Life: Looking Forward, Looking Back
“A person who only laments the past is a coward, whereas a person who can change the future is a true hero.”
~ Jackie Chan in Dragon Blade
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
Forward, forward, always forward. Life is funny. Even the Bhagavad Gita states that the course of action is unfathomable. Yet, so many attempt to fathom it before we move forward, and judge it looking backward. Actually, I do not believe life can ever be understood by looking backward, though 20/20 hindsight certainly has its advantages.
In The Golden Frog, the idea of memory was addressed. Memory is more about perspective than knowledge. This world is the world of perspective. That is why it is called relativity. Yet we cling to our perspectives as truth and look for the Truth in everything. As Dylan sings in the song “Love Minus Zero”:
“In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all”
When veggies get ‘stressed,’ they become toxic. Different things can stress different veggies. For example, celery as it gets older gets stressed. Potatoes kept in the light become stressed; sometimes you can even see the sprouts growing out of them. Many veggies become stressed when they are reheated leftovers or overcooked. I believe we are all quite able to tell when our veggies are stressed. If we just pay attention, we can feel it. It’s sort of like the blog I just wrote about the 
The population of bacteria within the gut is known as a microbiome. Of course, there are microbiomes throughout the entire physiology, but here we are focusing on the microbiome in the digestive system – predominantly the gut. Oftentimes when we eat, we feel like we’re eating for ourselves. However, an interesting approach is to eat for your entire population, i.e., yourself along with your microbiome. When you’re doing this, you can even feel into the entire microbiome within your gut. You may feel like that’s just your imagination, but interestingly enough, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re putting attention onto the entire population, yourself along with your microbiome. In so doing, you become attentive to the greater dynamic of your digestive process.
Have you ever noticed a jet stream that looked like it was going straight up? Have you wondered if it might be a rocket? Due to the curvature of the earth, a plane coming in your direction just appears to be going striaght up. If the earth was flat, the jet would look more like a point getting closer rather than a jet stream line going straight up. Just imagine you were a tiny point standing on a tennis ball and looking at another point circling the ball and coming in your direction. It would like like it is going straight up, not straight at you. Our world is smaller than we may think! Using the same sort of logic with respect to shadows, the ancient Greeks figured out not only that the world was round, but also with simple trigonometry they calculated the diameter of the earth.
Someone was told by a Chinese doctor that they had arthritis. The person was confused, claiming their joints always felt fine, so the doctor explained the following:
