Where the Buddha Meets the Road

 

“The Body is a Cancer” by Kiley Jon Clark

 

Imagine doing your own meditation. You are sitting there minding your own business when suddenly, you feel someone watching you. Some guy is standing across the road glaring at you. You decide to just ignore him, unfortunately, more arrive.  

Folks start showing up from all over the World, only to watch you do your own meditation practice. If this was all, it might be fine. But, they have other plans.

Soon, a huge Meditation Center is being erected. Hundreds of people, beeping bobcats, shouting foremans, cranes, dump trucks, and dust whirl around your ordinary, little meditation cushion.

Ok, so you may never have to worry about this happening to you, but from what I’ve read, this is pretty much what happened to Ramana Maharishi.

According to the book, “The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharishi,” it states, “He was born December 29, 1879 in Tiruchuli, Tamil Nadu, South India, the son of Shundaram Ayyar, a scribe and country lawyer, and given the name Venkataraman, which was abbreviated as Ramana.”

“At the age of seventeen he suddenly had an experience of death one day in which he suddenly realized that the body dies but consciousness is not touched by death. Whatever this “I” was, it is immortal.

After this experience Venkataraman lost all interest in things of this world and ultimately left home without his parents’ permission to find his way to the Holy Mountain of Arunachala.”

Which brings us to the fact, that although he wrote very little and spoke less, so awe-inspiring was his presence, that people came from all over the world to build an Ashram around him.

It is my understanding that although a lot of great saints are talked about, Sri Ramana is one of the very few that is openly acknowledged by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and most all others, as actually being a “Self-Realized Being” or “Awakened One.”

And although he did speak little, there is one thing that he did say, that I cannot get out of my mind.

Eventually, in his later years, Ramana started losing weight and it became harder for him to get around unaided. So, after much pleading, he was taken to a doctor by his devotees.

The diagnosis was, “Stage four Cancer.”

His followers began to weeping and wailing. They fell at the doctor’s feet begging to know about a “Cure” and “treatments.” But, with his ever present smile, Ramana simply said, “there is no need of treatment” and stood to leave.  

For the remainder of his time on Earth, people, cards, telegrams, and letters poured in, each in their own way, begging him to reconsider seeking medical help for his condition.

His one and only comment about the whole situation was both direct and puzzling.

“The body is a Cancer,” he said once while shrugging his shoulders.

Now, here is the thing that has been keeping me up at night. A couple of weeks ago, I took my daughter to a foot specialist to get some warts removed.

Just to make conversation, I asked the Doc, “What causes warts anyway?” I never expected what I was about to hear next. “Leading research says that warts are a virus that can live in standing water like gym showers and even the ocean. Because it is a living organism, I’m treating it with venom extracted from a species of Beetle,” his reply.

Ok, let me preface this by saying that I don’t live in a hippy trippy part of L.A or Miami Beach. This is San Antonio, Texas and this doctor is an older Hispanic man wearing cowboy boots.

I told him that I was amazed and had never thought of warts as being a living thing. And he blew me away even further. “Oh yeah, most of all diseases and sicknesses come from some living, invading organism trying to infiltrate and set-up shop in our body-organism,” he said while applying the “beetle-juice” to my daughter’s foot.

“OK,” I said, “I know that you hear about the flu bug, viruses, bacteria, E. Coli, staph infection and other tiny organisms that make us sick, but what else?”

“Well,” he said while bandaging her foot, “I saw an old man on his death bed become completely free of cancer by drinking water. It’s something called ‘Kanga Water’ and it has something to do with the ‘Fungus’ not being able to survive at that PH level.”

I told him to wait a minute and back up. “Are you saying that cancer is a living ‘fungus’ that can be cured with water?”

“None of this can be proven yet, by it’s my opinion that just like everything else, cancer is a living organism. The body tries to fight it off by producing tumors. There is one doctor who is opening up the infected areas with a scalpel and flushing the area out with Sodium Bicarbanate or Baking Soda, he has a very high percentage rate of folks that recover completely from their cancer.” he said with a smile.

Now, for the last couple of days, this is all that I’ve been thinking about. I remember reading in the ancient Vedas, “All of Life is food for another.”

And, indeed, everything lives off of something else. We feed on plants and animals, and eventually, we will be food for them. It seems, the whole of life, is spent consuming something and producing waste.

Could it be, that in truth, everything including the Earth itself, is some living form sustained by the consumption of another living form?

Is Cancer a type of Fungus? Are warts a Virus? Is the body itself, some form of cancer, as Sri Ramana Maharishi so clearly told us?