Reflection on three limit-experiences…

A good Anus reflects on the meaning of life from time to time. It looks back on cherished experiences, takes stock, and tries to come to terms with its own mortality. After all, Ernst Becker points out we are gods with anuses; that with anal play a child becomes a philosopher of the human condition.

In other words, for all our nobility, divinity, and soulful aspirations, at the end of the day, we eat and shit, and since we eat and shit, our souls are irrevocably tied to our bodies. The Anus respects that, and as it happens, three of the most meaningful experiences in his life occurred when the barrier between him and the world dissolved, and they did this through the vehicle of his body.

Let me recount them, in order of appearance…

When he was about twenty, this Anus had a mentor-friend who taught him to meditate. One Easter Sunday, we were walking in the woods, and we came upon a tiny pond; the frogs had just emerged, and they were singing. Gerard, the mentor, suggested we mediate there. We were halfway through the walk, so we still had plenty of time.

At first, when we arrived at the edge, the frogs had receded and stopped singing. I walked out onto a log that descended to the center of the pond; Gerard stayed on the embankment, next to the roots. We relaxed. We breathed. We went into ourselves, like he’d taught me.

And then something happened: the frogs started singing again, indifferently, at first, a few here and there, but as I went deeper into myself, the barrier between me and my surroundings began to disappear, and their song began to rise and rise, in a crescendo, and I — if a blended sensuous consciousness filled with singing can even be called an “I” — was swept up into their chorus, more and more, the deeper into myself I went and the less of myself there was.

The experience was ecstatic, like a natural communication with these singing frogs, through the total absence of thought and the sole presence of breath. But just as consciousness was about to become nothing but breath and sound, it became too much for me, like I was losing myself in it.

I froze my breath and engaged a thought, disengaging from them — and they stopped, instantly.

Living silence, nothing else.

Now, I hadn’t moved a muscle, I swear; they just stopped when I disengaged from them, from inside myself, what was left of it (the feeling I was about to disappear totally is why I broke away).

Gerard exhaled deeply, and I left my log. We walked the rest of the way home in silence.

The second time something like this happened was around two years later, at twenty two. I had bought a wetsuit, and I got it into my head to swim across a lake I’d swam before, in March. It was cold, of course, but the suit soon took care of that, so I started across.

Halfway there, the suit gave out, and I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I wasn’t going to make it back, either, it being halfway there. I started to worry. My muscles were locking up; fear seized me from below. At first I started hyperventilating, making me even more lightheaded; then real, gut-wrenching fear set in. I weakly called for help, then louder, desperate, but the nearest boat was a dot in my field of view, and with an electric motor, I knew it wouldn’t get there in time.

I started losing focus, flailing now, in the full grip of a welling, building panic, lost to myself, taking in water, now just a locus of terror.

And then it happened: this voice. Not my own, to myself, not even that metaphorical, internalized voice of a father or mother that tells you you’ve done something right or wrong. Yet, it was mine and not mine, and it said to me as though I was saying it to myself, without knowing how or from whom or from where: “if you panic, you will die.”

And I listened. It was a firm other-worldly voice, deliberate and decisive, neither warm nor cold but reassuring in some way, without intending to be. It just stated the situation like it was, and I said to myself, in my own voice this time, to myself, who was returning, “If I panic, I’ll drown.”

My voice was terrified, urgent, but as it dawned on me that mine mirrored that firm, unbeckoned voice, I finished with the only conclusion that could save my life: “If I don’t want to drown, I better stop panicking.”

So I did. Just. Like. That. I stopped, assessed and without thinking turned and started swimming, slowly and mechanically, overhead stroke, at first, then into breast stroke, from exhaustion, and then to doggy paddle, beyond exhaustion, and eventually into whatever cataleptic fits and jerks moved me one more inch forward, painfully, gasping, throat raw, lungs about to explode, barely conscious, barely breathing anymore, all time gone, inch by agonizing inch until even the agony was gone, barely alert now — until my feet hit the bottom and I could slowly stagger up the back, walking like the dead.

Just as I fell to my hands and knees, crouched in the cold mud, forehead down, in it, panting, gasping, barely conscious and hardly breathing anymore, my rescuer pulled up.

I don’t remember much about what followed. I remember his voice sounded infinitely remote, as from another world, and I recall standing up and staggering along the bank, as though to go around the lake (it had to be miles), vaguely aware of and indifferent to the broken reeds mangling my bare feet, as they sank into the mud. He asked me several times if I wanted a ride back, as he followed me, until the concern in his voice broke through my wraithlike stare and brought me back to the world of the living.

I distinctly remember the shocked, startled look on his face when I turned to him and weakly muttered “Yes, thanks.”

Somehow I made it home. In the shower, as the warm water washed over me and the mud and blood and grime went down the drain, the memory of his concerned voice opened the deep wells of fear still holding me together, and I fell shivering to the fetal position on the tile, vomiting, until it all washed away and I was myself again, warm in bed.

The third time I lost myself in an experience before finding it again happened two years after that, at university, during the summer, during one of my swimming workouts. I worked in an office from 8:30–5:00, and to break up the tension from sitting all day, I took to the pool, a friend of mine having recently shown me the proper freestyle stroke.

By this point, I could swim a mile, and near the end of this particular workout, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, something clicked and said there was an experience to be had, the longer I held my breath and swam in between them. I have no earthly idea why the tension of oxygen deprivation during strenuous activity intimated pleasure of some kind — who thinks suffocation is fun! — but nonetheless, to end the workout, I extended the number of strokes I took in between breaths, even as I shortened each breath.

It started with three, then four, then five, then six to nine, and by this point it felt like my pounding head would explode and my empty lungs would collapse, but an erotic tension was building, and at ten, something broke. Right at the tenth stroke and the promised breath my body longed for more than anything it’s ever longed for, the barriers between myself and the world dissolved, and I — if a sensuous consciousness slipping ecstatically through the water can be called an “I” — became ‘all’ world and light and water, and ‘no’ self.

Time paused. Effort so merged into result no space for reflection opened. Weightless in the water, buoyant, gliding, I finished another ten or so laps in pure, open, ecstatic bliss, ending only when it dawned on me — what was left of me, that is, a voice, softer than but remote like before: it has to end at some point, so it might as well be now, not at its dissolution.

Such was the gratitude for the grace that offered the most contented interlude of my life. Why be greedy all the way to its end…?

What, you may ask, can these three experiences possibly have in common? How can losing oneself in communion with nature, terror at drowning, and bliss in swimming be in any way alike?

The Anus has recently asked himself just that, as these experiences have poignantly returned to mind, with recent events.

Here are his reflections, approached through a question…

How would any of these limit experiences have been different, had they involved a person — not just any person, but a person one loves? Or, absent love, per se, someone one nevertheless trusts, however temporary or artificial the situation? What would the ecstatic openness created by a dissolved barrier be like in embodied intimacy, not just physical experience?

The Anus suspects that deep inside us, there is the capacity to dissolve the barriers erected between us and the world, and that we long to do so. It may be before nature, or others, or even, paradoxically, ourselves. To let those barriers go; to have them fall away — that is the thing, at once most desirable and most difficult. In his three experiences, the distinction between ‘him’ and ‘the world’ became indistinct, and in place of a reflective awareness emerged an ecstatic consciousness, open within experience, with nary a self to show for it.

As each experience shows, the self, however, was always on the horizon; it was never fully eclipsed. It had only receded. In one case, it lingered on the fringe of the terror and came back to confront it. In another, it lingered on the edge the bliss and came back to end it. In one case, fear of its total remission prevented the self from ever fully leaving.

These experiences, he notes, were all solitary…!

The Anus wonders what they would have been like, what the type might be like, in the presence of another, someone in the same state, on the other side of a dissolved barrier. One might find this in physical intimacy, most readily in love, but equally, he thinks, in limit experiences of trust and mutuality. Equally in profound moments of friendship. Even therapists and clients can hopefully pull them off.

In any case, the Anus realized in these experiences, the self would not want to leave, and he suspects that much confusion in sexual love comes from a longing for an impossible intimacy, when it does — that is, an experience of euphoria comparable to solitary communion, terror or bliss. It may even be, he thinks, that in the presence of another the self most emerges when the barrier dissolves — not retreats, as it must, with fear, bliss or nature, the latter being forever alien to us, no matter how bound to and one with it we feel.

No, the Anus likes the idea we are alone in our deepest places, until human voices wake us, and the trick, he finds, is to meet the speaker at a broken down barrier, before drowning in unmet expectations and impossible longings.

Unlike the three limit experiences he described, that meeting builds a connection far happier than solitary swimming and far more terrifying than nearly drowning ever deliver…