Portuguese man o' war

One day when I was at Little Beach, it was this absolutely gorgeous day, though. It has been flat over there for a week or so and Kona winds, and it was just crystal clear, flat, and I'd swim naked almost all the way around to the next beach. And I swam into a mass of a Portuguese man o' war. Portuguese man o' war are not these big things, but they're these little things that float on the surface and they have all these long tendrils that go down. They're like strings and they stick on you and they shoot little harpoons into you, and the harpoons have a protein that attaches to your pain receptors and fires your pain receptors off at maximum. And the reason they do that is if a fish swims into those tentacles, just one swish of its tail, it would just rip them all apart. But it's so paralyzed by the pain that it can't react and it's just paralyzed there. So I swam into a huge mass of these that had been blown by the wind, the Southern winds, and I was naked, so I took three handfuls off my genitals, and I looked under the water and there was a ball about this big, a mass of these things I ripped off of me, and they were all over my body.

Fortunately, I was right next to the shore and I crawled into this little spot. This is a really isolated spot where there's nothing around. And I crawl into this little spot and looking out in this crystal clear, beautiful day. There's no human thing I can see. It's just the island like it might have been for a few million years.

If you got into a fear state or anger state or anything like that, you would be dead in like 20 seconds. You would just rip things apart. So it was like one second. And if you got through that second, then you get to the next one. But I was in the sun and the sun was unbearable. There was a little bit of shade and I threw myself into there. And then after about three or four seconds, I would get claustrophobia and I would have to throw myself out back in the sun. So I spent an hour throwing myself in and out of this piece of shade and just screaming. And after about an hour, the pain went down just a little bit enough so that I could crawl out on a rock.

I realize that what saved my life was that the background feeling wasn't anger or fear, but it was this peculiar Buddhist thing that I felt like all the people in the world that had ever been tortured. It feels like there's so many people and beings right now that have such incredible suffering. It feels like for a moment I opened the door to their presence.