So what the liver has as its imagination we better listen to because there is nothing else that can be done about the way in which the digestion can operate. It's not like you can mess with it. You can't hold your liver like you can hold your breath. So you can't stop the fluids from moving and doing their thing all of the time. You can try to not listen to the liver, but you're not going to get very far. That's phlegma. And so when the liver goes bad, so to speak, when it gets filled too much with gravity, the very thing it becomes afraid of is the very thing that it's there to support, and that's life. Once again the gift of the organ is also its challenge. Its medicine is it's wound: it's wound is it's medicine.

We said earlier that the lung gets afraid of specific things: dogs and cats and thunderstorms. But the liver gets afraid of the relentless flow of life. Rather than dealing with life the liver would rather sit by the fire with a box of chocolates and read a good book and maybe have some egg custard just to keep things moving in the digestion, just to keep the flow going without having to do much in the way of work. The egg custard is already partially digested. The egg is oil from the mother bird and the sugar is already digested and the milk is also digested by the cooking process. The liver gets to have the life without the work. The liver wants to just keep things flowing easily, and then when it goes bad it says I'm not going to flow. I'm tired of flowing and I am going to sulk and be sodden and pout.

Once the liver is in rebellion and pouting you come down in the morning and see the grease left in the frying pan from dinner last night and the liver goes, 'Oh my God. Oh no, I can't do that. I can't digest the grease and protein. It's too much for me to deal with.' And then the thought comes up, 'God I wish it was bed time.' It's eight o'clock in the morning, and we just woke up, and the liver says, 'God I can't wait to come home and have a nap.' That means your liver is being pushed into states of rebellion. And what it gets tired of is living, because living is going to require that it make changes. The liver says, you want changes? I'll give you changes. It's day and night. Those are your options. You want changes? Those are the changes. Four o'clock AM I'm here. Four o'clock PM I'm there. Those are the changes. Take it or leave it those are the times when I work. Anything else and I'm just passing on whatever comes in.

It's like certain kinds of waitresses in restaurants; 'Mom's' restaurant. This is what you're going to eat on the menu here. This is really good for you. I've been telling you about this for a while now. So this is what you are going to eat. Right there on the menu -- honey! I can tell by your complexion you eat what's not good for you. So this is what you are going to be able to eat from now on. The dialogue with your liver is like that. It is like dealing with the waitress 'mom'. Eat this. It's good for you. And so when you don't listen to it, it gets sullen, and it starts to brood, and it starts to say I'm not going to participate in this. I'm taking the day off. So then you don't have any energy. You don't have any life. You don't have any enthusiasm and no creativity, because the liver is saying I'm just not going to do any digesting today. The most stubborn of temperaments can be the phlegmatic. The melancholic can be outrageously stubborn, but they're arrogant in their stubbornness. But the phlegmatic can be outrageously stubborn and they're still cuddly and lovely and soft and great, but it's just like, sorry. Out of my control. Sorry. And there's nothing you can do because you can't push the river. So that's what happens when you start to do things that your liver doesn't like. It just slowly builds to a spot where it says I'm not going to participate. And then when you wake up in the morning, it's just one fear of what could happen in life after another.

So if that's a little litany starting for you around three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning, when you wake up like oh my god, I gotta -- oh, gee I can't -- oh, I don't think I can. If your mornings are filled with that kind of mental process again and again. That's the 'mom' voice of the liver. That message means that if momma ain't happy ain't nobody happy. If that liver is not happy, you will not want to be in life. You'll be afraid of life. And the dew that that will secrete in you will be an imagination that life is just too much to bear. There's just too many choices, too many things. Whereas the lung is going 'this and not that' again and again. The liver is going 'ahhhh! I don't want to make all these choices.'

But that's just what the liver has to do all of the time down there in the digestive system. It's a short order cook. And so what happens is in the morning when you're having difficulty with the liver, this mood of 'I don't want to do anything', if it gets deeper over a period of time, it turns into a kind of rage at life. We begin to have little flare ups of rage at absolutely nothing. The cat could walk in and leave a footprint on the kitchen floor and that's all it takes. And then suddenly the liver gets congested. Then you get a back ache or a neck ache or a muscle ache or your back goes or whatever, and then you have to go see a massage person to work the kinks out, because the muscles are the end result of the creative imaginations of the liver. The substance of the imaginations which operate in the liver have to do with the production of glycogen. Glycogen is animal starch. It is a condensation of the carbohydrates of all of the food consumed the day before. The liver produces glycogen at night and stores it up so that during the day the glycogen is broken down and energy is released to live life. This is the diurnal rhythm of the liver. It must not be messed with. So when the liver's functioning well, the glycogen is easily being broken down in the day and circulating through the blood. At night the foods which were broken down during the day are synthesized into glycogen and stored in the liver for use during the next day.

When these rhythms are balanced every cell has energy during the day and every cell is cleaned and rested at night. During the day, all the muscles are receiving the attention from the liver that they need, and the imaginations that we have allow us, through the muscles, to move into life. From the liver we get motive force and will. And we play out the imaginations that were contained in the dew of the glycogen. Then we have energy. We are enthusiastic. So the most problematic thing to do with the liver is to change something fundamental with it, because the liver is phlegmatic. It expects things just to go on and on and it expects things to be nice and flowing. When this rhythm of day and night is upset then the phlegma of the liver turns bad and its gravity state is to try to push its agenda of how things should be. When that is not possible then the mood from the liver is that everything is not okay in life and life is not worth living. And so the depression that can come form the liver is a little deeper than the depression that can come from a lung, because you can reason with the lung. You can't reason with the liver. The liver knows what it has to do. It is very aware of what the contract says. This happens at this time and that happens at that time, no exceptions.

When the lung says no to life that's exogenous depression. It comes from fearing what can come to the soul from the outside. When the liver says no to life, that's known as endogenous depression. It means it becomes afraid of what can come from the inside. Because you could be living a life that was really pretty cool, and everybody would be going wow, man, things are really going great for you. But if you're in that liver state, the more great things that happen to you, the worse it is, because you know deep inside you that everything has to change and someday I'm not going to have $350 million dollars. Someday I'm only going to have half of that. Poor baby!

So that's what happens when the liver gets whacked. The crazy thing about it is if that stuff starts to happen in your life, you start eating things which help the liver to get whacked. The very things that we go to, like chocolate, is death for the liver. It's caffeine, oil and protein -- bleh -- and sugar. It's just like a molotov cocktail for the liver. The liver says,' I don't know what you're doing, but I'm out of here.' And the reason why it feels so good is because when you take it, the liver dumps toxins in order to deal with this thing that's coming in. The liver freaks out and says, 'There's this big load of stuff coming in! The mouth just told me this thing is coming down here, and man, we gotta deal with this, so I'm just going to have to dump whatever is in here now and throw that in the blood because we gotta deal with this thing coming down. It's protein, sugar, caffeine and oil all mixed together, and there's tons of it coming down. So we gotta deal with this! So what happens is, whatever is stored in the liver that's been in a holding pattern is dumped over board. The liver throws it out, and goes into the blood. It becomes a toxin in the blood and we become intoxicated. In-tox-i-cated. It simply means the liver has dumped and we're getting the imaginations that it was holding of the substances which are causing the problem, in order to protect us. So what do we do when they flood into the blood? We eat another Hershey's Kiss, of course, because we get the imagination that those substances are not being held on to and we want to replenish them again. The sugar and the caffeine are flowing out of the liver and we want them back so in goes another hit of the hair of the dog that bit us -- and we're back up again. But then the liver is challenged once again to digest them and the cycle is renewed. Once it gets to oscillating, then you're just trying to rob Peter to pay Paul, and the liver gets confused and then says I don't know what to do with this. I think I'll just throw it in the lymph, which is the great bunghole. And then we start to swell, and that's edema and perhaps in the long run cancer or some other severe teacher.

So these are pictures of pictures of pictures. And they all have to do with the alchemical image of dew, and every organ has a dew, and every dew has its gravity side and levity side, and every illness is a medicine. We just need to be able to get the biological and physiological side going a little better, and then we will see into the motive from the soul side of why we had to have that affliction, and that, then, is the road to self-transformation.