Dependent Arising and Illness

  We sometimes think of illness as the payment of karmic debt. For instance, we might attribute a person's illness to poor lifestyle or diet, without factoring the way that illness is often a combination of unforeseen circumstances that come together in some way. I tend to think that illness brings people closer to a compassionate view of life. It is not a form of punishment at all, but a way of viewing life as fragile. Pema Chodron remarks about afflictions such as anger can help us reach a more raw and vulnerable state of being, where we realize our own fragility and desire for happiness. In Welcoming the Unwelcome, she remarks, "We know that, at the most basic level, every living being desires happiness and doesn't want to suffer" (p.26).

    How can we welcome or embrace illness? One possibility is to see it in terms of the twelve links of dependent arising. When I see illness as something inherently existing, as something that "invades" my body, I create a dualistic rejection: the sickness becomes the terrible Other that is part of me yet not me. We see a lot of so-called "body horror" movies that illustrate horrific transformations of the body that lie beyond our control (see my earlier blog entry about the movie The Fly). Yet, from the perspective of the twelve links of dependent arising, this is fundamentally a form of ignorance. We mistakenly believe that something we generate mentally is actually outside of us attacking us, when in fact, all pain can be seen as sensations starting from the mind.

    By the time I have separated the sensation from the self, I have already concretized it and reified it. Perhaps I start to google possible "causes" of this illness, which serves to confirm me to a fixed narrative of how to respond to it. If, for instance, I attribute the pain in my leg to something malevolent like a spider or even a demon, I have succeeded in externalizing an reifying the pain into a story in which I play the victim. But I don't realize that the body sensations have no relation to physical things at all. The physical simply serves the confirm an illusion of self-sufficient reality that isn't in the experience itself.

    Mind can respond to sensations in both gross and subtle ways. As long as I make a choice to harmonize with the experience by minimizing the thoughts I generate about it--by seeing the experience directly, rather than embellishing upon it---I can develop a more harmonic relationship to the arising moments. This can help to calm me in the face of illness, and prevent me from mistakenly thinking that illness is some kind of objectively existing concept, rather than the result of interdependent conditions that does not have a single ultimate casual source or ground.

Pema Chodron (2019), Welcoming the Unwelcome. Shambhala