Union Mystifies Me
After all this time I am still mystified about union. There are many clues that our experience is not unique, e.g. “shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh“, but the modern world-view has no room for a consciousness that transcends my individual body.
A big clue is that when either of us talk about the experience of union, the other says “yes, yes, yes.” The agreement that we have on its nature is uncanny; we are not two blind people feeling an elephant. This happens consistently, yet still confounds me. Pardon my struggles to accept my own experience. “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Chico Marx, “Duck Soup”
I must say, Phil, that reading through this kinda confused even me as to what you’re actually refering to.
When you say union, is this sexual, relationship or spiritual based? Or maybe even something else.
Huh? 🙂
Hi Martin,
I’m mainly referring to sexual, where I have the simultaneous experience of myself and a conjoined self. It is facilitated by sex, but transcends it; I think of sex like a step-ladder that allows us to reach this place.
After repeatedly seeing it here, I am able to glimpse it in other situations like doing a crossword together, or jointly playing Mahjong. It brings up questions about self and identity. Although we normally identify with our body, we also identify as British, male, human, a member of a football team, etc., and under certain circumstances, our ego yields and our identity becomes that of the group.
Yet our identification with the body is so strong that we do not usually notice this transference of consciousness, and when we do, our culture has no words for it and no place in its model of the world for it, so it is dismissed.
In “Janus”, Arthur Koestler writes that just as cells are part of the human body, people are parts of a larger whole. Science has done poorly at locating the source of consciousness within the human body, and I think that if we are open to the possibility, we can sometimes transcend ourselves.
We have found sex to be a gateway, but the questions it raises go beyond that to ones about the nature of self and spirit.