Being here: A Buddhist approach to pain
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I was 25 years old and in an intensive care ward with neurological complications and acute pain. I was plunged into a strange and frightening world. Perhaps the shock of what was happening shattered my defenses for a time - I am not sure - but I had intense and vivid experiences that changed the course of my life. The way I perceived the world suddenly altered, and I see my spiritual life, in any conscious sense, as having started at that time.
The experiences were so intense and vivid that I could not but be changed by them and they have informed much of my questioning ever since. Of course I did not sustain the acuteness of perception that arose in that life-and-death time, but the memory of those perceptions has driven much of my subsequent practice. Since then I have been on a quest for truth, wishing to live more and more in harmony with the human condition in all its complexity.
I had four experiences in hospital. The first was when I understood for the first time the necessity of taking responsibility for myself. I was confronted with the medical reality that there was no wholly successful treatment for my condition and that at best I should think about coming to terms with it - “management” rather than cure. It was the first time in my life that the concept of taking full and complete responsibility for myself held any weight. Until then I had indulged the fantasy that my difficulties would just go away, or I bargained, or I lived in plain, deluded denial of what I was experiencing.
It was shocking and difficult to realize “this is it” - that my life did indeed contain physical pain and limitation when I was only 25 years old. It was extremely hard to let this fact in, but even then I knew there was something liberating in beginning to acknowledge this; and I felt galvanised to make the best of my life. Looking back I could see that in avoiding responsibility for myself I had precluded the possibility of improving my circumstances because I had essentially been passive. It was vital to realise this.
The result of the second experience was that I made an active decision to move towards life. I woke up one morning and felt sort of distant and thin. I felt that I could easily let go of my life if I so chose. I looked out of the window at the city of Auckland and it seemed far away and unreal. I felt gripped by a huge, existential choice. Did I want to live, and take responsibility for my life, or did I want to give up and die? I felt that if I had chosen death I really could have died. I don’t know if this is actually true but it was certainly metaphorically true. It is quite possible to be spiritually dead while physically still alive.
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