Cameron

Breathing excercises are great also. 4. 9 Bottle Wind

10. Oh yeah, and for those of you who never heard it, Ken Cohen's breathing CD is OFF THE HOOK. Tru Dat

Kenneth S Cohen has just released a 100 days qigong training course called The Essential Qigong Training Course . It is 5 CD's, 3 DVD's and 59 page workbook. It is from Sounds True but I think it's actually less expensive if you buy it from Amazon.com I met Ken last year and his training definetly shows in him. He has a very clear, balanced presence and does a really funny impersonation of Carl Jung.

Yes, it is mostly older material. I did the review on Amazon telling people if they have his book they probably don't need this course .But it is probably one of the best ways to learn for a beginner or someone new to Qigong without access to an authentic teacher. It was money well spent for me but I am a big fan of Ken's.

Of course the second i say I am taking a break you guys start talking about really interesting stuff.. It depends on whether you are talking about shallow breathing or the breath stopping. Shallow breathing means you are breathing at the normal BPM(breath per minute) for a normal person or Qigong novice this is around 15 or so breaths per minute. What Ken Cohen says in his book is after standing for a regualar period and getting good your BPM's should go down. The number he is shooting for is 3 or 4 BPM. A simple way to test this with standing meditation is to count your breaths. If you count sixty breaths in any standing meditation posture and it takes 5 minutes you are really still a Qigong beginner and have pretty shallow breathing. With time and patience you should get to the point(per Cohen's book) that sixty breaths takes about 20 minutes My experience is this has to do with both mental and phyisical tension. For example, when I do a zazen practice the Mind may be very busy and stressed out from the day and the first few minutes my breath is shallow. After 30 minutes or so my body really lets go into the posture and drops into the lower tan tien and the breath may become very, very deep. One thing I read from a zen teacher that I liked which is I think applicable to both sitting zen and standing meditation is you don't need to focus on making anything happen. It's mostly about letting go and when that truly occurs everything that is supposed to happen happens. The breath drops into the tan tien, circulates in the orbit, connects with the heart center, etc etc. It all goes by itself if you just learn to let go. Or as one zen teacher so eloquently told me " Learn to trust the process".

Ok, excluding RJ..the self proclaimed mastah of Taoist bonk toking and big draws...how many of the TB's smoke weed? I started smoking week as a troubled teeneager..I think I was like 13,14 the first time. It was an amazing and frightning experience. I felt that I was awake in a dream but that life itself was the dream. I kept saying over and over "It's all a dream...it's all a dream." So it was kind of tough to go back to whatever I thought was cool in middle school or high school after that. I would say I basically wasted my high school years on weed and playing video games. I sort of got my act together but then became a near daily pot smoker when I started college. the funny thing I got into meditation, qigong etc. along the way but I still had these weed smoking friends who came around. The last time I smoked was a little over 2 years ago. It was some really good shit. I went outside and looked up at the stars and they were all flying around. In Az you go out and night and you can just see everything. I remember looking at the sky thinking how all the stars are no longer statinary..they can now fly..and maybe the earth is going tos tart flying around to another part of the universe all of a sudden..gravity is no more! So that was it..I know prefer to deal in reality. But maybe some of you have a different opnion of the stuff? I have written posts on the HT board over the years about my experiences wth different drugs. I would say mushrooms(Pscylocibin) would be the one I would deem most spiritual. It was really out of body for me. but I wouldn't ever recommend weed/shrooms to anyone for any genuine spiritual insight. It's insanely fun/dangerous entertainment at best. So what's the general opnion..more or less a waste of time? Fun on occasion.. I am not talking about health here. Health wise it's all crap .I mean in terms of life in general..your outlook and shit..

Yes..I said I was going to take a break for awhile but I feel this issue is important. Marriage. I have heard both sides of the argument lately the first that marriage is crap and destroys a man's freedom and makes life suck. The other that marriage is great..having kids etc..but is obviously work. I have never been married and am not 100% on where I am with this issue right now but I think for a marriage to work long term it probably has to go something like this.. Joseph Campbell talks about marriage in The Power of Myth - please pardon the cut and paste: Moyers: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. Campbell: Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's the meaning of a flower? There's a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who gave him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called "the one thus come." There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. That's it. And your own meaning is that you're there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about. Moyers: How do you get that experience? Campbell: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It's the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It's different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It's another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we'll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that's what marriage is. Moyers: The right person? How does one choose the right person? Campbell: Your heart tells you. It ought to. Moyers: your inner being. Campbell: That's the mystery. Moyers: You recognize your other self. Campbell: Well, I don't know, but there's a flash that comes, and something in you knows that this is the one. Moyers: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male or female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society? Campbell: Because it's not regarded as a marriage. I would say that if the marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become one flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true -- the two really are one. Moyers: One not only biologically but spiritually. Campbell: Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction which may lead you to the wrong identification. Moyers: Then the necessary function of marriage, perpetuating ourselves in children, is not the primary one. Campbell: No, that's really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I've been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship with each other. Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting -- that's the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that's what you have become when you have married. You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's and ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. Moyers: So marriage is utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one's own thing. Campbell: It's not simply one's own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one's own thing. but the one isn't just you, it's the two together as one. And that's a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave. Daddy will fall in love with some little nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with and empty house and heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way. Moyers: That's because we don't understand the two levels of marriage. Campbell: You don't make a commitment. Moyers: We presume to -- we make a commitment for better or for worse. Campbell: That's the remnant of a ritual. Moyers: And the ritual has lost its force. The ritual that once conveyed and inner reality is now merely form. And that's true in the rituals of society and in the personal rituals of marriage and religion. Campbell: How many people before marriage receive spiritual instruction as to what the marriage means? You can stand up in front of a judge and in ten minutes get married. The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued. Moyers: You're saying that marriage is not just a social arrangement, it's a spiritual exercise. Campbell: It's primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology? Campbell: What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

Just found out Ron Diana died. Wow. I was sitting in this chair in front of this computer talking with him several months ago and his words were subtle yet inspiring. The last thing he said to me before our call ended " So play with that and call me anytime". We were talking about different Qigong and meditation practices. After our phone call I got an email from Ron saying that he felt very good about our conversation. I had no idea this was a man dying of cancer. I never met Ron but the first time I talked to him on the phone he told me " I feel like I already know you" And even though I barely knew him at all I felt the same way about him. He was the kind of person that you could talk to once every few years and feel like you had a conversation several minutes ago. Anyway, I didn't post this on the HT forum because I think there are alot of people from that organization that must know Ron better than me but I really liked what little I knew of him alot. My heart goes out to his wife Karin who was a very sweet woman from our phone chat also. May his loving spirit help us all through our dark times and have a happy, beautiful life. Cameron

Well, I meet alot of older people and it seems nice to grow older with someone you love. It makes planning things easy and you doe verything together. Alot of people really do well together in a marriage..BUT..as one comedian says you love your woman so much and you never want to be apart from her so the logical think is get the Government involved in the realationship so that in case things go sour you have to divide all your assets. A legally binding document is clearly the next stage of love then..there is the anti marriage stuff like this http://nomarriage.com/

Well, that's the thing most guys fall into the marriage is garbage, why marry category or the marriage is great I love my kids and life category. You sound like your more on the marriage is crap category. That's fine I have heard alot of valid opnions about that. I have also heard alot of good, valid opnions about why marriage can be good. I guess I would just like to here everyones feelings on this. except RJ because we already know he is his wifes pimp and I in no way shape or form support that kind of unhealthy realationship..

And you thought you were only slightly out of shape http://www.nearlygood.com/video/capoera.html

I knew you guys would like it

Let's all just agree that a real live woman is going to be better than porn on most every occasion. Even if she's not as hot as the porn chicks there is much more to it than that anyhoo. C'Money

Also, the Iranian wrestlers have a similar system that I am studying. One of my cousins had a relative that was pahlavan. I remember going to his house and seeing this picture of a big dude with an Indian club. I didn't know anything about it but thought it looked interesting.

Have you seen the DVD? They not only do bridging it is probably the main component of their conditioning. Along with dahdns and betheks. Furey's Royal court truly is the major conditioning excercises of the Indian Wrestlers with swinging the Gata and Jori coming in second. although it looked like some wrestling schools put gata and Jori swinging above bridging. Cama The Great

Watched the documentary "Weed" on the sundance channel yesterday. It goes behind the scenes at the Cannibis Cup awards they have annually in Amsterdam. Thousands of pot smokers and advocates get together to smoke and judge the best marijuuana in the world. A friend of mine who went to Amsterdam said the shit they call bubble gum is crazy and i got to see what it looked like and all these pot conessiuers giving there impressions. I don't even really smoke pot anymore but think it would be cool to check the Cannabis Cup put one year just for the experience. 1 week of smoking the best pot in the world. Also..prostitution is legal along with everything else. I wonder why RJ hasnent moved there yet and chooses to live in Hell-A. Or as some Iranians call it "little Tehran".

exctacy has been proven to cause brain damage and the 2 times I have taken it were somewhat fun but the down was horrible. I know people that used to do this shit every weekend but I have to think giving someone advice to take exctacy so that they can be more flexible is a shade shy of retarded

When the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler wrote about the fall of the Athenian republic over two thousand years previous to that time: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." Alexander Tyler

The way I do it the way wrestlers do it..on the forehead nost touching the mat. I have not had any experience telling me this is dangerous and matt furey gets alot of positive feedback saying that it not only isnt' dangerous but has helped people with back problems. After watching this DVD on Indian wrestling and seeing dudes flip backwards landing into a nose to floor bridge it is pretty obvious it is not a dnagerous movement if done properly.

Finally, a good production on the excercises performed by indian wrestlers. i have been interested in these excercises since Matt Furey introduced them to mainstream America 5 years ago. Now you can check them( and other training) by the dudes that invented it! I am ordering mine today! conditioning

Just watched this great DVD. The abilities of the Indian wrestlers is amazing an did not disappoint. I though I had some ability in body weight excercises until I saw a wrestler take down another while landing into a bridge with the other wrestler landing on top and it not being a problem! The segment on bridgin gymnastics is awesome .there is no real instruction in the excercises but people like Matt furey and Scott sonnon have basically already done that. What we have here is the actual display of abilities that goes beyond anything I have seen anyone do with bridging before. I would say we could start a new excercise at gym "Bridging breakdancing" but realize this excercise is way too difficult for most people.

My present take on this is you either help things grow or you help destroy things. I really don't see it as being very complicated. In my daily dealings with people I have a moment to moment choice to either help the person grow or help bring them down. So it's really, really simple . Not! It is way more challenging than that because you need a ton of wisdom which most people don't have to know how to help someone. Or to help youself for that matter. We can be our own worst enemies and worst life assassing sometimes. So, say I meet a girl that I find very beautiful but also very annoying. She has some things I like and some things I don't .As a shallow person I don't want to spend time with this person because I find little things she does to be self centered and annoying but maybe in a larger context she helps me to grow. Her so called personality flaws are really her perfection and I need to be with her and learn to accept people as they are. Or a so called negative type person. a druggie..or a chain smoker .Someone who appears negative on the outside .They contantly offer me drugs or smokes .it seems bad. From another point of view this person is helping me by making me stand up for myself and my decisions in life..they are teaching me how to say no. Some dude punches you in the face and that motivates you to start martial arts and teaches you discipline and focus. Some one steals you money because you are gullibale and that makes you assess yourself and become more responsible with money. I mean the list goes on and on and on. I am thinking the Universe is not stupid. the universe has been around basically forever, right? Maybe all these things do happen to teach us lessons. atleast that's how I hope it works. I like karma better than chaos. I am pretty certain there is a greater order to it All.

Scary shit.. Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC by Jerry Russell, Ph.D. Steel frame towers are built very strongly. They need to withstand the pressure of gale-force winds, the violent rocking motion of earthquakes, and the ravages of time. For this reason, they are almost impossible to destroy. Airplane strikes do not destroy skyscrapers. A bomber strike to the Empire State Building during World War II did not harm that building. The World Trade Center towers were designed to survive a strike by a Boeing 707. The 767 is more massive, so the building was stressed near its design limits. But if a failure had occurred at that moment, it would have been at the point of highest levered stress, near the base of the tower, and the tower would have fallen over like a giant tree in a forest windstorm. That, of course, did not happen. Fires do not destroy skyscrapers. Never in the history of steel frame structures has a single one been destroyed by fire. How to destroy a skyscraper. So, how do you destroy a skyscraper? Suppose you need the vacant land to build another one, for example. A nuclear bomb is very effective, but it can be difficult to get permits from the city. An early invention was the wrecking ball. A huge lump of steel and lead is swung from a massive chain at high speed. With the benefit of momentum, it is able to bend or break a few girders at a time. But it would be a hopeless task to destroy a tower the size of the World Trade Center, using a wrecking ball. The most effective, cleanest, safest way to destroy a skyscraper is known as controlled demolition. The trick is to distribute explosives at key points throughout the structure. The explosives are detonated simultaneously, destroying the integrity of the steel frame at key points, such that no part of the building is supported against the force of gravity. The entire mass is pulled swiftly to earth, where gravity does the work of pounding the structure into tiny fragments of steel and concrete. The gravitational potential energy of the structure is converted smoothly and uniformly into kinetic energy, and then is available very efficiently to pulverize the fragments of the building as they impact against the unyielding earth. Controlled demolitions have a striking and characteristic appearance of smooth, flowing collapse. As your eyes will tell you, the World Trade Center collapses looked like controlled demolitions. Here's the proof. The proof. According to the law of gravity, it is possible to calculate the time it takes for an object to fall a given distance. The equation is H=(1/2)at2, where H is the height, a is the acceleration of gravity (10 meters per second squared) and t is time in seconds. Plug in the height of the building at 1350 feet (411 meters) and we get 9 seconds. That is just about the length of time it took for the very top of the World Trade Center to fall to the street below. According to all reports, the whole thing was over in just about ten seconds. It is as if the entire building were falling straight down through thin air. As if the entire solid structure below, the strong part which had not been burned or sliced or harmed in any significant way, just disappeared into nothingness. Yet this (within a small tolerance) is what we would expect to find if there had been a controlled demolition, because the explosions below really do leave the upper stories completely unsupported. Like the Road Runner after he runs off the edge of the cliff, the entire building pauses a moment, then goes straight down. Any kind of viscous process or friction process should have slowed the whole thing down. Like dropping a lead ball into a vat of molasses, or dropping a feather into the air, gravitational acceleration cannot achieve its full effect if it is fighting any opposing force. In the case of the World Trade Center, the intact building below should have at least braked the fall of the upper stories. This did not happen. There was no measurable friction at all. This proves controlled demolition. We have been lied to. We have been lied to about this, at multiple levels. The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel. In point of fact, most of the fuel in the jets was contained in their wing tanks. The thin aluminum of the tanks was pierced or stripped as the airplanes penetrated the walls of the towers, and the result was the huge fireball which was seen on national TV, where most of this fuel was burned. A hot, vigorous fire would have blown out many windows in the building and would have burned a red or white color. This was not what happened. The fire in the World Trade Center was an ordinary smoldering office fire. But let's suppose that the fire was hot enough to melt steel. What would have happened in that case? Before it breaks, hot steel begins to bend. This redistributes the forces in the structure and puts elastic stress on those parts that are still cool. The process is asymmetric, so that the structure should visibly bend before breaking. But of course, no steel skyscraper has even bent over in a fire. Let's suppose the structure were sufficiently weakened that it did fail catastrophically near the point of the airplane strike. In this case, the intact structure below would exert an upward force on the base of the upper story portion of the building (the part that has been broken loose), while any asymmetry would allow the force of gravity to work uninhibited on the tip of the skyscraper. Thus, the top section of the skyscraper would tip and fall sideways. If it did not tip, it would have ground straight down through the building below. The gravitational potential energy of the upper stories would be coupled into the frame below, beginning to destroy it. The frame below would deflect elastically, absorbing energy in the process of deflecting. At weak points, the metal structure would break, but the elastic energy absorbed into the entire frame would not be available to do more destruction. Instead, it would be dissipated in vibration, acoustic noise and heat. Eventually this process would grind to a halt, because the gravitational potential energy of a skyscraper is nowhere near sufficient to destroy its own frame. If the World Trade Center towers had been built entirely out of concrete, they might have stood for awhile before toppling in the wind. But in that case, if they had collapsed straight downwards, the energy required to pulverize the concrete would have slowed the downward progress of the upward stories. The gravitational potential energy of the World Trade Center was barely sufficient to convert its concrete into powder, and for that to happen in an accidental collapse would have been impossible, but would have taken a lot longer than 10 seconds in any case. How it was done. The World Trade Center was leased by Westfield America and Larry Silverstein, on April 26th, 2001. Zim Israeli Shipping moved out of the buildings around that time. With a certain amount of shuffling of tenants from floor to floor, it should have been easy (with all the commotion and noise of remodeling) to plant explosives on several floors; enough for at least a sloppy kind of controlled demolition. There was more "magic" at work on 9/11, to produce the effects that were seen on the TeeVee. The events of 9/11, summarized. Taken all together, the evidence suggests very strongly that the attacks of 9/11 were fake terror, and quite possibly were a collaborative venture of the Israeli and US governments. Student pilots from Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations were enrolled in flight schools in Venice, Florida and other locations. The flight school in Venice is linked to CIA drug running operations, according to one researcher. A recently leaked document from the US Drug Enforcement Agency indicates that a number of Israeli intelligence operatives describing themselves as art students took up residences in close physical proximity to the Arabs as they moved about the country. The Arab flight students boarded the flights on 9/11. Did they intend to hijack the airliners, and if so, for what purpose? Had the Israelis played in any way the role of agent provocateur in organizing whatever was planned? It seems reasonable to conjecture that the goals of these Arabs were opposed in some way to some US Middle Eastern policy. It would be very interesting to question the Israelis regarding their knowledge of the Arab flight students. At any rate, if the Arab flight students had been ordinary hijackers, they might have taken the controls of the airplane, but their plot should have quickly been foiled for two reasons. First of all, the Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft are probably equipped with remote-controlled flight computers for purposes of hijack recovery. This was stated by a British intelligence operative and was also suggested by a former German secretary of defense. The technology needed for such systems is well known, and its utility is obvious. If these systems had been operative on 9/11, then they should have been used to take control from the hijackers. Secondly, the US air force has standard operating procedure to send jet fighters to intercept hijacked aircraft within minutes after they are reported. These fighters may be armed and are certainly very maneuverable, and an airliner cannot hope to match them. For these reasons, the Arab hijackers' mission should have been an ignominious failure. These measures (as well as pre-9/11 airport security measures) have been effective enough that hijacking has rarely been a problem for many years now. But on 9/11, the remote control systems were not used to bring the planes home, nor did fighters scramble to escort. Instead, the airplanes executed highly skilled aerobatic maneuvers (well beyond any known educational background of the Arab student pilots) and crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. If the remote controls were used, who was operating them? The World Trade Center towers are designed to withstand aircraft impact, which they did for about an hour. Then they collapsed directly to the ground, with remarkably little collateral damage to surrounding buildings, in a manner strikingly resembling the appearance of controlled demolitions. The US government claims that fire was responsible for the collapse, and this is certainly possible, but many reports have overstated the likely heat of the fire and the amount of fuel from the airplanes which was not consumed in the fireballs outside the towers. If explosives had been planted in the World Trade Center towers, they could have been used to trigger the collapse of the towers. Building 7 was destroyed later in the afternoon. It was never hit by any airplane, so there is no known reason (besides explosives) for it to have collapsed into rubble. However, a cloud of dust was seen in the area of building 7 immediately before the collapse of the south tower, which has not been explained. While the whole attack was going on (a period well over an hour) George W. Bush sat in a classroom and listened to a story about goats, and the US military did not respond to the first three attacks. A fourth flight was also "hijacked" that day, but it was apparently struck down by some sort of missile or bomb before crashing in Pennsylvania. Within hours, a massive media campaign to blame the attacks on Arabs and specifically on Osama Bin Laden was begun, and this campaign has continued to the present day. Our traditional American form of government, unfortunately, may not survive -- the Patriot Act appears poised to supersede the Bill of Rights. Given the many uncertainties about these events, it certainly seems that there should be more questions, more investigations, and more thoughtfulness about the responsibilities of the various parties involved. A little bit of logic will reveal that the Arabs alone could not have been solely responsible for the entire chain of events. It is equally unlikely that the Israelis could have pulled it off alone. Yet instead the US government is gathering up support for war against Middle Eastern nations, a tragic response to the enigmatic events of that day. The author has a master's degree in Engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon.

Yes..you threatened to school my weenie BJJ and Aikido with your Kali. " Don't make me come back here and show you my knife...Cam" Where I think the words you chose to use. Sorry..complete fabrication..your a sweet Lady Been watchin't too many Tarrantino movies. Oh..Winn comments on Evil.. This is a very difficult question to answer. One, we have animal genes, and violence is allowed (spiritually) as the necessary pattern of their life and survival. So it may be incomplete evolution of animal aspect of our animal-divine hybrid that appears to be the nature of humans. The question as to whether there are larger evil beings (whether alien or divine) behind human violence, a kind of war in heaven that humans are the unconscious playground for, is an even tougher question. It is overlaid with so much religious myth and belief, although most of it is much more recent than we realize. The early Daosits never mention reincarnationi or hell. I believe that theywere very focused on the truth of the present moment containing all that is needed to be known spiritually. But that doesn't resolve the question of violence, and its origins. My own conclusion regarding karma is that violence contributes to shaping patterns of incarnation, as all violence leaves a soul incompletion. But I don't believe personally that some fall of man due to an evil act has perpetuated karma ever since. There is no motive in the first instance. mcihael