Shared Wisdom

All of our loss experiences hark back to Original Loss, the loss of that ultimate mother-child connection. For before we begin to encounter the inevitable separations of everyday life, we live in a state of oneness with our mother. This ideal state, this state of boundarylessness, this I-am-you-are-me-is-she-is-we, this “harmonious interpenetrating mix-up,” this floating “I’m in the mil and the milk’s in me,” this chillproof insulation from aloneness and intimations of mortality: This is a condition known to lovers, saints, psychotics, druggies and infants. It is called bliss.

Our original bliss connection is the umbilical connection, the biological oneness of the womb. Outside the womb we experience the gratifying delusion that we and our mother share a common boundary. Our lifelong yearning for union, so some psychoanalysts say, originates in our yearning to return – to return, if not to the womb, then to this state of illusory union called symbiosis, a state “for which deep down in the original primal unconscious… every human being strives.”

         We have no conscious memories of being there – or leaving. But once it was ours, and we had to let it go. And while the cruel game of giving up what we love in order to grow must be replayed at each new stage of development, this is our first, perhaps hardest renunciation.

         The losing, leaving, letting go of paradise.

         And although we do not remember it, we also never forget it. We acknowledge a paradise and a paradise lost. We acknowledge a time of harmony, wholeness, unbreachable safery, unconditional love, and a time when that wholeness was irretrievably rent. We acknowledge it in religion and myth and fairy tales and our conscious and unconscious fantasies. We acknowledge it as reality or as dream. And while we fiercely protect the boundaries of self that clearly demark the you from the me, we also yearn to recapture the lost paradise of that ultimate connection.

         Our pursuit of this connection – of the restoration of oneness – may be an act of sickness or of health, may be a fearful retreat from the world or an effort to expand it, may be deliberate or unaware. Through sex, through religion, through nature, through art, through drugs, through meditation, even through jogging, we try to blur the boundaries that divide us. We try to escape the imprisonment of separateness. We sometimes succeed.

         Sometimes in fleeting moments – moments of sexual ecstasy, for instance – we find ourself returned to oneness again, though it may not be until later, “After Love,” as Maxine Kumin’s fine poem would have it, that we can begin to sort out where we have been:

 

Afterwards the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

 These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

 Spoons of our fingers, lips
Admit their ownership.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . .

 Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment, when

 The wolf, the mongering wolf,
who stands outside the self

 lay lightly down, and slept.

         It is argued that this experience – the physical merging that sexual union may bring – takes us back to the oneness of our infancy. Indeed, analyst Robert Bak orgasm “the perfect compromise between love and death,” the means by which we repair the separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover’s bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare some people so badly they cannot have orgasms) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection.

         Certainly Lady Chatterley provides us, for all time, with a vision of self-dissolving orgastic bliss as “further and further rolled waves of herself away from herself,” until the “quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched …. and she was gone.” Another woman, describing a similar loss-of-self experience, says, “Coming makes me feel that I’ve come home.”

         But orgasm isn’t the only means of extinguishing the self, of putting the watchful mongering wolf to sleep. There are many different highways that can carry us beyond our personal boundaries.

         I, for example, have frequently sat (or is it levitated?) in my dentist’s chair, adrift in a happy haze of nitrous oxide, feeling – as another user of this gas has put it – “as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.” The man I’m quoting here is the philosopher/psychologist William James, but a variety of respectable – and not so respectable – types have also testified to the power of drugs to bring them to his condition of…. melted unity.

         For others, harmonious oneness can best be achieved though the natural world, through a breaking down of the wall between man and nature, permitting some of us – some of the time – “to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is…” There are those who have never felt this union with earth and heaven and sea, and those who – like Woody Allen – have always stoutly maintained that “I am two with nature.” But some men and women find solace and joy not only in seeing but also being nature – in being, temporarily, a part of “one vast world-encircling harmony.”

         Great art can also – sometimes – erase the line between viewer and viewed and what writer Annie Dillard calls “pure moments,” astonishing moments she says that “I’ll bear with me to my grave,” moments during which “I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth…  buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away.”

         There are special religious experiences that can also re-create a state of oneness. Indeed, religious revelation can so irrefutably penetrate the soul that – these are Saint Teresa’s words – “when she (the soul) return to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her.”

         Mystical union is possible through a variety of transcendental experiences. Mystical union puts and end to self. And whether this union occurs between man and woman, man and cosmos, man and artistic creation or man and God, it repeats and restores – for brief, exquisite moments – the oceanic feeling of the mother-child connection where “the me, and the we, the thou, are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction.”