One of the things your authors have in common is our over-active intellects. We both grew up in environments that placed a lot of value on academic achievement, on succeeding in a world where the right answers got you a reward and the wrong ones got you an F. But we’ve also both come to learn that while the human intellect works very well for building bridges and discovering cures for diseases, and is indispensable for keeping food on the table and a roof over our heads, it isn’t very helpful for traveling in bliss.
Releasing the traps that your brain can set for you isn’t the only way to achieve transcendence, but it’s an important step – and that’s why we’re taking this chapter to talk about our ways of believing, and how they’ve worked for us. And, as the chapter title indicates, we find it easier and more relevant to talk about the process that we use for believing things than it is for us to talk about what those beliefs might or might not actually be.
Obviously, not believing in anything at all would not be a very functional way to move through life. We believe, for example, that you exist, otherwise we’d turn off our computers now and go to dinner and a movie. We guess we must believe that the restaurant and the movie theater exist, too. However, we often have trouble with more traditional belief systems, which are based on, well, belief systems – belief that God or Goddess exists, or doesn’t exist, for example.
One of the ways we believe is that we’re very suspicious of dualism. Dualism in philosophy is the theory that there are two basic principles or things, such as mind and body, and that by separating them we are expressing some truth. (As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, and the kind who don’t.)
In theology, dualism is the doctrine that the world is ruled by antagonistic forces of good and evil, or the concept that man has two basic natures, the physical and the spiritual.1 We are particularly suspicious of doctrines that split spirit and body, as if they were at war, as if the body were inferior and the goal of life to escape from it. We like what we get to do with these bodies – that’s why we’re writing this book.
A lover of Dossie’s, in an argument-fueled moment of frustration, once cried, “Either you’re wrong or I’m crazy!” At the time, that seemed to make sense to her, but of course it really doesn’t – both of them could have been wrong or crazy, or both right and simply disagreeing with one another. Dossie’s response: “Can you think of a third option?” The next time you get stuck in an either/ or dilemma, try thinking of a third option, and a fourth – the answer to dualism is pluralism, a much more suitable philosophy for sluts like us.
Some fallacies of dualism are pretty easy to perceive. Others seem incontrovertible: a thing must be either X or not-X. But we invite you to stretch your brain, to embrace a way of believing – or not-believing – in which it is possible for neither of these to be true, or perhaps both. There may come a time when it will work better for you not to make such a division – like when you want to be more connected than separate.
What do these philosophical/logical calisthenics have to do with sex or SM? Well, more than you might expect. Transcendent play is a way that we dissolve the boundaries of space and time, and the walls that seem to keep us apart form the people we care about. Where do those boundaries, those barriers, come from? Sometimes, we think, they come from patterns we learn when we decide that a thing must be either one way or another. If the divine is in everything, the divine is both one way and another: as simple, and infinitely complex, as that.
When you start out by cultivating your tolerance for ambiguity and paradox, you are loosening the strings on your mind, giving yourself permission to feel without judging, to trust your sensations and emotions rather than your busy brain. You are practicing believing in what you feel at the moment, not reflecting the past or fretting about the future. You are practicing for ecstasy.
Once we get better at believing several things at once, even when they seem to contradict each other, it’s a short and sweet step to letting go of our need to know anything at all.
Certainty is a trap, objectivity is a trap. How do we go about knowing what we think we know? We assume that we can readily tell which of our perceptions are subjective and which objective, but are we truly in no part subjective? We need to be willing to recognize that we can only see the world from our own point of view.
Dossie was fortunate enough to have this revelation at an early age:
Lost In the Great l-Don ‘t-Know
In the 1960s, I was a Utopian psychedelic activist. I believed that the universe, and our society, could be perfected – and somehow that possibility made me responsible for the job. In the idealistic omnipotence of my early twenties I castigated myself that I hadn’t figured out a way to fix all injustice, and solve the riddle of the cosmos.
Twenty-five years old, and a member in good standing of the love generation, I had been traveling inside my psyche for seven years, accruing wisdom along the way, and questing always for that defining revelation, the vision that would unriddle the universe and start me on my path toward healing the world. I yearned for enlightenment.
My daughter was an infant. I hadn’t tripped in quite a while, being first pregnant and then exhausted. But one fine sunny morning, a friend dropped by my house while the baby was taking her morning nap, bearing sugar cubes. In a totally against-character move (I was usually careful and planned trips well in advance), I spoke out: “Can I take two?” My roommates being free to care for the baby when she awoke, I sucked the sweetness and went traveling.
The rush was astonishing. I lay on my bed, no question of moving, I’d get vertigo from lifting my head. Everything was luminous: the sun pouring through the paisley bedspreads on the windows, the white sheets, the walls, my fingers. Looking at some messy paint on the side of my black dresser, I was instantly transported to the intergalactic void. I vaulted around in outer space for a while, looking for something to connect to, but everything was way too big. The distances, the speeds, these balls of frozen rock hurtling around, blinding nuclear fusions. How long would it take to hitchhike a light-year?
I got it. The universe was bigger than me. Lots bigger. Incomprehensibly bigger. And in my wanderings between the stars, nothing responded to me. The language of the stars was too huge, too fast, for my brain to apprehend. I felt like an ant.
Lost in the cosmos, feeling lonely and abandoned, I brought myself back to my body in my bed, sun still pouring in, though at a safer distance. In front of my eyes, walking on my white cotton sheet, was a tiny, nearly transparent spider. Her progress was unbearably slow and interrupted. Every few seconds, a piece of lint from my sheet would get stuck to one of her legs, and she would stop and painstakingly rub it off. With what seemed to me infinite patience, she would then continue her journey, only to pick up another piece of lint, stop, rub, a few more steps, more lint... Intent on her mysterious purpose, she progressed across my field of vision. I wondered what awareness she had of me, this tiny mind in a body smaller than the pupil of my eye that watched her. Was I as vast to her as the galaxy was to me?
I started laughing. What a fool I had been, a child in my twenties, to take on the job of solving the mystery of the universe. My brain, whose vastness I had only begun to explore, was still overwhelmingly too small to take in the cosmos. We were into mind expansion in those days, and I laughed like a maniac imagining stretching my brain out like a giant balloon, trying to fit it around the universe. I couldn’t reach around even one galaxy, not even a solar system. Earth herself was wondrously bigger than me.
“I quit! I resign!” I cried. What a divine joke! If anybody or anything was running this operation, he, she or it was welcome to the job. Swimming around in the galaxy again, I felt lost and lonely, so I flew back down to earth. My home planet was studded with glowing campfires, and around each campfire was a circle of people; dear, sweet, lovable people, doing what they could do to create warmth and light and meaning in the enormous emptiness.
I ran downstairs to share my revelations with my fellow communards and my baby. “I quit! I resign! I figured it out! The answer to the riddle of the universe is... I don’t know!”
As I came down from my grand journey, a lot of pieces about my life fell into place. I explained it all to my baby daughter, and she listened patiently, watching intently, it seemed to me, with her baby Buddha eyes. By now I wasn’t high any more, hours had passed, and I was in the resolution stages of my trip.
Many things fell into place for me when I let go of the notion that something was wrong with me because I didn’t know everything. I had explored my difficulties as illnesses with neo-Freudian shrinks, and been pathologized. I had sought healing from spiritual teachers who blamed my unhappiness on sin in this life or, if none could be found, I must have made some terrible error in a past life. All these attempts to make sense of my life had been predicated on the notion that something was wrong with me.
But wasn’t I, by and large, as good a human being as anyone else? I saw myself, along with the other people around the tribal fires in my vision, as a courageous pioneer, searching through the vastness, creating meaning in the sharing of love and support and warmth with other people.
I saw something else, with tremendous clarity, that I had never seen before. As I returned to a more normal state of consciousness, I realized that a lot of what I had blamed myself for added up to things that I had been taught were unwomanly: intelligence, outspokenness, overt desire for sex, valuing my own opinion, making my own decisions – not to mention my inexhaustible lust for chasing my own destiny. I had thought for so long that something was wrong with me because I didn’t fit into the role of nurturing wife and second fiddle, and found in myself no delight or fulfillment in the washing of everybody else’s socks.
This cosmic adventure made a feminist out of me at a time when feminism was considered pretty weird. In the aftermath of revelation, I vowed to learn to value all the parts of myself, especially those parts that I had reviled as too masculine. I vowed to grasp my life, full tilt boogie. I vowed to be androgynous. I vowed to embrace my sexuality. I vowed never to be monogamous again. I vowed to take my relationships with women, all my sisters, seriously, and to honor these connections, sexual or not. I vowed to remain unpartnered for five years so I could learn who I am when I’m not trying to be somebody’s wife.
My life plan was truly formed on that day. In the afterglow of the expanded mind, I was still thinking with luminous clarity. I saw that I needed to find myself as an independent person, and that I also needed affection and connection and love, and that there was no reason I couldn’t have all that at the same time. I vowed to find my security in my community, and in order to do that, to become a more affectionate and demonstrative person. To share intimacy generously, with my roommates, my friends and my lovers. I had work to do to reclaim myself, a lot of work, and what a blessing to have that glimpse of who I could be if I did the work.
It is now thirty-five years from that day; I am sixty years old; and all my visions have come true. I have been privileged to be part of a much larger movement, in feminism, in sexuality, in extended families, in queerness, in expanding definitions of self and relationships.
I notice, as I write down the early revelations that defined my life as an adult, that so much of what I needed to do was about letting go – of definitions, of roles, of tasks, of oughta-be. Letting go to open space for new ideas, new explorations – for could-be, might-be and wouldn’t-it-be-wonderful.
And now I get to write a book about this journey, and share it all with you.
In some belief systems, bad things happen to bad people in the afterlife; in others, in the next lifetime; in still others, here in this lifetime. These days, it seems common to hear people attribute difficulty in their lives to “karmic lessons,” implying that some intelligence, or law of nature, possibly divine, has made a plan to offer them exactly the adverse circumstances they need to learn what they need to learn.
We are, to put it mildly, skeptical. Do all the victims of an earthquake or a war or a plague need the same karmic lesson? Have they all called their fates to them by some need? Is everything painful that happens in our lives happening for a reason?
The two of us have discussed experiences we’ve had in our lives that we’ve valued, that we definitely would not want to have missed. Many of them, somewhat to our surprise, were painful losses, errors, illnesses, disasters: adverse events in our lives that somehow set us on a path that we valued.
Between us, we have survived physical and emotional abuse, the serious illnesses of a couple of our children, poverty, business disasters, losing houses, losing lovers and a lot of very hard times. These things have stretched us, taught us new things about ourselves; while we hated them a lot when they happened, we guess that we can accept them now as part of what has made us the strong women we are.
Happy, easy times don’t seem to stretch us very much. When things are going well, although we might very well be learning lots of important stuff, we don’t struggle, strive, stretch, push ourselves. Seems like the times when we discover our strengths are when we are battling with some adversity.
But we feel quite sure that none of this was planned. Troubles are opportunities, and tripping over some of them is inevitable in the world, and in the bodies that we inhabit in this life.
People want answers to the questions of Why? so intensely that they are willing to make them up. Things seem to us to fit together in the world because they grow into the spaces available. Plants need the sun to grow, but the sun doesn’t shine in order that the plants may grow, or that we should feel sunny, happy and safe. The sun shines because it is burning itself up in its own incalculably long lifespan.
So we believe that it is important to practice holding the blank, empty, painful space of what we don’t and perhaps can never know, and to stretch our ability to tolerate ambiguity. A lot of people are looking for answers. Sometimes it is important, and more truthful, to stay with the questions.
Traveling in the realms of transcendence is a goal that doesn’t match up well with the need to know it all, to be on top of things, to be in control. This is a lesson that most of us get to learn over and over – at least, we both do. The addiction to control sucks us in over and over again, and it’s a good thing that we have our wonderful friends, with their whips and ropes and their soft kisses, to coax us back out from the iron fingers of our control addiction from time to time. Even tops, who often become tops because they are eroticized to control, must have a clear understanding of what is theirs to control and what isn’t, and of the distinction between the fantasy of control and its reality – we’ll discuss this further in a later chapter.
Janet looks at boundaries and unboundedness:
Skin as a Meditation on Morality
Here’s a moment I like to remember. I was kneeling on the floor, bent over the edge of a bed. There was a clothespin on my clit. It had been there for quite a while. My lover was fucking me up the ass. Just as he came, he reached around, opened the clothespin, lifted it away from my sticky flesh.
The inside of my head went white. The next thing I can remember is that somehow I seemed to be holding all the bedclothes in my hands, and there seemed to be a very loud shriek echoing off all the walls.
What I love about that moment is its purity. I had no volition, no ego, no self. I was a tiny scrap of burning white energy floating in an infinitely huge universe, contained only by the intent of my lover.
It seems to me that the experience I’m trying so hard to describe in this book, whether you want to call it ecstasy or bliss or spirituality or transcendence or whatever, is always at some level about loss of self – about having the precious opportunity to forget, for just a little while, where I end and everything else begins.
Which brings me back again to the question of skin – the membrane that defines the boundary between what’s me and what’s everything else. Working on this book has brought me back again and again to the question of skin, and I’ve realized that at least for me, it’s a powerful metaphor.
For me right now, all of SM seems like an exploration of the nature of skin. When I beat you, I light up the nerves in your skin. When I put clamps on your skin, I compress its nerves and drive away the blood that feeds it, and when I take them off the blood comes back to heat up your skin and make you gasp. When I put you in bondage I have turned your skin to a rigid armor that holds you in place, and drawn your attention to the pressure of the ropes and cuffs against your skin, holding you in place when my hands can’t be there. (Is this, I wonder, why leather has become so important to SM – are we at some level recognizing the importance of skin to what we do?)
But here’s the real thing about skin, the important thing, the thing that’s about morality. Without our skin, we’d be part of everything, and everything would be part of us – so we’d never know what was ours to take care of, and what wasn’t. That’s what my skin does: it reminds me what’s mine to control, and what isn’t. Skin is my karmic job description.
Now, I have a friend right now who is receiving proof every hour that even inside his skin he doesn’t get to control things all that much - millions of cells are dancing an arrogant square-dance inside his skin, propagating and multiplying, sticking their little cellular tongues out at radiation and chemotherapy. But at least, I think, he gets to try to control what’s going on inside the pink membrane, the bag that we’re given for carrying our groceries.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book, I have a tendency to try to control a lot of things. I think of myself as good at controlling things, and I’m pretty sure that the world would be a much better place if they just let me run it. I make myself pretty crazy trying to control more than I really can or should. So it’s probably a very good thing that I have this soft chamois bubble around me to remind me exactly where my control stops.
Sure, there are lots of things outside my skin I get to influence— but anytime I get to thinking I’m in control of anything outside my epidermis, it’s time for me to take a deep breath and start letting go. Letting go, letting go, letting go. Remember, goddammit, Hardy, letting go.
And then, when policing that boundary begins to feel like too much effort, I can free up my heart, open my throat to scream, may be ask a good friend to pull a clothespin off my clit at just the right moment, and float skinless, a burning scrap of energy, boundless through the universe, for just a little while once again.
Now that we’ve finished explaining to you all the beliefs we don’t have, all the knowledge we refuse to know, all the causes we refuse to ascribe and all the control we’re struggling to let go of, it may surprise you to hear that all this non-ownership does add up to something resembling philosophies of life. Although Dossie’s and Janet’s philosophies sound very different; we manage to fit together very well: different metaphors, same cosmos.
Here’s Dossie’s description of how she sees the world.
The universe is bigger than all of us. Divinity, if that’s what we can call the energy of the cosmos, is infinite, eternal, or at least so much more vast than our consciousness can comprehend that it might as well be. Longer than we will ever know, bigger than we can see or imagine. When I need a reminder, I like to hang out with redwood trees: they are also way bigger than I can really get. We operate on finite brains, and there is no way we know what God looks like.
Understanding that the universe is bigger than me offers me infinite opportunities for becoming a bigger person, possibilities for growth beyond what I can imagine today. It unbounds me. Acceptance of the ultimate unknowability of everything frees me: it releases me from feeling responsible for controlling what I can’t.
I feel from my experiences that the divine energy of the cosmos, God if you will, or the tao, or kundalini, or eros, or the force – whatever you like to call it – flows through each of us all the time. That’s why I like names like “life force” or “the Way” to describe that mysterious energy that makes us living beings rather than hunks of meat. So if this animating energy flows through all of us all the time, and if that is what divinity is, then the only question becomes, why are we so seldom aware of this?
For most of us, everyday consciousness is focused on the tasks of life: working, walking, eating, communicating. Divinity is flowing through us, yes, but we aren’t paying attention. Spiritual practice and religious participation are among the huge number of ways that we set ourselves up to pay attention to the divine.
In 1 962, when I was first living on my own at the age of eighteen, I heard something that changed my life, from a guy I met in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Listening to my struggles to find a spiritual belief I could live with, he said: “Everything changes if you see God as a woman.” Here I was struggling with a god of wrath when I could relate to a goddess of compassion, of flowering and fruitful earth, of unconditional love. Something like a huge array of dominos went down, and everything, indeed, changed.
Because I got to choose. God, like the redwood tree, like the universe, obviously must be way much more than some grandfatherly guy with superpowers. So I don’t really know at all what God looks like. If you like to anthropomorphize the divine, if it works for you to focus on the ineffable by personifying it, then remember that you get to choose the form. I get to envision God or Goddess however it works for me at any given moment in time. Mother, crone, warrior, dancer, healer: the pantheons supply us with imagery, mental pictures we can imagine when we want to connect to any aspect of the divine, something we can talk with, ask questions of, pray to. Many of the world’s religions have a concept of an unknowable god, eternal, infinite, too big for us to grasp, and then a pantheon of lesser deities, envisioned as more or less human: saints, angels, elves, fairies, orishas, ancestor spirits, nature sprites, divinity on a human scale.
So to my mind, all religions are valid insofar as they supply ways for their members to experience and realize the divinity that flows through all of us. And it doesn’t matter if you imagine divine force flooding up from inside you, or pouring into you from above or below. It’s really all the same thing. Spiritual practice, religious ritual, high-consciousness sex: all ways of paying attention.
I have always been drawn to embodied spiritual practices, and indeed, that’s what this book is about. Embodied means occurring in the body, felt in the body, enacted with the body. Practices that move our attention through our bodies on a path to open our awareness to the divine.
Examples of embodied spiritual practice include gospel churches, where the devout sing and dance quite vigorously to raise the spirit. Hatha yoga stretches the body to open a clear relaxed channel. Sufi dancers spin and twirl, using the disorientation of turning and the focus required to remain upright, as the path they follow to wake up to the life force within. Prana, following the breath that flows in and out of each of us in turn, chanting and devotional singing, are yet more ways of moving energy in the body. Medieval flagellants, Hindu saddhus, modern flagellants in the Philippines, Native American piercing rites, ancient and modern practices of scarification: yet more embodied spiritual practices, these last involving sensations of pain designed to alter our states of consciousness and wake us up to the glorious flow of the life force inside us.
We perverts are not without precedents.
And Janet’s:
Yesterday I spent the day having astonishing sex. It’s only been hours, but the memory of sex is ephemeral, so all I remember now is flashes: clamping my hand across a mouth so I could feel the scream against my palm; pushing my left fist up against a perineum and my right hand flat against a belly, and feeling the bolt of electricity that threw my head back and rattled my teeth like an old-time preacher baptizing a child; the trembling of my knees as I fought to keep my legs open for whatever might happen between them next.
Today I am in an airplane, somewhere over Nebraska, I think. I have spent the day showing my passport to strangers, buying expensive snacks in airport gift shops, wrestling my overweight suitcase onto conveyor belts, reading glossy magazines with far more attention than they deserve.
Ever since Dossie and I started this book, I’ve been arm-wrestling with the question of spirituality, and the back of my hand seems to be nearing the table. The things that other people describe as spiritual experiences are things that I’ve experienced too: the still majesty of nature, the heart-stopping love that is parenthood, the miracle of seeing my own muscles and tendons rise and fall under my skin as I wiggle my fingers – my god, all I have to do is think about moving my body and it moves, just like that.
So I guess it was spirituality – the magic that vibrated my palm, that threw my head back, that shook my waiting knees. It was something, anyway. It felt to me like any other kind of energy – like electricity, or light, or heat: physical, concrete, measurable. It’s hard to talk about it much because everything I say sounds so vague and woo-woo – even the word “energy” sounds ridiculously inadequate, a groovy holdover from a less left-brained era. But if I’d been around in the 14th century, and I’d been able to perceive radio waves with my own body and had tried to describe what I was feeling, I’m sure it would have sounded equally ridiculous. Given a choice between sounding stupid and denying my own perceptions, I guess I have to choose the former.
But what I don’t get, can’t get, is what’s so especially spiritual about that particular energy. It’s certainly one of the great mysteries that holds the universe together, that connects me with friends and strangers and animals and plants and rocks. But so is the $5 I handed across the counter for a copy of Premiere a couple of hours ago. So is the bag of pretzels I ate, and so are the crystals of salt at the bottom I moisten my finger to pick up and lick off. I can’t understand why my hands dancing across this keyboard can be a spiritual experience and the silicon and plastic and metal they’re tapping can’t.
The phrase “sacred sex” makes a certain amount of sense to me, and heaven knows we need it after a couple of millennia of being told that sex is a dirty hellbound sin. But I just can’t work out a schema in which sex is sacred and choosing new tires for my car isn’t.
What is sacred, I think, is attention. If I’d had my mind totally focused on my clit yesterday, I’d have missed the moment when the power ripped up from my friend’s asshole into my right arm, across my chest, back down my left arm, into her belly, and round and round like a dazzling pinwheel of light. If all I can think about is how much money there is in my checking account and whether the $200 tire will last twice as long as the $100 one, I miss the astonishing realization that the tread under my hand passed through the rain forest and the steel mill and the conference room of a Madison Avenue ad agency and the shipping department of Costco; and that handing my credit card to the clerk has connected me with hundreds of people I’ll never meet, with trees I can’t climb and a factory whose workings I don’t begin to understand; and that I breathed in molecules from those people’s skin and oxygen exhaled by those trees and pollution floating in the air from that factory before I ever considered buying the tires.
It is with some reluctance – well, kicking and screaming, honestly – that I’ve come to conclude that the energy, or kundalini, or life force, or whatever it is we are writing about in this book, is absolutely real: when something lifts me off the floor and slams me against a wall, that’s evidence enough for me. But nothing about it strikes me as particularly “spiritual.” To me, it’s a physical energy, just like electricity: a form of energy that we don’t have the right instruments to measure yet.
Now if that’s spiritual, then everything is spiritual. And, yeah, of course everything is spiritual, but used that way the word has no meaning – when I look up a word in the dictionary, I like to find a more precise definition than “See also: all the other words in the dictionary” – so we’re back to the beginning.
Sex, because it feels so very good, is easier to pay attention to than hooking the back of my bra every morning: may be that’s why we call it sacred. But I think sacred sex is simply practice – a way of practicing to notice sacred everything.
1 Adapted from Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, Ed. Jess Stein, Random House, New York, 1971, and from Ehe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Wm. Morris, Ed., Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston, 1981.)