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A Zen Helper Disclosure on the Nature of Illness

Did you know that being sick is actually just your body having a big fuss about nothing? Here. Imagine this.

A tiny creature (so small you can’t even see it) – well, actually let’s make that fifty-four thousand eight hundred and seventy-two tiny creatures – these creatures are sneezed out of your colleague’s mouth and splatter all over your face. Now, even though there are fifty-four thousand eight hundred and seventy-two of these critters, you still can’t see them – even when they all band together in a tight little group and start shouting and waving their arms . . . or tentacles, or flagella, or whatever they have. So let’s think of them as one tiny collective organism, the size of this period — . — if you sliced it in half, let’s say, three hundred times.

Okay. Now this little speck comes into your body, and . . . what? It just sort of hangs around, scoots up and down your blood vessels, maybe hangs out in your liver for a bit, dodging white blood cells.

Now, you could collect all the disease organisms that you’ll come into contact with in your whole life, get them together into a big group, and . . . well, they’d still be so small that you couldn’t see them. Really, to be truthful, if you harbored them all in your body, you’d suffer no more effect than a weight gain of .000003 grams.

But your body knows better. We must rally against the enemy! Kill the, um . . . terrorists!!! So your white blood cells valiantly attack the invisible group of deadly loiterers, and that attack is called . . . an immune response! Yes! Justice will be served! Your body can now go into total purge mode – start coughing and sneezing to eject the little buggers! Raise its temperature (this is a fever), to burn them up! Puke incessantly to clear them from the digestive tract! Yes! Kill, kill, kill!!!!!

And that’s being sick. Your body making a big fuss about little bugs. If your body didn’t make a fuss? Well, those bugs would just sit there and have nothing to do. Maybe, if they were really ambitious, they could breed like mad, make millions of baby bugs, and by the time you became 96 years old and died, they’d have succeeded in giving you a weight gain of .000004 grams!

Yes, there is a deep Zen lesson inherent in all this. And the lesson is that we suffer not because of the world around us, but because of our reaction to the world.

Meditate on that for seventeen hours (while not eating, peeing, or shifting your weight), send your donations to the great teacher (that’s me), and you will surely find true enlightenment.

Here is a poem. Done in the ancient Achu style from Japan. (Get it? Achu? As in a sneeze? Which rhymes with haiku? Genius, I know.)

Puke, of grayish green

A sneeze, full of buggies mean

Children, innocent at school

Knowing not that their teacher, cruel

Has infected them with virulent disease

Soon they’ll be coughing up a strange cottage cheese-

looking sputum, from their lungs

and having a doctor hold their tongues

as he looks to see if they have strep

Or something worse, that kids can get

from teachers who use disinfectant

which everyone knows breeds intensely anti-biotic resistant bacteria that nothing can kill since they’ve lived through the apocalypse of whatever brand of soap that claims to be killing 99.9% of germs but is actually just killing off the weak to prove Darwin right and single out the most powerful germs to live on and breed and create microscopic creatures which our bodies will grossly over-react to as they have parties in our organs and eat penicillin and erythromycin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, laughing all the while!

Yours in Wellness,

Kenton

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Zen Helpers. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.