I guess I'm writing in this blog again.

Because I don't know any other way to process my life.  You don't mind, dear reader, if I talk to you for a little while, do you?

When I lost my leg, the pain was quit severe.  Confined as I was to a hospital bed, there was little for me to do about it either.  The pain medication was dutifully rationed, and did little to dull the sensations anyway.  I was reduced to metaphor as a coping mechanism.  I ran through the traditional comparisons rather quickly, as there turn out to be only two: my stump was on fire, or it was being jabbed with tiny knives.

Easily bored and of a literary bent, I began to think of other ways to describe what was happening.  What remained of my leg wasn't on fire, but encased in ice, submerged in acid, being chewed by dogs.  It wasn't knives that I felt plunging into it, but stiletto heels, plastic cocktail swords, long filaments of coarse wire.  These metaphors also soon ran out.

So I expanded my reach.  The ways we describe pain are incredibly arbitrary after all.  What is the difference in sensation between being burnt and frozen?  How is the pain of losing a limb different from the pain of being electrocuted? Biologically speaking, the difference is insignificant indeed.  It is not the sensation itself, but the circumstances that accompany it which decide how we view it. If I didn't have any context--if I couldn't see for myself the blank space at the end of the gauze--would I even know that my leg had been removed, instead of having been stuck into a cauldron of piranhas?  Would it even hurt?

I decided to try an experiment.  I imagined that instead of lightning or fire or knives, that it was snowflakes falling on my new meat.  That each dart of what I had come to assume was pain, was in fact a large, icy crystal falling on my skin and slowly melting.  And then a brightly colored gerber daisy, poking through the surface and opening its petals.  The feet of little birds, the tongue of a cat, a phosphorescent lichen glowing blue in the antiseptic air.

I was not entirely successful.  For a moment I would be able to see the sensation as something other than pain, even as something beautiful, but I am far too attached to my perceptions for it to have lasted.  I had at that point been believing in pain for thirty years, and the time it evidently takes to disbelieve outlasted my stay in that room.  The tyranny of perception has a great hold on me.   But its hold is not absolute.  Pain isn't real.  It has no identity of its own, and no particular root in reality.  It is a psychosocial construct, one that we would forget the moment we stopped believing in it--or even if something else captured our attention.  If the coffee cup next to me as I write this suddenly asked me how my day had been, no doubt I would cease to feel the throbbing that even today plagues me.  All available processors would be devoted to this new phenomenon, and such a trivial thing as pain would be shuffled to the bottom of the task list.

And there are those who learn to do exactly that after extensive training and meditation.  Fire walkers and the like are a well documented fact.  Pain is a sensation that we can interpret as we see fit.  And what is true for physical pain is true for emotional pain as well.  Emotion is like water: it has no flavor of its own, but merely takes on the character of that which surrounds it.  The tears that come from a particularly moving scene on the stage or a glorious panorama are neither happy nor sad.  They are the water of emotion, building up and finally breaking free.

And so it is that what I am today is neither happy nor sad.  I am just emotionally soggy.  Yes, this has been a difficult year.  Yes, I have been through betrayal, abandonment, and ill-usage of the moderate to severe variety.  But is this pain?  Only if I decide that it is.  I could easily look around this isolated room, filled with reminders of three wasted years, occupied only by my own sad, hobbled, aging meat, and interpret the rush of emotions as loneliness, desperation, hopelessness . . . or I could decide that this is what the song of a goldfinch feels like, a magnesium flare, bright green leaves piercing the bark of a tree in spring and unfolding.  This could easily be pain.  But it could just as easily be something else.

Am I going mad?

Boethius knew that time is a game.  As did Teresa of Avila.  Siddhartha knew, but he didn’t care that much.  He was concerned with the bigger picture, the glorious, spinning, stationary unity of it all.  But the vast armillary sphere of reality, in its oneness, is no different than the bizarrely resolved chord of my individual life.  By looking at it, from the knowledge that it doesn’t exist, can I perhaps find peace?

The future, of course, does not exist.  Most people would agree that what I have now is not what I will have then—that what will be is not what is.  And yet this multitude of atoms of which the Tathagata speaks is said by the Tathagata to be no multitude.  Thus it is called ‘a multitude of atoms’.  Neither atoms of dust nor worlds are real.  Our personal multitude of present perceptions is neither real nor unreal.  It neither exists nor does not exist.  Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive, nor not alive.  But it does not, as some think, exist in some intermediate state.  Such a state would be a convenient, but meaningless theoretical construct, designed to spare us the discomfort of the fact that the cat is neither alive nor not alive.  It neither exists nor does not exist.  To say that there is some third option is no more a solution than to answer “I don’t know”. 

That which we are experiencing seems to fold in upon itself to cause some future reality, the nature of which we do not yet know.  But this is a trick of perception, an illusion fueled by a belief in separation, in sequences, in divisions of time.   Our present is not causing our future, however.  The future and the present are parts of the same Rubik’s cube, and the turns of one side do not cause the shifts on the other.  They happen simultaneously.  The cause and the effect are indistinguishable.  Did we move that red square so that it is next to another red square?  Or so that the white square on the other side is in a better position? Yes.

And this is what Boethius saw in his prison.  He saw time from above, not from within, and that it was one flower, infinitely unfolding into and out of itself, and that one what seemed to be the center, was in fact more petals, as was what seemed to be the base.  The nunc stans does not distinguish between one part and another.  And so is it said that each petal is neither real nor unreal.  A shadow is not real.  It has no substance, no identity.  It does not exist in any explicable way.  And yet we see it.  Shadows cast by light are tricks of perception.  As are shadows cast by time.

But just as the red square and the white square, that which we call the present and that which we call the future, have no meaningful distinction, turning and moving as they do simultaneously, so too does the yellow square move.  That which we call the past has no mind of its own, no volition, no separate existence.  Even those who accept the meaninglessness of the future bristle at the suggestion that the past does not exist.  But it is no different.  How many revisions has our past undertaken?  How many times have we twisted the red square into position, and found the yellow square somewhere new?  And yet it does exist.  Furthermore, Bhagavan, this perception of the past of which the Tathagata speaks is said by the Tathagata to be no perception.  Thus is it called the ‘perception of the past’. 

It is not difficult to conceive that our future is formed even as our present unfolds.  Neither is it absurd to suppose that the movements of our past have caused our present to be what it is.  But every movement has three parts—and, of course, no parts at all, and six parts, and parts without number.  Every motion of the red square changes the entire cube.  Every movement of the present has as great an effect on the past as it does on the future.  The past is subject to the constant unfolding and whirring of reality no less than the future is.  And it all exists as one, viewed from a prison cell, until the pieces click into place and we are free.  A Rubik’s cube that disappears once it has been solved, only to never have existed.