Reading Less and Less, Resting More and More

The bodily processes continue to slow down. I'm spending even more time in bed. There are three books that I'm in the process of reading. They may not get finished. There's less and less initiative to do much reading except to glance through the newspaper headlines, read the funnies and check out Dave Barry on Sunday.

I started rereading Fuhrman's book. In addition my sister in law lent me Larry Dossey's Healing Words. He's another MD that's pushing the frontier of medical practice. He's done a meta analysis of the considerable literature on the efficacy of prayer in healing. The research is somewhat confusing and contradictory. What he's done is put together a framework that seems to tease out the more subtle elements of the process to get at a deeper understanding of what's going on there.

Another book I've started is Garrison Keillor's The Book of Guys. He places the dilemma of the modern American male in a humorous perspective. He's a Mark Twain type of writer - humorous but witty and wise at the same time. I may not see much of that book until I start eating again.

I brought along a couple of dozen audio tapes that I listen to lying in bed. That's easier to take than sitting up reading. My mind is alert, it's just that the body doesn't want to sit up for very long periods. For instance I just got up to go get my daily water ration and then sat down to do this journal entry. After this I'll probably lie back down again.

I have listened to physicist David Bohm talking about the Implicate Order and biologist Rupert Sheldrake discussing Morphogenesis. Sheldrake makes a keynote presentation at the IONS conference I attend on the way home. My students read selections by these authors as their last two assignments for the term. I believe their ideas hold promise for a "scientific" underpinning for understanding the intuitive experience.