Saint Einstein
SAINT EINSTEIN
November 5th ‘09
I have to tell you about FBS and PRM. Before I explain what these mean, let me just say, they are states of body-mind. Like space-time, body and mind are one, though it is hard to see beyond the illusion that they are two. Einstein is a hero of one of the characters in the novel I am writing currently (or rather, not writing currently because of FBS), and my character has dragged me into Einstein’s world. I no longer know if I am creating the character or he me. Anyhow, now I worship Einstein too, primarily because he bends the mind and allows us to see things-concepts, matter-energy in an altogether different light. Understanding even a little bit of what he is talking about – and I myself, being a Pooh- with- very -little -brain, understand very little of it – is illuminating, mind expanding, and transforming. Einstein for me is the perfect example of how science can be and is a religion. Certainly the New Physics, quantum mechanics, has revealed truths that take us back thousands of years to the Vedas: Space-time, matter-energy, body-mind-soul (sorry, I left out an essential part of the equation before).
But this is not what I meant to say at all, at least not consciously, but since my meandering mind has brought me here, here I am. I will say one last thing about Einstein before I return to what it was I meant to say, consciously. Above all, Einstein has taken us, cognitively, beyond duality.
FBS is Fuzzy Brain Syndrome. It is hard to write about FBS because when you are experiencing it, the brain is so fuzzy that words and ideas elude it. Trying to catch them is like grabbing a fistful of fog. In an effort to take the brain a bit further on this track I look up ‘fuzzy’ in the American Heritage Dictionary (my fav), and am directed to the root of the word. Fog, rot, decay, foul, foulness, filth, defiled, putrescent, putrid, all come from the same root. I find myself objecting to the strong nouns and adjectives and hesitate to apply them to my mind, which I honor and respect, at least when it is not fuzzed. When it is, I am lost in mazes of confusion and very low visibility. I don’t remember what day or date it is, what I came to a room to do or get, where I put my glasses or other really important and/or minor stuff. And the brain fog lasts for days, if not weeks and months. It is age related, I think, for I do not recall many, or any, of these in my youth, except when I drank or smoked cannabis a little too much. Complementing this mental state is the physical state of PRM, when your body is so stiff it feels like a living rigor mortis, which, of course, as we know, is the stiffening of a body after death. It gets hard to get up while sitting, and sometimes when you are standing it is an effort to sit down. One goes about as if one were already dead.
I have been afflicted by both of these body-mind states lately. Long observation has taught me that it invariably happens to me when I return to the US after my six month stay in India. I would like to analyze this to gain some understanding, and so far have only come up with a few things, none of which may be the answer: jet lag (but lasting a month and a half?), culture shock (but after I have lived here, off and on, for forty years?), going from connection (sometimes too much) to isolation. The last of these reasons resonates, but I’m not certain this is the answer, either. When I return to India from the US it takes a few days of sleep adjustment, but I am plugged in right away. To my mother, my siblings, their children and grandchildren, friends, domestic help, dogs. There is a jostling, sloshing, full, overfull, abundant, noisy, crazy sense of life in India that my body-mind-soul finds quite congenial. In the US we return to an abandoned house which needs putting together again, a lot of mail, most of which is junk, catalogs that tell us to buy, buy, buy, bills, bank statements: nothing personal at all. After the initial shock and some degree of sweetness in keeping crazy time schedules, eating in the middle of the night, sleeping through the day, a rather conflicted sense of solitude begins to creep in. Both Payson and I do love it here, as well, especially the quiet, the silence, the lack of disturbance and distraction, and the vast unobstructed view to the very horizon of the Pacific Ocean in sunny Southern California. It would be simply wonderful if it weren’t for FBS and PRM that invariably afflict me. I feel unwell, get upper respiratory infections, have no energy, and drag about stiffly, like Frankenstein’s monster, in a fog.
But this morning, after altogether too long an unproductive period, I remembered three things: first, to pray for relief, to meditate, and to do yoga, all great ways to unify the body/mind/soul split. The effect of these is that I am sitting down and writing this, and working a bit on my novel, FBS and PRM somewhat abated, plugged into my solitude and isolation as a good thing, something to be borne with patience and gratitude. After all, I do passionately desire to be alive and vital, or at least content, through all the circumstances of my life: here, there, good, bad. As the Sikh Gurus and all the prophets (and I rank Shakespeare and Einstein amongst them) tell us: there is nothing good or bad but thinking, dualistic thinking, makes it so. I know, not from any books or prophets (though these have ploughed and prepared me), but from my own experience, that many, many gifts come from experiences we tend, mistakenly, to label as ‘bad’ or ‘tragic.’
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Posted by kamla Nov 8th 2009
