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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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My Dear Kat,

I want to write about union. It’s a difficult subject, especially for me, because it flies in the face of everyday experience, but time after time we have this experience of union, of oneness. It occurs most often when we are sexual, but plain physical contact can bring it out, too. I want to be clear on one point: there is no loss of self; instead, the experience is of myself and of us simultaneously. I don’t mean a sense of you and your body. It’s a sense of a third autonomous center that only comes into existence (or is perceived, don’t know which) when my own ego and intentionality are quietened.

Sounds strange, right? But here’s the next strange thing: that when you or I talk about this, the other says “Uh-huh … yes … right” and there is no disagreement on the experience. I cannot imagine that much agreement happening were we having separate hallucinatory experiences.

So what is going on here? Two factors come into play for me. Firstly, I want to point out that experience trumps theory, or as I put it in my youth, “the fact precedes the explanation”.   Any theory has to accommodate the facts; if it doesn’t, it is deficient. Of course, illusions may exist — the car wheels caught on film appear to be spinning backwards — but the entire body of theory exists IN ORDER TO explain our experiences, so they must have a certain validity. Secondly, I like theories that explain the facts of my world; they organise it, make sense of it, and have useful predictive powers.

Bearing these two in mind, I propose that both realities are true: that we are both separate and one. This contradicts Aristotelian logic. Tough. Light is both a wave and a particle, which doesn’t make sense, either, but the evidence for it is overwhelming.

In order to make this more palatable, let me offer a metaphor: we are like pages in a book. Every page appears unique; it has its own number, its own words, its own meaning, yet we more easily see the book as the unit. Is there a similar one-ness to the world that we are failing to see?

Just as we can come up with a list of differences between you and me, so we can come up with a list of equivalences: culture, nationality, race, DNA, and the very atoms of which we are composed. So maybe we are both an individual and a species; an individual and a life-form; an individual and a collection of atoms. Our culture emphasises individuality, especially in America, so our upbringing teaches us to only see that fact.

But what constitutes an individual becomes less clear-cut the more it is examined. For instance, a single person is not just an arrangement of 10 trillion human cells, but also contains ten times as many microbial cells that are essential to well-being, for instance see here “some researchers think of our bodies as superorganisms, rather than one organism teeming with hordes of subordinate invertebrates.”

In the West, our belief system is built on an egocentric framework. To admit the experience of union it is necessary to expand that framework to allow for its possibility, otherwise any experience of union will be overlooked or dismissed. Having made room for it, we also need a non-egoistic situation where it can emerge. Sex is one such, but it can be found in intimate conversations or communing with nature.

In the West, we use words for explanations and answers, but they fail to satisfy in answering the Big Questions because language works best as a divisive tool. Words classify the world into this and not this, which makes them very unsuited to describe union, or one-ness. Additionally, a word is not the thing; we can only use a word like a pointer, so expecting words to guide us to union is optimistic. Instead, the opposite is true: silence, listening, observing, being open to the present, can guide us there. The knowledge of one-ness is experiential, not verbal.

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My Dear Kat,

I think we are on to something important in this discussion of allowing something to happen.  By insisting on a particular movie or director or genre rather than a preference, certain possibilities are ruled out, but by being open to alternatives, anything is possible.  This is a subtle point.  It’s different from suppressing one’s desires, different from taking a position of not caring, and different from freezing into inaction.  It’s about being open to other possibilities, of not being locked into a mindset of how things have to be.

We had a discussion about sex this morning that picked up this idea.

Sex seems to get better and better; again and again we have a never-before experience of union, and yet next time we discover something fresh and new.  This feels very mysterious, and contrary to the way things work in the world.  You pointed out that we act similarly to how we behave outside; we don’t have rules about what must be or expectations about what should or will happen, and this allows a spontaneous flow into states that we cannot imagine beforehand.

One way we came to this was when a medical condition precluded intercourse for some time.  This required us to be sexual in other ways, and showed us that sexual excitement and orgasm is not limited to particular body parts, but can occur anywhere and in many ways; it is a state of arousal that we achieve together, a state in which any or all of the body can partake.  Of course it is facilitated by and strongly connected to genitals, hormones, history and erotica, but it is as if they are only a gateway to bonding, that experience of being part of something over and above our individual selves.

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My Dear Kat,

Last night, when we came together, we once more embarked on that extraordinary sexual journey.

We go into a place of sexual ecstasy that seems independent of what we are actually doing physically; we can arrive there by lying, touching, holding, kissing, and it seems we can remain in that state indefinitely, or at least until we collapse, totally sated.

But here’s the peculiar aspect of it: that it has its own unique quality; it is different every time we’ve made love, and this happens again and again; it is as if there is a huge space there to explore, and each time, we start off with the knowledge of our previous experience.

This may not qualify as erotic writing; there are no bodily fluids, no licking or sucking or stroking or moaning, but it seems appropriate because what we share seems to transcend the simply sexual.  Calling it that doesn’t begin to capture the experience, and though I struggle for descriptions, it is so far beyond words that afterwards, the details are lost to my verbal brain, like a dream that vaporises in the morning.  But my body knows and remembers.

Kit

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My Dear Kat,

I want to talk about how sex is between us.  It’s fabulous, it’s instant, it’s mutual and it’s shared.

By fabulous, I mean that it’s breath-taking; time and time again, we go to places and achieve highs that we never did before.  I’m not talking about the physical positions; they don’t seem to have much to do with it.  It’s a strong sense that wow, we never danced like this before, we’re going hand-in-hand (maybe make that gland-in-gland) down paths we’ve never been before.  Afterwards, the experience seems so other-worldly, it can be hard to believe it actually happened.

By instant, I mean that the sexual energy emerges full-blown: pow, there it is!  We’re in this place again.  There’s no contradiction with what I’ve just said about each time being different; these two things exist simultaneously.  That’s just the way it is.

Then there is the magical way it’s mutual.  I get turned on, and you respond, and I respond to that, and it’s 0-60 in 5 seconds again.  It happens nearly every time.  Oh, occasionally the other fails to respond due to tiredness or illness, but that causes no grief; we merely flow into a different place.

This mutuality is magical because of its improbability, because it says that I touch you, I affect you, because it is wonderful to be seen and to have my sexual needs so ecstatically met.  And we synchronize like this not just sexually, but also with most other things we do together; we rapidly find the choice that accommodates both our needs.  We do this by being present, by wanting the best for the other, by not clinging to our ideas of how things should be.

Lastly, the experience is so self-evidently shared.  We move together, responding to each other, becoming the junction between the two of us, treating that skin like our own, each our side of the fence, but holding hands through the railing, proof positive of the other, touching and merging to be us together at the same time as remaining completely myself.  I have nowhere in my cosmology to place this, yet there it is.  Not just once or twice, but again and again, over and above my sense of self, that sense of us.

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