This is not science here, but it is knowing. An active, live knowing of a vast truth. I can’t tell you what it is, I can only tell you what it is like.
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.
So this weekend, in my tantra workshop, I was in and out of states of ecstasy for two days, living in a temple and practicing with other tantrikas for our monthly weekend of exploring bliss. A new image came to me this time: during a meditation on heart opening, I felt water running up from the earth in a bright opal fountain, shaped almost like lightning. It came up my body to my heart, meeting scarlet energy pouring down through the top of my head. They met in my heart, the red and the white streams of light, and spread out to cleanse and warm my entire being.
Imagery can be a big help in attaining ecstasy. It can help to imagine pictures, colors, sounds, plants, flowers, animals (Dossie’s personal snake is the humble San Francisco garter snake, a jet black beauty with red and yellow racing stripes).
Leonard Shlain does a good job explaining the value of imagery in his excellent book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.1 There he explains most beautifully how our technological culture has valued the left brain’s ability to generate and work with abstractions, like numbers and equations, like phonetic symbols for sounds. Abstraction has been tremendously valuable for ensuring our survival and well-being, and allowing us to adapt nature to us rather than us adapting to nature. This has made us a very successful species – however, as we well know, we are in danger of destroying our ecological niche by continuing to try to adapt nature beyond what nature will tolerate. Shlain suggests that we have neglected our right brain, our image-making capacity. We ignore our feelings, stating that we are “imagining things,” as if there were no truth or value in the discoveries we make through imagining.
We think of “imagining” as if it were a child’s game: making believe, making things up, fantasies suitable for comic books. But look at the root of the word. To imagine is to make an metaphor in the mind, an image in pictures or sounds or sensations of something we can perceive internally – an image that may be better able than language to convey a complex truth: not precisely, as a scientist would like it, but accurately enough to communicate the gestalt. This is why some forms of truth are better expressed in poetry, and why in our culture we have to work to find language with which we can communicate our emotions.
So perhaps imagining is a valid form of perceiving and a truthful way to explore the universe – particularly when traveling in the open realms of ecstasy, where precision may be inimical and boundlessness our best friend.
Imagination may speak to you in many ways: auditory, musical, tactile, kinesthetic, emotional. Colors and shapes may be more important than objects or beings. We are suggesting here the power of following your imagination, rather than leading it.
Visions may tell a story, or they may just flow, like a dream. Here is a vision of Dossie’s that turned into a poem:
Kali Dasi
Black skin, Scarlet tongue,
hard feet horny trample me,
Beloved, Destroyer, my Mother.
Your skin eats light
utterly round Your hips.
I sink in Your breasts, infinite softness
hanging beneath the skulls of men
Your arms trap me implacable
in the language of crows You
open me up You
tear me down
Tigress sweaty over me, Your fur scours.
You turn me over, buffet me,
spread my legs with Your great paws.
Your claws, sheathing and unsheathing,
knead my flesh, spilling little streams.
Scarlet Your tongue, bright like persimmons
You lick salt in my wounds.
Your huge tongue
in the language of frogs
Rough like starfish
licks my cunt, sucks me dry:
I am not ready.
I try to offer myself but You allow
no will, no reason:
I am not ready.
I am Yours because You take me.
Tails of snakes enfold me, muscles
Wrap my limbs, crush my chest, I cannot breathe:
Your rattling in my ear is all the sound of the universe,
deafening me.
Where Your rocks meet Your waters in thunder
Your cliffs are dangerous, my Lady
Your tides turn stones back and forth, clicking.
Shaman’s rattle, diamond back,
Demon Mother, Killing Moon,
eclipse me in Your infinite darkness.
With shining steel nails on fingers and toes
You lift me, shake me, split my skin
spill my life in sticky red streams and then
You let go.
I land empty
dry and rattling:
I have forgotten that I am.
I must be
Yours.
Not always what you expect
Ecstatic states are not always predictable or reliable – they sometimes appear when you’re not expecting them, or fail to appear when you want them desperately, or zoom off in a direction you’re not expecting – they’re not like cars with accelerators and steering wheels that you can control and manipulate. Although certainly you can get better at managing them with time and practice, it is best to remain humble in the face of ecstasy, and to recognize that ecstatic states have their own will and desire that is beyond our will, as Janet learned here:
Getting Lost
I spend a lot of my time lost. It’s kind of a state of being for me, and I don’t fight it much any more — I’m on my way somewhere, and I think I know where I’m going, everything looks pretty familiar; and then all of a sudden it doesn’t, and there I am again, lost. And I don’t mind when my friends tease me about it, and I don’t even get too frustrated when it makes me late to things — sometimes I find something cool while I’m wandering around looking for a landmark. The main thing to remember is that I always find my way home eventually — I’m sitting here writing this right now, right?
Once in a while, though, it’s late at night, and I’m by myself in the car, and the terrain outside looks frightening, and the gas gauge is ominously low (I habitually drive until the little gas tank on the dashboard flashes danger red), and I snap down the door locks and I’m lost lost lost and I utterly forget the part about somehow always getting home OK.
Which brings me somehow to a big room in a rural retreat in Sonoma County filled with pairs of women breathing hard. There’s a boom box playing New Age music somewhere in a corner. I’ve spent the whole day doing tantra exercises, some with Dossie, some with other women, and I’m running enough sexual energy to light up a small city. Dossie and I have met for the final practice of the day; we are both tousled, sweaty, tired, exultant, aroused and ready (we think) for whatever will happen next....
She plops onto my lap, breast to breast, crotch to crotch, and wraps her arms around me; we press our mouths together, leaving a little room at the sides for oxygen, and begin to share breath — my exhalation becoming her inhalation, back again, deeper and stronger, the breaths becoming groans as our pelvises begin to move back and forth and we press closer together.
My energy penis twines up into her cunt, locking us together in exaltation. I am distantly aware that there is a storm rising in me, a big one, bigger than I have yet experienced; it pervades and then engulfs me. My cock begins to pull me up into Dossie, lifting my hips up from the floor, and a flood of heat opens my mouth, and noise begins to come out of me, high-pitched, tearing my throat open; she is riding me like a bronco. “EEEAAAAAAA...” Some part of me is aware of the sound, cannot believe it is coming out of me, is frightened by it. My body is arched like a bow, lifting Dossie’s weight and mine high off the ground. My face is stretched wide open and still the sound comes. I suck in another breath and go on screaming as the energy arcs up my body in wave after wave. My fists
are slamming into the floor and I cannot find my way out of the breath. The distant part of me thinks of seizures, of strokes, of torn muscles — can my body sustain this ecstasy?
But, apparently, it can, and it knows its own way out, knows its landmarks. Soon enough — Dossie tells me later she thinks it was about a minute and a half — the tidal wave begins to recede into smaller waves, then into ripples, then into a calm, if considerably sweaty and disconcerted, peace. I open my eyes and Dossie is peering into them, looking half delighted, half concerned. I giggle. “What the fuck was that?Jeezus!” And then, like the child who gets off the roller coaster and walks halfway down the midway before the scaredness hits, I fall apart. “That... that was scary... I didn’t know if I could stop.” And I burst into tears, cry my way through everybody else joining hands and singing, cry in Dossie’s lap until it’s time to pull myself together and go home. I talk to the instructor and tell her what happened, and she gives me some ideas about what might have happened, how to take care of myself, how to prevent such a frightening thing from happening again if I didn’t want it to.
The next day, though, I decide to take it very easy, to spend most of the day soloing, to keep things low-key. I keep my energy very contained, have a few quiet small waves all to myself — and discover they feel pretty much like the previous night’s tsunami, just smaller, and that my body knows its way into this process and back again quite well. And I realize that all I’ve done is found a new way to get lost, and that getting lost is part of who I am.
I am never going to be someone who follows an exact path or who knows where I am all the time, and that means that often I’ll be disoriented, and sometimes I’ll be frightened. And it may mean that sometimes I’ll get hurt. But for me, the path to ecstasy is not the path from Here to There — it’s the random streets I wander when I let myself get lost.
Catharsis and purgation
It’s important to remember that not all ecstasy is about happiness (“a state of being beyond reason or self-control,” remember?). Ecstatic states may serve an important purpose by awakening catharsis for grief, rage or other difficult emotions. While these may not look like as much fun as energy orgasms, they are often, in our experience, at least as profound, and in an odd way as joyous, as their more lighthearted counterparts.
During much of the time that we were writing this book, Janet was mourning the loss of a long-term relationship. At one point she wrote:
There’s very rarely a day lately in which I don’t cry.
I didn’t used to be like this. I can remember when tears were a very unusual event for me, something that happened only in moments of great stress or crisis, often months apart. These days, I’m talking on the phone with someone and I start to cry, or I’m sitting here in bed writing and I start to cry, or I’m playing with someone in a nice scene that I thought was going to be hot and erotic and fun and pow, there I am crying again.
I don’t like it. I feel leaky — like the membrane that holds me together has suddenly developed little holes, and if the force behind it gets big enough those holes will tear and I’ll just dissolve, just a big messy puddle of Janet that can’t be stuck back together. And besides, it’s boring to cry and cry and cry, and I just can’t believe that one nose can produce that much snot, but apparently mine can.
Today I was playing with a friend. He was spanking me, a nice long warmup with his hand and then with a little leather paddle. And I just couldn’t stay there with him. My mind was straying backward into the past and then rocketing forward into the future, and the thighs that I felt under my hips were the thighs of every man I’ve ever played with except him. And I told him I needed to stop, and I cried for a while. I could have gone on crying a lot longer, probably should have, but I just didn’t want to because I’m so, so, so sick of crying.
A month or so after Janet wrote this, we both had the opportunity to participate in one of the extraordinary body rituals put on by Fakir Musafar and Cléo Dubois, rituals devised for the express purpose of allowing people to achieve ecstatic states through intense sensory experience. Here is Janet’s account of how the ritual enabled her to process that blocked energy into a healing catharsis:
Through the years, Fakir and Cléo have used various techniques, mostly drawn from body rituals in universal spiritual practices, to achieve altered states and ecstatic journeys. The one they’re mostly doing right now is adapted from an Indian ritual. We spent the morning listening to them discuss the day’s plans, watching videos of the tai pu sam festival in Kuala Lumpur and some rituals Fakir and Cléo have led. Then we warmed up and raised energy with flogging and light play-piercing.
During the break, we had snacks and drinks, and were invited, if we liked, to draw a tarot card from various decks spread on a large table. The one I drew gave me a shock — it was the King of Swords, from a deck dating from the late ‘60s, and it could have been a portrait of the lover from whom I’d recently parted. Well, so much for any ambiguities about what I was here for today.
Then Fakir and master piercer Raelynn Gallina worked to place two large-gauge piercings on either side of each participant’s upper chest, following the needles with two large, scary-looking hooks, about three inches long. One end of a strong nylon cord was tied to each hook, and each of us was given a mountaineer’s carabiner. We could choose to attach ourselves to one another — in couples or groups — or to a stationary object.
The drumming started, and everybody began to dance — mostly slowly and cautiously at first (it reminded me of the feeling of stepping slowly into very cold water) — then more daringly as we got used to the feeling of the hooks, which was painful but not unbearable.
While I could see and hear that many other participants had gone into a joyful space, with lots of shouting and laughter, I went into a space of deep sadness, loss and mourning. I danced with Dossie for a little while but then asked to dance alone. I attached my hooks first to an overhead point, then to a point at my feet. I pulled gently and then strongly, wove back and forth, leaned backwards and let the hooks bear some of my weight, all the while with my face contorted — it felt as though my mouth were stretching wider and wider, trying to open up and scream but unable to release what was inside — and tears running down my cheeks. A few of the people serving at the ritual came by to make sure I was OK, but I waved them away.
Dossie came back, and by then I was ready to be with her. We hooked ourselves together and danced close, and with her there to ground me I was able to release howls of pain and sadness. I began to stamp my feet as I danced, hard enough to bruise my soles and to send shock waves up my legs and into my hips and torso. BAM. BAM. BAM — every stamp sending another jolt of my pain down into the earth, which could receive that and more without noticing at all.
Finally, I became too tired and dizzy to feel safe on my feet any more. We sat together and watched the other dancers wind down, which was quite beautiful and joyous to watch. One woman was on her knees, her body stretched backwards perpendicular to the floor, her hooks attached to chains from the ceiling so that she was suspended by the skin of her chest, her long hair spread around her in a black rippling fan, her face a study in bliss. Groups of ten and twelve people were fastened together like daisies by a central carabiner, jumping and shouting to the music. The drums slowed, reluctantly recognizing the limits of the flesh if not the desires of the spirit, and finally came to a halt, as Dossie and I cuddled, and I blew my nose and prepared to re-enter reality.
A feast was spread in the middle of the space, so we ate and had some water and tea to drink. When I felt OK to drive the twenty minutes or so between the playspace and my loft, I came home (to find my next-door neighbors having a very loud party — well, I guess we each have our own forms of release).
The next day I felt sort of like I’d been hit by a very large soft truck: achy all over, wrung out, drained, a little wired; but cleansed, and very glad to have been there. Another time, I’m sure the same ritual would hold a very di
fferent experience for me: perhaps I’d be hanging blissed-out like the girl with the long hair, or dancing in one of the daisies. But mourning was my job that day, and the ritual was the right place and the right way to do it.
Connection, clarity, creativity
And when the firestorm of bliss has passed, and we are left limp and awestruck in its wake, what a magical time that is!
The time spent coming down from an ecstatic journey is very special and precious, and uniquely vulnerable. While it often feels as though we’re back in normal consciousness, frequently we are not – this is not a time to undertake a long car trip or to discuss the family budget. It may, however, be an excellent time to enjoy more mundane sensory pleasures like food or sex or a visit to nature – the senses are very heightened during this time of lowered boundaries. And it may most definitely be the time to reaffirm our connection with those we love, with words if that seems like the best way, or simply with loving touch, cuddling, warm hand to silky skin...
Many of us also find the minutes or hours after an ecstatic journey to be a time that gives us special access to our creative powers. Most of the foundations of this book were laid the mornings after scenes the two of us did together, as we sat in the sunshine in Dossie’s or Janet’s living room, drinking coffee and frantically jotting notes on legal pads, trying to keep up with the rush of ideas. Transcendent experience shakes up our brains, unsticks thoughts that are in danger of getting entrenched, frees us up to think in new and dangerous ways.
And perhaps best of all, we find that ecstasy changes us, maybe permanently. We’re never exactly the same people after a blissful experience that we were before. We learn, we expand, we shift, we grow... and we prepare to do it all again, preferably as soon as possible.
Radical Ecstasy Page 6