I found myself Saturday night entirely “by accident” at the tail end of a talk about love and sex addiction by Susan Cheever, who was promoting her book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. By the end of the evening, I felt cheap and common. Today I’m just annoyed. I say “by accident” because I was supposed to go to this, of course. These little synchronicities keep happening. M and I had just finished a fabu 4-course dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Cambridge. She somehow thought that it would be romantic to go to a lecture about the Holocaust, but I thought otherwise, and besides, we were in Cambridge and I didn’t want to go to a temple in the suburbs. We’d taken separate cars, so we split up. I headed into Harvard Square to go to the bookstore, but then willy-nilly, I impulsively banged a left and instead turned toward the bookstore in Porter Square. I called my friend L. on the way there, hoping to meet her for coffee. L is my very favorite “deep writing” friend, someone I used to do these very intense sort of drama/writing things with. I’d recently reconnected with her, and — click! — she said she’d recently found one of the journals that we wrote together. So I was feeling particularly synchronistic and, as it turns out, we were practically driving past each other at that moment, except she was heading in the opposite direction, towards where I was originally headed. But no matter. I digress but…once I went out to western Massachusetts with a girlfriend, went to the D.A.R. State Forest, walked halfway around the lake to where there were no other people, and just peripherally noticed someone else there, just one other person, with a dog, and it was L. I live for this stuff. So I was sort of feeling those invisible lines of connection when I walked in to this scene at the bookstore. At first I thought it was Lori Gottlieb because of what she was saying. My hackles went up. But it was Susan Cheever, talking about love and sex addiction. My hackles stayed up. Cheever comes from what feels like a similar place as Gottlieb, saying — basically, grow up if you think you can have 24/7 bliss. Talking about the “mature love” that marriage is. About how the initial stages of romance always fade, to be replaced by a different sort of love. About how there are people out there — shocking! — who actually spend their time pursuing a deep connection with another human being, over and over again, because of the — the endorphins! It’s just biology, right? Saying that it’s the same mechanism that leads us to drug addiction. Some people go a little haywire, and they get hooked on the “high” of this connection. So that means it’s wrong because, well, addiction is wrong. I started feeling particularly cheap, as if she thought that what I’m looking for could possibly be purchased on a street corner and smoked, as though I were just another lost person looking to get high. Maybe my marriage is ok and I’m being childish. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m pathological. After the talk, I went looking for any books by Mindell because a fellow blogger recently opened my eyes to his existence, but they didn’t have any. Instead, I “stumbled upon” a book about the complications of an affair and how to resolve those, about divorce, about kids in divorce, about choosing. I’m not really in that situation now but — well, let’s just say I can really, really relate to it. Mmmm. I read so much of it that my arm was sore from holding the book up and soon it was time to go. There’s nothing quite so deflating as to believe that what you’re feeling is so common, so seemingly run-of-the-mill that smart people take years of their lives to write books about it because there are so many others like you who do or feel whatever it is that you think is so special. People all over the world looking for and finding real love and connection outside their marriages — imagine that! (What I can’t imagine, though, is who would actually buy and bring home a book entitled “When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships.” I mean, don’t you have to be single to have that book in your house? But if you’re single….). I went home to another promised evening of lustful lollygagging which went forgotten and unfulfilled, and found myself on the computer again, M snoring in the next room. I happened to look at a fellow blogger’s MySpace page where she listed the times she’s had near-death experiences. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but the next day, as I was mowing the lawn, I remembered. When I was in college, I quit my summer job at a pickle factory one morning and headed to the Adirondacks with my friend C. and her dog. We got to the bare top of what was the highest mountain within 20 miles just in time to be enveloped by a ferocious, Zeus-like thunderstorm, lightning cracking around us like warfare. There are different kinds of near-death experiences. Some of them are startling after the fact, as you look back and think just how lucky you were not to have died. With others, there are doctors involved, trying to stop your descent. Mine was a different flavor. It was the any-second-I’ll-be-gone flavor. It was especially intense because it lasted for a good 10-15 minutes, which, if you’ve ever experienced the feeling that you will die at any second, is a very, very, very long time. There’s something about lightning that is especially unnerving, too – it strikes without warning, and it’s completely random. Plus the thunder, especially the flash-boom not-even-any-seconds-to-count kind, just makes you want to suck your thumb. During this time I experienced superhuman strength and agility, felt my mind to be at its peak functioning, and all of existence was thrown into sharp relief. I was transformed into a being I didn’t recognize. I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I remembered being four. I had profound realizations. I was able to leap across large boulders wearing a full backpack, sure-footed as a mountain goat. If this all sounds a bit like love to you, then I’d say you’re on to something. Of course, it’s not like I didn’t come close to pissing my pants, close to leaping across the mad divide and becoming hysterical, but I surfed that wave and good. I did it for my friend. I knew if I lost it, she’d lose it too. And on top of imagining my own instant annihilation, I was imagining hers, and I could not bear the idea of her being struck dead next to me. If that also sounds like love to you, congratulations. By the time we straggled back down the mountain, these feelings had mostly faded. The weather had cleared and we were safe. It’s the adrenaline, stupid. It’s just the adrenaline – isn’t it? Really powerful stuff, that. Cooks your mind in all sorts of ways. We both felt it fading, and by the time we returned to her girlfriend’s house the following day and tried to tell her about it, the most awe-inspiring, amazing event of our lives became an adventure that was just a dream, a story that we would tell in which the characters were not us but two people we’d met briefly on a mountain. It was someone else’s story. Near-death is a window that most aren’t lucky enough to see open. The divinity outside that window — maybe it’s Shiva the Destroyer, but it’s divinity just the same. It’s awesome and big and mind-blowing. It’s not about adrenaline — that’s just how we reduce our felt experience to “science,” make it not-our-own. To get so close to your own non-existence is just extraordinary, is an amazing gift. It’s no different being in connection, being in love, touching souls, being wildly passionate — this is divinity, too, it’s the other window, the familiar one. It’s Shiva the Creator divinity, the Transformer, the one we welcome. We want that window open all the time. We are inexorably drawn to it because we want to be amazing. The “drug” of love and sex brings us there, it’s the most powerful holy thing we can access so directly. To pathologize that desire is to miss the divine spark within that desire. Of course it comes out wrong sometimes — of course it does. People end up with porn addictions and all sorts of other unhelpful behaviours. Of course it can wreak havoc on the orderly parts of a life when we are led there. And we are led there if we aren’t being transformed or destroyed already — we’ll keep coming back to it because somewhere in all of us we have met Shiva the Destroyer. It’s why some get the 3-year itch, the 7-year itch, why we find ourselves at a crossroads in mid-life when we thought there were no more turns. We look for the open window when there’s not enough air. There should never be a 12-step program for moving away from the divine. To deny that pull is to deny Shiva. To deny it is to try tricking both Destroyer and Creator into leaving you alone, and that’s just not possible. Call it what you will, but please don’t make it about endorphins. I found myself Saturday night entirely “by accident” at the tail end of a talk about love and sex addiction by Susan Cheever, who was promoting her book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. By the end of the evening, I felt cheap and common. Today I’m just annoyed. I say “by accident” because I was supposed to go to this, of course. These little synchronicities keep happening. M and I had just finished a fabu 4-course dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Cambridge. She somehow thought that it would be romantic to go to a lecture about the Holocaust, but I thought otherwise, and besides, we were in Cambridge and I didn’t want to go to a temple in the suburbs. We’d taken separate cars, so we split up. I headed into Harvard Square to go to the bookstore, but then willy-nilly, I impulsively banged a left and instead turned toward the bookstore in Porter Square. I called my friend L. on the way there, hoping to meet her for coffee. L is my very favorite “deep writing” friend, someone I used to do these very intense sort of drama/writing things with. I’d recently reconnected with her, and — click! — she said she’d recently found one of the journals that we wrote together. So I was feeling particularly synchronistic and, as it turns out, we were practically driving past each other at that moment, except she was heading in the opposite direction, towards where I was originally headed. But no matter. I digress but…once I went out to western Massachusetts with a girlfriend, went to the D.A.R. State Forest, walked halfway around the lake to where there were no other people, and just peripherally noticed someone else there, just one other person, with a dog, and it was L. I live for this stuff. So I was sort of feeling those invisible lines of connection when I walked in to this scene at the bookstore. At first I thought it was Lori Gottlieb because of what she was saying. My hackles went up. But it was Susan Cheever, talking about love and sex addiction. My hackles stayed up. Cheever comes from what feels like a similar place as Gottlieb, saying — basically, grow up if you think you can have 24/7 bliss. Talking about the “mature love” that marriage is. About how the initial stages of romance always fade, to be replaced by a different sort of love. About how there are people out there — shocking! — who actually spend their time pursuing a deep connection with another human being, over and over again, because of the — the endorphins! It’s just biology, right? Saying that it’s the same mechanism that leads us to drug addiction. Some people go a little haywire, and they get hooked on the “high” of this connection. So that means it’s wrong because, well, addiction is wrong. I started feeling particularly cheap, as if she thought that what I’m looking for could possibly be purchased on a street corner and smoked, as though I were just another lost person looking to get high. Maybe my marriage is ok and I’m being childish. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m pathological. After the talk, I went looking for any books by Mindell because a fellow blogger recently opened my eyes to his existence, but they didn’t have any. Instead, I “stumbled upon” a book about the complications of an affair and how to resolve those, about divorce, about kids in divorce, about choosing. I’m not really in that situation now but — well, let’s just say I can really, really relate to it. Mmmm. I read so much of it that my arm was sore from holding the book up and soon it was time to go. There’s nothing quite so deflating as to believe that what you’re feeling is so common, so seemingly run-of-the-mill that smart people take years of their lives to write books about it because there are so many others like you who do or feel whatever it is that you think is so special. People all over the world looking for and finding real love and connection outside their marriages — imagine that! (What I can’t imagine, though, is who would actually buy and bring home a book entitled “When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships.” I mean, don’t you have to be single to have that book in your house? But if you’re single….). I went home to another promised evening of lustful lollygagging which went forgotten and unfulfilled, and found myself on the computer again, M snoring in the next room. I happened to look at a fellow blogger’s MySpace page where she listed the times she’s had near-death experiences. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but the next day, as I was mowing the lawn, I remembered. When I was in college, I quit my summer job at a pickle factory one morning and headed to the Adirondacks with my friend C. and her dog. We got to the bare top of what was the highest mountain within 20 miles just in time to be enveloped by a ferocious, Zeus-like thunderstorm, lightning cracking around us like warfare. There are different kinds of near-death experiences. Some of them are startling after the fact, as you look back and think just how lucky you were not to have died. With others, there are doctors involved, trying to stop your descent. Mine was a different flavor. It was the any-second-I’ll-be-gone flavor. It was especially intense because it lasted for a good 10-15 minutes, which, if you’ve ever experienced the feeling that you will die at any second, is a very, very, very long time. There’s something about lightning that is especially unnerving, too – it strikes without warning, and it’s completely random. Plus the thunder, especially the flash-boom not-even-any-seconds-to-count kind, just makes you want to suck your thumb. During this time I experienced superhuman strength and agility, felt my mind to be at its peak functioning, and all of existence was thrown into sharp relief. I was transformed into a being I didn’t recognize. I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I remembered being four. I had profound realizations. I was able to leap across large boulders wearing a full backpack, sure-footed as a mountain goat. If this all sounds a bit like love to you, then I’d say you’re on to something. Of course, it’s not like I didn’t come close to pissing my pants, close to leaping across the mad divide and becoming hysterical, but I surfed that wave and good. I did it for my friend. I knew if I lost it, she’d lose it too. And on top of imagining my own instant annihilation, I was imagining hers, and I could not bear the idea of her being struck dead next to me. If that also sounds like love to you, congratulations. By the time we straggled back down the mountain, these feelings had mostly faded. The weather had cleared and we were safe. It’s the adrenaline, stupid. It’s just the adrenaline – isn’t it? Really powerful stuff, that. Cooks your mind in all sorts of ways. We both felt it fading, and by the time we returned to her girlfriend’s house the following day and tried to tell her about it, the most awe-inspiring, amazing event of our lives became an adventure that was just a dream, a story that we would tell in which the characters were not us but two people we’d met briefly on a mountain. It was someone else’s story. Near-death is a window that most aren’t lucky enough to see open. The divinity outside that window — maybe it’s Shiva the Destroyer, but it’s divinity just the same. It’s awesome and big and mind-blowing. It’s not about adrenaline — that’s just how we reduce our felt experience to “science,” make it not-our-own. To get so close to your own non-existence is just extraordinary, is an amazing gift. It’s no different being in connection, being in love, touching souls, being wildly passionate — this is divinity, too, it’s the other window, the familiar one. It’s Shiva the Creator divinity, the Transformer, the one we welcome. We want that window open all the time. We are inexorably drawn to it because we want to be amazing. The “drug” of love and sex brings us there, it’s the most powerful holy thing we can access so directly. To pathologize that desire is to miss the divine spark within that desire. Of course it comes out wrong sometimes — of course it does. People end up with porn addictions and all sorts of other unhelpful behaviours. Of course it can wreak havoc on the orderly parts of a life when we are led there. And we are led there if we aren’t being transformed or destroyed already — we’ll keep coming back to it because somewhere in all of us we have met Shiva the Destroyer. It’s why some get the 3-year itch, the 7-year itch, why we find ourselves at a crossroads in mid-life when we thought there were no more turns. We look for the open window when there’s not enough air. There should never be a 12-step program for moving away from the divine. To deny that pull is to deny Shiva. To deny it is to try tricking both Destroyer and Creator into leaving you alone, and that’s just not possible. Call it what you will, but please don’t make it about endorphins.
|
I found myself Saturday night entirely “by accident” at the tail end of a talk about love and sex addiction by Susan Cheever, who was promoting her book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. By the end of the evening, I felt cheap and common. Today I’m just annoyed.
I say “by accident” because I was supposed to go to this, of course. These little synchronicities keep happening. M and I had just finished a fabu 4-course dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Cambridge. She somehow thought that it would be romantic to go to a lecture about the Holocaust, but I thought otherwise, and besides, we were in Cambridge and I didn’t want to go to a temple in the suburbs. We’d taken separate cars, so we split up. I headed into Harvard Square to go to the bookstore, but then willy-nilly, I impulsively banged a left and instead turned toward the bookstore in Porter Square. I called my friend L. on the way there, hoping to meet her for coffee.
L is my very favorite “deep writing” friend, someone I used to do these very intense sort of drama/writing things with. I’d recently reconnected with her, and — click! — she said she’d recently found one of the journals that we wrote together. So I was feeling particularly synchronistic and, as it turns out, we were practically driving past each other at that moment, except she was heading in the opposite direction, towards where I was originally headed. But no matter. I digress but…once I went out to western Massachusetts with a girlfriend, went to the D.A.R. State Forest, walked halfway around the lake to where there were no other people, and just peripherally noticed someone else there, just one other person, with a dog, and it was L. I live for this stuff.
So I was sort of feeling those invisible lines of connection when I walked in to this scene at the bookstore. At first I thought it was Lori Gottlieb because of what she was saying. My hackles went up. But it was Susan Cheever, talking about love and sex addiction. My hackles stayed up. Cheever comes from what feels like a similar place as Gottlieb, saying — basically, grow up if you think you can have 24/7 bliss. Talking about the “mature love” that marriage is. About how the initial stages of romance always fade, to be replaced by a different sort of love. About how there are people out there — shocking! — who actually spend their time pursuing a deep connection with another human being, over and over again, because of the — the endorphins! It’s just biology, right? Saying that it’s the same mechanism that leads us to drug addiction. Some people go a little haywire, and they get hooked on the “high” of this connection. So that means it’s wrong because, well, addiction is wrong.
I started feeling particularly cheap, as if she thought that what I’m looking for could possibly be purchased on a street corner and smoked, as though I were just another lost person looking to get high. Maybe my marriage is ok and I’m being childish. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m pathological.
After the talk, I went looking for any books by Mindell because a fellow blogger recently opened my eyes to his existence, but they didn’t have any. Instead, I “stumbled upon” a book about the complications of an affair and how to resolve those, about divorce, about kids in divorce, about choosing. I’m not really in that situation now but — well, let’s just say I can really, really relate to it. Mmmm. I read so much of it that my arm was sore from holding the book up and soon it was time to go.
There’s nothing quite so deflating as to believe that what you’re feeling is so common, so seemingly run-of-the-mill that smart people take years of their lives to write books about it because there are so many others like you who do or feel whatever it is that you think is so special. People all over the world looking for and finding real love and connection outside their marriages — imagine that! (What I can’t imagine, though, is who would actually buy and bring home a book entitled “When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships.” I mean, don’t you have to be single to have that book in your house? But if you’re single….).
I went home to another promised evening of lustful lollygagging which went forgotten and unfulfilled, and found myself on the computer again, M snoring in the next room. I happened to look at a fellow blogger’s MySpace page where she listed the times she’s had near-death experiences. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but the next day, as I was mowing the lawn, I remembered.
When I was in college, I quit my summer job at a pickle factory one morning and headed to the Adirondacks with my friend C. and her dog. We got to the bare top of what was the highest mountain within 20 miles just in time to be enveloped by a ferocious, Zeus-like thunderstorm, lightning cracking around us like warfare.
There are different kinds of near-death experiences. Some of them are startling after the fact, as you look back and think just how lucky you were not to have died. With others, there are doctors involved, trying to stop your descent. Mine was a different flavor. It was the any-second-I’ll-be-gone flavor. It was especially intense because it lasted for a good 10-15 minutes, which, if you’ve ever experienced the feeling that you will die at any second, is a very, very, very long time. There’s something about lightning that is especially unnerving, too – it strikes without warning, and it’s completely random. Plus the thunder, especially the flash-boom not-even-any-seconds-to-count kind, just makes you want to suck your thumb. During this time I experienced superhuman strength and agility, felt my mind to be at its peak functioning, and all of existence was thrown into sharp relief. I was transformed into a being I didn’t recognize. I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I remembered being four. I had profound realizations. I was able to leap across large boulders wearing a full backpack, sure-footed as a mountain goat.
If this all sounds a bit like love to you, then I’d say you’re on to something.
Of course, it’s not like I didn’t come close to pissing my pants, close to leaping across the mad divide and becoming hysterical, but I surfed that wave and good. I did it for my friend. I knew if I lost it, she’d lose it too. And on top of imagining my own instant annihilation, I was imagining hers, and I could not bear the idea of her being struck dead next to me.
If that also sounds like love to you, congratulations.
By the time we straggled back down the mountain, these feelings had mostly faded. The weather had cleared and we were safe. It’s the adrenaline, stupid. It’s just the adrenaline – isn’t it? Really powerful stuff, that. Cooks your mind in all sorts of ways. We both felt it fading, and by the time we returned to her girlfriend’s house the following day and tried to tell her about it, the most awe-inspiring, amazing event of our lives became an adventure that was just a dream, a story that we would tell in which the characters were not us but two people we’d met briefly on a mountain. It was someone else’s story.
Near-death is a window that most aren’t lucky enough to see open. The divinity outside that window — maybe it’s Shiva the Destroyer, but it’s divinity just the same. It’s awesome and big and mind-blowing. It’s not about adrenaline — that’s just how we reduce our felt experience to “science,” make it not-our-own. To get so close to your own non-existence is just extraordinary, is an amazing gift.
It’s no different being in connection, being in love, touching souls, being wildly passionate — this is divinity, too, it’s the other window, the familiar one. It’s Shiva the Creator divinity, the Transformer, the one we welcome. We want that window open all the time. We are inexorably drawn to it because we want to be amazing. The “drug” of love and sex brings us there, it’s the most powerful holy thing we can access so directly. To pathologize that desire is to miss the divine spark within that desire. Of course it comes out wrong sometimes — of course it does. People end up with porn addictions and all sorts of other unhelpful behaviours. Of course it can wreak havoc on the orderly parts of a life when we are led there. And we are led there if we aren’t being transformed or destroyed already — we’ll keep coming back to it because somewhere in all of us we have met Shiva the Destroyer. It’s why some get the 3-year itch, the 7-year itch, why we find ourselves at a crossroads in mid-life when we thought there were no more turns. We look for the open window when there’s not enough air. There should never be a 12-step program for moving away from the divine.
To deny that pull is to deny Shiva. To deny it is to try tricking both Destroyer and Creator into leaving you alone, and that’s just not possible. Call it what you will, but please don’t make it about endorphins.
I found myself Saturday night entirely “by accident” at the tail end of a talk about love and sex addiction by Susan Cheever, who was promoting her book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. By the end of the evening, I felt cheap and common. Today I’m just annoyed.
I say “by accident” because I was supposed to go to this, of course. These little synchronicities keep happening. M and I had just finished a fabu 4-course dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Cambridge. She somehow thought that it would be romantic to go to a lecture about the Holocaust, but I thought otherwise, and besides, we were in Cambridge and I didn’t want to go to a temple in the suburbs. We’d taken separate cars, so we split up. I headed into Harvard Square to go to the bookstore, but then willy-nilly, I impulsively banged a left and instead turned toward the bookstore in Porter Square. I called my friend L. on the way there, hoping to meet her for coffee.
L is my very favorite “deep writing” friend, someone I used to do these very intense sort of drama/writing things with. I’d recently reconnected with her, and — click! — she said she’d recently found one of the journals that we wrote together. So I was feeling particularly synchronistic and, as it turns out, we were practically driving past each other at that moment, except she was heading in the opposite direction, towards where I was originally headed. But no matter. I digress but…once I went out to western Massachusetts with a girlfriend, went to the D.A.R. State Forest, walked halfway around the lake to where there were no other people, and just peripherally noticed someone else there, just one other person, with a dog, and it was L. I live for this stuff.
So I was sort of feeling those invisible lines of connection when I walked in to this scene at the bookstore. At first I thought it was Lori Gottlieb because of what she was saying. My hackles went up. But it was Susan Cheever, talking about love and sex addiction. My hackles stayed up. Cheever comes from what feels like a similar place as Gottlieb, saying — basically, grow up if you think you can have 24/7 bliss. Talking about the “mature love” that marriage is. About how the initial stages of romance always fade, to be replaced by a different sort of love. About how there are people out there — shocking! — who actually spend their time pursuing a deep connection with another human being, over and over again, because of the — the endorphins! It’s just biology, right? Saying that it’s the same mechanism that leads us to drug addiction. Some people go a little haywire, and they get hooked on the “high” of this connection. So that means it’s wrong because, well, addiction is wrong.
I started feeling particularly cheap, as if she thought that what I’m looking for could possibly be purchased on a street corner and smoked, as though I were just another lost person looking to get high. Maybe my marriage is ok and I’m being childish. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m pathological.
After the talk, I went looking for any books by Mindell because a fellow blogger recently opened my eyes to his existence, but they didn’t have any. Instead, I “stumbled upon” a book about the complications of an affair and how to resolve those, about divorce, about kids in divorce, about choosing. I’m not really in that situation now but — well, let’s just say I can really, really relate to it. Mmmm. I read so much of it that my arm was sore from holding the book up and soon it was time to go.
There’s nothing quite so deflating as to believe that what you’re feeling is so common, so seemingly run-of-the-mill that smart people take years of their lives to write books about it because there are so many others like you who do or feel whatever it is that you think is so special. People all over the world looking for and finding real love and connection outside their marriages — imagine that! (What I can’t imagine, though, is who would actually buy and bring home a book entitled “When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships.” I mean, don’t you have to be single to have that book in your house? But if you’re single….).
I went home to another promised evening of lustful lollygagging which went forgotten and unfulfilled, and found myself on the computer again, M snoring in the next room. I happened to look at a fellow blogger’s MySpace page where she listed the times she’s had near-death experiences. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but the next day, as I was mowing the lawn, I remembered.
When I was in college, I quit my summer job at a pickle factory one morning and headed to the Adirondacks with my friend C. and her dog. We got to the bare top of what was the highest mountain within 20 miles just in time to be enveloped by a ferocious, Zeus-like thunderstorm, lightning cracking around us like warfare.
There are different kinds of near-death experiences. Some of them are startling after the fact, as you look back and think just how lucky you were not to have died. With others, there are doctors involved, trying to stop your descent. Mine was a different flavor. It was the any-second-I’ll-be-gone flavor. It was especially intense because it lasted for a good 10-15 minutes, which, if you’ve ever experienced the feeling that you will die at any second, is a very, very, very long time. There’s something about lightning that is especially unnerving, too – it strikes without warning, and it’s completely random. Plus the thunder, especially the flash-boom not-even-any-seconds-to-count kind, just makes you want to suck your thumb. During this time I experienced superhuman strength and agility, felt my mind to be at its peak functioning, and all of existence was thrown into sharp relief. I was transformed into a being I didn’t recognize. I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I remembered being four. I had profound realizations. I was able to leap across large boulders wearing a full backpack, sure-footed as a mountain goat.
If this all sounds a bit like love to you, then I’d say you’re on to something.
Of course, it’s not like I didn’t come close to pissing my pants, close to leaping across the mad divide and becoming hysterical, but I surfed that wave and good. I did it for my friend. I knew if I lost it, she’d lose it too. And on top of imagining my own instant annihilation, I was imagining hers, and I could not bear the idea of her being struck dead next to me.
If that also sounds like love to you, congratulations.
By the time we straggled back down the mountain, these feelings had mostly faded. The weather had cleared and we were safe. It’s the adrenaline, stupid. It’s just the adrenaline – isn’t it? Really powerful stuff, that. Cooks your mind in all sorts of ways. We both felt it fading, and by the time we returned to her girlfriend’s house the following day and tried to tell her about it, the most awe-inspiring, amazing event of our lives became an adventure that was just a dream, a story that we would tell in which the characters were not us but two people we’d met briefly on a mountain. It was someone else’s story.
Near-death is a window that most aren’t lucky enough to see open. The divinity outside that window — maybe it’s Shiva the Destroyer, but it’s divinity just the same. It’s awesome and big and mind-blowing. It’s not about adrenaline — that’s just how we reduce our felt experience to “science,” make it not-our-own. To get so close to your own non-existence is just extraordinary, is an amazing gift.
It’s no different being in connection, being in love, touching souls, being wildly passionate — this is divinity, too, it’s the other window, the familiar one. It’s Shiva the Creator divinity, the Transformer, the one we welcome. We want that window open all the time. We are inexorably drawn to it because we want to be amazing. The “drug” of love and sex brings us there, it’s the most powerful holy thing we can access so directly. To pathologize that desire is to miss the divine spark within that desire. Of course it comes out wrong sometimes — of course it does. People end up with porn addictions and all sorts of other unhelpful behaviours. Of course it can wreak havoc on the orderly parts of a life when we are led there. And we are led there if we aren’t being transformed or destroyed already — we’ll keep coming back to it because somewhere in all of us we have met Shiva the Destroyer. It’s why some get the 3-year itch, the 7-year itch, why we find ourselves at a crossroads in mid-life when we thought there were no more turns. We look for the open window when there’s not enough air. There should never be a 12-step program for moving away from the divine.
To deny that pull is to deny Shiva. To deny it is to try tricking both Destroyer and Creator into leaving you alone, and that’s just not possible. Call it what you will, but please don’t make it about endorphins.