Of cats, cones and painkillers

Ashitaka and Kashmir proudly sporting our Wolfdog-Malamute’s cone (and as kittens furthest right) 

Introduction

We have four cats. One is the mother of the twins above, the fourth a rescued black tom called Nokoribi. We’ve known the twins since birth, so, perhaps more than Firefly (mother) and Nokoribi, they feel like our own children to us. Caring for living beings, providing them with everything they need to survive and thrive, is a sacred and daunting duty. When it comes to caring for non-human animals, one is often obliged to do things to them they most definitely would rather did not happen. What is in your heart when you grievously intervene to curtail another’s free will is very important to how those interventions are experienced by those you care for, and thus how they recover.

This is a true musing about lockdowns, medical interventions and what quality of care might bring them about. 

Too many cats!

We have four cats. The small street we live on is home to about 10, and neighbouring streets are home to many more. So there are lots of cats around these parts, and all across the UK; we don’t need them breeding like flies, to put it crudely. When their time was due, we had the twins – boys both – neutered. Ashitaka’s operation ran smoothly. Kashmir’s followed a rather different course.

The vet’s fondling informed her that only one of Kashmir’s testicles had descended. Bring him back in six weeks, she said, and we’ll take another look. Six weeks later, his second testicle was still nowhere to be found. The more expensive, hunt-the-ball operation would begin that very morning, but first a few questions. How was his most recent stool? Soft, I replied, mousse-like. Ah … well … better not operate, just in case. Reschedule, please. So we drove Kashmir home, unscathed, for a second time. 

He must have wondered why, randomly, we took him to see an odd-smelling woman who fondled his scrotum, only to drive him back home again. Twice.

10 days later, though, the fondling was finally followed by an operation. 

When we collected him, the vet seemed a little discombobulated. She wasn’t sure if she had found the second testicle. She had sent a sample to the lab and would find out within two weeks if it was indeed testicular matter she had cut out. We would not be charged for a subsequent operation if such were needed.

Unnerved, we drove poor Kashmir home. 

Still heavily sedated, he was in no pain. Back in his familiar environment, as soon as I opened the door of his carry-cage, he bolted out and ran up the stairs. He was by turns exuberantly playful and excessively affectionate, behaviour we had seen before, after Firefly’s spaying, while she was still sedated. 

When we saw his wounds, we were alarmed. 

Of course he was trying to clean them. We did not want to cone him, as both his brother and mother had reacted wildly when coned after their operations, and we figured he would react similarly. We let them deal with their situation cone-free. After gentle correcting, both learned to leave their wounds alone. We felt it safer to take the same approach with Kashmir. 

But the larger of his three scars, right down the middle of his belly and about three inches long, started pumping out a clear, pinkish liquid we later learned was plasma. It was horrible to watch. Had he been properly stitched up? Was it a botched operation? When we then coned him, he thrashed and writhed, causing more plasma to pump out. He left pools of it wherever he stopped. So we removed the cone again and resolved to be by his side, in shifts, to gently stop him licking his wound, until it had properly closed. 

This did not work. The leaking plasma matted his fur, which he desperately wanted to clean. This made it very hard to police his cleaning effectively, to make sure he was not cleaning and worrying his wounds. The hours crawled by but the wound would not close. And he was too playful, active, insistent … uncontrollable. We had enjoyed success with this policing strategy with Nokoribi after a cat-fight wound had become an abscess. Not so with Kashmir. 

Finally, though not trusting the competence of the veterinary surgery much at all, we called up and asked for advice. We were told not to worry, that weeping wounds were not uncommon, that we really had to cone Kashmir and wait out his thrashing and writhing. We followed these instructions and, after about 20 minutes, he accepted the cone and settled down somewhat.

But his wound would not stop weeping, even through the next day. In no pain, he was still too physical, we thought.

To kill pain, or not to kill pain, that is the question

Pain is information, feedback from our body about how to behave, what precautions to take. Sedated, Kashmir behaved far too recklessly – it seemed to us – for his wound to heal. We had been given fairly potent painkillers we were to administer 24 hours after the operation, then repeatedly in 24-hour intervals until they ran out. We discussed whether to use Kashmir’s pain to control his behaviours for his long-term benefit instead, and decided this was, on balance, the wiser course.

Next day, coned and miserable, his pain made its presence felt. He hunkered on the blanket we had prepared for him and slept, rousing only when thirst or hunger became too strong to ignore. Coned throughout, in serious pain, we brought water and food to him. He was with us in bed for days. We surrounded him with love, and it was clear to us our love, our deep care, gently eased its way through his balled defensiveness. 

The wound stopped weeping. Every opportunity we had to inspect his wounds told us he was healing beautifully. It was a very moving experience, though one shot through with concern.

Our three-way bond grew deeper. Kashmir knew, as all non-human animals know, that we meant him no harm, that our emanations were loving, that he was being bathed in love from morning to night and back around again. But we don’t want to put him through another operation again. The results from the lab were inconclusive: Whatever it was that the vet had partially cut out of Kashmir, it was not testicular. In Germany, vets use an ultrasound device to locate the undescended testicle before operating. Not so here in the UK. So not only was the operation three times more expensive than it would have been had both testicles descended, it was an ugly failure. 

Our experience with the medical profession, especially after lockdowns and ‘vaccine’ mandates, after being on the receiving end of its opprobrium and icy disdain for daring to disagree with its assessments, has been badly negative more often than not. This includes an almost fatal mishandling of my wife’s hyperactive thyroid that went undiagnosed throughout an entire pregnancy, and the non-diagnosis and arrogant disinterest in my own extreme shoulder pain, which turned out to be a very bad case of frozen shoulder and bursitis. There are good doctors of course, but one has to find them. It is worse in the UK than in Germany, and I can’t speak for other countries, but our experience has distanced us from the medical profession. Our trust in it has been cut to the bone.

Watching Kashmir manage his healing as guided by his pain was, as said, a beautiful thing, though also fraught. I dealt with my own potentially deadly illness, possibly c19, which I think became pneumonia, without any help at all from any doctor or hospital. I allowed my body’s communications to guide me. I stayed calm throughout. People who care about me were around me. I made a full recovery. Perhaps this was reckless of me, but my personal conviction is that we moderns are too afraid of pain, and of death. There is most certainly a place for the wonder of modern pain-management drugs – I would never argue otherwise – but who can put their hand on their heart and say we have not coddled ourselves too much?

Wisdom is the doctor

The body knows. When we freak out, our body cannot be heard. Any kind of hysteria is a wildfire-malfunctioning that burns all useful information to ash. The more we are exposed to learning how to handle our pains and illnesses, the wiser we become, the more seriously we take risks to our health, and the more confidence we have in what the body can do. Health-for-profit is bound by its own economic logic to interrupt this, to intervene, to exploit.

Specialisation makes wisdom seem remote from us; we outsource most of what we could do ourselves to others. If we perceive this dynamic as counter to our interests, we can choose to learn how to help ourselves where possible. While I do not advise anyone on their own health concerns, I do humbly suggest my reasoning here is generally warranted. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, goes the saying. Wise prevention and wise self-management harm health-industry profits. 

Imagine a world without junk food, imagine populations everywhere thriving from meaningful contributions to their communities. Imagine a world of healthy soil, water and air, of social governance structured by transparent knowledge accessible to all, a world in which the bling and glitter of consumerism were a distant memory. What kind of health industry would fit such a world? One very different to the one we have.

It is its very difference, so easy to picture in broad brushstrokes, that is so redolent of what ails us today. 

Fear does not foster health. I did not feel the interventions of lockdowns and mask and ‘vaccine’ mandates during the ‘pandemic’ to be healthful, or loving. Corona measures were both fear inducing and induced, and thus as far from wisdom as it is possible to be. Kashmir knew my wife and I were wholly concerned with his wellbeing as we locked him down and coned him. Sometimes these things must be done. But I know management of whatever c19 is/was was not similarly intentioned. It felt sinister from the start: totalitarian, designed to herd people into something … into more obedience and away from wisdom and love. Towards more fear. And now 15 minute cities feel the same, like a continuation of sinister intent. 

Am I allowed to ask whether global warming is a bad thing? Is there truly such a thing as “runaway” global warming? Or is the fear too great to permit disagreement, to admit discussion. Why is “anti-vaxxer” a pejorative? When I try to discuss such things, I am told there is only one side: Science. “If you question me, quite frankly, you question the science.” I cannot imagine a more religious, or more chilling, statement.

In what kind of system are we living when there is only one side?

In fear, it is as if our fear is the only thing keeping us alive. Those who question our behaviours and beliefs are thus dangerous fools. We need our precious fear to make it through! But all emotions feel justified. Indeed, while felt, all emotions must be justified – i.e. have a cause –; otherwise they wouldn’t occur. Earned wisdom penetrates this sense that an emotion triggered by an issue is somehow The Truth of that issue. 

It is utterly non-controversial that fear is bad for health. Why were/are we kept in fear, why do we seem to want to remain afraid? I look around me and see no imminent danger, but almost everyone seems existentially afraid. Why? This state of affairs hasn’t materialised out of nowhere, uncaused. 

Kashmir is not afraid of me. He knows I love him and want what’s best for him. He trusts me totally. Being forced or finessed via a generalised Stockholm-Syndrome into ‘trusting’ authority has very different psychological colours. You can feel (not emote) the difference between genuinely earned trust, and ‘trust’ forced upon you by whomever, just as you can feel the difference between an imagined health-care system rooted in wisdom and love, and one rooted in the profit motive.

This, for me, is the lesson of the pain of this historical moment. This, for me, is the cultural wisdom these horribly interesting times can yield. 

Will yield; as the pressure mounts, our hunger for something wiser, something truly organic, is becoming irresistible.

Tyranny’s harvest

Dose anyone suffer with anxiety and panic like me this all started with the COVID-19 I’m still struggling to get well getting out alone is not easy I’ve been on different medication over 2years I would love to do all the things again like walking crafts going on a bus to town all these things I panic with been at home alone been in shops it never ends. I blame Boris  Johnson. The mental Heath are struggling to support those that need help to get there lives back. what do you think?. – Carol C.

Hi, I agree. I won't go into my political stance or beliefs but I'm struggling to get back to how life was before the whole lock down. Everything for some reason just feels different. I hope you find your normal again. – Sami S.

Till my first panic attack, I was nice and happy boy.Drinking, smoking, going out, and in perfect health,  then everything get change. Now no drinking, no smoking, only doctors and medications that made me sick. One day I was on the street enjoying, and in a moment hit my nose by accident and little blood bleak. And a one simple think passed  by my head. Im dying. I baaaam. My first panic attack. Short of bread, tight in chest, the world started to circle, I was nearly fold down. From this moment to now, doctors and medications. I understand how you feelling and wish from my heart to win this battle. And then tell me :) . If you know some manly or mixed groups, I want to join :)  My English is not so good, sorry if many mistakes in the words. Thanks :) – Spas M

Introduction

I copied the above quotes from an online neighbourhood forum. Carol C. initiated the thread with her plea for help, the other two quotes are replies that most closely echo Carol’s fears, though there were tens of other comments in a similar tone, too many to deal with here. 

For someone like me who advocates love, the fear voiced in their words is, to say the least, a challenge. This is an attempt to address it.

What chance love?

I hope it is obvious from the above that fear is not a sustainable solution for navigating society’s challenges; a life lived in fear is neither healthy nor joyous, where joy is the fruit of health. Ego – “consciousness in the service of fear” – is gifted at seducing us into distractions that so often become addictions aggressively defended, gifted at enmeshing us in tangled webs of self deception, of seeing bounty in playing the role of oppressor or victim, and so on, all to keep us safe from and unmolested by dangers lurking Out There only fear can guard against. 

Ego’s perpetual refrain might be phrased as: Life is deadly, fear your most loyal ally. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! 

This is the reflexive-instinctive substratum state power mines in its systemic need to (fearfully) control its subjects, so as to keep day-to-day life on an even keel and itself in power. Similar mechanisms of control are used by multinational corporations and organisations. Fear is the go-to choice for stressed-out rulers and ruled alike when facing the difficult challenges of keeping an entire people on the same page, or simply making ends meet. But freed to run its course, fear leads to corruption, decadence, misery, endless power struggles, grotesque inequalities, and so on.

Love, by contrast, is very difficult to attain; it requires a lifelong commitment to ruthless self-honesty, courage, compassion, humility, ego dissolution, while avoiding collapse into escapism and victimhood. How many individuals are ready to take on this task before their world falls apart? How many peoples, nations, corporations? It is rare indeed that individuals commit to love before devastating corrective feedback forces their hand, and yet more unusual that entire nations do so. In fact I’m not aware of the latter having ever happened.

It seems covid19 has distilled this age-old and very human dilemma into painful focus for wave upon wave of people, including Carol. The coming fallout from the disastrous Russia-Ukraine war will represent another distillation of this choice, and further intensify fear, already at fever pitch throughout entire societies. 

And yet, were I to run this foundational fear-love choice past any of the three people quoted above as an invitation to a healthier way of being, how could I be sure I was not unintentionally luring them onto a road they are not ready to travel?

Whom should we blame for our messes, who should make things right for Carol? What I see beneath Carol’s fear, and beneath that of others like her, is the system that promotes and sustains it. But in truth I believe blame misses the point; only Carol can walk her unique path to health, and by walking it, create it. For all of us within a broader system that promotes and sustains such fears, however, staying true to the only path beyond often seems impossible. Indeed, most succumb to the devil they know, at best seeking help from professionals and drugs that almost never address the root of the problem. This is too familiar a lament. The work that needs to be done is too hard, too exhausting, too against the grain of The Way Things Are.

In other words, the only way out seems so hard it hardly bears mentioning; it is almost cruel to suggest it, however gently. Is a commitment to becoming love a bridge too far for frail humanity?

I feel the intense need in Carol’s words and am instantly on the other side of reality, heart and mind. How can power be so cruel, so implacably violent yet remain oblivious to its impact, grind relentlessly on as if its measures were Ultimate Good? I find no satisfactory answer, see explanations referencing sociopathy and psychopathy as cartoonish, skeletal, misleading. I watch power’s effects unfold but have a minimally detailed sense of its root cause as generalised fear teamed with ego’s comfy allures. Stunned again and again by events, I am now like a light neither off nor on, my switch stuck between two binary poles, waiting for something to make sense. I suspect many feel the same way.

Love is clearly the only way, but almost nobody dares learn what this really entails. I take stock of my own situation, of what I am and feel, and come up wanting, even though I can find no flaw in the foundations of what I flatter myself I know. I want to do something effective, anything at all, but watch on dumbly as one event seeps into the next, on and on and on.

The powers of mass manipulation humanity has acquired in pursuit of state power, of status,  stability, safety, are far beyond its wisdom. We do not deserve them, and yet we have them. We wield them relentlessly, wanting to know no better. We are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and our world has run amok.

How cruel is love?

The cruel, stubborn thought that will not fade away is that things must be this way, that I must accept – does “accept” mean love? – the horrors we have unleashed. These horrors – something whispers to me – are the only way we can learn. Without free will there can be no learning. With free will anything can happen. To accept free will and humanity as they are is to accept horror, evil banality, the most profound corruption and perversion, long dull lives of quiet desperation … all of it. The state of the human world is necessarily and always the truest reflection, indeed embodiment, of how we are as a species.

The third quote at the top of this article is from a non-native speaker obviously struggling to find his way. He is culturally at sea here, out of place, perhaps delivered here by processes beyond his control: the ebbs and flows of history. Carol is no doubt working class, did not receive an education beyond, I guess, age 16, is of a nervous disposition and has slipped into a confused state of crippling fear. Her view of the world is shared by Sami S. There are, I’m confident, millions more like them across the UK, and elsewhere in the world. And I sense their number is growing. They are all real human beings living real human lives the broader system cannot care about. They are ‘useless eaters’ from the system’s point of view: history’s detritus. I see myself as one of them by virtue of not fitting in, of not agreeing with the system’s base value system.

History is cruel and there is no stopping it. Systems become established, enjoy some period of success, lose their way, then collapse at some speed and are replaced. When civilisational systems emerge, and when they thrive, and when they fade away, some percentage of the human beings that constitute them ‘fail’, while others ‘succeed’. How can it be any other way? 

Does it follow from this, then, that love is cruel? Yes. No. Both.

Do you really understand ‘failure’? Can you value Carol’s suffering and aching loneliness for what it is, for the rich experience of futility it delivers, its contribution to the maturation of her wisdom as soul, and thus to humanity’s wisdom generally? If we are to choose love knowingly, willingly, we need to explore and exhaust the potential of every other way of being as well. 

In the Grail legend, Parsifal easily finds the Grail (wisdom/love), but does not value it. This is the fool’s early success, beginner’s luck. Undeserving, he loses the Grail and drifts into multiple experiences of failure, of suffering. These are the trials we must complete to truly earn love, to be capable of being a vessel for its expression through us. Only after we have travelled all paths that are not love, are we are ready to find and appreciate the Grail. This seems to be how reality works, fundamentally.

Must we accept evil, then? Yes. No. Both.

Yes, in that to squash free will out of existence in pursuit of utopia would create far more evil than it attempts to defeat. 

No, in the sense that evil leads to terrible suffering, and the only path towards a healthy relationship with suffering is the one that appears before us as we dedicate ourselves knowingly and willingly to love. The wisdom of accepting that we do not control all outcomes, all decisions, all emotional reactions Out There does not preclude encouraging love in ourselves and others, as our means allow. ‘Failing’ to be The Shining One who defeats evil for all time is no failure at all, no cause for self-doubt, self-hate, feelings of impotence, no reason to slip back into fear. 

Love is as cruel as we want it to be. While we yield to ego, to fear’s easy seductions, love seems idealistic, foolhardy, reckless, even terrifying. When we give ourselves in humble service to love, we learn through very difficult challenges that the rewards and outcomes of our service are fruits whose goodness is beyond our wisdom to know (for some unknowable length of time). This is a very difficult lesson to learn and its pains are directly proportional to the power of our fear, our determination to cling to what we think we know, to old comforts, ideologies, habits of thought and emotion.

It follows, then – if I am right in this –, that my own pain in the face of the world’s horrors is just that. I have yet to learn how to let be that which I cannot change so as to remain calm and effective for those things I can. No doubt most of us experience some version of this challenge. It is a very human state of being to be stuck in; nothing could be more ordinary.

Conclusion

Perhaps love is too much to ask. Perhaps this is true, but also false. Perhaps love’s daunting, unsurmountable challenge, rooted in its unconditionality, is precisely why we finally choose to walk willingly towards it, and delight in how it evolves within us as we learn.

God/love is the sole ‘perspective’ – state of being – from which we, while humans, can get a tiny sense of how it might be possible there is nothing to forgive, there are no enemies, nothing to fear. Human successes in this spiritual endeavour are fleeting; it is a state of being that cannot be sustained for very long in our realm, the realm of opposites. 

Love has no opposite. God has no opposite. From the human perspective, then, there is a cruelty to our situation, not only from the real pain our (necessary?) suffering creates, but also from the teasing potential each of us has to evolve into our maturity, grow closer to love while somehow never quite making it. Perhaps attainment of this state of being really is impossible in this realm. If true, this is precisely why we need guidance and faith, and, equally importantly, patience with ourselves and each other.

To the degree that there is evil, or even an entity we call Satan, that entity or quality of being is not God’s opposite. Ego/Satan wants desperately, compulsively to demonstrate it is indeed God’s opposite – and therefore equal – and so with luck prove that the real God is Ego/Satan. But God/love is beyond this dualistic hubris, this oppositional state of being. Ego is therefore barking up the wrong tree, fighting a futile war, a war whose battles can all be ‘won’ yet deliver ‘total defeat’ when all is said and done. And yet the battles are real and humanity carries their burden, reaps the mounting harvest of fear, that quality of being ego serves.

Humanity is necessarily embedded in, is perhaps a function of, dualism, but perhaps precisely in order to earn the quality of wisdom needed to progress beyond it, to evolve into whatever follows. Some argue this scales to a cyclical collective process, and talk of ages progressing one to the next until collapse back down to the beginning of the next cycle, with each iteration delivering vital lessons. Why this must be so will remain mysterious until we shed our bodies and reside fully in the non-physical, the non-dualistic, but I think it safe to say our incarnations on earth are not pointless; if they were, I’m sure incarnation in the physical realm would not happen. Something about what we go through on earth as physical beings positively affects the quality of how God/love evolves, it being eternal and ever changing in its fundamental changelessness. This paradox can only resolve for us when we are once more fully soul or spirit no longer thickly veiled by our humanity, when we can again know All That Is fully open to its splendid riches.

As humans, then, we need faith to have a chance of ‘accepting’, however briefly, what history delivers – history, that is, as the experienced manifestation of human evolution, an evolution irremediably shaped by the realm of opposites which is its sacred host.