greenstorm | Personal Development: Anatomy of a Mystical Experience

On the spur of the moment I went to Guu with Paul for dinner. I'm going to throw around the word "God" a lot in this post. Read it how you will, as you believe: serendipity, coincidence, one being or many. That's irrelevant to what I'm writing.

Drew gave me the most connected hug I've had all month before dinner. May be relevant.

God opened the way for dinner-- we were going to go somewhere else, or not go at all, but Paul was magically made un-broke and I was as well. So we went to Guu. Normally when we go there together we eat until we're not hungry; not until we're full, but until we've had enough. Tonight we were positively gluttonous. Together we ordered and shared:

grilled squid legs
marinated eggplant (mostly mine, he doesn't like eggplant much)
salmon yuke (salmon sashimi in soy something sauce with a quail egg served with prawn crackers)
baked black cod
pumpkin croquette (mostly his, too sweet for me)
pork intestine (one of the two absolutely spectacular wins of the night. So rich, so texture-y, so meaty)
yellowtail neck (I have never had fish so melty, soft, and buttery in my life)
black sesame rice cake for dessert (I was reduced to chanting 'oh god, oh god, oh god' under my breath while eating this, it's the other big win)

There's something really nice about small plates, isn't there? But it was pretty much a rolling-home sort of full. I would have eaten another order of the black sesame cakes if I hadn't thought my stomach would literally burst.

The sun was going down as I walked to the skytrain. I got in it and when I got off at Joyce it was dark.

Now let me make it abundantly clear that I am prone to and used to a variety of brain states, of mystical experiences. Good food will set these off, if I do even a half-day's fast it doesn't even take good food. Sunshine will do it sometimes, lack of sleep will help induce other ones. I can ride religious ceremonies without even trying. You can tell I was prepped earlier today by the happy list I made.

So near the end of the skytrain ride and the wait for the bus I was beginning to feel love. This fierce adoration/worship of/from everything rises up and it pushes on my skin both from inside and outside. I feel like I'm going to burn up, or explode, or burst into tears (these are good things). At this point I don't feel the oneness-with-the-world that I read about in brain studies. Instead I feel an intense attachment with the world, but everything is seperate from me still. I don't know, words are failing me but I'm going to write until it's down. Bear with me.

So there I am on the skytrain or the bus and the sky is dark blue along the horizon and darker blue above and there's this feeling in me, and the window is cold against my cheek and my elbow. And I do the thing I always do: first I think who I can call and say 'I love you' to, because normally I reflect this feeling like a mirror, redirecting it. I think, there's no one it's okay to say that to this intensely right now. Then I start to analyse it, to take the feeling to pieces so I can come home and tell you guys about it because it's a big wonderful feeling I want to share.

Here's where something that's never happened before happens. I think: no.

Do you know that when I was with Angus, when he loved me, over Christmas sometime in there, it was the first time I'd ever relaxed enough in someone's love to just feel it and accept it as okay, rather than loving them back as hard as I possibly could every second I could feel their love directed at me? It was okay. It didn't matter whether I was good enough or not, that was beside the point. I was loved, and loved gladly, not loved by what I gave in return.

So I remembered that, some thread of Angus lingering in my thoughts from the first redirection attempt, and I relaxed. I set something down, I softened something, and instead of bring a rigid surface that caught and reflected or preserved I just let myself feel that love directed at myself. And it... came in, and it held me, and it kept loving me. I didn't cry on the train.

This sounds so ridiculous, so silly and self-help-book and pop psychology, but it didn't feel like that at all. It was a palpable warm thing, it was absolutely completely the same feeling of being held by my mom when I was very little and upset and she held me and everything was magically okay. It was this feeling, but it was coming, not from a person, not from mom or Angus, but from the world.

And of course love is a feedback loop. I loved it back harder because it loved me. There was so much that I was certain I was going to break, but the love I was receiving was totally non-invasive, very gentle, it just sort of kept enough pressure on the outside of my skin that the return emotion I was feeling on the inside of my skin didn't explode me.

And so I called Angus because he and Piotr are the two people in my life who I can talk about this sort of thing to and not feel stupid and flailing for words (well, not too flailing for words) and we talked me through it a little more-- I kept tensing up and trying to redirect or analyse and then catching it and relaxing again.

And by the time I got home, by the time I'd walked the long block down the alley, I was crying. And the thing about this love that I felt directed at me is that no person can be worthy of it, do you understand? It's a big and complete-unto-itself thing that doesn't need me and there's no amount of doing- or being-something that can bring it about or that can stop it. It was just there. And the thing is that I feel/felt intensely unworthy of it. I feel like I need to fight for love; I don't trust it if it's freely given, I suppose, but I also feel like I'm failing in my duty if I'm receiving it and not giving anything. But the thing is, it was so obviously present and definite and loving that it sidestepped my feeling unworthy of it, it went around and through like sunlight goes through your hands and reduces your flesh to a rosy glow. It didn't disappear the unworthiness. It just coexisted for awhile so I could see both at the same time. And so I felt thoroughly loved and relaxed and held, which I seldom do.

So you guys have read some of my downs now (especially if you read a year or two or four back on this blog) but I've never documented an 'up' as thoroughly. I've never had such an epiphany about joy, never learned from the experience of love and wonder, like I have from pain. So here we go. Here's the beginning. Things love you, Greenie: people and things and life and everything. As the Desiderata says, I have a right to be here. Remember that. And remember that it's okay for things to be that way.

Something very old is being healed this year.

Now I feel quiet, a little drained, there's an odd tension and an odd peace in there. I can't quite relax because I don't want to let the experience go, but it's over for now and I need to.

I can't quite relax, but I think I can surrender myself into the trusted embrace of my bed. It'll reach up and hold me gently and wrap itself around me, and that's what I need right now. I need something to hold me.