The Gift of Chronic Illness

Imagine a happily married person who comes home one day to find that their beloved spouse has disappeared, emptied their house and swept all the bank accounts clean without even saying goodbye. Imagine that moment of sickening realization, when everything they had thought was true now reveals itself to have been false. The entire paradigm can shatter in a way that leaves a person untethered from their previous assumptions of sanity.

This is how chronically ill people feel about the conventional medical system.

This “untethering” is crucial to discovering the gift that chronic illness has to offer. On a personal level, it offers redemption through dismantling ego. Societally, it is the doorway to the next paradigm. We, the canaries who become phoenixes, become tour guides to the future, with all the existential challenges and personalized medicine that awaits.

The unsettling disorientation of the shattered life creates a familiarity with the state of “we might never know.” And of course, there are many trillions of dots that have never been, will never be, connected by the human mind. There is a seething, careening, intelligent design of life roiling in the evolutionary process that we glimpse and try to measure. Feeling the truth of this allows us to take a stance of humility, even to surrender.

There are a great many practical benefits to getting this into perspective. It allows you to not take any of this personally, to not be angry with your doctors or with society for “failing you,” to make contact with the peace inside of you that is unaffected by what happens to you.

Paradoxically, this feeling of floating away from the familiar with no rope without fighting it is the space into which solutions can arise. It turns out there was this intelligence all along, out of which the human mind arises. The hubris of the human mind and the current scientific paradigm appears within it like a toddler’s tantrum in an enormous expanse of compassionate consciousness.

It’s much more of a process of releasing a misunderstanding than discovering facts that will heal you. One of the misunderstandings that it is time to release is that we are separate, that this whole caboodle is anything other than one single, closed-system organism of Earth. Wholesale annihilation of microbes or wildlife, for example, will reverberate within the closed-system with predictable consequences. As Eckhart Tolle says, “your understanding is not a powerful contribution to the truth.” By this, he means that the nature of reality remains unchanged whether or not you perceive it. In other words, you feel separate? You’re still not.

How does this apply to complex chronic illness? There is a shift underway both in science and in consciousness …and chronically ill people are sort of driving it. There will be more and more of us, eventually becoming the majority. Releasing psychological and paradigmatic “holdings” could be a path to a deeper healing for society and for individuals than we may have ever had access to, had we stayed well.

As we know, rock solid answers are currently hard to come by in this field. It appears that the very apparatus of our scientific method might blind itself to the possibility that we are still in the dark ages. Still, solutions DO come! Yes, there are controversies as to whether one can become “colonized” by mold, or whether MARCoNS is still important to fight or how big a role actinomycetes play in “mold” illness. The brash and unrepentant front edge of Environmental Medical science (Hello Dr Shoemaker, Dr Klinghardt, Dr Nathan and all of ISEAI) are the ones who are ACTUALLY helping people, in part because they are untethering themselves from the ineffectual previous paradigm.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

It’s really not very surprising to learn that the paradigm that needed to make profit with antibiotics and pesticides, chemicals and processed food, is now failing to even understand the nature of the problem when it comes to the Alzheimer’s/Autism/Cancer/CVD epidemics. EVERY paradigm blusters and bloviates before it is inevitably replaced. (400 drug trial failures for Alzheimer’s? Come on, now.)

The whole of complex chronic illnesses will come into a new era of understanding, (probably after crises where the rich and powerful get sick themselves) when humanity will finally begin to grasp that it is the microbial world that is rising in response to human devastation. All of the ubiquitous microbes, the fungi, bacteria, viruses and parasites are not just mutating, but sharing information with each other to optimize current generations’ success at our undoing. This is not personal. They are not our enemies. This is the Earth’s immune system flaring in response to our activities.

It is our alignment with this reality that offers solutions. It is LACK of microbial diversity in our guts that is a major problem in human health. Intact, diverse microbial ecosystems = resilience in human health. Dead, pathogenic and compromised microbial ecosystems in bodies, soil and buildings = illness on personal, societal and global levels.

The arc of human history and of scientific inquiry DOES lean towards truth. It does this by removing what was always false. Sometimes a change in understanding will alter the rest of your life. It’s not that new information changed the nature of reality, it’s that your grasping of this information allows you drop into alignment with truth for the first time.

So may you be blessed with finding doctors who feel this, who are humble and curious and devoted to being of service. May you be blessed with having your “holdings” shattered and may the deepest intelligence of the universe find a path right through your body, burning up everything that is not who you really are.