Illness as indicator

Monday, April 14, 2025

4:45 a.m. Illness as indicator, and illness as facilitator. Yes?

And how do you feel?

You know how I feel: crummy. (Crumby, for purists.) But I trust my state of health or non-health is not being used for display purposes.

Isn’t the theme illness as indicator? Why would your state of being not be relevant?

Okay, well, I have a mild headache and I’ve been up and down all night and I have a persistent wheezing and my back hurts. Other than that, things are peachy as usual.

Now look at the negative space.

The rest of the picture, you mean? Well, as far as I know there isn’t anything serious going on, and things have often been much worse.

Bring firmly to mind some of your difficult nights (and notice, it has been a good while since you have gone through one like that).

You have a point.

Describe one, just a little.

I feel like a kid: “Do I gotta?”

It will be instructive – only don’t wander into it, just describe it a little.

Very reluctant even to bring it to mind. All night long, gasping for breath, nothing holding it off, no rest because I can’t lie down or even relax in a chair. Chilly or sweaty or both alternately, wracking coughing, maybe sneezing, painful breathing, each breath an effort, hours of waiting for the time to pass because day is never as bad as night and sometimes the attack would cease the moment the sun came up, which was perplexing and irritating, if finally a relief. Getting through the next day on insufficient sleep, knowing that another night is coming –

You’re right, things are a lot better now.

Your friend Bob’s wife Karen suffered from spinal cord leakage that left her in continuous unbearable pain. Your experience wouldn’t necessarily have been easier for her, but you an see that she might have swapped if only for the variety, for the surcease of the torment she endured on an unending basis.

Sure. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to swap with her. Mine was easier to bear, and besides, I was used to it.

Dirk’s ankylosing spondylitis – would you have swapped for that?

Hell no! And I see your point. It is the same point the good sisters used to make in Catholic school: Everybody’s burden fits them, nobody else’s would. They didn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.

Now, let’s tread lightly here, lest anybody think we’re making light of anyone’s situation.  Still, it must be said, nothing is random in the universe. If you are bearing a burden, (a) there’s a reason or it – that is, there is something in it for you, and (b) therefore, you can bear it. Even if you ultimately have to kill yourself to be free of it, that isn’t defeat and it isn’t meaningless. Nobody gets cheated in the full scheme of things, regardless of what appearances in 3D suggest.

I can hear people thinking, “That’s easy for you to say,” and I will respond on your behalf as I always do when someone says that: Whether it is easy or hard to say is not the point. The point is, it’s true.

So supposing someone has a severe life-threatening or let’s say life-crippling illness: Steven Hawking, say, or the actor who became a paraplegic after he fell from a horse.

Christopher Reeve.

Consciously, would either of them have chosen life in such a strait-jacket? Then why would they have chosen it at other levels? “Upstairs,” as you put it.

I don’t have a clue. I assume it isn’t random; I always assume that. But beyond that, no idea.

You were told from the beginning, 3D life is choosing. And you gradually worked out that it is always choosing within limits, and that the limits are never random, hence could be said to have been chosen at some level. But let’s look at that a little more; it may look different now.

I sort of have the idea. It isn’t that the limits were chosen before the life, or even within the life.. but I can’t quite get the next step in the chain of logic.

It isn’t logic, so much as data. I’m providing you with a new angle of vision to look at the facts you already know, and then adding a correlate.

And it centers around the nature of limits.

Yes! And what about the nature of limits?

We can only be in one place, one time, while we are in 3D. Our experiences here are concentrated, focused. And, I see it, by definition we are here and not there,  now and not other times, genetically shaped as we are and not otherwise, etc. We live within limits; that’s the precondition.

If you are placed in a certain moment of time, in a certain locale, does every bit of it have to refer to you? Does it have to reflect your preferences? Is it (in this sense) “all about you”?

We take what comes with the territory.

Let’s say, you take the territory, and what comes with it is a mixed bag, some of which affects you and some of which doesn’t affect you.

And the indicator is what we resonate with!

Almost there. And what determines what you resonate with?

Partly, our decisions as to what we value, what we want to be.

There. Now is it clear?

I’d say, adverse circumstances are as much “us” as favorable ones, and they always fit our conditions or else we couldn’t resonate with them.

You might say, better, it is the resonance that determines what you can or cannot experience, and, within that, how you will experience it.

Therefore, nothing at random, but not necessarily everything as we would prefer it.

And there is your “illness as indicator.” It isn’t exactly about your moral character, or even your beliefs and preferences. It is more, Here’s what you allow into your life by resonance with what you are, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly. Change, and the resonances change – and perhaps your external situation changes.

It feels like I have it at this moment but may lose it as time goes on today.

That’s why you write things down, and print them, and send them to the wind.

No, I meant, I’m not sure I will be able to hold the meaning that the words try to express.

I know what you meant. When you reread the words, cast yourself back to the moment. Intend to remember the inner meaning.

Okay.

And how do you feel?

Very funny. I have just the slightest of headaches – a wisp, no more – and my breathing has been better pretty much since we began. But I notice, whenever I am intensely absorbed in this work, my breathing rapidly becomes background. In effect, it smooths out to let me concentrate on other things.

Or vice-versa. Very well, so much for illness as indicator. You thought we might provide a table: This symptom indicates this cause. I trust this was better. Next time, perhaps, illness as facilitator.

Thanks, Jon. Very helpful. Till next time.