I finished last week's Daily Reminders with a couple of posts all about how we're experiencing a world of thought-perception, being projected outwards (i.e. inside-out), rather than some objective world-out-there, that we've got a window on (i.e. outside-in).
If you missed them, they're both pretty good ones to catch up on!
And they brought to mind an amazing little article I once read, in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). It's many years since I read the journal, so I'm not sure whether they still do this, but they used to have a lighthearted section near the back, called ‘Minerva’, that would detail odd little case histories – medical curiosities, if you like.
(I'm gonna be honest with you here guys – it's pretty much the only bit of the journal I ever read 😂)
I can't send you to the original, because it's behind the paywall (the citation is below), but the full text of it is freely circulating the internet, so I've included it in full.
Because it's not just emotions and assessments and situations like giving presentations that are created in thought-perception, it's pain, too!
Have a read of this:
A builder aged 29 came to the accident and emergency department having jumped down on to a 15 cm nail. As the smallest movement of the nail was painful he was sedated with fentanyl and midazolam. The nail was then pulled out from below.
When his boot was removed a miraculous cure appeared to have taken place. Despite entering proximal to the steel toecap the nail had penetrated between the toes: the foot was entirely uninjured.
(And I can tell you that fentanyl plus midazolam is about as hardcore as it gets.)
What's the takeaway?
Well, this is a teeny, detail-lite case history where we don't really know all the facts (and of course nobody will ever know what the builder himself experienced – even his own memories are likely to be false now, given all the hoo-haa)!
It's also likely that he could feel something (even though it went between his toes, it's still a big old nail!) and was very freaked out by what it looked like.
For me, it's (yet) another invitation to pause and consider that:
Whatever that unfortunate (soon to be completely-zonked 🥴) builder did experience in that moment, 100% of it was created from within. His psychological system, just like yours and mine, was asking,
📦🗣️ “What must be true for me to make sense of the data I'm receiving?”
…and it served him up with the reality described in the case history. One that clearly lay somewhere down at the thin end of the normal distribution curve.
What's not being suggested
Again, it's important here to draw the distinction between (the Principle of Thought)—or ‘Thought-perception’—and bog standard ‘thinking’.
Pain is made of Thought-perception – that version of ‘reality’ offered up to us by the 3 Principles. It's a matter of (somewhat confusing) semantics, but when I talk of ‘thinking’ I'm referring to the blibber-blabber DVD commentary track that then interprets that experience, judges it, adds meaning etc. (And let's be honest here, people – usually makes it worse.)
So it's not that pain isn't there and we just think it is… it's more that the experience of pain is actively constructed from Thought. Which is pretty malleable stuff.
I can tell you that the last time I was sat in the dentist's chair, I tried to not-think-about-pain and it didn't make a blind bit of difference!
Then again, it is at least possible to do a caesarean section delivery—knife through skin!— with hypnosis alone.
And there are enough anecdotal reports of war injuries going unnoticed, or people not realising they'd broken a bone during some heroic rescue or other, all at one end of the curve…
…and then this guy, with a nail (not) in his foot, at the other.
It's such an interesting, potentially helpful and relatively unexplored idea, and I was very glad to see, not so long ago, that my daughter's school was pointing in this direction, too!
🧐
Giles
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Giles P Croft
A metamorphosis of pain, as told by a client.