The meaning effect and Alan Watts

I wanted to write about my experience of placebo or "the meaning effect" as Daniel Moerman calls it.
But ... I am so full of joy over a book I just finished reading.
Alan Watts: "The Book about the taboo against knowing who you are"
I mean ... just the title.
I want to be the one who wrote that book, but alas that place is already taken,
so I have to make do with just being excited, joyful and elated.
Not a very buddhist thing to be, I know; I am supposed to be cool, calm and collected, equanimous. But there is hope, because the word equanimous, that I had a tendency to read as being laidback, not perturbed by life, unmoved, like a rock, rather means open-ended, curious, with the quality of not-knowing, and then we return to Alan Watts.

Be patient, I will try to tie these ends together.

So first of all Alan Watts talks about the idea or experience if you like of the universe as a whole, and that we are not just part of that whole, we are the whole, each and every one of us. A little bit like when you see drops of dew where each and every one of those drops mirror the world around. So the taboo against knowing who we are relates to the myth we believe, that we are separate and indeed that we are born and die.
Watts asks, as the hindu mythology does, that if we are indeed the Universe, then how can we be born and die. Our forms are just different playful aspects of the universe unfolding and folding back in again.
More over he says, that the Universe only exists if there is someone to experience it. What we feel to be out there, outside our skin, is really inside us, we experience life "outside" in our bodies. And if we are not separate in the first place, what is there to fear? (This is a poor rendering of the book, which contains more, better and more clear, I am making a mess of the point;-) Read The Book by Alan Watts)


BUT ...

I don't normally experience the world this way. I, like all of you, feel intensely that I am separate and I fear the death of this apparently separate identity. Not only the physical death of it, but I also fear the moment to moment letting go of the images of myself, that I tend to cling to. And in so doing, I know, that I get caught up in thoughts about the world and my life, that are not life and actually stops me from having a fresh take on life. Seeing it as it is. Or rather being it as it is. because a whole lot of the trick here has to do with language. One of the traps of having a language, maybe THE trap is, that we mistake the words, that divide things very conveniently, so that we can communicate, for the experience.

But nothing in life can be divided in to parts, that are not connected to the whole.

AND ...

then I will return to my experience with pain and healing. And this is tricky, so try to keep your tongue straight in the mouth, as the Danish saying goes. It means pay attention.
We have a tendency to think of pain and disease as something whe HAVE. But who has it? Is there a someone apart from the body, that has something, that we can call pain and disease? As though there is somehow a controlcenter situated somewhere in our heads having the experience? In reality, when we look closer and look at the experience, there is no I, that has the pain. There is just experience of pain, AND very importantly, when we permit the experience and don't get caught up in language around it, it is not a set thing. It is not a thing. It is a process. Body is a process and pain and disease is a process. Not static. Language stops something, that is otherwise always in the process of expanding or contracting, and makes it solid. But that is an illusion. It isn't solid. It never was.

So, what am I trying to say here?

This is a much more open-ended perspective than saying that I have a body and pain or disease and that I or someone can fix it. What tends to happen when we experience pain or disease is that we start telling ourselves a story about it to ourselves and to others and that fixates the condition. From being a process it suddenly becomes a thing, that we have.

SO ...

my proposal is, that the more we can avoid telling stories about what is going on and just pay attention to it as it is, the more we aid healing. Or, that we know the power of these stories and therefore tell ourselves stories of strength and empowerment. Like: There is a process in the process"my body" (poor language, I am still stuck with calling my experience "my body") that I don't understand, that is causing me pain, but I trust the process, because the intelligence of my body is a thousand times more than I can grasp with my mind (again poor language dividing "me" in to "my body" and "my mind").
I trust this process and I will relax into it and try to give it the best environment I possibly can by listening and following the advice from this process. I.E. rest when needed, eat nourishing food, meditate, spend time in nature, slow down. What ever is nourishing. And then trust. Have patience. Relax with it. Have courage.

Pain or disease are not things. The body is not a thing.
It is an intricate and miraculous process. And what a wonder to be forced to slow down and listen to this process.
If you had asked me 10 years ago whether I wanted to have 3 years with pain coming and going and not being in control of ny body I would have shouted NO, definitely not, but yet now, I would never choose to leave that part of my life out.

These days there is NO pain. I don't know why, the pain is gone, and I doubt that anyone would be able to answer that question, but every day I wake up and am GRATEFUL for this painfree body. And every day I know that the pain might retur and it's okay. For life is as it is, not to be controlled, but to be surrendered to and indeed when we surrender there is joy and grace and a sense of playfulness. What does this day bring? What happens in this process that "I" call my body today?

We never know... And in stead of being a source of fear, and this is the whole point, really, to live more fearlessly, it can bring elation and a sense of relaxation. This is where the surrendering happens, when we deeply realize that we can't control our lives.

stay tuned ...