Weekly Features Post
Issue XXVI
Hectic days around here. Ongoing health fights, family obligations; you name it, we have it.
Eric was supposed to have gallbladder surgery today. He ran around the past couple of days, trying to get his life in order so he could take two or three days for the surgery and recovery.
And then the hospital caught fire Monday night. As part of a construction project, a contractor drilled through the main electrical transformer. Quite the big deal. All patients were evacuated and the hospital emptied out.
Eric called the doctor's office yesterday to inquire about the surgery. They implied they'd let him know by noon. He called again at 2:00, telling them he needed to know so he could cancel the babysitter if necessary. They said they wouldn't know until after 5:00.
So he postponed the surgery.
The doctor's office was a little snooty about it and implied Eric was being unreasonable.
It reminds us of Ivan Illich's observation from Medical Nemesis over thirty years ago: “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” It's one of our favorite quotes (as evidenced by our use of it three times on this site).
Eric thinks highly of his local hospital, but it has electrical and fire-related problems right now. It won't have conventional power for quite awhile and will have to rely on generators. Eric saw almost every ambulance in town at the hospital Monday night, carting away the patients.
So apparently he is supposed to be willing to undergo non-emergency surgery, while the ambulances are in use for bringing patients back (thus leaving none for him, if something went wrong), while the hospital staff is pre-occupied with a chaotic situation and some dude is riding the Gilligan Bike to provide the operating room with power.
Pass.
And we fully expect the hospital won't permit surgeries anyway, given the apparent problems. We've found it to be a responsible institution.
Yet the doctor's office wanted him to do it anyway, if the hospital would be open.
Wholly different perspectives, that.
That being said, Eric is meeting with his doctor today, and he fully expects that the doctor will agree with Eric's conclusion. We know from experience that doctor's staffers seem to be edgy (probably because ill and irritable people are short with them all day), and Eric probably caught one who was having an especially bad day in light of the fire.
Oh well, there is a bright side: Eric was able to write the Weekly Features Post today.
A further bright side: Eric has been hearing about non-surgical remedies for gallbladder problems. Most of them deal with "flushes," but when he searched the Internet, those remedies seem to deal with gallstones. Eric doesn't have gallstones. He has a thickened gallbladder wall. If anyone can direct him to a natural remedy for a thickened gallbladder wall (see e-mail link to left), he'd appreciate it.
Stoic's Porch
"All cruelty springs from weakness." Seneca
More Anonymous Ramblings
In A Guide for the Perplexed, E.F. Schumacher points out that we can't control our own thoughts. The much-celebrated daydreamer is merely an individual who is mentally drowning in a stream of thoughts that he can't stop even if he wanted to.
Schumacher, drawing on the work of the Russian occultist thinker P.D. Ouspensky, showed that the person who walks through life with such a stream of thoughts lives in a “mechanical” existence, an existence where he is merely the prisoner of his thoughts, unable to control his own mind, a mere child in the arena of mental development–a person lived by life rather than a person who lives life (which is the theme of Ouspensky's only novel, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin–a weird little book that's worth the paperback price). The first step to wisdom is to stifle the inner chatter, and this is accomplished through meditation. Schumacher quotes an array of thinkers–from Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy–to make his point convincingly.
Schumacher describes the method of obtaining self-awareness. Forgive the lengthy quote, but its worth the space:
Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana. . .
Nothing can be achieved or attained as long as the little egocentric “I” stands in the way–there may, in fact, be many little, egocentric, and quite uncoordinated I's–and to get away from the “I,” man must attend to “God,” with “naked intent,” as a famous English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, calls it . . . The enemy is the intervention of thought . . .
It is not a question of good or bad thoughts. Reality, Truth, God, Nirvana cannot be found by thought, because thought belongs to the Level of Being established by consciousness and not to that higher Level which is established by self-awareness. . . Thoughts cannot lead to awakening because the whole point is to awaken from thinking into 'seeing.' . . .
It is impossible to obtain any control over circumstances without first obtaining control over the ideas in one's mind, and the most important–as well as the most universal–teaching of all the religions is that . . . clarity of vision can be attained only by him who succeeds in putting the 'thinking function' in its place, so that it maintains silence when ordered to do so and moves into action only when given a definite and specific task. 'Therefore the vigorous working of your imagination, which is always so active . . . must as often be suppressed. Unless you suppress it, it will suppress you.' The Cloud of Unknowing.
While the centerpiece of the Indian method is yoga, the centerpiece of the Christian method is prayer. . . The Christian is called upon to 'pray without ceasing.' . . . This command has engaged the serious attention of Christians through the centuries. Perhaps the most famous passage on it is found in The Candid Narrations of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father, an anonymous jewel of world literature which was first published in Russian in 1884, in which a pilgrim, in order to learn how to pray without ceasing, obtains the Philokalia, which 'comprises the complete and minute knowledge of incessant inner prayer, as stated by twenty-five Holy Fathers.'
This inner prayer is also called 'the prayer of the heart.' The essence of it is 'standing before God with the mind in the heart'. . .
Now, the person is distinguished from other beings by the mysterious power of self-awareness, and this power, as we have already noted, has its seat in the heart, where, in fact, it can be felt as a peculiar kind of warmth. The prayer of the heart, normally the Jesus Prayer (consisting, in English, of these twelve words: 'Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) is endlessly repeated by the mind in the heart, and this vitalizes, molds, and reforms the whole person. One of the great teachers in this matter, Theophan the Recluse, explains thus: 'In order to keep the mind on one thing by the use of a short prayer, it is necessary to preserve attention and so lead it into the heart: for so long as the mind remains in the head, where thoughts jostle one another, it has no time to concentrate on one thing. But when attention descends into the heart, it attracts all the powers of the soul and body into one point there. This concentration of all human life in one place is immediately reflected in the heart by a special sensation that is the beginning of future warmth,' which grows gradually stronger. Whereas in the initial stages the attention is kept in the heart by an effort of will, in due course this attention, by its vigor, gives birth to warmth in the heart. This warmth then holds the attention without special effort.
By concentrating on one short prayer, often the Jesus Prayer, all distracting thoughts are shoved to the side and the heart and mind are made completely clear, concentrating, so to speak, on nothing–and thereby the stage is prepared for God.
This might be good advice, especially for today when mysticism tends to be denied or categorized with occultist-type beliefs. But at one point, in my effort to follow Schumacher's advice, I remember saying, “I want to be a mystic,” a goal whose failure is contained in its formulation.
The Last Word
Wahala: inconvenience, trouble, fuss, calamity. "Whatta wahala!"
