PHYSICAL PAIN: ITS DIRECTIONS

I awaken to excruciating pain—mostly in my back, but also sometimes my neck and the occipital nerves towards the top of my head. My back feels as if it has been bashed with 2x4s. So I rise from bed early out of necessity and then go downstairs, one stair at a time due to the painful stiffness through my body. All this pain diminishes as I move around, but not entirely; it still lurks in my body, surprising me with its sharpness now and then. Approaching bedtime, I take a pain pill and a sleeping pill. These enable me to sleep and rest for a while until my sharp pain awakens me as if I had fallen asleep on a medieval torture machine, the rack. My doctor says this is the result of spinal bone spurs, which is a spreading crystalization of calcium over the backbone, with protrusions of “bone” into spinal nerves. The pain radiates out following any old slight bone fractures of which I have a few in my lower ribs on the right side, due, not just in my estimation, to a belt that struck me there when my bones were still forming. The pain has come home to roost or so it would seem. However, since it does diminish as I get on with my day, I consider myself lucky indeed, even blessed. My wife, in the nerve pain of her severe and chronic fibromyalgia is always in pain, and can barely move around at all. I told her yesterday, “We get up, have our coffee, do our errands and doctor visits during the day, have dinner, watch a movie, go to bed, and then we’re dead—if all goes well.” She laughed. Pain makes life literally tortuous. Every day one is tortured simple because one has a body that is subject to such. Such is the nature of bodily existence. This by no means makes the body “bad.” I surely enjoyed its pleasures well enough when I was young and younger and still do what I can to counterbalance the pain.

But the pain of existence—the inherent life of the pain of the world, the suffering of the world, called weltschmerz by Schopenhauer—has always been there for me and is inherent within every human being, be they conscious of it or sensitive to it or not. For all its pleasures and wonders and great joy and beauty, life is painful and life is suffering. This does not make it bad at all; it is just that to the extent that we identify ourselves with our physical bodies and the physical world without getting beyond this level of identity is the source of our loss—for the body and all that it holds dies and all is lost in that regard. Buddhism offers no remedy to physical pain, saying that it is inherent to life and the body and must therefore be borne by us. We do have the ability, though, to not suffer over our suffering, i.e., to not make our pain cause us more psychological pain—which is what we tend to do. Rather than accepting and being with the pain and ourselves in pain, we pray to God to take it away—which is all in vain as well as a vanity, an unreality, a falsity. My own pain I tend to take with a grain of salt; it hurts but it is as it is and I adapt and accept. My wife’s pain is something that is more difficult to accept, for it includes an acceptance of losing her, of having her with me no longer. This kind of acceptance is most painful and most difficult, though the fact that one who is in chronic and severe pain may be relieved of such pain does make its acceptance more possible. One of life’s most difficult dilemmas is to allow oneself to love another, for this is to love another as oneself. Even when that love is deepened beyond one’s very being, since it is still personal, i.e., of the person, of the body, when they leave their body, a part of the one who loves them is taken away. The hole in one’s heart, in one’s being, is not only metaphorical. How many mates whose spouses die, follow them very quickly. This is called “heart-breaking,” and that goes to the very core of one’s being, of one’s life. On the other hand, such a death of one who suffers and is then released from at least its physical aspect, is a blessing and an opening to whatever is to happen next. I assume that something does, but that’s another story. That story pertains to our need to let go of the suffering and pain in our mind and heart to every possible extent, before we finally leave the body.

I loved my mother very much and was close to her though I lived three thousand miles away and also had a disabled child which made it pretty much impossible to visit her and my father. They were in ill health but did their best to come to see us. She died young. But I found that when she left her body, she was closer to me—as if she literally entered into my being and became a part of it. I missed her even less because she was always present. Perhaps this is how it is for those whom we love deeply; they somehow enter into us when they depart their bodies. Perhaps it’s purely psychological, though I actually don’t think it’s only that. I think somehow it’s literally physical. I know an Indian medicine man, leader of a local ancient tribal people. He’s very big, probably 350 pounds and well over six feet tall. He told me that he has “seven grandfathers” that live in his body, that they are always hungry and he obediently feeds them. At the time I thought, “What a feeble excuse,” but now I have more of a sense of the truth of his statement. If we take other people into ourselves, into our very cells, when they are alive, which I believe to be absolutely true, why cannot this happen just as much or even more so once they leave their bodies?

“Pain” has the capacity to lead us many places within ourselves. Esoterically or spiritually, pain is the great purifier as well as the “punishment for sins.” Perhaps any of this is true. Perhaps pain is “karmic.” And/or perhaps it is simply part and parcel of existing in a body and as a body, not just as an individual but as a part of a great whole of humanity with whom we share the same heart, the same feelings in many respects; even the same mind and soul, if you will, on a certain level. Is it “my” pain? Is it “our” pain? Am I suffering for others or just for myself? One must be able to hold these questions properly and in a balanced way so as to avoid megalomania and narcissism, but just where between each of us are the boundaries? I don’t know if our own “taking on” of the pain of others actually reduces their pain, but if it’s not diminished, our own willingness to take it upon ourselves, to put another’s being before our own, reframes us, reforms us, purifies us of our own “sins,” our own actions committed in ignorance. As I’ve said before, I never know where these “conversations with myself” will lead—but they generally go where they want to go.

There's a line from No Country for Old Men in which the Sheriff visits an older sheriff who is now in a wheelchair. The Sheriff asks "How are ya?" and the man says "Yer lookin' at it."