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Febrile Illness totally wipes me out

Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/29/13 11:34 PM
on march 5 i got wiped out by some horrid viral thing, probably flu b, i would guess, given recent exposures

it was amazing how some little bit of protein and genetic material combined with the totally dysphoric immune chemicals a virus inspires my body to release can basically reduce one's level of physical function to that of an near invavlid and fog an otherwise sharp mind to the point that my meditative, jhanic and baseline abilities were about 90% shut down

terrible muscle aches and joint pain

wicked headache

head totally congested

so tired yet couldn't sleep worth a darn, and usually sleeping is one of my talents

spinning vague fever-thoughts: do i have meningitis, if i got sicker could i get up the energy to call an ambulance, i have been laying around for days so are those leg cramps now blood clots,

so fatigued I could barely get up the energy to make one simple meal a day

just keeping hydrated took almost too much energy

at my best moments i was able to collapse in a papa-san chair and watch Glee, Charmed and Secret Circle: tried more sophisticated fare but couldn't handle it

at other times my eyes ached so badly imcould barely open them, which reminded me a lot of the dengue i got in cambodia

missed work on the 7th: I haven't missed work since one day in residency about 8 years ago

spending my 11th wedding anniversary alone tonight as i told carol to stay away as she truly doesn't want this: such was my wedding anniversary present to her

tried to go into work yesterday: they took one look at me and signed me in as a patient

IV's really hurt

IV fluids gave me chills but i felt somewhat better

went home fogged, vague, spaced out

finally fell asleep about 5am

woke up with a terrible sore throat that felt really tight, started coughing and gagging until i vomited, swallowing not only hurt like crazy bit made it feel like i might cut off my airway: OMG, i thought, do i have epiglottitis, am i going to get a trach, came the thoughts, though luckily i can see my own epiglottis in the mirror and it was ok

knowlegde is a curse a times when one knows what can go wrong

today i am somewhat better, still taking it easy

point is, mortality is hard, and it is easy to be confident if one has been some long period of time from something like this, and one might be tempted to say something like such moments are a challenge to our practice, but more accurate would be that practice was basically impossible in any way i might think of practice, and basic survival weakly took over, and even that fails to really capture the arc of the illness, which really was its own thing, like a hurricane to a beach town: just ride out the destruction as best you can

i have always found the limits of practice interesting, and moments like this one make me reflect on platitides like "pain plus resistance is suffering" and a recent tweet i saw along the line that if we learn to handle all emotions we can handle anything, and think that they either know something far beyond what i know or they have not recently been sick enough to remember that there are things that can lay us low despite what we might have thought of as powerful practice and lasting transformation

interesting aside: when laying there in the hospital bed getting fluids i was on the monitors and i kept trying to get into something jhanic, as i find them healing, and the alarm on the bed kept going off, as my respriratory rate would go below 3/minute at times and generally stayed around 7, and when it went the lowest was when i was able to get something passable as perhaps weak 3rd jhana, and then the O2 sat monitor would go off as my oxygen sat kept dropping to the high 80% range, which correlated well with the better mindstates, so one more question for the scientific journal: is hypoxia and/or hypercarbia part of the jhanic buzz?

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/9/13 9:07 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
What comes to mind to ask is, what would this experience have been like if you hadn't been practicing all these years? Can you remember being this sick before you attained paths? How do the experiences compare?

Oh, and I sincerely hope you get well soon. Thanks for the sobering reminder that we all have bodies that are subject to these things. There's a reason why so many spiritually-inclined people want to rise above embodiment somehow.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/9/13 9:32 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
"the flu is like being seasick, at first your afraid your gonna die, then after a while your afraid your not gonna die"

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/9/13 10:36 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I once got sick but not to an extent as you and nobody that would care for me. I did manage it quite well because I let go of the resistance.

I don't know what will happen if I get as sick as you but I guess I won't be able to manage it as well.

Edited to add: I still think that death meditation is very important!

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/9/13 10:34 PM as a reply to Jane Laurel Carrington.
As to what it would have been like otherwise (had I not developed my practice), it is really hard to tell, I think, as feeling somewhat better now, I don't honestly think I can recollect in full accuracy what it felt like at its worst, and that was just 3 days ago, and so I am pretty sure my memory of the last time I had the flu before I had my practice trip pretty together, which is too many years ago now, will not be that great, but my honest guess is not much different: whatever those immune chemicals are, they really do a number on this stuff, I think, and clearly adversely impact brain function, attention regulation, energy level, perceptual clarity, and the like. As noted above, I kept thinking about when I had dengue (1995, about 7 months pre-stream entry): very similar sort of horrible, I seem to recall.

As to flu and seasickness, so true, except then there is the stage where you are too tied to care if you live or die, as you just don't have the energy or mental capacity left through the fever-induced brain fog, sort of the hell-realm version of equanimity.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 12:34 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Daniel,
Do you ever consider that there may be individuals that would use "powers" to injure you to try to stop your spreading of a very effective dharma? I hope you have your shields up or whatever you do.
Sending you metta, be well
~D

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 12:42 AM as a reply to Dream Walker.
Interesting thought. Know any specifics I should watch out for?

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 12:44 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I think that it is good to have the antibodies now when I am younger, such that when I get old I will have more flu strains that my immune system knows how to handle.

I remember the flu season from 2 years ago, the swine flu season, and noticed that I didn't see a single patient who was over about 55 with it, and we were just buried in flu. I presume it must have been close enough to something they got exposed to that younger generations didn't. This year I am seeing it in the elderly and it is not pretty, so it must be more novel or at least since they were born.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 1:03 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
First off, thanks a ton for your book. It helped me immensely and still does.

I was reading my other favorite forum the other day and came upon this-
http://wiki.my-big-toe.com/index.php/Bullying,_Voodoo_and_NPMR_Assisted_Bullying

I really like Tom Campbell theory of everything and have been trying to cross pollinate the information between forums. I believe you may also enjoy his perspective. I really hope you check it out.
Thanks,
~D

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 1:11 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
...baseline abilities were about 90% shut down


curious what you mean by that^

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 1:30 AM as a reply to Adam . ..
meaning that generally there are all these things I have access to very, very easily, with trivial to no effort, just there, and whatever those cytokines and other immune chemicals do, they clearly interrupt a lot of that functionality to varying degrees.

Typically my baseline level of perception has this immaculate, pristine direct clarity to it that is very noticeable and nice: not so when dazed with that viral thing.

Typically jhanas are right there, just a slight nudge away or just spontaneous when just laying down: not so when wiped out with that viral thing.

Typically fruitions are a dime a dozen: not so when wiped out with that viral thing.

that helpful?

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 3:50 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
I guess I was just wondering about the traditional dogmas which say that some aspect of awakening is irreversible by any conditions. For example thanissaro bhikku reports of ajahn suwat that even after the brain injuring car accident which eventually killed him he said that "the thing I got from meditation" was unchanged despite things like hallucinations going on. Is any "baseline" stuff totally unshakeable for you? Do you have any thought on why not if its all still subject to karma? Is attaining something totally constant and unshakeable important to you?

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 3:57 AM as a reply to Adam . ..
Ah, ok...

Did the illusion of duality reassert itself? No.

Did the illusion of agency reassert itself? No.

Did centerlessness re-distort to a sense of a center point? No.

Did any of those really seem to matter when I was laying there in dazed, bleary, wiped-out pain? Uh, this question would seem more theoretical than practical. I could point out some interesting things I noticed about how the unfound mind retained that uncanny diffuse silence when the IV was being inserted despite me being a total needlephobe, and how the direct pain of that 18g needle was totally unfiltered by the dualistic distortions that plagued the Daniel's of Old, and yet, something in that is missing something of what was going on as the main focus of the experience, and that is not its intrinsic luminosity but the total suckiness of the whole being-sick-like-that thing.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 2:08 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Thanks Daniel. And also thanks for keepin us all up to date on your practice I always like hearing about it.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/15/13 7:28 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Get well soon.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/10/13 11:57 PM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Hey Dan

I hope its all fine for you now !

I recall my own rush to the emergency twice. In one case I was having a terrible kidney stone pain. Like you
say , its difficult to meditate at such times. however during those painful moments , there were a few intermittent
moments were there was less pain to no-pain and it is during these times I seized the moment and reflected
on anatta / stream-entry and the wicked inner laugh came..you know that one ? the one that sees nobody is there
inside !

In the other case , I was terribly fatigued so I could not incline to do any kind of practise at all..I'm not sure
whats the best thing to do when one is exhausted and fatigued to incline to anything at all..it is for these
reasons I gave up actualism - somehow its impossible to see the universe as benevolent..benign - yes

maybe more concentration is key ? so that in the midst of the terrible things going on, insight occurs quickly and leads to relief soon ?

Disease and pains have always been interesting topics to uncover in the framework of insight practise.

Regards
Shashank

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/15/13 9:22 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
This makes me wonder.

I have heard that the Buddha was able to abide in jhana even at the point of his death.

Also I remember hearing a teaching by Sri Ramana Maharshi that some "Jnani" will seem to suffer at the time of death while outwardly exhibit calm.

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/15/13 4:19 PM as a reply to Adam Dietrich Ringle.
Glad to hear you're feeling better Daniel.

I've often wondered how you find practicing alongside being a doctor. I am training in the health care profession myself in a much less demanding role and often question my career choice! If you wouldn't mind answering is there anything you've found that has helped your practice while training/working as a doctor? And do you feel anything has hindered your practice at all?

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/16/13 3:43 AM as a reply to Scott P.
Practicing while being a doctor...

Well, the preposterous hours and pace force one to adopt a make-every-moment-practice point of view at least to some degree, as time for what most people would call formal practice can be very, very limited.

The extreme situations regarding sleep deprivation, crazy pace, intense personal interactions, very complex rapid-fire problems with very high stakes, life-or-death nature of some aspects of the work, the risks involved, the blood and odors, the violent patients, the lack of time to do things like urinate and eat for very long periods (sometimes up to 14 hours or so), along with the patients/family members/staff members with major personality disorders and the very complex politics on many fronts make for an extremely challenging job, a job that will show you daily what limits your practice, has, as you are likely to find them very, very rapidly under those conditions, and that really allows one to be more honest about what has been done, what hasn't been done, what else there is to work on, what holds up well despite profound pressures, and the like, so it is sort of like the ultimate pressure cooker beyond, say, a war zone, which at times the emergency department sort of looks like, though bullets flying are very rare (but fists, spit and vile language are not).

As to hindered my practice, that would very much depend on what one wanted to do. It is a great service, a great opportunity to do good in the world, a great opportunity to connect with and help thousands of people, to save lives, to increase the world's happiness and wellbeing, so were one looking for that with good pay, one can find it there.

It is not very good for one's own physical health at all: the circadian flips, the brutal hours, the lack of ability to take time to eat: very taxing on this mammal.

It is not good for the sorts of things that take very long hours of practice in a short space of time: finding, say, 14 days in a row to do serious concentration practices 18 hours/day so as to get up to the levels I can access when I get that sort of warm up: basically impossible in my current life, so that is a hindrance. However, I am going to be changing jobs and the hours won't be quite as extreme and more time for things like that will be possible, at very long last...

The Three Characteristics present at all times, and all sensations are worthy of investigation, so making that the focus all through life: that is the thing you get from doing what would otherwise look a lot like working yourself to death...

Helpful?

Daniel

RE: Febrile Illness totally wipes me out
Answer
3/17/13 6:08 AM as a reply to Daniel M. Ingram.
Your description of being a doctor sounds much more horrible to me than your description of being ill!

Yes thanks it's very helpful in that its a great example of practicing well under (very) imperfect conditions. I have worked in A&E (as we call it in England) and found the 'circadian flips' very difficult, I found it a very unnatural thing to be doing. I am now in oncology which I feel is better on the old mind and body. Still its hard to focus on form rather than content in these settings, almost dangerous.

Hope your new job works out, are you staying in the same field? ED, ER, however its called in the US.