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...I began to experience a distinct feeling of malaise. The sickness enveloping me was at first very subtle. Mild feelings of nausea and tension were making themselves manifest. Soon the nausea and tension were intensified to a point where every cell seemed to be involved. It is difficult indeed to describe this experience: it was so all-encompassing. The slightly humorous description of every cell in my body being drilled by a dentist begins to convey the atmosphere of impending disaster, emergency and excruciating pain that for me seemed to last for eternity.
Although I saw no images, I began to think of Petronius, Seneca, Sartre and other philosophers who deemed suicide the only meaningful death. I had the fantasy of lying in a bath of warm water and my life's blood flowing out from my veins. In fact, I am quite convinced that had I the means at that time, I would have killed myself. I was totally submerged in a situation from which there would be no escape except through death. And like life, the absurdity of it all, the exhaustion of carrying my pain-filled body through days, years, decades, a lifetime, seemed insane to me. Why did I have to be involved in something so utterly futile and painful as living, only to meet my death in agony?
This state persisted for hours. I thought I would never leave that place, yet even though there was an element of strangeness about this state of consciousness, I recognized it as something familiar. It was a state that I had experienced before in various forms; in fact, it seemed to be the underlying matrix which has influenced my world view and my mode of existence. To live it so intensely, if only for a few hours, in the form of an amplifed hell from which there was no escape was an important lesson.
I knew during the latter part of this experience that I no longer wanted to dwell on the suffering aspects of mankind, but did I have any choice in this matter? I felt that I would do anything to escape, but was there any way of escaping? I suddenly realized that on some level, I did not have any choice in this situation. I was being propelled through intimate, cellular suffering, and it was being done to me; I could not turn it on or off. I thought about karma here and started trying to puzzle out what in my past was responsible for leading me to such a monstrous place. But no amount of analysis yielded up any answers. I fell trapped in a maze from which there was no egress. I was stuck and that was my fate, to be someplace that was not the creation of living but being caught on the wheel of suffering. I loathed my fixation on suffering, but the more I could not accept my fate, the more difficult it became for me. It was as though I was a prisoner in a concentration camp and the harder I tried to get out the more I would be beaten, the more I struggled to free myself the tighter the bonds would become. And yet, I knew somewhere deep inside that I had to fight, that I had to escape, and that I would, but how?
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