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Dear Kat,

The experience of union we have during sex is so intense and other-worldly that it confounds my brain, so I loved this morning’s conversation and I want to record it here.

Since Aristotle, Western culture has been based on classification: something is A or not A, and this viewpoint is a tool for the scientific method and a premise of Western culture.  In contrast, much of Eastern philosophy believes in the essential oneness of the world, and that the self is illusory.  Based on our experience of both being conscious of union and yet retaining full consciousness of our selves, we suggested that this paradox applies to the competing world views, too; that the world is at the same time both separate and unitary.

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We started by talking about how transcendent sex was and how hard it was to find words for it and I said I would have to speak at 60 words a second to capture the experience and asked if you agreed with the description and you did and I marveled at how our descriptions always agree and you said it’s because we’re having the same experience which is possible because by being completely undefended it allows the merging to take place and the result is that we experience ourselves fully at the same time as the merged experience and it could happen between any two people or a group of people and if it spread it would lead to world peace and I thought wow, I must write this down tomorrow.

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Dear Kat,

We talk about presence and the present a lot, but it’s a hard subject to pin down.  I see it as an alternate, more basic way to view the world.  Life has learned not only to react to the environment, but to remember the events so that it can react appropriately, and to predict events also.  In other words, our model of the world contains a past and a future.  Furthermore, we have invented language, wherein words are a stand-in for one or a bundle of experiences, and can also incorporate other words, leading to a very efficient way of storing information.

All this has been such a successful strategy that our attention routinely roams around the brain areas that manage the past and the future, interspersed with checking on linguistic summaries of the present.  As a result, to experience the world in anything but verbal terms is very hard, but I want to point out some of its attributes.

It’s unspeakable, by definition.  It cannot be captured in words.  It is like a reflection in a pool; if you reach out to grasp it, the ripples of words only hide the reflection.  It is a hard discipline to leave it be.

It is primary.  Our entire verbal and intellectual edifice is derived from this.  It cannot be dismissed as of no consequence just because it has no place in our mental model of the world.

It has a timeless quality.  The sense of time does not vanish completely (though it can be severely distorted by the flood of sensations), but our view of time is a construct of the mind, and it is as if I simultaneously experience two facets of reality: the flux of change (for time is change, nothing more or less) and and an eternal, unchanging element.  It’s not eternal in the sense of lasting forever, but in the sense of being outside of time.

It’s constantly new.  This moment has never been before.

All that is preamble to talking about how we are together.  We both choose to focus our attention on the present, whether it be the scenery while driving or the press of flesh on flesh, and we react in concert to an uncanny degree, far more than if it were viewed in the light of our past or our expectations.  It is as if we are drinking from the same fountain, tasting the same wine.

To phrase it differently, our relationship consists of what is happening, not what did happen or what might happen.  So many complications and misunderstandings are avoided by this.  I thank you again and again.

As a postscript, I want to say that I am not advocating the hedonism of the grasshopper over the hard work of the ant, but I am saying that the rich fields of the present nourish and sustain the whole of our lives.

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Dear Kat,

I want to expand on your post about joint experience.

After making love, we often talk about the experience, and every time, we are in complete agreement on what we have just experienced.  When I talk, you always concur with my descriptions, and furthermore, this is not at all surprising; in fact, the surprise would be if there were any significant differences.  This is true the other way, too;  you describe how it was for you, and I go “Uh-huh, uh-huh” in concurrence.

For events like watching a movie or going to a play, we have also “experienced the same thing”, but in those cases, we often differ in interpretation or meaning; our experience of the event has been mediated by our history and viewpoint.

That’s not what is happening here.  It is as if you and I actually touch, and I don’t just mean physically, but in some other dimensions as well, to use a hackneyed metaphor, and our descriptions of the shape of the surface of contact must necessarily correspond.  (One shape would be the inverse of the other, but that’s a simple mapping.)

That’s rather abstract, mathematical, scientific, but that’s my language, I guess, and as you say, we are engaged in finding a language for this experience.

Kit

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