I refused the government's bailout because I had completely fallen in love with the wandering life. He even thought that he had realized the truth of freedom, that is, "the body enters purgatory, and the spirit leads to freedom", which has a kind of ascetic understanding. In retrospect, I must have had some kind of masochistic mental illness, and the more physically painful it was, the more mentally pleasurable it was. After the spirit splits from the body, it is as if it does not feel the pain of the body. To be hungry is only to be physically hungry, to be cold is only to be physically cold, and to be mentally neither cold nor hungry, it will only be happy and sad. For a long time, the spirit has been imprisoned in this bulky body, unable to be free. Now watching the body suffer, the spirit seems to have won some kind of victory, always laughing from time to time. If this situation were allowed to continue, I would be schizophrenic.
But before my spirit went wrong, the body went wrong, and it made me understand completely that the spirit cannot exist independently of the body. Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" mentions that the mind and body are a group of "emergence phenomena", that is, a thing will produce new phenomena as long as it forms a group, such as countless water molecules forming water flows, and water flow is the emergence of water as a group; for example, the consciousness of the bee colony is not controlled by the queen bee, but the group consciousness behavior of the bee colony. In the same way, human consciousness represents the relationship between countless groups of cells. Without the body, there is no way to talk about consciousness, even if the body is missing a finger, consciousness will change.
After the dumb man entered the shelter, I occupied his cabin and lived a "early out and late return" life. The government sent a big quilt, and I was no longer shivering at night. During the day, I would go back to the square and find a south-facing, sheltered corner to bask in the sun. I like to watch the subway mouth come and go, observe their expressions, and eavesdrop on their conversations. In addition to spiritual freedom, another great joy of wandering life is this, and I observe human beings from a divine perspective, just as I did when I was a child crouching under the eaves and watching ants move: a large group of crushed ants carrying debris and dust, their ranks are so organized that even if they are destroyed by external forces, they will soon return to normal.
After about 10 days, my stomach and intestines malfunctioned, I always felt bloated to death, and sometimes I didn't feel hungry for a day without eating. I didn't care at first, I just felt that the spirit had once again triumphed over the body and reached a certain state of detachment. Later, the stomach became more and more serious and began to thin. Sometimes I pull four or five times a day because I haven't eaten anything, and all that comes out is water. In order not to have diarrhea, I try not to drink water, which leads to electrolyte imbalance in the body and the beginning of fever. I lay quietly in the dark hut, my whole body scalding hot, and my mind was confused and hallucinating: I saw the dumb man lying face down on the broken wooden board, his body like a piece of red-hot iron, steaming with water. He just lay motionless like that, like a dead man, and I shook him, not reacting at all. His body sank like a stone, and I turned him over with great effort, and his face startled me, and it was clearly me. Later I got up and drank some water, but after a while my stomach grunted again. In a trance, I saw myself crawling out with my stomach covered and crawling into the grass...
I woke up again in the hospital, with fluids on my arms, white curtains hanging from the windows, and a man in a police uniform standing by the bed. He said he had saved me in the hut when I was unconscious and the quilt was covered with and urine. If someone hadn't smelled the stench and called the police, I might have died inside. My phone was down for 3 months and they have contacted my mum, who is on her way to it. Then he took out a pen and paper, made some notes, and after repeatedly confirming that I was mentally normal, he left. I looked blankly at the ceiling of the ward, everything in the hospital was white, white ceiling, white walls, white quilts and sheets, and the doctor's clothes were also white. And everything in the dumb hut was black, black floor, black walls, and black bedding. I was forcibly pulled from the black world into the white world, and my head was inevitably in a trance, wondering if all this was real. The black, moldy cotton coat had been replaced by a hospital gown, and the only marks that remained were of a face full of mustache and vigorous hair. It was as if my spirit had never drifted away, or had never existed alone, as if it had been sewn into my stomach by a needle and thread.
My mother was stunned when she entered the door, she didn't seem to recognize me, and she seemed to recognize me at a glance, as if I were her 20-year-old son. She pounced, snot and tears, smeared on my unkempt hair and beard. She asked me how I had spent the past two years, and I said I was doing well, this time to experience life, accidentally got sick, and that's it. I did not tell her about the absurd life I spent with Fang Jie after resigning from the company, nor did I explain to her the spiritual understanding of wandering life for consciousness and body, life and existence. It wasn't hard to deal with my mom, and from childhood to adulthood, no matter what fancy reasons I concocted, she had no doubts. In her heart, I have always been a good child who is well-behaved, hard-working, hard-working, kind and kind. I think even if I kill someone, she will think that the person who was killed did something wrong. I once asked her why she believed in me so much, and she said she believed in herself. This sentence can be interpreted in my opinion as she can't accept another me, because she raised me alone, poured her heart and soul into me, and denying me is equivalent to denying her life, which not only means that her life's hard work is in vain, but also means that her remaining life has completely lost its meaning.
My mother took me to cut my hair and shave my beard, and now I completely broke with the wandering life on the surface, and I could no longer find the mark of the wandering. After the treatment of the hospital and the careful care of my mother, my health quickly improved, and I could eat a little, but the diarrhea still did not relieve much. The doctor suggested I had a colonoscopy, during which time I was placed in a gastroenterology ward. There was an old man living in the ward, probably in his 80s. He was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer and has lost hope of a cure and can only be maintained by drugs. Because the cancer cells had metastasized to the lungs, the old man gasped for breath as he spoke, and there seemed to be a thick phlegm in his throat that slid up and down with his breathing. His illness was very painful during the attack, and it may be fine during the day, but at night he had to fall asleep. One night I was awakened by the groans of pain from the old man, who turned his back on me on his side, and the moonlight covered him like a shroud from the window. His body twisted into a twist, and his mouth kept making "ooh ooh ooh" sounds. I asked him if he wanted to help call the nurse, and he waved his hand at me: "It's useless to call, tonight's metering has run out." After a while, he took the initiative to talk to me again and asked me if I could prescribe a bottle of sleeping pills in his own name, he couldn't prescribe it himself, and his son didn't prescribe it to him, so he couldn't live now, and he couldn't die. He was naïve, and anyone who knew a little bit about the law knew it wouldn't be a good idea to do it. Looking at the way he struggled in pain, I fell into a long-term uneasiness: people in such a situation do not even have the right to die, how good it would be if the law allowed euthanasia. In the cultural genes of Chinese, death is always associated with the bad things of pain, terror, sadness, etc. If euthanasia can be legitimized, then death will appear more relaxed, more decent, and even warmer. So this is not a matter of law, it can even trigger the whole nation to think about life and death, and it has great significance for the progress of civilization.
I didn't choose a painless colonoscopy because I didn't want to be poked unconsciously, and I believed that since there was an option for a regular colonoscopy, its pain must be within the tolerable range. "Others can do it, why can't I," I said to myself. But when I saw the doctor take a black tube that was more than a meter long with a thick thumb, I was really panicked, and I didn't believe that something so long could really fit into my stomach. The doctor kept me relaxing, but the sharp swelling pain in my stomach made me break out in a cold sweat. My eyes were fixed on the corner, imagining myself lying in a mute hut, surrounded by mold... My spirit flew out of my body again, looking at the painful twisted body and emitting a sneer... The doctor said that I had a fava bean-sized polyp in my sigmoid colon and wanted to cut it off for me, go back and do a biopsy to see if it was benign or malignant. I couldn't say a word except "be well" in my mouth, just hoping that the black pipe that was more than a meter long could come out as soon as possible.
Fortunately, the final biopsy turned out to be benign, and after the operation, I stayed in the hospital for another week, and I could only eat a little liquid food every day. This week I understood that the true meaning of happiness is "eating, drinking and sleeping", for me, being able to eat and pull is happiness, and for the boss next door to be able to breathe and sleep is happiness. These most instinctive things are usually the things we are most likely to ignore, and we tend to be too attached to that metaphysical spiritual happiness. In addition to understanding the true meaning of happiness, my body and spirit have also reached a certain degree of reconciliation, and the body strives to recover health so that the spirit can soar with more energy; the spirit also strives to maintain a positive and pleasant state, so that the body can recover faster.