Week One Quiz

What attracts me to Chinese Medicine?

There are many things that attract me to Chinese medicine. I could ask, what is unattractive to me about Chinese Medicine, and the answer would be nothing, nothing so far anyway. I spoke to the idea of balance as being a key factor in my attraction to C.M. I think an excerpt from the Nei Jing sums it up well for me. The Nei Jing states: "If one follows yin and yang, then life results; if one opposes them, then death results. If one follows them, then order results; if one opposes them, then disorder results." I take this to mean that if one makes living in balance a priority in life then beauty results. Disease, pain, and suffering is all movement away from balance. Now, easier said than done, of corse, but Chinese Medicine is a usefull tool to remind us, to guide the body back into a state of balance. From this place we are more usefull, flexible, at peace.

What do I honestly think of physics, really?

I don't have much of an opinion of physics, outside of the movie "What the Bleep do we Know," and Gary Zukav and Chopra's reference to Quantum physics in thier books. I have never taken a physics course so it would be unfair of me to pass judgement. I was in a physics course for two weeks at PCOM in San Diego. I didn't think the course was particularly hard nor incredibly interesting, but thought provoking. The teacher really was a disappointment. Nice guy but not a very good instructor. I am interested in exploring a physics course that doesn't involve mathmatics, hallelujah! Math was never my forte.

Now that I think about it, have I ever experienced time "slowing down"?

As I said in class I felt time slowing dow at moments of extreme stress and extreme awareness. My attention was more as the observer, almost a peering down at myself. The time of stress that seemed to bring on the feeling of time slowing down was when my own mother went into anaphylactic shock. As she lay unconscious, eyes rolling back in her head, not breathing, it seemd like an eternity, when in actuality it was probably only seconds, minutes at the most. i was dialing 911, watching her boyfriend shake her and yell "don't die on me." Rather dramatic, the scene was. But the entire time i felt as though i was functioning in my body but outside of it observing at the same time. Everything seemed very slow, there was a pulsing that I could hear in my own head, and yet i still continued to perform tasks asked of me. Time seemed to return to its "normal" pace once the paramedics were standing around mom's bed peering down at her, speaking with her. Mom had returned from who knows where, and was out of danger at that point.

The Meaning of Time:

Time is a social construct; therefore any meaning I attach to it is socially contstructed as well since I am socialized and have no way of separating that out from "myself" completely. My ideas or thoughts aren't entirely my own then because any thought that I have on the subject has already been tainted by what society has determined it to be. So, my influenced thoughts about the meaning of time are, well, for starters, time is used as a measurement. It can be used as a measurement of how much someone likes you by how much time they devote to spending with you. It is a measurement, possibly, of how responsible someone is. Was the person responsible enough to arrive to work on time, for instance. We use time to measure how well, or not, we are keeping up with others. At certain ages, or by a given time, we are "suppose" to have accomplished certain things. The measuring of time is all around us, from the watches we wear on our wrists, to birthday celebrations. We place alot of "superficial" meaning on the concept of time but do we ever really stop to consider its deeper meaning? or does it even have one? I know that my TIME is limited here on Earth. That is significant to me. I am handed a set number of years to essentially "live my life" in a meaningful way. Beyond my existence in this physical form what will time look like? Will there be any construct of time or will it cease to exist altogether? These are questions I can't answer definitively but can only ponder, alone in my room on nights in which I am plagued by insomnia, or openly in a blog for a physics class.