How NOT to be ill - The Mindfulness of Bleating...

First time ill in a year or so... As I write this, parts of my brain are just falling away like bits of wet cake...
But will moaning really expedite my recovery more than common sense and kindness to myself? 

How often do we get ill? How do we define it? Is a disease the same as an illness? And what about afflictions? Are there varying degrees by which one passes from one into the other? A few questions of this ilk have been rolling around my mind the last few days, but sadly not nearly as much as my eyes have rolled around my head, experiencing as I have been the heaviest cold and stomach bug as I've had in many a year. People (including myself) use pejorative terms like "man-flu" with a sarcastically knowing smile, but influenza is no laughing matter. Between January 1918 and December 1920 (an incomprehensibly long time to be living in daily fear of sneezing), Spanish 'Flu infected approximately 500 MILLION people. Of that figure it carried off this mortal coil a staggering 20 percent or 100 million delirious, shivering and otherwise hapless souls, or approximately 5 percent of the global population, more than both World Wars combined. Such an outbreak would be unimaginable today. Social infrastructure would collapse, mass panic would ensue, and ailing governments, themselves debilitated and acting out of fear, would impose martial law in most of the Western world. How many of these laws would not be later repealed? It doesn't bear thinking about. 

Yet with a corpse-to-be just brimming with pathogens, the last few days have given me plenty of opportunity to pick over and unpack such phenomena as "sickness", "wellness" and suffering in general, as well as affording a few happy moments to get all misty-eyed about the eventual collapse of society. It's not that I hate people, I don't. It's just the way we are conditioned by "the powers that be" which I find so unhelpful and counter-productive to spiritual and emotional freedom, independence and initiative. But it's ok, it won't last. Nothing does. I just pray that the glass ceiling which halts our collective progress is shattered before the canvas flooring upon which it is all based is rent asunder from beneath our startled feet, collapsing under the weight of it's own hypocrisy, vice and folly, and a classic example of this absurdity is our disconcertingly un-enlightened and deluded approach to health in general, ill or otherwise.

Sometime, a few days of convalescence can leave us feeling a bit out of touch...

Last week a close acquaintance of mine at work was off for a few days. When he returned, he was a husk of his former self. His sentences were punctuated with hacking coughs, he sounded like he had been mauled by Jesus and had evidently come into possession of what could charitably be referred to only as a "rasta-glazed stare". This last observation, offered with my head tilted to convey a suitable degree of concern, he was less than pleased with, and when I asked how he was holding up, his answer was succinct and with a pained expression in his puffy, swollen eyes. "I've been off for two days man!" he wheezed with the numb incredulity of a airship-crash survivor (the Hindenburg springs to mind), a sad gratitude for having survived combined with the post-traumatic shock that often follows such a lymphatic ravaging.

In life, we perceive many things on a daily basis. In fact, life itself, our world and our entire universe IS NOTHING MORE than the totality of our combined experiences, screened through our perceptions and preferences, converted to electronic signals and set to a backdrop of and coloured in with various forms, volitions, mental arisings. Thoughts, events, smells, conversation, sounds, volitions, sensations of various kind, anything which can be experienced through our sensory organs all interrelate and create our experiences, which we then interpret and spin stories about to ourselves. Even that which can be sensed, turned over and examined by our minds (which in the Buddhist tradition is seen as a sense-organ in it's own right) will trigger of an explosion along intricate neurological pathways in our brains, synapses firing and whipping electrical signals along the electro-chemical Autobahns of the body at incomprehensible speeds. The statistics and latest scientific findings are simply jaw-dropping:

268 -  Speed (in miles per hour) at which signals travel along an alpha motor neuron in the spinal cord, the fastest such transmission in the human body. Sensory receptors in the skin, which lack the speed-boosting insulating layer called a myelin sheath, are among the slowest, at 1 mph - this is why being tickled makes us laugh.

100,000 -  Miles of myelin-covered nerve fibers in the brain of an average 20-year-old. Neuroscientists at UCLA, who have studied myelination in the brains of adults ages 23 to 80, find it tends to peak at 39 for both sexes.

100 trillion -  Minimum number of neural connections, or synapses, in the human brain. That is at least 1,000 times the number of stars in our galaxy. British researchers reported in December that genes involved in the workings of synapses account for about 
7 percent of our genome (genetic "blueprint").

50 -  Depth, in nanometers, of the smallest grooves detectable by a human fingertip (that is about 2 millionths of an inch). Most of the 2 billion or so nerve endings in the outermost layer of our skin sense pain; those dedicated to temperature allow us to detect differences as small as 0.01 degree Fahrenheit.

Don't ever try to tell me that the human body isn't something arrestingly spectacular! Moreover, at some point or another in our evolutionary past, all the cells that currently make up our mortal bodies can be traced back through our genetic heritage through times when we all had (in reverse chronological order) furry knuckles, tusks, scales, gills etc, and if we go far enough back, to when we were single-celled organisms (monomers) drifting through the primordial soup of earth's seas, gradually and graciously oxygenating the atmosphere some 3.5 billion years ago, a startling feat for which we should all be considerably grateful and congratulatory. Prior to that, if contemporary science is anywhere in the right ball park, all the atoms that currently make up our bodies and the world that surrounds it ALL originated from the fallout of the "Big Bang". In effect, we are made of stardust, and with that in mind, and given the vastness of the KNOWN universe, nothing seems to me more unlikely, agreeable and underrated than existence itself. And existence is rooted in our conscious experiences.

 Without our sensory experience, without consciousness, there would be no life on earth, so on the balance it seems to suggest that if we trace it back further, all experiences are indeed preceded, created and lead by and through our minds in dependance of possessing both consciousness and any combination of up to six senses - sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing and the mind itself (for our thoughts). Maybe that is part of the problem? When we suffer through either physical or mental ill-ease or discomfort, the lense through which we filter our sensory experiences, our aperture of awareness if you will, narrows and shrinks. Our egos and subconsciously-held eternalist beliefs are loath to accept the truth; that a fluctuating physical fortune is part of the price we pay for the temporary and tenuous gift of a body. In dependance on the body, consciousness arrises through which to view and explore these ever-shifting sensory experiences and processes from the inside out, as consciousness itself it was once defined by Bhante Sangharakshita (English academic, Buddhist teacher and founder of the FWBO/Triratna Buddhist movement in the late 1960's). 

The Buddhist "Wheel of Life" (shown here in Tibetam form).
The outer ring illustrates the 12 Nidanas (or stages) by which a person is born, develops as a psycho-physical being through the senses and eventually dies to be reborn, either day by day or over many lifetimes,
depending on one's interpretation of "Conditioned Co-Production" ( or "Pratitya-Samutpada") -
Empowering stuff, look both teachings up!

Put simply, we think we are special, we think we are unique, and on many levels it is is absolutely true. However, when consciousness comes into contact with the external world via the sense-organs, we experience phenomena which trigger feelings and emotional responses which we then categorise as either positive, negative or neutral. In dependance on these experiences we then seemingly create a false and disproportionate sense of self-importance and at worst make our beds as breeding-grounds for conceit. We grasp at the positive or pleasant, ignore the neutral and kick back and develop aversion to the negative or painful, and in doing so, over time create habits. Eventually these habits calcify to become our character, our personality, which then shapes and defines our lives.

The mind itself, whilst remaining by and large a thing of profound mystery, is notable for two things (three if you count it's ineffability); it's propensity for acting habitually and it's merciful plasticity. The mind possesses the same maddening characteristics of an old high-school friend of mine - I'm convinced we all knew one person in our lives like this - one who could have achieved or become anything they desired to, but could never be bothered! I can well imagine many people who knew me back then (and hopefully not contemporarily) fingering me in that accusatory lineup, as it were. With all this in context, you can see why Buddhists traditions have always placed so much emphasis on developing clarity of thought, mindfulness clear and radiant, and why the first enumerated "step" on "The Noble Eight-Fold Path" is one of Right Vision or Correct Perception of life, seeing things as they REALLY are. In short, the development of Wisdom, as we provisionally term it. As the opening six verses of the Dhammapada, one of the oldest and most popular collection of aphorisms and quotes of the Buddha, says:

1. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by (our) mind(s). 

If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows even as the cart-wheel follows the hoof of the ox (drawing the cart).

2. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by (our) mind(s). 

If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs.

3. Those who entertain such thoughts as ‘He abused me, he beat me, 

he conquered me, he robbed me,’ will not still their hatred.

4. Those who do not entertain such thoughts as ‘He abused me, he beat me,

he conquered me, he robbed me,’ will still their hatred.

5. Not by hatred are hatreds ever pacified here (in the world). 

They are pacified by love. This is the eternal law.

6. Others do not realize that we are all heading for death. 

Those who do realize it will compose their quarrels.

When I start to reflect on this (and for "pure" you can also read it as "clear"), on how profoundly simple and obvious this all is, but how we so often act against our better judgement, it makes me want to cry equal tears of both joy and despair.  Regrettably though, on this occasion I shall have to try and stoically hold firm as my mucal requirements have bereft me of all remaining tissues, and besides which, I'm far too busy trying to learn how to "smell" with the back of my tongue. Bleating on and complaining to ourselves and the free world about how ill we are only serves to once more put us in the centre of our own personal psycho-drama, reinforcing our own propensity towards self-absorbsion, selfishness and self-centredness, the opposite of kindness, generosity and love. We are addicted to ourselves, and every time we indulge in a bit of "harmless" moaning or Facebook whinging, we are lending credence and plausibility to the age-old lies which we unwittingly whisper into our own ears; that we are the centre of it all and that everyone cares about us as much as we do. Not possible, and nor should it be so. I feel strongly that the time has come to stop lying to ourselves - after all, if you can't trust yourself, who can you trust? We do have a right, a duty to care for ourselves, granted, but perhaps we could try and allow it to find increasing expression with the conscious aim of being for the benefit of others too? After all, as people living in the early 21st century, we have both rights and duties, the pre-eminent of which is to care for one another, irrespective of whether we stand to gain from these interactions or not. As Sangharakshita once said, the golden ideal to aim for in life is to "Love when there is no need to Love", in an unbiassed, sincere and non self-referrential way. "Spiritual insight does not consist of seeing new sights with the old eyes, but in seeing the old sights with new eyes" - and that goes for one-another too!

From even his teenage years as a conscripted soldier during WWII, Sangharakshita
(born Denis Lingwood, London 1925) believed in and lived by kindness and compassion...  

...which took him all over the world for over 60 years as a monk and teacher...

...and continues to serve him well in his 88th year. Sadhu!

We are in it together, each and every one of us. Old age, sickness and eventual dissolution are an inescapable aspect of life, a pre-requisite of it in fact. "The Great Leveller" takes back that which was only on loan in the first place, and our inconsistent and ever-failing health, be it a common cold, the 'Flu or colon cancer is simply a natural expression of this most natural of Laws. Of all the species to have ever existed on earth, 99.9% have become extinct. Ours is no different and why should it be? True Wisdom, the Perfection of Wisdom sees birth and death as two sides of the same coin, with no distinction between the two in the wider sense and with both words completely subjective. They are merely descriptive of the universe's ever-changing evolution viewed from different ends of the all-seeing celestial telescope of "I". From the stars we came, and one day, hopefully not too soon, to the stars we shall return. Just remember to bring extra tissues and vapo-rub, just in case.

Yours, smiling but with a head like a punctured football,

The Dharma-Farmer xx

May any merit gained in my acting thus go towards the liberation and benefit of all beings.

May all beings be well, may all beings be happy, and may all beings find peace

 during their short stay on this planet and beyond...