There's no mystical energy controls my destiny...

Tonight a coworker and I began discussing Tarot and all of those "Metaphysical" beliefs. At first the conversation seemed normal. She said she had a tarot deck, but really just believed in positive energy rather than anything that could predict the future or reveal a person's being through a card trick.

Seemed okay.

By positive energy, she means karma. I told her that I understood following that as a practice for life because people will remember if you treat them well or like dirt (isn't that right, John Bolton?), but I don't really believe there is a mystical energy that actually balances out good and bad, positive and negative unless we're actually talking about electrical charges. Human behavior is a matter of sociology & psychology, not physical science.

Seemed to be cool with that.

Then she tells me she believes in past lives. Hmph. She claims she had a past life regression once. I see. I asked her if it had been done through hypnosis. Of course, it had. Because she said it was a very deep and meaningful experience for her. I just finished with, "well that's interesting."

There's just something about a white American lesbian telling me she used to be an 11-year-old Chinese boy who still has to work on problems that have plagued her for all of her lives that makes me wonder how she is managing to get through this life. It's a little funny, but at the same time sad to me that people are always looking somewhere else for guidance instead of making decisions for themselves. What scares me the most is that there are these hypnotists out there who prey upon the poor fools who believe there is something good about putting someone under a trance. In a book by Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, there is plenty of talk about that.

I won't ever give this coworker my blog address. Likewise I won't ever tell her to her face that I think she needs to wake up and smell the Cafe Mocha. It isn't that I'd care to see her spend the rest of her days following her own shadow, but it's a hell of a thing to be responsible for waking someone up when they have a nice dream going.

Let's just keep this between you, me and the one other person who reads this blog.