuck there, in a materialistic mindset. It's easy to get trapped in matter on one's way down to the root of our being, which is why many people think they can just avoid all that and go straight up to the cosmic pole where everything is light! But without the grounding in the lower pole, it's like half the person is missing, and the experience can't be fulfilling. So, the person who has made it down to the lower pole to activate the dynamis, is the genital character type. That process is a kind of descent, which prepares us for the ascent, up to "full orgastic potency." Theoretically, genital primacy happens at puberty, but many adults even though they can function sexually, haven't actually fully arrived there. The Genital Character type has gone through the developmental process successfully, whereby the individuality (true self) has mastered each stage of development. When this *doesn't* take place completely, then there are excess energies which haven't been transformed into consciousness. That excess energy is neurosis - people are doing a lot of excess, frenzied neurotic activity because they're not fully grounded in that lower pole of their being. Then you see the various developmental blocks at the various stages - ocular, oral, anal, phallic. Character armoring develops in the spaces where the true individuality hasn't taken up its rightful place in the person's consciousness. Nature abhors a vaccuum, so neurotic activity fills in. So the neurotic person can behave in various unhealthy ways. The polarity you describe between overindulgence and inhibition - those behaviors can both be driven by the same principle - the neurotic armoring that is preventing the person from making contact with that lower pole of their being. In other words, a person who isn't grounded in their being could behave politically correct or politically incorrect - there isn't really a fundamental difference. It's not a matter of simply trying to balance that out, as many people try to do. So "better" sex if it's still on that same continuum, isn't ever going to be fulfilling.. it might be more *satisfying* on that continuum but is ultimately going to be frustrated. It's like trying to use a type of fuel that we're not designed to take. We can improve the quality of that fuel (organic soy comes to mind , but still if it's the wrong fuel source, we're not going to get the efficiency until we switch over to a whole different fuel source. And that's about switching from *attraction* which is based in the CNS and comes from the false ego, to *resonance* which is based in the ANS and connected to the higher self. Hope that helps a bit - you might like to read Reich's Character Analysis -Karen

MS is a name given to a group of symptoms, which could have a number of different causes, and usually has several or more interrelated causes. But there are many cases in which artificial sweeteners especially aspartame cause nerve damage that results in MS-like symptoms. So if the person is drinking diet soda, that's the first thing to look at.

The complete system of medicine that Dr. Hahnemann called Heilkunst. It doesn't matter what the conventional system calls the illness, because those names are just abstractions - arbitrary designations to describe symptoms which are only the perceptible effects of disease. They don't reflect the real causes, which can't be perceived by the ordinary senses. That's why modern medicine doesn't cure disease - it's looking for the problem under the streetlamp because they can see better there, even though the problem is located somewhere else. Heilkunst identifies disease according to the real causes, and works on the causative level.

Hi Peregrino, I think what you said about the nervous system is key. The central nervous system and autonomic nervous system form a primordial polarity. When we're stimulating the CNS, a whole cascade of functions results which are quite different than when the ANS is being activated. Anything that activates the CNS without also connecting with the deeper ANS function, is going to be one-sided and imbalanced. There's a completely non-judgmental, scientific way (not mainstream science, but science in the true sense of the word ) of understanding that as an imbalance in which the person can't tap the fullness of their life energy. The CNS activity is outer directed; the ANS activity is inner directed. With CNS alone, you can get satisfaction, but not deep fulfillment, because you're not intimately connected with the other - whether it's a partner or an idea that you're interacting with. The pulsating rhythm of life that Reich called orgone is activated through the ANS. We can't go directly to CNS without passing Go, but we often try to because working with the ANS is more challenging on many levels. Two good sources of research from a western perspective would be Karezza by Alice Bunker Stockham, and Wilhelm Reich's work. Not specifically about porn, but about the CNS/ANS polarity, which I think helps to explain the problem. -Karen

There are a lot of ways to support the lungs by balancing things - moving energy around in various ways. Herbal lung tonics - Avena/Plantago compound by Herbalist & Alchemist is one of many good ones. And Buteyko breathing is an excellent practice. The urge to smoke is sometimes a need to correct a breathing imbalance. That's always good to do in any case, but smoking also creates a different type of energetic disturbance, a trauma that can't be removed by those methods. Since you've smoked before, the disturbance is still there. To target the deeper disturbance, it would be good to use a potentized remedy (what people commonly call homeopathic). If you can find the remedy Tabacum, in a medium potency like 30C, that would be great. And because cigarettes have lots of other stuff in them besides tobacco, the remedy Nux vomica is a great general cleanser, also in a 30C. The lungs are about taking in the fullness of life. Blockages there can be about feeling emotionally smothered or stifled in some way. There can be chronic grief from fear of taking in life energy. This is just a bare outline, but usually when there are lung issues, or someone has lung issues on their mind, they can relate to that in some way. You could try smoking ceremonial herbs if you're feeling drawn to that, but I think the key is to try to understand what is really behind the desire -Karen

Fear is the means of controlling people, and fear mongering plays right into the global elite's agenda. The conspiracy theory community is looking for truth, but gets caught in fear along the way. It takes a lot of work for us as individuals to keep our eyes open and deal with the fear within ourselves. -Karen

Glad you brought this up. Sadly, Aaron died of cancer on Friday morning. His film - America: Freedom to Fascism -Karen

The homeopathic materia medica shows quite a few substances that can have that effect - mostly toxic ones like aconite, barium and snake venom, which a person isn't commonly exposed to at a qigong conference . But also phenols, which many common substances contain - wintergreen, chili peppers, and cannabis to name a few! Or your own state of mind could produce substances with interesting effects. -Karen

Consciousness has free shipping

My bad. I should have mentioned that the article doesn't apply to monkeys! Geminis, maybe half of it applies And really, the idea is awareness, not to make judgments about what's right or wrong. Even wasting time and money isn't necessarily wrong.. and I've done plenty of both. It's more a matter of what you're really after. If you want the short-term experience, like visiting a foreign country and immersing yourself in that culture.. well, actually it might be more fun to just do that . But if you want to do what's best for your health in a deeper way, it takes a bit more than just getting on the bandwagon of the latest/greatest. Just a matter of what you want. -Karen

I'm selling the East West Herb course as described on Michael Tierra's website, www.planetherbs.com. It was a terrific training, integrating TCM, Ayurvedic and western herbalism. Since I'm selling the materials only, that corresponds to the "Community Herb Course." The "Professonal" course includes interaction with a teacher and costs more. But the 3-book core text is the same for both. I am NOT selling the additional books that come with the course, just the core texts. The additional readings can be easily purchased and are relatively low-priced books. I have it listed on ebay: http://tinyurl.com/2vv8n7, and will consider offers. But if anyone here is intrested, we could handle the transaction directly. -Karen

Yup, I find it fascinating, this idea of Reason which is not about the intellect as we know it. It takes some work to build a foundation for it in terms of defining the words being used.. because in this system, words like "thought" and "idea" have precise meaning as real phenomenon, beyond the abstractions we've made of them. Not to mention the old bugaboo "science", hehe. I might try writing something on Reason, and see if I can avoid getting into the "retroactive man" conundrum - where every thought seems to require taking a step back to provide the background, so you never get anywhere . -Karen

Hi upfromtheashes, Glad you asked. It sounds difficult, but I'm sure it's possible to turn this kind of instability around, even though it's been chronic for 12 years. Getting on a good diet will help build a foundation, for sure, but I don't think that meditation practices or dietary change will do the whole job. I'll tell you about a medical system in a minute. But for starters, for your own self-help, I think it would be a good idea to focus on things to help ground yourself. Moderation is the key. Think about how you could bring some routine into your life, whatever small rituals work for you. Meals at the same time every day, or as close to a routine as you can manage. Very simple and gentle practices or ordinary activities like music or art, whatever could give you some sense of grounding. And I would not do any powerful energy practices on your own. This will help to calm the excess Vata energy. If you could do some gentle self-massage with sesame oil, or with Brahmi oil on the head, that would be great. Some nasya oil inhaled, if you can get ahold of it. Then I think that a system of medicine called Heilkunst could be profoundly therapeutic. It's the complete system of medicine discovered by Dr. Hahnemann, which includes homeopathy but goes far beyond it. Heilkunst sees diet, meditation, all those activities as a category called "Regimen." Regimen has an important place, to fill deficiencies and remove excesses, to achieve a balance, according to the "law of opposites" (give something warming when you have a cold condition, for example.) But then there is another category called Medicine, which involves energetic substances that can actually remove disturbances of the life force. This is where the "law of similars" (like cures like) comes in, and is not simply about balance. Regimen and Medicine form a polarity, a bit like yin and yang, and we need both. But whenever there is such a disturbance of the life force, or several, then "regimen" although valuable in its own right, just isn't enough. Heilkunst includes Regimen, Medicine, and Therapeutic Education which is a spiritual journey of understanding the meaning of the healing process you're going through. It's is the only system of medicine I know that can tackle the kinds of complex, chronic conditions that modern people have. The various natural healing practitioners take a stab at these conditions with the tools that they have. But generally when you go to practitioners, each one sees the problem from a different point of view, and would treat it differently, like each person seeing a different leg of the elephant and no one seeing it for what it really is. So those methods are largely hit-or-miss. And I know how frustrating it is to keep throwing this treatment and that treatment at the problem hoping that something will eventually stick. Heilkunst is unique in that it's not just another treatment, but it's like an umbrella over all the natural healing methods, a framework that understands where they all fit in according to known principles of natural law. It's a system of diagnosing and removing the disturbances that are actual impingements or blockages of the life force. The remedies that remove those disturbances are clearly known, and can be applied in a very systematic approach according to the natural laws of cure. Removing causes is completely different from simply trying to manage symptoms. Heilkunst has an estimated 80-90% success rate with all kind of complex, chronic illnesses - and the measure of success isn't just the alleviation of symptoms, but removing the underlying causes. Many other methods can boast dramatic successes in some cases, but their actual rate of success with those conditions is very low. It's rare for people getting Heilkunst treatment to not see significant improvement, unless they decided to stop treatment. And they are working with the very difficult cases, because often people come to Heilkunst after exhausting other possibilities. I personally have been all over the natural health field for 25 years, and have never seen this kind of success anywhere else. When you're sick, you don't have energy to spend running around to zillions of practitioners in a trial-and-error approach, so you want to work in the most efficient way possible. Even though you would paint a different picture of yourself each time, I'm sure there is a theme that would run throughout each picture, which a Heilkunst practitioner would be competent to recognize. What Heilkunst treatment would do would first be to get you stabilized so that you could then start removing all the shocks and traumas that have been lodged in your life force. Even the shock of ECT can be removed. We still have to process the emotions related to those events, but that's a true healing process. The treatment process is like moving forward in a boat - as you move forward you can stir up some turbulence, but you don't want to rock the boat too much. So at times you want to slow that down and just concentrate on stabilizing for a while before picking up speed again. When you know that the boat is taking you where you need to go, you can trust that process. It helps to have a practitioner who can be a proper guide because they have profound understanding of this territory. If you have any interest in pursuing this treatment, or even if you're just curious, here are some intro articles: "Can't Decide"? "What is Heilkunst" Here is a bit more in-depth Q&A on Heilkunst. Or you could go directly to the main website for the Hahnemann Clinic for Heilkunst. Consults can be done by phone, so you don't have to trek to the Himalayas to find a brilliant healer. Remedies sent by mail. Very accessible and affordable, and options for low-income people. One more note - Heilkunst treatment never interferes with any other kinds of therapies you might want to do, and vice versa. All the best for whatever path you choose, Karen

Hi Mat! Not quite as much, and millet also doesn't have as much of the phytates that make other grains hard to digest and bind minerals. It doesn't have to be pre-soaked or sprouted like other grains do. So that's the up side. The down side is that millet isn't very nutrient-dense, or energy-dense. We're really extracting energy from foods, and the less energy the food has, the more the body has to provide it own energy to process the food. So I wouldn't use millet as a staple food, but occasionally I'm sure it's fine. I prefer the taste of basmati rice and quinoa, so I go for those when I want a little grain (and when I'm not occasionally indulging my wheat addiction ) But generally I find there are plenty of yummy, energy-dense foods to keep me happy. -Karen

You could know the truth of the situation if you looked past the outer appearances of what the people are saying, and saw the inner content of what was occurring. To use a medical analogy, it's like when someone is being cured of disease, and they may go through an intense healing process in which all kinds of nasty symptoms come out. If you judge the process based on that superficial nastiness, you think something went terribly wrong. But if you recognized the true nature of what was happening, you see the deeper purpose being served. This isn't to say that all experience is fair and part of healing; the person may really be in a disease process, not a healing process, and again, it takes skill to discern the difference. You can look at the fruits of a teacher's teaching that way, although of course that's not as easy as looking under the street lamp where it's easier to see . -Karen

Sounds good, mantis. Mythmaker, freeform, I have another way to look at the question of whether there are absolutes in what is good for us. The problem is that the intellect wants to force the issue into an either/or kind of false dichotomy, the old objective vs. subjective philosophical argument, which can't be won on that level of thinking. What we're going for, I think, is a new kind of objectivity - not the kind that's separate from us and simply tells us the rules to follow. But an objectivity that comes from each person's inner capacity to activate the function of resonance. Let me clarify what I mean by resonance, as opposed to attraction. You see the mango ice cream, and the false ego is attracted to it. It's all about "yum, I want it." Then we fight with that desire, because we know that it's not always reliable. We could say there's no absolute right or wrong about it, sure, but also that if we just keep eating mango ice cream whenever we get the urge, we might not be getting what we really want and need. So how do we solve that problem? Not by creating rigid rules that say "ice cream is bad for you." But not by going with whatever feels good to the false ego, either. There is another way, as usual! It's a sort of higher sense of objectivity, which operates through resonance. I can know what's good for me in an objective way, without rules telling me what I'm supposed to do, but also without the subjective bias (which is really the false ego trying to convince me that mango ice cream is a healthy fruit ). There are a lot of ways we can delude ourselves about those choices. With this higher form of objective thought, I might actually know that today a little mango ice cream might be just what I need, even though it may not be "correct" in any theoretical sense. Tomorrow it may not be the right thing. It's a matter of activating a higher function of desire, that works according to true resonance, not attraction. And then there is no right or wrong in the sense of rigid rules, but a rightness in terms of the resonance. The learning process is about recognizing the difference between false attraction and true resonance. Then it would seem that eating only what is truly resonant with you at a particular time, assuming that we were fully attuned to that, is the best thing. But not always. There's another side to this, that taking small amounts of poisons, or substances that are "bad" for us, can give a kind of workout that we wouldn't get otherwise if we were eating everything that agreed with us all the time. But this is a more advanced practice, you could say. There was a guy who ate an airplane. Took a while, and I wouldn't say that it was healthy in the usual sense, but he got a kind of workout from that. That's just a bizarre example, of course, but the point is that we have choices that Weston Price's natives never had. And that's because we now have the capacity to use this higher Reason to make choices that are truly resonant. Our consciousness has evolved, and we're not hunter-gatherers eating only what's available in season, according to pure instinct. The challenge now is to develop this higher capacity for Reason, which older cultures couldn't have activated. That's why we have to put some thought into our dietary choices, and learn certain principles. It's not about one-sided intellect, but not about one-sided instinct either. Oh, and some totally raw ice cream made from raw cream, egg, honey and fruit might actually be totally healthy in the summer. Might be too healthy, and I might need to find some steel shavings to top it off. Craig - I didn't read your post until just now, and caught the word "airplane," ha! Great story. Add blueberries. -Karen

Mark, I would turn the question into an exercise for your own discernment. Perhaps that's the real benefit that the question could have for you? If we had these things pre-rated for us, we'd miss the chance to do our own spiritual exercise, which is what strengthens discernment. Same as in the natural health field, there's a multitude of choices. In past ages there wasn't any of this, but now we have a rather unique chance to learn something from this availability of choices. There are zillions of outer forms, but very few fundamentally different phenomena. Look at the inner content vs. the outer form. Even someone who is not after your cash could be quite sincerely deluded.. or someone may be an appropriate teacher for certain students but not right for you. Or you resonate with a particular teacher at a particular time, because that was a stepping stone to something else, and then it's time to move on. I would look for a resonance that feels true at this time, even if it's not the kind of intense attraction that the false ego loves. Same way you enter into any mature relationship. The true self knows resonance when it experiences it. -Karen

Mantis, You've gotten excellent responses from folks here, and I hope it helps. I completely agree with you that there's something wrong with the the way the "expert" opinions in the health field change all the time. I followed the vegetarian, grains and beans type of diet for decades, before I discovered that many of the assumptions I had about that were coming from the health food industry's promotional campaigns, not from any real science. And by science I don't mean just the conventional research, which has heavy biases. But the kind of direct observation of nature that Weston Price did, when he visited indigenous people and saw the diets that kept them healthy. This is where we don't get the truth handed to us on a silver platter anymore - we have to do the investigation ourselves. There are people around who have done this kind of independent research for many years and can help guide others and show them some shortcuts through the jungle. I do private consulting to help people cut through the confusion. It really is like wandering in the wilderness sometimes, when you're looking for natural approaches and there are just too many fad diet books and diet gurus out there saying conflicting things. It doesn't mean that it's all meaningless, but that you have to zero in in a simpler way on some basic principles that are grounded in reality, not in marketing hype. For starters, you could try changing just ONE thing about your diet, and notice how you feel. Like freeform says, there is no good or bad in an absolute sense, but that you'll find that you feel better from eating a certain way. And that may shift at different times, because we're always changing. If you eat foods that don't enhance your health, you'll notice that effect and have a choice about changing that or not - it's only your choice. So, the whole diet and health food industry would like us to think that it's about which diet is best, which supplements are the latest and greatest.. they're selling products. But it's really about finding out what works for you as an individual, and everyone is unique, so every diet is unique. Take care, Karen P.S. Another tip for starters is to choose foods from the outer aisles of the supermarket - fruits and vegetables, animal foods, eggs, etc. - in other words, the least processed and packaged. Then you can start tweaking things later.

Mantis, Your post asked for information, and you got it. No need to be snide. Dietary guidelines aren't rules that prevent you from eating what you like - but going for whatever is attractive at the moment isn't what most people really want anyway. Take care, Karen

Hi mantis, There are lots of things that need to be factored in to determine what's a good diet for you as an individual. But I can tell you a few things that can contribute to a disruption of the appetite regulating mechanism. 1. Zonulin - a protein found in grains, which can increase intestinal permeability, causing "leaky gut" and also interfere with appetite regulation. 2. MSG and free glutamic acid in processed foods - a big issue for vegans who are eating soy foods. This is how we get Chinese restaurant syndrome even when eating so-called natural foods. See the list of ingredients that contain hidden MSG: http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html 3. Artificial sweeteners, especially aspartame, interfere with appetite regulation and make people hungrier. 4. Grains in general - promote insulin resistance and carb craving. Let's take the tofu, rice and wheat bagel: Tofu is not a healthy food for anyone. See the Weston Price Foundation website for lots of info on that. Rice is okay for some people, in small amounts, but others do best with no grain at all. Brown rice should always be soaked or sprouted. Wheat bagel - wheat isn't healthy for anyone, not even whole wheat, although some people can tolerate it better than others. And on the issue of protein - the type of protein is just as important as the amount. You want to give your body the particular type of fuel it was designed for. And good quality fats are very important, and very lacking in vegan diets. Fats satisfy. So your instinct is right - your current diet idea could use an overhaul . -Karen