Sunday, January 27, 2008

MOVING TOWARD THE MIND-CENTERED: HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM

It is time for me to revisit the subject of my religious beliefs to see what has been happening since I last took a look at the subject. As Carl Jung, the great 20th century psychologist and thinker, makes clear, the growth in the religious impulse is a natural development as we grow older, and I certainly see this development in my own life.

As the death of people we know, including loved ones, becomes commonplace and we face more and more health issues in our own lives, the reality of our own mortality comes into focus. Faced with the difficult facts of mortality we are drawn toward the answers that religion offers.

Eknath Easwaran and Meditation

When I step back and take a look at my own religious impulses, I see that I am not just getting more religious but am moving toward Hinduism and Buddhism. I cannot be surprised at this discovery, given the fact that I have remained constant in my adherence to the practices of Eknath Easwaran, founder and guiding inspiration of the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation, and specifically to the practice of meditation since joining the Floyd County (Virginia) Satsong in September 2006.

The stated practices of the Blue Mountain Center are eclectic and unlimited, that is, open to everyone including everyone of all religious faiths. The fact is, however, that while he was very knowledgeable about the religions of the West, most notably Christianity, Eknath Easwaran came out of the Hindu tradition, and he was also steeped in the beliefs and practices of Buddhism, which itself grew out of Hinduism.

(Eknath Easwaran, 1910-1999, was born in Kerala in southern India, and first came to the U.S. in 1959 as a Fulbright Scholar, then subsequently settled in the San Francisco Bay Area permanently in 1965. The developer of Passage Meditation and the Eight Point Program, Sri Easwaran was the author of 27 books on meditation and mysticism during his lifetime. http://www.easwaran.org/Nilgiri.cfm.)

Mind Centered Morality

Another reason that my interest in Hinduism and Buddhism should come as no surprise has to do with my long interest in and dedication to the idea of the individual mind as the center of the universe and the source of our morality. This was the idea that I propounded in my first book of poetry I Will Mean, first published in 1975 and revised in 2005. (See the website: http://www.iwillmean poetry.com for more on this book.) Important aspects of Hinduism, the oldest continuously practiced religion, are mind centered, and Buddhism is entirely mind centered.

Moving toward religion in general and Hinduism and Buddhism specifically, yes, but then, I must ask myself, do I accept a key tenet of these religions? Do I accept the idea of reincarnation? No, I do not. And, for that matter, do I accept the major theological tenets of Christianity and Judaism? Do I accept the idea of a transcendent all-powerful God who intervenes in the affairs of mankind? Do I accept the existence of heaven and a life of the soul outside the body? Do I believe that the ideas of good and evil are the purview of this supreme transcendent being who judges each of us and exacts penalties on the transgressor? No to all of the above.

Agnostic on Theological Issues

However, when I say “no,” let me quickly assert that these are soft no’s. Ultimately I am an agnostic on all these questions. I am a doubter. I am a skeptic. All I can say with certainty on any of these issues ultimately is that I simply don’t know. I am too much an advocate for the importance of reason and the scientific method and too much a student of history to accept these specific ideas.

I am an agnostic on the theological issues, but as for morality I believe as I first made clear in I Will Mean that it is incumbent on each of us to be his own source of moral authority. We have the right to judge the behavior of others, and we all bear individual responsibility for our actions.

The Reality of God

Let’s bring this discussion back to where it began. I claim that I am becoming more religious. In what way? The common ground I can find with Hinduism and Buddhism is the idea that the divine, that is, the reality of God, can be alive in all of us. The fact that our minds can conceive of God and all the associated powerfully positive qualities associated with God is the best argument for the existence of God. We find God and the idea of perfect goodness in ourselves. We keep God alive in ourselves.

At the same time, we stray from God when we allow corruption inside ourselves to take hold—corruption in the form of selfishness, corruption in the form of addiction or extreme preoccupation with substances including food and drugs and destructive forms of behavior.

Evil of Hatred Obsession

Our ideas can also be a corruption, that is, can be in opposition to the possibility of God within us. We can become obsessed with hatreds for this group or that group. Instead of practicing the supreme manifestation of the God within, which is love, we indulge in the hatred of people. We become trapped in the tightening mental prison in which we hate the individual because he is the member of the hated group, and we hate the group because it is composed of hated individuals. The total unreasonableness of people trapped in such hate preoccupations does not dawn on them, or more accurately they will not let it dawn on them.

Meditation, which I do every day for at least one half hour in keeping with the practices of the Blue Mountain Center, is my way of finding and centering in consciousness the God within. My meditation now consists of seven memorized prayers from the Jewish, Christian, and Hindu traditions, which I recite to myself at least once and sometimes twice a day. These prayers are all found in the book God Makes The Rivers to Flow, a compilation of prayers selected by Eknath Easwaran and published by Nilgiri Press, the publishing wing of the Blue Mountain Center (website: www.nilgiri.org).

Let Nothing Upset You

The latest addition to my meditation repertoire is the shortest and comes from the Christian tradition. Entitled “Let Nothing Upset You” (page 206), it is by St. Teresa of Avila and is just seven lines long. I quote it here:

Let nothing upset you;
Let nothing frighten you.
Everything is changing;
God alone is changeless.
Patience attains the goal.
Who has God lacks nothing;
God alone fills every need.

I added this prayer to my meditation because of what it says to me as I proceed through multiple chemotherapy treatments and because it helps me address a central obsession in my life: what I perceive as the insufficient recognition of my creative work. For both of these issues, the word “patience” in the prayer is very meaningful as is every word of the piece, for that matter. But how can I, an agnostic who claims that he doubts the existence of a separate transcendent God, say such a thing? “God” is mentioned three times in a piece that is only 29 words in all.

Because God is the best in us. Let me end with a recent poem of mine that summarizes my thoughts on this crucial subject:

THE BEST IN US

No king of the good.
no emperor of ideas,
no president of order.
So how do we, all the single I’s,
make sense of the possible,
fill time with the semblance of a plan?

On radio Guillermo Dell Toro said
when confronted with atrocity
he learned no supreme separateness
offered any answers,
that if that is what he had to have
he’d have to make his own.

Struck with his profundity
you were suddenly in trouble.
Why all the study of the mystics?
Why say words from long past seers?

Then it dawned on you:
There is no contradiction.
The struggle toward enlightenment
coexists among the constancies.
As we seek a path for ourselves
our quest is tempered by the best in us,
a best as utmost as the mountains,
a best as always as the sea.

See my comprehensive website at http://www.sasaftwrites.com, also http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

Sunday, January 13, 2008

HOW AM I DOING, A CHEMOTHERAPY STATUS REPORT

I have now had two treatments, and I am pleased to report that I am not feeling too bad. That’s two treatments down and another 22 to go. The routine is as follows: I go twice a week for two weeks in a row. I am off the third week, and then a new cycle begins.

There will be a total of six such cycles, meaning that the total amount of time involved is 18 weeks. Since I took my first treatment on January 7, I’ll finish up the first full week of May, that is, assuming that there are no interruptions for illness.

Pneumonia, A Concern

How likely is an interruption because of illness? Hardly out of the question. In 2002 when I did two separate rounds of chemotherapy—the second one at Johns Hopkins University Hospital as part of a bone marrow transplant—I got a nasty case of pneumonia. The disease was a side effect from the first round of chemicals, and it kept me from proceeding with the bone marrow transplant for several months.

Diseases like pneumonia take hold in the body because one of the results of chemotherapy is an assault on the body’s blood chemistry, for example on the white cell count. It is our white cells that protect us from disease. The fewer white cells we have, the more likely that diseases can infect us.

Watch the White Cell Count

In my case, as a victim of a form of blood cancer called lymphoma and specifically of what is now referred to by the acronym MCL or Mantle Cell Lymphoma, I have a defect in the way my body makes white cells, at least one kind of white cells, the B cells. The chemicals I take then have the job of killing white cells. For me then, close scrutiny of my white cell count is critical.

What chemicals am I taking? I’ve talked about one of them already in a previous posting. It’s called Velcade, trade name for Bortezomib, a product of Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Inc., and Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, L.L.C. I also mentioned the fact that during my treatments of 2002 I took a product called Rituxan, a lot of it. Surprise, surprise, I’m taking Rituxan again.

Taking Rituxan Again

According to the website http://wwww.lymphomaininfo.net, Rituxan (generic name Rituximab) is “a monoclonal antibody” that works by taking advantage of the fact that cancerous B cells “have a site on them called the CD20 antigen. This is like a puzzle piece, waiting for a molecular linkup with another substance. IDEC Pharmaceuticals developed the anti CD20 antibody IDEC-C2B8 which links up to the antigen site on the B-cell. This allows Rituxan to target B lymphocytes [for destruction] and not other cells in the body which do not have the CD20 antigen site.”

Sounds like a miracle drug, doesn’t it? Yes, but here it is five to six years later, and I’m being treated for a relapse of MCL. I have to hope that whatever the Rituxan doesn’t get rid of this time around will be knocked out by Velcade, which I pointed out in a posting two months ago is a “proteasome inhibitor,” a type of biochemical whose job it is to promote the natural process in the body of “apoptosis,” that is, the process of eliminating anything made incorrectly. Translation: the elimination of cancer.

Seconds for Velcade Infusion

Another surprise for me as a chemotherapy veteran has been the frequency and the amount of time I am getting the two drugs. For every one time that Rituxan is administered, Velcade is administered four times. The infusion of Velcade takes seconds. The infusion of Rituxan is much slower.

On my first day of infusion, that is, January 7, I was in “the chair” from 11:00am until 3:30pm or a total of four and a half hours. Of that time, Velcade infusion lasted less than a minute. About 20 minutes was taken up with the infusion of drugs to prevent side effects such as respiratory attacks and nausea. The rest of the time or about four hours was all Rituxan. All future infusions of Rituxan, I’ve been told, should last about half the time or about two hours. The first use of Rituxan must be handled especially slowly to guard against an allergic reaction.

Put Directly in a Vein

Lest there be any doubt about it let me make clear that all these drugs or chemicals are put in the body intravenously, that is, they are dripped directly into a vein. None of them can be taken by mouth.

Once I have completed the ordeal, can I expect to be cured? No! My oncologist, on the staff of Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital, made that clear during a preliminary meeting during which the forthcoming procedure was explained to me. “I’m afraid that we do not have a very good record of success when it comes to curing lymphoma,” she stated.

I Love Life

So why am I doing this if I can't expect a cure? Why am I going through the whole not exactly pleasant procedure? For a prolonging of the good years, such as the five good years I experienced after my two rounds of chemotherapy and my bone marrow transplant of 2002. I love life. My mind still works, and I still have a lot of work to do. My wife, family and friends continue to convey the fact that they want me around. Any other reasons for wanting to stay alive pale by comparison to these.

Bring on the Rituxan and the Velcade. Let’s get on with this war.

For a look at the variety of writing that I do, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft