#5080 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - Editor: Jerry Katz

The Nonduality Highlights http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights/


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A reader of the Highlights writes...

Six months and two weeks ago I began a journey that has been very very hard; often nightmarish, horrific, and challenging to everything.

On a Monday evening, in the middle of meditation, I instantly projectile vommited and developed a prolific shortness of breath. After unrelenting vomiting and air hunger, went to emergency room.

I sat for seven and a half hours before being seen.

Tests were run and I was diagnosed with right lower lobe pneumonia and a collapsed lower lung as well as pleural effusion (a build up of fluid in the sac that holds the lung.

I laid helpless on a gurney for two days until they found me a room.

I was then hospitalized for 6 weeks. A number of mishaps occurred, one after the other, that the team of physicians treating me referred to as "the perfect storm."

Sixteen days into my hospitalization I was still running fevers of 103-105F, so they decided to do a thoracentesis where unsedated they have you lean over a bedside table and use a 16 inch needle to go in to drain the fluid in the pleural sac. They figured it must be this fluid that was keeping my temperature so high, despite four different I.V. antibiotics every six hours.

It turned out that I had Mersa as well as two other antbiotic resistant bacteria and a anti-fungal resistant form of yeast.

They changed all my meds up and my fevers still would not go down. So they did a CT scan and discovered that the radiologist who did the thoracentesis had pierced both the diaphragm and the liver while removing the needle.

Now I had rather large abscesses on both the diaphragm and the liver and had developed a liver fistula as a result of this clinical error.

I was on 4 different kinds of I.V. narcotics for pain that was quite literally mind-shattering for me.

The errors did not end. The fever persisted. So I had a five and a half hour surgery where they took five liters of pus out of my abdomen and found that my gallbladder was gangrenous and exploded in the surgeons hands when he removed it.

I have two tubes (Jackson Pratts) hanging out of my abdomen that I have to empty approximately 4 times per hour.

I am admitted weekly for CT scans, flouroscopy and tube adjustments.

Monday I will have my 16th surgery in six and a half months.

I realize that I did not need to write to you, nor tell you all of this.

I only say this: I would kiss your feet if I could because every day of my life is filled with so much pain and exhaustion and I have been through so very much and there seems to be no clear end to all of this in sight.

BTW, I also died for four minutes and forty seconds in the ICU during all this adventure. [editor's note: this story is told below].

Were it not for the teaching of non-duality I am certain I would have killed myself by now.

I owe over half a million in hospital bills now and am terrified to be at the mercy of the American healthcare system.

My deepest love, respect and gratitude to you and your beautiful team of editors.

Infinite Love,

[the reader has been kept anonymous]



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"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt, only more love." - Mother Teresa

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[In this next email, the writer continues...]

If you feel that my story could be helpful, feel free to use it as you wish.

It has been the great power of lucid awareness that keeps revealing again and
again, that the lamp of Consciousness can consume everything when I let go and
allow it to consume the me-thought,

I would like to share a bit about my near death experience. The few that I have
shared it with have either gotten angry at me or tried to reinterpret it for
me...which is really about giving it a contextual framework that eases their
comfort level.

I am rather fine with it all.

Briefly, I did not see light. I did not experience love.

This was, initially, a profound shock to me because I have trusted for decades
that the ONE was Light Whose singular quality was Love.

I entered an unspeakable Vastness that was not light, nor was it darkness. It
was not a something and there was nothing present in this nothingness that was
empty of anything at all except boundary-less pristine awareness. Naked
infinite awareness inseparable from the absolute living nothingness being
experienced.

No thought. No I. Just this no-thing-ness.

After a time, I was aware of something communicating with me without words yet I
perfectly understood.

"Stay or go back. But if you stay any longer, you will not be able to go back."

It was a difficult decision for me because I knew the road to recovery would not
be an easy one.

When I knew I wanted to return, light...scintillating appeared with a love I
cannot begin to describe.

I remember how painful it was to actually enter the body again; the body seemed
ridiculously small for the infinitude I recognized as the only I there is.

And so the morsels sublimely via NDHighlights and Daily Dharma have been an ever
flowing lifeline; an unceasing and uncompromising light in a bodily journey that
seems bereft of any certain closure.

Infinite
Love
[anonymous]