Heart of dukkha
I went to my PCP today for a routine checkup. Usually in and out visit with some brief chit chat about vaccines. Sharon and I have been simpatico on the true nature of the Covid jabs from our first meeting a couple of years ago. I thought this was a good thing since it made getting along even easier. People who think the same way on big ticket items in the area of health are rare now and it's never good to have a standard doctor asking you about jabs. Leads sometimes to a Not Good relationship with someone who thinks they know more about health than you do. In a normal world, your PCP would be reliable, knowledgeable and trustworthy.
I do the twice a year visit because I need one minor medication and to get routine bloodwork. Then there's the annual visit for screenings. I was supposed to provide a sample then mail it to a lab for my colon cancer screening, but I don't care anymore. The indignity of shitting in a box and then taking said box to UPS for drop off is just too much. If this doesn't lead to disenchantment, then I don't know what does. Welp, see you next life!
Today, I noticed Sharon looked a little different. She'd lost weight and brought up that she had heart surgery since my last visit in August. She was modified with four heart stints after her doctor told her that she had the heart of an eighty year old.
I was dumbstruck. How did this happen? I assumed she had somehow avoided the jab since she was totally conversant with its many lethal side effects and the death rate. We had talked about it before. So I blurted out, "Wait, what, you got the jab?" I had just assumed given her knowledge of the issues that she had figured out how to dodge it. Naive thinking on my part. This whole time we had been swapping stories, she was herself jabbed.
"Yeah, he (pointing to the senior doctor down the hall) made us get it."
I was genuinely upset. She mentioned she was using the standard protocol to try to kill off the spike proteins, but of course, the damage was done. Her stints may keep her alive longer, but her heart is decades older than her body now. She knows her life has been shortened, knows the cause and she was genuinely fearful. Understandably. On the way out, she asked for my prayers. I assured her that I would be sending positive thoughts her way. She always says, "I always enjoy visiting with you!" The feeling is mutual.
In reflecting on it, I don't feel I handled the encounter well at all. This week has been me ruminating on her fate, the state of her husband and kids. Today, I woke up extra grumpy even though I had a restful sleep. It bothers me that even with all the data, all the stories and research, no one is discussing the devastation visited upon the world through the jab. Sharon is someone I instantly related to and enjoy seeing. She is a happy Christian and a fun person to talk to.
About a year ago, I turned her on to an IVM dealer and she's been on that protocol daily along with natokinnase, Vitamin D and zinc. At this point, her longevity is compromised and all that's left to do is to kill off the spike proteins. Maybe they're all dead, but it would really suck for her to get turbo cancer on top of the heart disease. The stories of spike proteins becoming a permanent fixture of your DNA are out there and I've no competence to judge the claim. Your body is reprogrammed to produce these things and I've seen one report in which a study claimed that the spike proteins were still around 18 months after injection.
I post a lot of blog entries that the kids would say are black pilled thematically. It's really my character to get into this stuff, probably because I had a rough childhood and came out with a darker bent than most people. Suffering early in life does that to you and there are benefits to it. I like to think it has a certain usefulness spiritually. If samsara can lose its charms, maybe you can escape! Or maybe you can become more empathic with other people. A lot of our suffering is seeing other people suffer, even we don't know them personally.
Today was challenging for me because while I don't know this woman very well, it really hit me to know someone (again) who had been put through the ringer by the Covid jab. These are people who have had to undergo serious, invasive medical treatments in order to save their lives. In the case of one family member, she got turbo cancer and died three or four months after diagnosis. Some people get no treatment, they just keel over dead or never wake up.
And still, they are hidden in public life. For years, I've tracked some of these people and have donated to their funds for medical and personal care. I fantasize about winning a lot of money and spending part of my day finding these people and donating to them, to help them in their time of need.
Sharon did her homework. She looked up her lot number and cross checked it with the known "hot batches," the ones responsible for a higher than normal rate of death and destruction. Sadly, her Covid jabs were among those.
I can inwardly get negative about little stuff in my work space. Truth is, everyday I sit and think about how good I have it, to be part of a great company and to have agreeable co-workers. There is always dukkha of course in every aspect of existence, but mine has been really manageable for the past few years. I've never been forced to take a toxic jab that turned my heart into that of an 80 year old by a boss in order to keep my job. I reflect also that everything is impermanent; my job could be an early victim of AI, or I might get switched to a totally different group that has personality issues, etc. So I enjoy what I have and commiserate with those who have it much harder.
I'm one of 19% of the American population who took no Covid jabs. I told a friend one day that, come the die off, I would have to impregnate many young, beautiful unvaxxed women who survived. Line them up and just go at 'em, perpetuate the species. Gallows humor to be sure, but we don't understand exactly just how widespread the problems are now and I fear that the death toll will suddenly begin escalating. Think of a line on a chart that suddenly goes parabolic in 2028 or 2030. There are lots of Sharons walking around and many do not know that their tickers are irreparably damaged or that tumors are growing in their organs.
Black pilling can be a form of wallowing in nihilism. It's the dark twin of eternalism. Both are extremes that lead to suffering here and now. They are in my mind a kind of bi-polarism of the mind, buffeted as it is by internal and external forces, personal and impersonal. So I try not to black pill myself and because of practice, I am much, much better than say a few years ago. But looking at dukkha, maybe even looking for dukkha, has a spiritual benefit. Surely you wouldn't need to go far at all to find it! It's everywhere!
Of course it is, but oddly all of us save a tiny few actively work to overlook it. If we ever saw the full scale and sweep of dukkha, we would becoming arahants instantly.
Ajahn Martin will mention the body, how much work goes into maintaining it. Just pondering this should leave us disenchanted with samsara, but it doesn't. This shampoo smells so good! Or this soap! This mouthwash gives me a fresh clean feeling that lasts all morning! So much work and we love the body. Love it, love it, love it. And we love all the thoughts that go around maintaining and improving the body. The idea of the body is just as delicious as the body itself. We don't stop to consider that we need nice smelling soaps because our body will very quickly begin emitting a rank odor that compounds exponentially the longer we avoid soap and water. The body is so great and our lives are spent almost entirely in its service.
People don't need to exert themselves to find dukkha. "In dukkha, we live and move and have our being," to paraphrase the Good Book. There is a seeming paradox to the practice: In being aware of dukkha, foreseeing one's own death and the break up of the body and its disintegration into nothingness is depressing. It's something we instinctively avoid especially in the West, but it's also the path to having a happier life – like, now. That's the paradox, that even in rare cases, a meditator can have his corpse or images of actual rotting human corpses and enter jhana.
I don't do corpse meditation very often, but I've found it refreshing in the past because it leads to lightheartedness born of honesty. The mind likes to fabricate everything, but its specialty is the notion of a self. An eternal one of course. Most everyone takes it for granted that they will live to see another day.
Hovering at either end of the eternalism-nihilism pole leads to suffering; eternalists don't understand that their hope for a future heavenly existence reunited with a body is as fraught with disappointment, as is eternal life in a hot lake of fire in the company of demons. Lucifer is an interesting duck within Yahwist literature because he has traversed from one end of the axis – heaven – to the other. For a classical Christian worldview, this is unique. For Buddhism, it is part of the cycle, where beings wander between extreme ends while missing the middle.
In a later blog, I will write about a book that helped me to understand dhamma and the crucial role in plays in transforming life from a slog through disappointment, pain and suffering to something that is pleasant.
