A Taste For Undifferentiated Oneness

When I was a junior in college I read a freshman theme written by a girl named Betsy, whom I didn’t know. From that theme I knew at once that she was the one I should marry. That was a sort of subliminal knowledge that coexisted with a lot of other considerations that contradicted it. For example I was “going with” another girl – Sheila – who was by all conventional standards a perfect match for me. And indeed, I was very drawn to Sheila. But there was something quite special about the girl who wrote the English composition. She described an intense moment of experience she had while wading out into a swimming area in an ocean Bay. It was nothing she could have made up, nor would she have had any reason for doing so. Having had such an experience was not then, any more than it is now, a reason to be socially esteemed.

Betsy was a somewhat shy and socially awkward girl who was reasonably, but not outstandingly attractive by conventional Hollywood standards. Sheila, by comparison was a knockout. But Betsy knew about Atman and Brahman. Even if she had never heard of them, she knew about them. That fact was more important to me than any other fact or combination of facts. Only I did not fully grasp that at that time.

We became friends immediately but it was three years later before I suggested to her that we should go through this life together. She had reservations – not because she didn’t want to be with me because she had some problems that she feared would make my life difficult. She did not adapt well to the reality of her family and her society and saw the difficulty between her and these social groups as being her fault. As she caused them suffering she would cause me suffering. I saw the conflicts between her and the rest of her life as deriving from a fundamentally different understanding of reality. It was a political conflict – as are many conflicts that are treated as though they are derived from psychological problems of the younger less powerful member of the group. I had no such issues with her. I knew that our primary understandings of life were the same – and that whatever differences we might encounter could be managed. Relationship shattering issues just were not going to emerge.

My bonding with Wall was similar in an odd way with my bonding to Betsy. It had to do with the love of God – of the One – or whatever it was that modern life murdered. (To quote Nietzsche on the subject, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”) With this difference between wall and Carol: With Carroll the attraction had to do with the fact that we both had experienced in a spontaneous way a oneness with something which we believed to be the absolute. With Wall our bond and to do with the absence of God in modern culture. We both grieved God – Intensely.

Once you have an intense taste of the undifferentiated oneness certain political alignments and fundamental life goals are no longer possible. You will not, for example, see the purpose of your life being to claw your way to the top of the hierarchy of wealth, influence and renown that structures most of our social institutions.

So what about sex? I am torn here. It’s really a private matter. Yet I feel that my essay demands I touch on it in some way. So let me do that. My descriptions will be a bit abstract – but, I think, accurate.

There are two levels to sex. Or perhaps I should say domains of sex – because I don’t want to suggest that one of these “levels” is superior to the other. The whole point of my metaphysics is that unity and individuation are two equally important poles of Being.

When you are with someone who is centered in individuated oneness, everything is sex. That’s the unitive bond. You have sex with every part of your body and with every entity you encounter and to which you give your attention. Your eyes unify you with the bugs in the grass and your toes with the sand on the beach. That’s how we were with each other.

But what about the other pole – all that stuff that most people would have in mind when they heard the term sex. Well, again my approach will be abstract in a way that may prove disappointing to people who are looking for something a little more steamy. But let me tell you about what I now considered to have been our wedding night.

One day the opportunity to use the apartment of a friend overnight came to us. It was an important night for us but I feel strongly disinclined to describe it in detail – and am sure Carol would be even more strongly disinclined to do so. Yet there was something about that night that is an important part of my autobiography. So how should I handle this?

In the 1950s movie directors had a different way of handling sex scenes. The man and the woman (which was always the relationship under consideration) would perform some act that was understood by the audience as a preliminary to foreplay. It might not be more than the man unbuttoning his shirt while he looked longingly at the woman. And then the bedroom door was shut and that was that. All else was left to the imagination of the moviegoer.

The ancient Greeks had a similar way of dealing with highly violent scenes. They occurred offstage and were described by the chorus. These evasions of scenes that were deemed to be too graphic worked well for anyone who had a reasonable capacity for fantasizing.

So I will close the door on all that happened there – except for two general points which can be described in a very abstract manner. The first point is that it was more like the show and tell that two children might engage in the lovemaking of experienced adults. That is how it should be. Despite being in our early 20s neither of us was very experienced. The second point is that I felt no need to prove myself. Betsy loved me and I loved her. Nothing about our sexual prowess, or lack thereof, was going to alter that basic fact. Therefore I was under no pressure to perform. And that was wonderful. We had a fine and fascinating night together, and on the real level of things, that was our wedding night.

Loose-Willy Dynamics

I didn’t know, of course, the real reason he wanted me to take a drive with him. How would I have known that he planned to kill me?

He had a loaded revolver with him. We stopped on some rural road and got out of the car – I guess to take a leak, though I don’t really recall. Then we got back into the car and returned to the college. Only later did you tell me about his intent to kill me, or the reason for it. He was in love with the girl at the college who wanted to marry me. I was not interested in her – not as a potential spouse, at any rate. She was a very nice person who would, I think, have made someone an excellent wife. But she was too conventional for me.

Why he decided not to kill me after all, I don’t know. Probably he didn’t know either.

Maybe he read an omen in the cloud formations. Maybe he realized it wasn’t worth destroying his whole life just to get the satisfaction. He, apparently, had his own inner “loose Willie’s” with all the unpredictability of Loose-Willy-dynamics. I could have been dead. It gives me a strange feeling to think of all the things that would not have happened had he followed through with his original intention.

Terry was short and a bit plump. Reminded me of Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Wonderland. He was definitely egg shaped – and a bit pompous.

Terry dressed in suit with a colorful vest, and he smoked a pipe. He had a collection of pipes of all shapes and sizes. His favorite was one that was shaped like Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as smoking. I didn’t much like his choice of tobacco.

Terry was the student pastor at Mountaintop Christian church – a very rural church a mile or so off the Skyline Drive – which wound it’s way through the mountain tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In order to get to the church we took a “shortcut” to the top of the mountain. This involved a road that went up the side of a steep slope using a series of hairpin curves. It was a gravel road barely more than a single line. Had we slid off this road I think very little would have stopped us from careening down the mountainside to our deaths.

I was assigned to be his assistant pastor. I had no real functions except to admire his work and be friendly to the people. I liked the simple and rugged mountain people who lived in the community the church served, so it was easy to be friendly with them. And Terry was an intelligent man with a flair for drama – so I did admire his work. His theology was even more progressive than mine. He didn’t believe in God, but believed in the teachings of Jesus. He told me this, but obviously would not have shared it with members of his church.

His talent for drama and storytelling expressed itself both in spellbinding sermons and occasional dramatic presentations. I remember one in which he had the church act out a Easter drama using a full sized cross that was dragged down the central aisle. Like many people skilled in drama, he had a narcissistic streak that made him reluctant to share the limelight with anyone. I’m not sure how well I would have performed anyhow. I was very conflicted about the possibility of being a minister. I did feel a calling of sorts to provide ordinary people with spiritual options that were compatible with a scientific (but not scientistic) worldview.

Eventually I got my own church. I was a student pastor to another rural Virginia church – but not one in the mountains. I conducted only a few services there a when I became involved in the “sit-in” to protest against racial segregation.

I assumed that the church people would not want a person who went against the mainstream public opinion on race issues, so I didn’t try to hook up with them again. (This was very irresponsible of me. I should have at least made some contact with them to nail down what was going to happen.)

To my surprise the elders of the church wrote me a letter saying that they wanted me to continue being their minister. I decided I was just too conflicted about the whole idea of coming a minister. (I remained so for my whole life.) But these people from that small rural church taught me to important lessons:

1.) Don’t assume you know what people are thinking and feeling without getting that information directly from them.

2.) Don’t underestimate people just because they are not well-educated.

I was very touched by their reaching out to me and sorry that I did not respond earlier in a more mature way.

WALL

College is a place for falling in love. At least it was when I went to a small church related liberal arts college from 1958 to 1962. Those with whom I fell in love rose like mountain peaks above the cloud-cover of a huge mountain range.

Without exception, those who were important to me were significant religious leaders on the campus. In those days there were liberal arts colleges which did not teach a fundamentalist version of Christianity but which took religion seriously. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, most intellectuals have been weaned away from any form of religion – which means that they no longer have a serious interest in literary, philosophical and artistic history of the civilization of the world. Everything is math and “science.” It’s technology, really. If you can’t make a gadget out of it, it isn’t true. We have succumbed to a cheap pragmatism. In the days I went to college science and humanities were on a more or less equal footing.

So who were these religious leaders? Looking back on it, I am reminded of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Each of the slightly bigger than life characters in Mann’s novel represented a particular psycho/spiritual possibility. So it was at Lynchburg College. Rev. Stanger, who held weekly religious discussions at his home, represented a liberal, middle-of-the-road spirituality. He was open-minded. He was convinced of the importance of religion, but a little vague with regard to what he really did believe.

VAnAuken – educated at Oxford and a proponent of high Anglicanism – held religious views that would have parallel those of CS Lewis. He also had weekly discussions at his house.

And there were two students who were of equal prominence. Terry Riester, who belonged to DeMolay – and later rose in the ranks of the Masonic Lodge. And finally the Antichrist, Wall, who saw the world as a place of endless absurdities and felt that the religions of Steiner VanAuken and Reister were pale reflections of a true spirituality. Wall believed that God is dead, as a cultural fact – and that no other fact in the world came close to being equally Important. Without God, we lived in a wasteland – a void. He was my primary love for much of my college life.

Physically Wall was tall gangly and tough – intelligent and well coordinated – and an excellent athlete. He was a pitcher on a bush league baseball team. Once Wall had me catch for him while he warmed up for a game. I was horrified when I saw how fast those balls he pitched came at me. I wasn’t primarily interested in catching his pitches, but in getting the catchers mitt between me and the ball so that I wouldn’t be killed. I was neither tall nor gangly, nor an excellent athlete.

It took a few months for me to fall in love with Wall. I think I may need to explain this statement.

At that time I found boys – more or less from the time they grew their permanent teeth up until they sprouted facial hair – very beautiful. Most of my life I have also found girls and women my own age more or less equally attractive as boys. There was an emotional component to my attraction to boys that made my feelings for them stronger then what I felt for young girls though I was not oblivious to their charms.

I could, for example, relate to a poem like this by Jamie Gil de Biema.

Hymn to Youth

Oh, not you again, use (barefaced little charmer).

What brings you to the beach? We grownups were quite relaxed

And you come in to glue open our eyes, stirring up

our imaginations to impossible dreams.

Risen from the waves, all splendor, and brilliant in pure sensation

(You little beast) dripping to the shore with tiny rosebud breasts,

Your delicious bum like twins smiles.

Oh, slim little goddess with rounded ankles,

the suggestive push your hips

Giving birth to your delicate thighs. Precise and indefinite beauty

– no one’s tears have yet stained your fine white cheeks.

And we watch you rise, the incarnation of a mythical land,

rise with bulls, sea shells and dolphins on the white sand between sea and sky,

Still tremulous with water drops, dazzling the sun and smiling –

Smiling and singing far off at the waters edge. But we hear only

The proclamation of kingdoms of youth: that intensely free and fabulous land

In which desire can swell, like the sea, without guilt.

(Oh, you little beast:) why did you choose

This beach to display your intricate childish beauty

– In which the frank face of the starlet

And the charming shyness of the prince are blended?

But you suddenly frown, your fine brow tormented by a fleeting thought,

And turn your face back to the sea – beautiful indifferent girl

With salty-wet hair– And saunter along the beach

As if you didn’t know that behind you follow

Men and hounds and gods and Angels and archangels

And thrones and an entire melancholy ocean.

My eyes, also, would have followed her down the beach like hounds. But for me, girl beauty was something to be worshiped from a distance.

Women were their own species. I was attracted to them with a mixture of lust and fear.

But men? However much I might have desired their friendships, when I was an adult myself, men were not sexually appealing to me. I did not seek out pictures of naked men nor fantasize about engaging in sexual activities with them. The idea of allowing a man to perform annual sex with me was positively repulsive. (This is not to say that I look down on men who are so attracted or that I consider such activities as objectively repulsive. It’s just not my cup of tea.) Yet in all respects other than physical attraction I had all the symptoms of being intensely in love with Wall. It was exciting just to be with him. I liked talking with him. I wanted his approval. I would’ve been happy to have married him, though I would have been preferred to forgo the physical consummation of the marriage.

Perhaps this is the place for a digression. In one of my novels I put my view of the nature of sexual attraction in the mouth of a character. Here it is:

Everyone's got a different landscape. And that's a good way for it to be. Their ain't no gay nor straight nor pedo nor bi, and certainly no normal or abnormal, no more than you can say about an ocean or a continent, this one here is normal, and that one is abnormal. Each person is just his or her own landscape -- which like any landscape is a mixture of things. We just find ourselves among all these hills and forests with all the living things within them, and sometimes we find joy in their beauty and other times we tremble at the dangers that might pop out at us at any moment.. To always see the beauty while at the same time never forgetting about the possible dangers – that is the way I think we should live. Beautiful and dangerous are useful words. They define real things that happen to us and around us – things we can know and see. But “normal” and “abnormal” -- what use are those terms? When I look around me I don't see no normal or abnormal. I see beautiful and ugly and loving and hateful and helpful and dangerous – but not normal or abnormal. Those are life killing words. Those are words narrow people use to try to put life in a little box because it's too big and unruly for them to accept on it's own terms. Normal and abnormal? Pah! Show me an abnormal mountain.

                        From A Galaxy of No-Stars

So what am I to say about this peculiar situation when I seem to be in love with a man but experienced little or no sexual attraction toward him. That does to some extent challenge my notion that sexual energy is what drives love relations. Of course the easiest solution is to say that I was repressing my sexual feelings. I suppose this is conceivable but by and large I’m pretty open and honest with myself about what my feelings are. Perhaps Eros is frequently but not invariably connected with sexual desires, but can equally well manifested itself through our emotional and intellectual centers. I don’t know. I’m simply trying to record the facts here with whatever understanding I have.

My bonding with Wall was connected in an odd way with my bonding to Boone – the woman I was eventually to marry, and who will be the topic of another vignette. In both cases my love of them had to do with the love of God – of the One – of whatever it was that modern life murdered:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

                              Nietzsche

With this difference between wall and Betsy. . .

With Betsy the attraction had to do with the fact that we both had experienced in a spontaneous way a oneness with something which we believed to be the Absolute. With Wall our bond had to do with the absence of God in modern culture.

We both grieved God – Intensely.

Perhaps I should round out this picture of Wall with an event that happened a week or two after I was in the sit-in. A weight-lifting muscle bound student – John Todd -- at the college decided that “nigger lovers” should not be left in peace. One evening when I was going back to my room in the dorm he blocked my way and threatened to beat the shit out of me. I have no doubt that he could have, but I managed to walk around him and make it back to my room.

The next day I told Wall about the John Todd incident. It never occurred to me that he would do anything about it. I was just updating him on the news. Later I learned from him that he confronted Todd in a store downtown where he happened to encounter him. He invited Todd out to the street where they could have it out. Todd declined the invitation and Wall let him go with the understanding that he would not bother me again.

Strange. That put me in the roll of the threatened girl friend protected by her lover. I had never seen my relationship with him in that light before.

And this brings me to the icy road in West Virginia where I was almost killed on my way back from Christmas vacation in Indianapolis. Without describing the event in detail, I almost skidded into a truck on a bridge. I lifted my foot off the break just in time to regain my control of the car.

Why was I almost killed that day – and why was I spared? Just mechanical randomness? “Sometimes you get the bear sometimes the bear gets you?”

Perhaps

But like all religiously oriented people I tend to see the events of my life as driven by significance. Not by accident.

Perhaps it had something to do with what was waiting for me back at college. It turns out that two of the three most important people in my life had decided to betray me. Wall and Sheila and decided to get married.

Perhaps on some level I knew that– And did not want to go on living.

And why was my life not ended then?

Perhaps something wanted me to go on living. Or perhaps something wanted to spare some of the others who might have been killed or seriously maimed in the accident that almost occurred. I end up with only “perhaps.” Nothing definite. May it was random. The luck of the draw.

It does seem probable to me that other levels of causality in addition to the mechanical ones we observe all the time, exist. We catch glimpses of this in what Jung called “synchronicity.” The problem is that, so far as I know, there is no way of actually verifying this. How would one distinguish between events really were driven by forces we didn’t understand, and unverifiable speculations that we imposed over events that are actually random? I’m afraid that my speculations on such matters always end up in question marks.

By treating some of my speculations as existential hypotheses I want to explore I escape paralysis. But that doesn’t erase the question marks.

In any case I was not killed on my trip back to school. That much I can report with certainty.

The accident that didn’t happen highlights another preoccupation of mine. As I get older and think back over my life I realize I have caused happiness in some situations and suffering in others. I carry within me a sort of balance sheet. I want the amount of happiness caused to exceed the amount of suffering caused. Had I hit that truck it would have caused more suffering in the various cars that would have plowed into us than I could have overcome in several lifetimes. It is so easy to do damage and so hard to really help. The cards seem stacked against us.

However it is, the bottom line of this accounting can never be calculated. We don’t know what most of the consequences of our acts have been – or will be. And whenever we attempt to calculate the balance, we are not yet dead. So it could be radically altered by something that is not yet occurred.

As the Greeks said, consider no man happy before his death. I forget who said that. One of the playwrights, I imagine.

Sheila and Wall did get married and they had a beautiful son. Then Sheila ran off with still another man – taking the boy with her and causing Wall almost unbearable grief. I am not judging her for this. I don’t know what their relationship might have meant to either of them. But I am sure that this confirmed his belief that this world is just a realm of grief and suffering and that the only intelligent thing to do is to seek a path of escape.

Sheila walked away from a young man she was going with in order to begin her relationship with me. Then she left me for Wall without any warning. Finally she left Wall with their child. Watching her ability to leave without seeming to give it much thought did make me think that perhaps her leaving me before we got married and had a child may have been a blessing rather than the curse it seemed to be at the time.

It might seem surprising, but it was not his taking Sheila from me that ended for good my relationship with Wall. Eventually we recoiled from that and resumed our friendship. What finally ended our relationship was a theological matter. He joined a group called the Path of the Masters, which taught people to separate from this “veil of tears.” My belief was that we should remain committed to this world and that our path should be a matter of transforming our way of being in the world – not escaping from it. As Martin Buber said it:

“Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself. We are created with one another and directed to life with one another. Creatures are placed in my way so that either a fellow creature, by means of them and with them may find a way to God.”Quoted in the "Catholic Worker."

Oddly enough, the new religion of the elite, trans-humanism, also discards creation as a sacred place. In its own way, it too sees creation as something to be escaped – by “overcoming it.” Among modern and non-religious philosophies, only world-views grounded in a strong ecological awareness retain some degree of appreciation for the sacredness of creation.

I Am Is Born

I need no miracle nor special sign
Beyond the range of commonplace design – 
No burning bush, nor parting of the sea.
Though I should surely love such pageantry, 
I need but birches, pale against the snow,
Or on a twisted limb a stately crow
To see I AM is born in Bethlehem
Swaddled in the mystery of i am.  

A Question of Performance

My rather short and unimpressive life as a womanizer began with Sheila. We attended the same college. I was active in the civil rights movement, was recognized as something of an intellectual, and was generally a bit rebellious. I was deemed something of a colorful character, but this was a small but noteworthy liberal arts college so I was only a big fish in a small pond. But for all this, I had a hidden shame.

I was a virgin.

Not only that but I knew very little about sex and had no confidence in my capacity to perform. That one word contained it all. Perform.

One day an extremely attractive young lady came up to me and introduced herself as Sheila. She felt we should be boyfriend and girlfriend and said as much in front of her present boyfriend. Sheila threw off her old boyfriend and we started seeing each other. She was more than open to our consummating our relationship and may have wondered about my timidity. As long as a woman did not “come on” to me too aggressively I was reasonably confident. I enjoyed “making out” and always push things to the limits – which were more limiting those days that in the modern times. It was those very limits that gave me a sense of security.

But she was not the sort to hold back. She began taunting me in a strange way.”I know what it is. You’re another Walter, unquote she would say. She never specified exactly what faults I shared with Walter but it was clearly a sexual issue of some sort. So she declared that we had to put the matter to the test. At that time I lived in a off-campus bedroom rented out by a local resident who happened to know my parents. It was an easy matter to slip a girl into my room without my landlady noticing. She seemed actually, to make a point of not noticing things. So it was not long before we landed in bed with nothing at all to limit what we did. And to make a long story short, I was unable to perform.

That was, I think, the most devastating experience in my entire life. Even so, we continued to go together and when circumstances were less demanding I was able to perform just fine. I just needed a little training and fine-tuning. We made plans to get married. But it did not go well for long. She developed a fondness for my best friend who must have been more manly or more intelligent or more profound, or more something that I was. And the moon in my world came crashing into the sun.