You’re welcome. I’m glad what I wrote hit a chord with you.

While I don’t know what unbearable chronic physical pain is like, I know about emotional downward spirals. Sometimes the will to go on simply gets the wind knocked out of it. But as long as struggle is possible, my own belief is to continue to struggle, if only to let out a cry for help.

There are always two values at stake in any trial: the external value (like life or health), and the internal one, which feeds or strengthens the soul. Life or health may be lost, but the other is guaranteed provided one tries. So I hope you will continue trying as long as you can. In this regard, if you like to read stories, I highly recommend the novels of Ayn Rand.

Like darkness, water is a condition of life and therefore of health and healing. Just as I have found eating to be more satisfying and sleeping more restful, I have found bathing during a retreat to be more refreshing than usual. In fact, hydropathy greatly influenced Natural Hygiene, the theory of health and healing on which my approach to darkness is based. Water is irreplaceable in the hydration and elimination of toxins, both gross and subtle (energetic).

Water is also highly conductive and thus useful for earthing (grounding) purposes. Earthing has proven rapidly effective in reducing chronic pain. Swimming or floating, especially in natural bodies of water (no chlorine or bromine), is the best way to discharge accumulated electromagnetic pollution and also absorb useful electrons from Earth. This is hard science, a clinically tested extension of what is already applied throughout the electronics industry.

In this connection, using earthing sheets in bed has also helped many people in the reduction of pain and many other inflammatory conditions. I ground my bed at night and use the same wire to ground my computer when I use it. I notice when I forget to do either.

So I hope your dreams of swimming are fulfilled somehow. Whatever your other fears may be, I do not know what basis they could have. Health results from healthful living, which means providing the conditions of health. Illness results from witholding these same conditions. There are fewer conditions more immediate than water or more enjoyably provided than by swimming.

But, of course, there can be extenuating circumstances that require adaptation of the basic principle. Feel free to write me privately for help in working this out. The devil is in the details.

The strangest connections happen while tramping about the internet sometimes.

Just found your site after visiting a KickStarter project where I saw the name Andrew Durham in the comments… the humour and fun link provided there gave me a smile (which I’m in sore need of lately) and so I did a quick search of this name and found your LinkedIn page… which led me here.

I’ve been in an emotional downward spiral that I’ve been struggling with from early childhood and just fighting the continuous urge to die sometimes is unbearable, let alone fighting off all else, but now I’m struggling with unbearable phyiscal pain as well that has left me teetering between that sad old desperate thought of giving up on my dreams and saying “Tough! Ain’t gonna happen… time to throw in the towel” or just existing on through all the pain until my body says enough.

Truly, even the hottest tears eventually run cold.

But the reason I’m writing (before continuing on with reading) is something you mentioned in your answer to Stephanie above:

Hi, Stephanie, I think as you read you will see that I do not view darkness as having any healing power whatsoever. Only organisms have healing power. Only the body has the power to heal itself. It merely uses the condition of darkness to perform certain processes difficult or impossible elsewhere. Like a swimming pool doesn’t make me swim, but I can swim in it, whereas I can’t swim on a basketball court.

This hit such a chord with me. Curious your linking your ideas with darkness to swimming: Darkness and water have always been two, well I’m not sure what to call them other than constant droning calls in the back of my mind. And strangely the constant ‘craving’ for water… to swim, to float, to move through oceans… has gotten so strong in the last few years and almost unbearably so since the physical pain has taken over the main focus in the last year that, when I’m able to dream, I often dream of swimming… and always at night, or at least in dark & vast places. I so wish I had listened at the beginning… who knows now what sort of healing I could have gained before it all went too far.

Simple fear has kept me bound to land… not fear of water, but other fears.

So I’m curious if you have any ideas if darkness and water are linked in any way besides all our first 9 months of existence of course, or if using the two together can increase the results or the speed of healing. Just a thought.

Looking forward to reading more and learning more… and thankful for a happy accident.
…and having severe difficulty swimming in this basketball court of life

M.
(thank you!)

Yes, I think that’s exactly what he would say. It sounds like you might have read Origins of Agriculture already (so important to me it’s practically the only thing on this site I didn’t write). I wonder, as the authors of this article do, what could have caused this change? Was it just an accident? How could healthy people (whom I don’t think we remotely resemble) do something so drastically incorrect? I find it hard to believe, thus the catastrophe idea.

To clarify, I added “long” and “repeated non-responses” to the first sentence.

Just as consciousness is subtle tissue, so the body is gross consciousness.

In darkness, this fact becomes palpable. I feel like I fall to the ground and it is a good feeling: I’m here! The body is not something I get into. It is something I express as. It is no less a manifestation of my being than whatever else I might identify with.

I do not view the body as something essentially different than consciousness. Actually, it is just looking at the same thing from different angles. A human being is a body, and it is also, in another way, a consciousness. Metaphysically, even physiologically, there is no actual difference. Every cell demonstrates consciousness. Being and consciousness are the same thing viewed in different ways.