On being authentic ... "and relevant"

An article in the Sunday NY Times discusses the attempts by evangelical/fundamentalist churches to become "relevant" by morphing into cafes, yoga studios, movie theaters, whatever.

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with any religion is on the rise, including a third of Americans under 30. Even so, nearly 80 percent of unaffiliated Americans say they believe in God, and close to half say they pray at least once a month.

The “spiritual but not religious” category is an important audience that evangelical leaders hope to reach in a culture that many believers call “post-Christian.”

So they arrange meetings in movie theaters, schools, warehouses and downtown entertainment districts. They house exercise studios and coffee shops to draw more traffic. Many have even cast aside the words “church” and “church service” in favor of terms like “spiritual communities” and “gatherings,” with services that do not stick to any script...

For new leaders coming out of seminary, “the cool thing is church planting,” Mr. Bird said. “The uncool thing is to go into the established church. Why that has taken over may speak to the entrepreneurialism and innovation that today’s generation represents.”..,

That strategy, blending religion with everyday activities, disarms people put off by traditional notions of church, said Scott L. Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“It’s pretty low risk to wander into a bar or movie theater or hotel,” Professor Thumma said. “It ends up delivering the message of relevance: we’re just like you, we’re struggling, we might have a beer together — and our faith is also relevant.”

Disarm, indeed.  There's a lot to criticize in the article ,  and it's trivially easy to criticize  as well.  You have incredible arrogance: "Jesus went out of the synagogue, and therefore we should..."  "The uncool thing is..." You have this idea that you should be "low risk" and "disarming" to people.  And their "faith" is "relevant." 

Yeah, true true true...and...what of ourselves? There is a value irrelevance, kind of like a mathematical proof.  Many times you start out with several lemmas,  which don't necessarily seem related at first.  Usually, there is a "bridge" built with other intermediate steps between these lemmas, which, applying other axiomatic principles or lemmas leads to the final proof.  But sometimes, a proof can be constructed with seemingly unrelated lemmas, and the final proof just falls into place, kind of like an "Aha!" moment in print.

You have bills to pay, demands to other people to be met. It doesn't always seem relevant to wash the dishes or do the laundry - some demands on time and wants will always seem contradictory to one another. 

Being at peace with that can be a real pain in the butt.  To be in reaction to the fact that others are not at peace with it is also a want that is contradictory, etc. etc. 

It used to be important to me to point out how all those other folks "were wrong" and I was...etc. But...it's not as important as it used to be, partly because I realize that my reaction to the above is a pointer to my own inauthenticity.  And I can be pretty inauthentic and hypocritical. 

Don't get me wrong. It's important to attempt to see things and do things as they are.   But as they are, the illusions of others are important only to the extent that transcending all beings dukkha should be done expediently. 

Let them have their movie theaters and coffee houses.  I want to help us here.  I want to help me as well as you.  If that here is in a coffee house, and it's in an emergent whatever, there it is.  I won't be oppressing people there because of their beliefs or not, and won't countenance others' oppression likewise. I will help you if I can, or at least I intend to.

So today that means some odd yard work. It's the day before New Years' Day. Stuff has to be removed.

Some things I experienced from 2012...

I typically  don't do lists of "best of  the year" though perhaps I could.  I just don't get out enough.  Beyond that though, people generally don't experience things linearly.  So here's some stuff. Experiences:

Movies (4 of which are kind of sort of new in 2012, and of those new ones, all were actually better than Argo, which was the best Hollywood film I've seen of this year):

1. Outrage: Way of the Yakuza.  Though critics derided the violence in this movie, its intricate tale of a Yakuza on the downfall was so representative of the zeitgeist (see I can use those words too!) of Japan of late, even though it is a more complex retelling of Sonatine.  Nobody in the US can make a movie that is this kind of crime movie so beautiful.

2.  Argo.  Commercial appeal.

3. The early Stephen Chow movies. 

4. Dragon.  Donnie Yen and Takeshi Kaneshiro made this movie what it is, which is a kind of mash-up of a film-noir with a martial arts movie, though intelligently made and performed; it asks  the question, "Can people really change?"

5. Hara-Kiri Death of a Samurai.  Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's (1962) Harakiri is, oddly, more faithful to the original than we've come to expect from remakes of Hollywood movies, which is a tremendous compliment to Miike actually.  Miike's films are noted for over the top violence and horror, but this one has very little of that.  Instead this is a must-see film to watch about the demands of honor, loyalty, and what those with power and authority owe the powerless in their charge.  I once saw the crucial (and most violent) scene in Japan in the mid-90s,  and am glad this film was re-made.   It is a tremendously sad film, but well worth your efforts to see.  

Books:

I'm still getting through Hsu Yun's work.

Maybe more stuff.

On Myoshinji disavowing Eido Shimano

NellaLou got the story a few days ago, and I'm just now catching up with it, or I should say, I'm expanding a bit on the comment I made there. It has to do with a rather oddly timed statement from Myoshinji stating that successors of Eido Shimano aren't connected to Myoshinji.

I agree somewhat with the comments of Carol Spooner:

I find it pretty disgusting that they allowed American Zen students to believe otherwise for several decades. Pretty damn cynical in my view. In addition, Shimano had a very public transmission ceremony from Soen Nakagawa Roshi, with many Japanese priests and officials in attendance. In addition, there were many Japanese priests and officials in attendance at the opening of Dai Bosatsu Monastery. There is reason to believe that Soen Nakagawa Roshi ever officially “registered” Shimano’s transmission in the record books at Myoshin-ji — for whatever reasons he may have had. But no one told the students here in the US. To the contrary, they actively participated in making Shimano look authorized and genuine. Bah! I say. Bad form.

As for this having far reaching implications for much of the US Rinzai world, I really don’t think so. Much of Soto Zen has already disconnected from the Japanese temples, and no longer registers their priests there. American Zen will stand or fall on its own feet, IMO. Whether it’s the death knell of ZSS and Dai Bosatsu Monastery, maybe. They made much of their Japanese connections in the past. But there are several independent Shimano Dharma heirs who have split from him, both recently and over the years, who maintain Zen Centers of their own without needing the support or recognition from him or from Myoshin-ji.

I think it does have implications, at least as far as legitimacy of teachers is concerned.  As it happens there are other Rinzai teachers in the US,  and they are not Sasaki Roshi or his successors, either.  (And it begs the question, will Sasaki's "home branch" in Japan make similar statements at some inopportune time in the future?

But...it reminds me of a larger point, and one that is not often mentioned in American Buddhist circles.

Sometimes, sometimes, organizations deal with "problem people" by assigning them to places far away from where the action is, far from where they could do noticeable damage to the organization.   This is common in many governments and corporations.  The Catholic Church was notorious for doing this, and not only in the child molestation scandal; google "Diocese of Partenia" for a telling example of how how the Catholic Church responded to progressives in its ranks of bishops fairly recently.  Did Soto and Rinzai organizations in Japan do this?

I am sad to say it would not surprise me if this were the case, but then again I'm not entirely certain how these organizations are run.  If this were the case it is as bad a decision to have had people assigned this way as it would be in any organization with people who are notably really problematic.  That is to say, such things are ticking time bombs. 

I tend to see why Brad Warner tends to be critical of the official Soto-shu hierarchy in Japan, and statements such as those from Myoshinji don't exactly put a harmonious and consistent view towards what is legit teaching and what is not.  That is certainly problematic.  But it may ultimately help things; maybe it will help demystify all the hoopla about succession, and such, and get people paying more attention to what really matters. I hope so. Life's rather short.

Some times seem to have a recurring theme.

This year's holiday season seems to revolve around odors.  The other day I was cleaning the house and the vacuum cleaner failed spectacularly, leaving the house with an odor of a combination of burnt rubber and dust and that very characteristic "electrical fire" smell. 

It was not good.

Now my house is awaft  (this doesn't seem to be a word yet, but should be) with incense from Tibet, from Japan and from India.  It's to cover up another scent, which needs covering up. The origin of that scent is too exotic and far-flung to be repeated here.  

Fascinating odd karma is what existence sometimes brings. 

You don't see this often in US media: Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing

I had missed this post in the NY Times/International Herald Tribune dated November 29th.  It's worthy of note because it demonstrates that the China-Tibet relationship is far more intertwined than what is often made out to be, and that the average (Han) Chinese person has a far different view of Tibet than what is often presented in the US.

On a freezing Tuesday this week, dozens of special guests from China’s cultural, political and business elites gathered within the blood-red walls of the Forbidden City. They were there for the opening of the newly restored Hall of Rectitude, the center of Tibetan Buddhism during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing.

After a fire in 1923, the hall and about a half-dozen surrounding buildings that comprise the Buddhist architectural complex lay in ruin for nearly a century in the northwestern corner of the 8,000-room former imperial palace... 

As I mingled in the crowd in the Forbidden City on Tuesday afternoon, I heard, once or twice, the words “Dalai Lama” spoken quietly, seriously — and one such mention turned into an impassioned discussion about “why the Dalai Lama doesn’t like China,” among three visitors who looked Chinese and spoke Mandarin, as they looked at Tibetan tangkas, or religious paintings, in one of the new galleries... 

Much of China’s claim to Tibet rests on the close relationship that existed between Beijing and Lhasa during the reign of three Qing emperors — Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong — in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s religious leader, exercised great influence on the emperors during that time, in a patron-priest relationship...

This is not the only Tibetan temple in Beijing, either.  Most importantly, there is the "Lama Temple," which I visited several years ago, and again, discussion of the situation in Tibet wasn't discouraged, at least in one tour group I had overheard. The Lama Temple is huge. Point is, there's a lot of Tibetan Buddhism in China outside of Tibet,  not even near Tibet.  And also the point should be made that China's traditional relationship to religion was the political and religious were strongly intertwined; this happened before the Communist era, and those patronized religions weren't considered "false" because they were patronized. 

All of that said, it would be good for some kind of modus vivendi to be worked out between the Tibetans and Chinese.  That part of the world has more than enough problems right now.  Then again the same is true for people everywhere.

Reflections on the Time of the Year and all the Shootings

It's that magical time of year... "the most wonderful time of the year,"  so it is said. This wonderful time of the year has been the time in which there have been a number of high profile shootings, including the horrific story at Newtown Connecticut.

There have been the obligatory calls for can't we get along.  A nephew in law mentioned that it's been 13 years since Columbine, and the state of our mental health and the state of our violence have not changed in any way.  He's right.  Nobody made it a priority.

It does make the Zen blogosphere sex scandal situation ridiculously irrelevant by comparison. 

People tend to get wigged out during high stress times.  Yeah, love each other.   But relax, too. Stop. Relax.

It is crazy, but being relaxed and keeping composure help cause peace.  Being stressful to the point of loss of composure is hazardous to peace.

There's abuse and there's abuse and there's narratives

I had written a somewhat long post that I have refrained, so far, from publishing.  

And I'm going to publish this one instead, although I'd like to make a point or two in this post that will have been made in the other post, if I decide to publish that one. (That one's just a bit too incendiary perhaps.)

Let's stipulate that some women were harmed as a result of abuse by Sasaki Roshi - though I have absolutely positively no first hand knowledge of any events in the matter.  My interest is that of a lay practitioner in the Rinzai school, as well as a guy who's known his share of bad things flown his way and all related suffering to that.  Not to mention all the crap that I've inflicted on others as well.

But were all women who interacted with Sasaki Roshi harmed, and were they all harmed to the same degree?

Likely not.  This is not to minimize the suffering of all who were greatly harmed but it is to point out a fact that is sometimes lost, especially if one is too attached to a narrative.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion mentioned that he was the recipient of highly inappropriate sexual advances on the part of some clergy member.  But Dawkins makes a very interesting point, one that I heartily endorse.   That point is that the abuse of children by attempting - and succeeding often - at convincing  them they are fundamentally damaged goods who will suffer the fires of hell for eternity can be far more damaging and widespread than the incidents of sexual abuse by Christian clergy. 

He's right. 

He's so right.

I was never sexually abused by clergy, but I sure as hell was the recipient of various forms of abuse predicated upon the above narrative. 

We should be careful about the narratives we are prescribing for the harm we see around us.

On second thought, maybe some of these posts aren't all Zen, Buddhist, or anything like that

Nathan wrote a good post yesterday or the day before.  This post is not about that post.  And unlike him, you'll be able to tell who and what I'm talking about here, even though my tendency is to remain elliptical anyway.

The other day I said that everything was perfect, and complete, and lacking nothing, etc., and that's still true.

But with a different mix of treasure and poisons smeared through the aggregates you'd get a different reality more or less.

In reading a couple of the posts about the latest brouhaha, I was struck by two things:

1. Some of the so-called teachers were certainly not acting in a way I'd have done, if I were a designated teacher.  In particular,  two teachers blogging on Sweeping Zen...these folks are supposed to be teachers? (And one of them is a psychologist?)  

2. It seems that I have an issue not with Sweeping Zen's blogging about Zen master sex scandals, but, ummm...the very premise of "Sweeping Zen" itself.  I was kind of surprised to conclude that, but there you have it.

Regarding the first point, I don't know if it's because of the weakness of their teaching, practice, or whatever, but it seemed that line after line from their  posts revealed a profound lack of understanding of various things.  I've already blogged about a some of them, but this attitude of "I'm right - and if I'm mistaken, it's because I'm RIGHT!" that I read from them, well, I hadn't quite caught that before.

Regarding Sweeping Zen itself...hey, I've run this little blog for significantly longer than Sweeping Zen's been around...Mr. Tebbe obviously think's he's filling a need, a niche, etc. But Mr. Tebbe's site...well...about that...

Sweeping Zen is the global Zen community’s largest online resource, a trusted voice on issues that matter most to Zen practitioners of all walks of life. A grassroots initiative, we rely exclusively on the generosity of our site readership to continue our important work.

I have to think Mr. Tebbe wrote this, and it's  at least partially untrue, I regret to say.  I can think of at least two sites that have more resources - like, you know, texts and such (one is the "Zen site.")  I've regularly consulted those sites for texts, histories, etc. While I generally respect some of the teachers that have posted at Sweeping Zen,  I would hardly say that their words, videos, etc. "matter most" to me.   And what am I, chopped liver?

Moreover, the "global Zen community" contains a heck of a lot of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean practitioners, not to mention Vietnamese.  A heck of a lot more folks than read Sweeping Zen no doubt.   There's a Japanese Roshi - in Japan - with more Twitter followers than Sweeping Zen.  Significantly more.   Not that that's any measure of anything, but it's just one data point.

And if you call yourself a "trusted voice," don't be surprised if that engenders skepticism. I'm just saying.

How do people get this way? 

I used to have more grandiose ideas about practice and all that.  I had grandiose ideas about this blog, though I kind of like the way it's settled into itself.  But it's just a blog, dammit.   And I never really entertained the notion that this blog would be authoritative with respect to matters of Zen.  I mean, that's oxymoronic.  

But I think this kind of sort of "mission statement" is part of the same problem as some of those posts I'd read elsewhere. These sort of statements reveal the state of the minds of those who make them, in which there are ...well...how do you want it said? Unskillful thoughts? Poisons? Ignorance? Whatever. 

So ... I guess all I'm really saying is "more humility, please."

The Way was the Way before people discovered problems with power relationships and their own ignorance, and the Way will survive even this blog post.

Useful Obscurity and Celebrity Opposition

The title of this post is a play on Ivan Illich's "The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies," which I read once long ago, but haven't been able to re-locate.  Illich is one of those people that would make my list of authors who've influenced me, and while much of what he says is flat out wrong, naive, and unworkable, it's useful to read him as a thought exercise.

In the title I've referenced, Illich makes a plea for the idea that too much of what is done in society is relegated to "professions," which he views as blocking people from entering endeavors they otherwise would have little problem entering (if people were "usefully unemployed"); in effect, professions are an otherworldly clerical class as seen by Illich (oddly, given his theological background, or more properly precisely because of his theological background). 

As a professional, as one who has seen the rank stupidity that goes with people acting as though education and credentials don't matter, I can't abide by Illich's position categorically, though for sure many professionals have huge blind spots and canyons of ignorance abiding in their minds, and no doubt that goes for yours truly.  But Illich's point does have some utility...when it comes to "celebrity."

It's an interesting coincidence in the Buddhist blogosphere when in the short space of time the Joshu Sasaki thing is going on while it's announced that Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges will kind of sort of do a road show together.  Celebrities.

Why are there celebrities? The short answer is because there are those that make others to be that.  Maybe they are attractive or like Stephen Hawking, ostentatiously crippled.  Maybe they are brilliant, like Hawking, or maybe they're NFL linebackers.  In some cases, they are human bubbles (well, we're all human bubbles) - really popular human bubbles, such as Bruce Lee, who was incredibly talented, and not simply physically and whose celebrity became a kind of bubble which if traded on some kind of market exchanges, would have reached stratospheric heights.

But almost all of us are not celebrities.   Many of us are fans who live in a kind of symbiotic albeit likely dysfunctional relationship with celebrities.  I think the whole fan - celebrity thing is indeed dysfunctional.  I think it's more than OK to consider that John Lennon or Lady Gaga are talented folks, but the idea that these people are different - they are the celebrities who make the fans who the fans are - that idea is strange and unhealthy.

As I get older, I am trying to develop and keep learning new things, and not simply technical things in my chosen field.  I am doing this not only because I don't want to watch TV all day when I'm retired (if I ever actually retire), but also because I find it inherently interesting.  I am not a professional musician nor artist, but I would like to find my own voice and view in these things; my own idiom; I can say after all these years I kind of do have my own idiom in my style of technical development/design approaches.  And I am fortunate enough to be doing some parenting/mentoring/leading...hopefully passing on what little I have learned with a minimum of damage to the next generation.

I have been fortunate that in more than one of these endeavors I've met people with remarkable, tremendous skill and in some cases trained with them.  You've never heard of them unless you're a kind of specialist, but it doesn't really matter; they never needed popularity or fame to do what they did, but they did need the 10,0000 hours of practice and effort.   That 10,000 hours tends to be 10,000 hours not doing PR; it is indeed useful obscurity.

Now I have no problem per se with a Jeff Bridges/Bernie Glassman road show; I liked The Big Lebowski as much as the next guy (probably more - I maintain the film can't be fully appreciated without a deep knowledge of The Big Sleep,  because that's where the humor's really deeply embedded).   I just can't imagine what claims they could make on my attention beyond those things that already have huge claims on my attention.   I mean ...seriously...why should I see them? Does it have to do with clown noses?  An understanding of Zen?  The basic goodness of a fictional naive stoner who is really an anti-Philip Marlowe? (A more interesting area of exploration: Jeff Lebowski contra Philip Marlowe; but you can explore that yourself, can't you?)  Well, whatever...

Good luck to Danny Fisher and Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman - though I hope somebody gets to ask the latter about Genpo Merzel, if only out of a sense of mischievousness.  But even if I lived in the LA area, I'd have other plans that night. 

I see more of Brad Warner's view momentarily...

This thing from Sweeping Zen regarding some yearly message from "Soto-shu" sounds really corporate.

I mean really corporate.

Oh, that's not Adam Tebbe's fault either, in fact, kudos to him for bringing that up.

無 does not mean "nothing." But it doesn't mean something either.

I'm reading something by Koryu Osaka on the 公安　無.  And he wrote what's in the title of this post more or less, or at least that's attributed to him somewhere in that text.  No matter.

I'm reading stuff on Buddhism in the blogspace, stuff that seems re-hashed, and to some degree recycled.  I've rarely, if ever, recycled anything, myself; I can't fault those who do, but I wouldn't recycle anything on this blog until I re-edit a bunch of old posts and publish them together.  At least that's my plan.

But the stuff I read on Buddhism in the blogspace...it tends towards being quite ...um...not what I'd intended to be blogging about in the Buddhist blogspace (please don't get me started on celebrity meatspace-op blog posts either, but chacun a son goûts.)  And there's still that feeling I've had of late...everything is exactly the way it should be.  Flaws and ignorance and hatred and all.   My own hatred and anger and stupidity and basest rage and all that comes with that and all that is misplaced, disowned, lost, and forgotten or repressed. That too is exactly as it should be - it is as though it is neither overdetermined or underdetermined; it's n  equations in n unknowns, so to speak.

It's all  無.     Those Buddhist blog posts, this Buddhist blog post, it's all 無.  Ditto for self/no-self,  poisons, celebrities, misplaced interpretations of sutras, vestigial rantings about George W. Bush, etc. etc.

It's exactly the way it should be; it's all the product of aggregates that have come together, dependent on previous conditions, states, actions, etc, to be exactly the way it is now.

Is this making any sense at all?  Hope so.  And the nature of the "self" is just like this.

The stupid...sometimes it's hard to take...

It may be down the memory hole pay wall by now, but the New Yorker had an article up last week about college kids taking speed...only they weren't calling it speed, and they were couching it an updated version of the language that was use in the 60s to describe physician prescribed pep pills. 

Not long ago, I met with Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in his office, which is tucked inside the labyrinthine Penn hospital complex. Chatterjee’s main research interests are in subjects like the neurological basis of spatial understanding, but in the past few years, as he has heard more about students taking cognitive enhancers, he has begun writing about the ethical implications of such behavior. In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition. Chatterjee worries about cosmetic neurology, but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery has; in fact, with neuroenhancement it’s harder to argue that it’s frivolous. As he notes in a 2007 paper, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter,” needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all “abundantly clear.” In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

Chatterjee told me that many people who come to his clinic are cognitively preoccupied versions of what doctors call the “worried well.” The day I visited his office, he had just seen a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names. “Here’s an example of someone who by most measures is doing perfectly fine,” Chatterjee said. “She’s not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems, and it’s very hard to know how much of that is just getting older.” Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation, both of which have been shown to help maintain cognitive function. But maybe they’re already doing so and want a bigger mental rev-up, or maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill.

Recently, I spoke on the phone with Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge University, and the co-author of a December, 2007, article in Nature, “Professor’s Little Helper.” Sahakian, who also consults for several pharmaceutical companies, and her co-author, Sharon Morein-Zamir, reported that a number of their colleagues were using prescription drugs like Adderall and Provigil. Because the drugs are easy to buy online, they wrote, it would be difficult to stop their spread: “The drive for self-enhancement of cognition is likely to be as strong if not stronger than in the realms of ‘enhancement’ of beauty and sexual function.” (In places like Cambridge, at least.)

See what I mean? Take a pill to make yourself "more."  Now I happen to be in the camp that would say it is possible to use technology to alter our behavior - this is in some ways self-evident: a pair of running shoes makes it easier to run.  A Wing Chun dummy enables one to practice Wing Chun without a partner.   A swimming pool helps one practice swimming. 

There are limits to this though.  Technology will extract a kind of "karmic debt" with everything else - it then becomes a question of one's willingness to use the technology at the price of the karmic debt.  I'm having a cup of coffee. If I want coffee in the future I'll have to make more soon - and the whole host of behaviors of having coffee come with the coffee.  If I have it late at night I can't sleep.   A technology that makes us feel happy all the time robs us of honing the skill of using depression, sadness and grief to benefit all.  The same goes for other kinds of technologies besides the chemical. 

You get the point. Speed kills now just as it did then.  Taking that crap won't make us all John McAfee, but we might be something repugnant anyway.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

Yesterday I had a colonoscopy for the first time in my life.   Probably most people who read this blog who aren't over 40 or so have little idea of what that actually entails.   To put it bluntly, you eat a very low fiber diet for a couple of days and then the day before you have the colonoscopy you're supposed to have a liquid diet until...it's time to take the "super laxative" they  prescribe for you.  And then there's predictable results.

You take that super laxative again (in the regimen I was prescribed) a few hours before you're supposed to show up at the hospital for the actual procedure.  After the second ingestion of the super laxative, along with a liter of water, you're not supposed to eat or drink anything until the procedure.  Suffice it to say, when you're at the hospital, you really aren't in any shape to do much of anything.  You're dehydrated, your electrolyte balance has gone blooey,  and your mind can't really focus on anything. 

Being at the hospital in this shape, when for all intents and purposes you're otherwise healthy is strange, to say the least.  I was in the "short stay" area of the hospital, but it still was a hospital, I was in a hospital bed wearing a hospital gown, etc. etc. etc.  The TV had some kind of "hospital advice" channel for new mothers.  Someone had left a "Weekly Standard" as reading.   I tried reading some blather about the "Tea Party," and didn't get far.  Then I went through 2 episodes of "Law and Order" on the TV (even now I haven't a clue what the story line was).  They wheeled me into the place where the colonoscopy was to occur,  gave me some kind of Valium derivative mixed with fentanyl  - and I was out.

Anyway, I had the predictable meal afterwards, slept, ate again, etc. etc. slept,  and then I woke up this morning.

And I sat.

And everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be.   

It probably is related to the microflora ecosystem in my gut and its relative changes after the procedure, as well as a whole host of other aggregates and things, but ...anybody else ever feed profoundly good after something like this?