Mum is old, confined to the wheelchair, as if waiting for her days to come to a final. Her body frame tells a lot from being a diabetic the toll it has upon her. First, the illness took away her sight exactly nine years ago. By sheer luck, or purely an act of love, I managed to coax her to meet a china physician, whom with a three inch long acupuncture needle, with unwavering certainty and confidence, inserted into her skull, without needing to try twice. After a few sessions, she swore that the physician has, without her knowledge, poked a few thousand needles into her skull, as she explains later that she felt her entire brain was vibrating uneasily, as if electric current was passing through her head.
Obviously without her ability to see, she has made a wrong assumption. A single needle is all what the physician gave with a mild electric current connected at the other end of the needle, yet the experience itself would have magnified the entire nerve-filled gray matter; that I am sure would have been an uneasy experience for anyone. It is of no wondered, her hands are ice-cold whenever she is brought to the clinic, though emotionally she showed a kind of courage which she always portrayed. The healing modality did recover her sight, but her ignorance of her own diet brought a full swing of glaucoma to her sight.
Secondly, gangrene has had one of her legs amputated. As I sit beside her, I am mindful of a soul that is weary from the bodily dis-ease that imprisons her to the little corner of the wheelchair, day in and out. Many a times sitting alone, she has obviously forgotten about her wheelchair bound experience as she talks to herself joyfully as if there are people around communicating with her. There was once she walked out of her wheelchair forgetting she is no longer two legged. She was also being noticed eating an unseen banana deliciously as she expressed how nice the experience was to an unseen force whom the observer herself could not see. She seemed delirious, but who are we to know what is in her space as her mind experience brought her to a very real dimensional experience that we are not able to perceive, as understandably we are still trapped in this physical body. And aren’t those who talk or walk in their sleep goes through similar experience?
What is real then? Has reality much to do with the body, or to be précised, the perception of the body? As where we are, so long as we feel that we exist, we are practically experiencing reality, at that moment, irrelevant whether it is in this dimension or not. It can be in a dream, in a coma, in an unconscious state of insanity, or even in this reality. So long as there is a perception of a body, of me, mine or I; the so-called realness of that moment becomes our experience, and hence make us think it is real.
When I am not grounded or anchored into this moment, in this so-called reality, I am obviously no longer here, but somewhere other than here. That somewhere can be as real as here, as I am still identified with the idea of me, mine or I. What then is the difference between now or there? Can I say that here is more real than there? Or “there” is more real than here? For when I am “there” I no longer identify it as “there” except “here”, all the time and hence my reality.
Again, what is real? If the Buddha’s answer to the passing mendicant is “I am the Awakened One” – without question, we are all still asleep in our deepest slumber, a dream in the making, oblivious to its deception. As Morpheus told Neo, in the Matrix, “do you think you are really breathing, in this program”? And may I add on, “do you think you are eating, walking, sitting, peeing, moving around anywhere, everywhere”? Do you think there is someone or somebody, or for that matter, yourself, in your own hologram, except a deceptive dream? Am I really, really here? Or is this just a figment of an imagination as pointed out by Mad Hatter to Alice in her wonderland.
Hence, is there really death then, except the dissolution of the body? Can the mind die? Or simply does the mind continues on, albeit a dream state?
Oh, Absolum, please do not leave me until I know I am the real Alice... (adapted from Alice in Wonderland)
Have you been under general anaesthesia before? From my experience having been through GA twice, the mind stops. Nothing. One minute I was conscious. The next I was conscious again but after the surgeries were done (a few hours have passed but it was nothing to me). In between = nothing, total darkness. So I believe death is like that – the mind stops, nothing. The difference between GA and death is we never will regain consciousness after death unlike GA.
Yes I have. I will say the memory is not registering rather than the mind stops.