Radical Ecstasy Read online

  The experience of ecstasy just about always coincides with an expansive feeling of self-worth, of loving the entire universe and ourselves as a part of it, along with a lovely sense of life being validated as a way to participate in something larger, some energy that is larger than each of us. Through that participation, we also get to discover how deeply and lovingly we are connected with each other.

  Ultimately, in transcendence we rise above our everyday hassles and frets, get bigger than our judgments (including the harsh judgments we so often apply to ourselves), and experience a sense of wholeness, integrity and just plain rightness which is rewarding in and of itself.

  Compared to that extraordinary bliss, any external rewards of transcendent states are almost the icing on the cake – but there are consequences of transcendence that can make our lives work better after our journeys are over for the moment, when we return to more mundane pursuits.

  The dissolution of boundaries involved in ecstatic experience means that we can, for a while, expand our vision beyond our everyday paradigms and the limits of our current worldview. When traveling in ecstasy temporarily dissolves our templates, maps, patterns, personal mythologies or belief systems, we can make new associations, incorporate new ideas, see with a vision unclouded by our history. This can lead to new solutions for problems – in much the same way we might search for a solution by “sleeping on it” or dreaming about it.

  For instance, as is described later in this book, it was an ecstatic journey that first led Dossie, back in 1969, to look into feminism. In the bright light of transcendent vision, she saw how society’s expectations of her as a woman didn’t fit her. Through the temporary clarity of an ecstatic state, she created a plan to change her life and grasp her power in ways that she had not previously thought possible. Thirty-five years later, as a therapist, an author and an outrageous free spirit, she can report with assurance that it all worked very well.

  Sometimes the rewards are smaller and more secular. Janet has had numerous experiences of returning to her mundane existence the day after an extreme and blissful scene, and suddenly finding herself able to solve creative problems on which she’s been stuck for months — a friend calls this “defragging her brain” (after the process of defragmenting the data on a computer hard drive), for the sudden cognitive and emotional clarity it gives her.

  Our experience of transcendent states is that they open up our own power in the form of tremendous energy that becomes available to us for whatever purpose we might choose.

  So, with all these goals in mind, we set forth to discover the hows and whys of the astonishing experience that we have dubbed radical ecstasy. Welcome to the journey.

  1 Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ghing, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Vintage Books, New York, IÇ)J2 ¦

  2 Antonin Artaud, in a letter toj. Paulhan, 1932.

  3 Edward Gorey, quoted in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Alexander Theroux, Fantagraphics Books, 2000.

  4 e.e. cummings, 73 poems, Harcourt Brace, NewYork, 1961.

  5 Merriam-Wehster.

  6 Newherg, D’Aquill & Rause, Ballantine Books, NY

  How We Believe

  One of the things your authors have in common is our over-active intellects. We both grew up in environments that placed a lot of value on academic achievement, on succeeding in a world where the right answers got you a reward and the wrong ones got you an F. But we’ve also both come to learn that while the human intellect works very well for building bridges and discovering cures for diseases, and is indispensable for keeping food on the table and a roof over our heads, it isn’t very helpful for traveling in bliss.

  Releasing the traps that your brain can set for you isn’t the only way to achieve transcendence, but it’s an important step – and that’s why we’re taking this chapter to talk about our ways of believing, and how they’ve worked for us. And, as the chapter title indicates, we find it easier and more relevant to talk about the process that we use for believing things than it is for us to talk about what those beliefs might or might not actually be.

  Letting go of either/or

  Obviously, not believing in anything at all would not be a very functional way to move through life. We believe, for example, that you exist, otherwise we’d turn off our computers now and go to dinner and a movie. We guess we must believe that the restaurant and the movie theater exist, too. However, we often have trouble with more traditional belief systems, which are based on, well, belief systems – belief that God or Goddess exists, or doesn’t exist, for example.

  One of the ways we believe is that we’re very suspicious of dualism. Dualism in philosophy is the theory that there are two basic principles or things, such as mind and body, and that by separating them we are expressing some truth. (As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, and the kind who don’t.)

  In theology, dualism is the doctrine that the world is ruled by antagonistic forces of good and evil, or the concept that man has two basic natures, the physical and the spiritual.1 We are particularly suspicious of doctrines that split spirit and body, as if they were at war, as if the body were inferior and the goal of life to escape from it. We like what we get to do with these bodies – that’s why we’re writing this book.

  A lover of Dossie’s, in an argument-fueled moment of frustration, once cried, “Either you’re wrong or I’m crazy!” At the time, that seemed to make sense to her, but of course it really doesn’t – both of them could have been wrong or crazy, or both right and simply disagreeing with one another. Dossie’s response: “Can you think of a third option?” The next time you get stuck in an either/ or dilemma, try thinking of a third option, and a fourth – the answer to dualism is pluralism, a much more suitable philosophy for sluts like us.

  Some fallacies of dualism are pretty easy to perceive. Others seem incontrovertible: a thing must be either X or not-X. But we invite you to stretch your brain, to embrace a way of believing – or not-believing – in which it is possible for neither of these to be true, or perhaps both. There may come a time when it will work better for you not to make such a division – like when you want to be more connected than separate.

  What do these philosophical/logical calisthenics have to do with sex or SM? Well, more than you might expect. Transcendent play is a way that we dissolve the boundaries of space and time, and the walls that seem to keep us apart form the people we care about. Where do those boundaries, those barriers, come from? Sometimes, we think, they come from patterns we learn when we decide that a thing must be either one way or another. If the divine is in everything, the divine is both one way and another: as simple, and infinitely complex, as that.

  When you start out by cultivating your tolerance for ambiguity and paradox, you are loosening the strings on your mind, giving yourself permission to feel without judging, to trust your sensations and emotions rather than your busy brain. You are practicing believing in what you feel at the moment, not reflecting the past or fretting about the future. You are practicing for ecstasy.

  Letting go of knowing

  Once we get better at believing several things at once, even when they seem to contradict each other, it’s a short and sweet step to letting go of our need to know anything at all.

  Certainty is a trap, objectivity is a trap. How do we go about knowing what we think we know? We assume that we can readily tell which of our perceptions are subjective and which objective, but are we truly in no part subjective? We need to be willing to recognize that we can only see the world from our own point of view.

  Dossie was fortunate enough to have this revelation at an early age:

  Lost In the Great l-Don ‘t-Know

  In the 1960s, I was a Utopian psychedelic activist. I believed that the universe, and our society, could be perfected – and somehow that possibility made me responsible for the job. In the idealistic omnipotence of my early twenties I castigated myself that I hadn’
t figured out a way to fix all injustice, and solve the riddle of the cosmos.

  Twenty-five years old, and a member in good standing of the love generation, I had been traveling inside my psyche for seven years, accruing wisdom along the way, and questing always for that defining revelation, the vision that would unriddle the universe and start me on my path toward healing the world. I yearned for enlightenment.

  My daughter was an infant. I hadn’t tripped in quite a while, being first pregnant and then exhausted. But one fine sunny morning, a friend dropped by my house while the baby was taking her morning nap, bearing sugar cubes. In a totally against-character move (I was usually careful and planned trips well in advance), I spoke out: “Can I take two?” My roommates being free to care for the baby when she awoke, I sucked the sweetness and went traveling.

  The rush was astonishing. I lay on my bed, no question of moving, I’d get vertigo from lifting my head. Everything was luminous: the sun pouring through the paisley bedspreads on the windows, the white sheets, the walls, my fingers. Looking at some messy paint on the side of my black dresser, I was instantly transported to the intergalactic void. I vaulted around in outer space for a while, looking for something to connect to, but everything was way too big. The distances, the speeds, these balls of frozen rock hurtling around, blinding nuclear fusions. How long would it take to hitchhike a light-year?

  I got it. The universe was bigger than me. Lots bigger. Incomprehensibly bigger. And in my wanderings between the stars, nothing responded to me. The language of the stars was too huge, too fast, for my brain to apprehend. I felt like an ant.

  Lost in the cosmos, feeling lonely and abandoned, I brought myself back to my body in my bed, sun still pouring in, though at a safer distance. In front of my eyes, walking on my white cotton sheet, was a tiny, nearly transparent spider. Her progress was unbearably slow and interrupted. Every few seconds, a piece of lint from my sheet would get stuck to one of her legs, and she would stop and painstakingly rub it off. With what seemed to me infinite patience, she would then continue her journey, only to pick up another piece of lint, stop, rub, a few more steps, more lint... Intent on her mysterious purpose, she progressed across my field of vision. I wondered what awareness she had of me, this tiny mind in a body smaller than the pupil of my eye that watched her. Was I as vast to her as the galaxy was to me?

  I started laughing. What a fool I had been, a child in my twenties, to take on the job of solving the mystery of the universe. My brain, whose vastness I had only begun to explore, was still overwhelmingly too small to take in the cosmos. We were into mind expansion in those days, and I laughed like a maniac imagining stretching my brain out like a giant balloon, trying to fit it around the universe. I couldn’t reach around even one galaxy, not even a solar system. Earth herself was wondrously bigger than me.

  “I quit! I resign!” I cried. What a divine joke! If anybody or anything was running this operation, he, she or it was welcome to the job. Swimming around in the galaxy again, I felt lost and lonely, so I flew back down to earth. My home planet was studded with glowing campfires, and around each campfire was a circle of people; dear, sweet, lovable people, doing what they could do to create warmth and light and meaning in the enormous emptiness.

  I ran downstairs to share my revelations with my fellow communards and my baby. “I quit! I resign! I figured it out! The answer to the riddle of the universe is... I don’t know!”

  As I came down from my grand journey, a lot of pieces about my life fell into place. I explained it all to my baby daughter, and she listened patiently, watching intently, it seemed to me, with her baby Buddha eyes. By now I wasn’t high any more, hours had passed, and I was in the resolution stages of my trip.

  Many things fell into place for me when I let go of the notion that something was wrong with me because I didn’t know everything. I had explored my difficulties as illnesses with neo-Freudian shrinks, and been pathologized. I had sought healing from spiritual teachers who blamed my unhappiness on sin in this life or, if none could be found, I must have made some terrible error in a past life. All these attempts to make sense of my life had been predicated on the notion that something was wrong with me.

  But wasn’t I, by and large, as good a human being as anyone else? I saw myself, along with the other people around the tribal fires in my vision, as a courageous pioneer, searching through the vastness, creating meaning in the sharing of love and support and warmth with other people.

  I saw something else, with tremendous clarity, that I had never seen before. As I returned to a more normal state of consciousness, I realized that a lot of what I had blamed myself for added up to things that I had been taught were unwomanly: intelligence, outspokenness, overt desire for sex, valuing my own opinion, making my own decisions – not to mention my inexhaustible lust for chasing my own destiny. I had thought for so long that something was wrong with me because I didn’t fit into the role of nurturing wife and second fiddle, and found in myself no delight or fulfillment in the washing of everybody else’s socks.

  This cosmic adventure made a feminist out of me at a time when feminism was considered pretty weird. In the aftermath of revelation, I vowed to learn to value all the parts of myself, especially those parts that I had reviled as too masculine. I vowed to grasp my life, full tilt boogie. I vowed to be androgynous. I vowed to embrace my sexuality. I vowed never to be monogamous again. I vowed to take my relationships with women, all my sisters, seriously, and to honor these connections, sexual or not. I vowed to remain unpartnered for five years so I could learn who I am when I’m not trying to be somebody’s wife.

  My life plan was truly formed on that day. In the afterglow of the expanded mind, I was still thinking with luminous clarity. I saw that I needed to find myself as an independent person, and that I also needed affection and connection and love, and that there was no reason I couldn’t have all that at the same time. I vowed to find my security in my community, and in order to do that, to become a more affectionate and demonstrative person. To share intimacy generously, with my roommates, my friends and my lovers. I had work to do to reclaim myself, a lot of work, and what a blessing to have that glimpse of who I could be if I did the work.

  It is now thirty-five years from that day; I am sixty years old; and all my visions have come true. I have been privileged to be part of a much larger movement, in feminism, in sexuality, in extended families, in queerness, in expanding definitions of self and relationships.

  I notice, as I write down the early revelations that defined my life as an adult, that so much of what I needed to do was about letting go – of definitions, of roles, of tasks, of oughta-be. Letting go to open space for new ideas, new explorations – for could-be, might-be and wouldn’t-it-be-wonderful.

  And now I get to write a book about this journey, and share it all with you.

  Letting go of causality

  In some belief systems, bad things happen to bad people in the afterlife; in others, in the next lifetime; in still others, here in this lifetime. These days, it seems common to hear people attribute difficulty in their lives to “karmic lessons,” implying that some intelligence, or law of nature, possibly divine, has made a plan to offer them exactly the adverse circumstances they need to learn what they need to learn.

  We are, to put it mildly, skeptical. Do all the victims of an earthquake or a war or a plague need the same karmic lesson? Have they all called their fates to them by some need? Is everything painful that happens in our lives happening for a reason?

  The two of us have discussed experiences we’ve had in our lives that we’ve valued, that we definitely would not want to have missed. Many of them, somewhat to our surprise, were painful losses, errors, illnesses, disasters: adverse events in our lives that somehow set us on a path that we valued.

  Between us, we have survived physical and emotional abuse, the serious illnesses of a couple of our children, poverty, business disasters, losing houses, losing lovers and a lot of very hard tim
es. These things have stretched us, taught us new things about ourselves; while we hated them a lot when they happened, we guess that we can accept them now as part of what has made us the strong women we are.

  Happy, easy times don’t seem to stretch us very much. When things are going well, although we might very well be learning lots of important stuff, we don’t struggle, strive, stretch, push ourselves. Seems like the times when we discover our strengths are when we are battling with some adversity.

  But we feel quite sure that none of this was planned. Troubles are opportunities, and tripping over some of them is inevitable in the world, and in the bodies that we inhabit in this life.

  People want answers to the questions of Why? so intensely that they are willing to make them up. Things seem to us to fit together in the world because they grow into the spaces available. Plants need the sun to grow, but the sun doesn’t shine in order that the plants may grow, or that we should feel sunny, happy and safe. The sun shines because it is burning itself up in its own incalculably long lifespan.

  So we believe that it is important to practice holding the blank, empty, painful space of what we don’t and perhaps can never know, and to stretch our ability to tolerate ambiguity. A lot of people are looking for answers. Sometimes it is important, and more truthful, to stay with the questions.

  Letting go of control

  Traveling in the realms of transcendence is a goal that doesn’t match up well with the need to know it all, to be on top of things, to be in control. This is a lesson that most of us get to learn over and over – at least, we both do. The addiction to control sucks us in over and over again, and it’s a good thing that we have our wonderful friends, with their whips and ropes and their soft kisses, to coax us back out from the iron fingers of our control addiction from time to time. Even tops, who often become tops because they are eroticized to control, must have a clear understanding of what is theirs to control and what isn’t, and of the distinction between the fantasy of control and its reality – we’ll discuss this further in a later chapter.