**  

J. G. Liddy, "Is Joe Dense? A Case Study Analysis of Personal Identity,"

Personasophical Studies 4 (1998): 327-409

ORGASM

*

Chapter 7. passion

bringing it all back home

*

X wants me to be there, beside him

while leaving him free a little;

flexible, going away occasionally,

but not far: on the one hand, I

must be present as a prohibition

(without which there would not be

the right desire), but also I must

go away the moment when, this desire

having formed, I might be in its way:

I must be the Mother who loves

enough (protective and generous),

around whom the child plays, while

she peacefully knits or sews. This

would be the structure of the

"successful" couple: a little prohibition,

a good deal of play; to designate desire

and then to leave it alone, like those

obliging natives who show you the path

but don't insist on accompanying you

on your way.

Roland Barthes

A Lover's Discourse

*

First there is a mountain, then no mountain; then there is.

In meditation we begin with separation. I am me

and you are you. This is my breath, yours is elsewhere.

The beginning of my inbreath, the middle, then the end.

The beginning of my outbreath, the middle, then the end.

It is work. We have to build walls to close ourselves off from

the world. Thoughts and feelings are distractionsthat must be eliminated. Cutting right

back to the breath.Then boundaries begin to break down. For something there is that does

not love a wall, that wants

it down. The ego starts to

reveal its innate permeablility. Where do I start?

Where

do you leave off? Mountains overlap with, and dissolve

into, rivers. I discover that I cannot isolate myself

from my world. We let things return to preexisting states

knowing that everything is connected. This knowledge is heavenly,

hell being that place where nothing connects. I am still me

and you are still you, but now I know intimacy. I honor

the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.

I honor that place in you where if you are in that place

in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.

I and you and we no longer need to make thoughts or emotions

our enemy but can make use of all aspects of selves to build

sacred spaces. I no longer have to push away disappointment.

I can use it to develop tolerance. The separation I perceive

does not obscure firsthand knowledge of underlying connections.

This is the transformation of daily life, the Hegelian aufgeheben,

as ordinary experience is recast in the form of a mandala.

I am talking about how to think about understanding the relation

between extraordinary meditative experiences and real life.

We thought at first we had to be a Buddha. We had to say "No!"

We had to renounce everything in order to find ourselves.

And yes! Indeed: a willingness to renounce the search for pleasure

is a fundamental aspect of Buddhism. But then we see the problem

is deeper: the problem is holding on to pleasure and it

(the problem) is pushing pain away (the problem is not the

reality of pleasure and pain itself). We begin to see

how it is possible to practice in the midst of daily

life. Renunciation is not so compelling when we appreciate

how truly impossible it is to renounce any aspect of an

interdependent world. The field of meditation then opens

its arms to the whole wide world of life. The passions that once

threatened the meditative stability we worked so hard to gain

now --these very passions! --become special opportunities for self

discovery. And then we bring the lessons of meditation back to

daily life. This unity lies at the heart

of the most beautiful and enduring visual

symbol of Buddhism:

the mandala.

A mandala is a sacred

circle, a model or image of an enlightened being or representation

of a pure and undistracted mind. At the center sits a single

Buddha figure in meditation, or sometimes it is a human couple in a passionate

embrace!

It can be used as an object of meditation or to encapsule

teachings. It is a depiction of liberation and bliss "by an

inividual fully integrated with his or her environment and field

of associates" -- a description how it is possible to remake

our environments; how to see the everyday world through the joy

of realization; a tangible demonstration that this world is filled

with the wholeness we seek. Each of us is already the mandala

of our own liberation.

How often the center is an entwined couple!

There are several meanings for this. The couple copulates for us

to represent the union of form and emptiness,--this part sounds

really good; I wish there were pitcures put in to illusrteate

the positions--;  

the fusion of love and wisdom in the awakened mind.

On another level they refer to

the ordinary bliss of seeing, looking, liking, flirting, smiling,

fantasizing, dancing, touching, embracing, fucking, coming,

holding, coming! coming!! coming!!! the bliss of orgasm

which in Tibetan Buddhism is extolled as a window into the

fundamental mind of pure being!

In orgasm, it is taught, we surely

are free for a moment of habitual patterns of thought and action.

There are even advanced meditation practices that use sexual bliss

as a vehicle for opening the mind. There are important parallels

between meditation and relationships. Happiness in an intimate

relationship depends on the capacity to bear a great deal of

disappointment.

The lover who just moments ago gave us such pleasure

inevitably will disappoint us, just as our parents once

did. But the mind is capable of tolerance. As in relationships,

in meditation we can have experiences of profound harmony. And

the impulse in the beginning is to try to stop all thoughts and

disturbing emotions, just as the impulse when falling in love is

to try to preserve the harmony with one's lover. But stopping

thoughts

is no more possible than having a relationship without

conflict. The frustration one feels with one's lover

is mirrored by the frustration that many meditators feel with

their own minds. In both cases, the most difficult thoughts

and feelings are those involving the mix of desire and aggression.

The mandala is supposed to be a sacred space that is

undisturbed by distracting emotions.

But how could it be possible to create such

space? Beginning meditation instructions usually teach the value

of subduing disturbances and quieting the mind. Entering the

mandala means finding another way. With enough practice in

meditation we learn how to let disturbances come and go, turning

them from obstacles into more grist for the mill. This is the key

to the mandala. When we learn to let emotions like anger rise

and fall on their own, instead of struggling to get rid of them,

we can deepen our practice and enhance our capacities

for relationship and passionate engagement. If we are unwilling

to make room for our most unruly feelings, we must shut ourselves

down instead. The ability not to be unnerved by such powerful

emotions is related to the capacity to be alone. I have learned

from my patients that people who are least secure about being

alone also have the most trouble with the pressures of intimacy.

They seem to view the elimination of separation as the desirable

goal of a relationship, just as many people engaged in meditation

see the elimination of disturbing emotions as the very pinnacle

of spiritual understanding. Yet this is a recipe for disaster.

The mandala implies that all of our experience can be

enlightening.

In mixing desire and aggression, it suggests one need neither

eliminate nor be controlled by passions.

To understand this promise, we need to know

more about the central couple. The sexual yoga

with which they play enables them to harness their passion,

converting the familiar energy of doing into the more subtle, more

powerful, more enlightening energy of being. Sexual attraction and

interaction is a vivid model for the spiritual journey.

The imagery also reminds me how much is lost

when sex's spiritual dimension is neglected.

Our culture is in danger of losing sex's spiritual

dimension, even with all our freedom and supposed uninhibitedness.

One who is sexually abused or degraded in her early sexual

encounters has trouble opening up to the potentially transcendent

nature of sexual intimacy. So too our culture, with its aggressive

promulgation of sexuality, has difficulty cultivating the more

subtle yet powerful energy of passionate intimacy. Falling in love

is a mystical time of ego dissolution, as even Freud recognized,

yet we have had trouble appreciating how exalted is this state.

The practice of sexual tantra rests upon the idea that clinging

is as much a problem in lovemaking as in the rest of life. For sex

to be deeply satisfying, clinging to familiar experiences must

yield to the unknowability and separateness of the loved partner!

The awe and appreciation then can complement

pleasure and release, and this combination characterizes

the best sex. Being separate and being

together cease to be mutually exclusive.

There is wisdom in this state, not only raw instinct. Our instincts about sex fail

to lead us most directly to the wisdom. The Tibetan traditions of

sexual tantra, cloaked in secrecy for centuries, offer guidelines

for reversing our standard sexual conventions. The male partner

is encouraged to admit his dependence upon his lover. He

continually subordinates his need or instinct to dominate or

control, and he develops a reverent attitude toward the woman's

unfathomable arousal. "Her lap is the sacrificial altar, her hair,

the sacrificial grass." Lovers are taught to breathe their genital

feelings into their upper bodies, through their hearts, throats,

heads, dispersing sexual arousal throughout the body and mind

instead of localizing it in the genitals. The intertwined couple

are taught to spin a mandala palace of great bliss and intricacy,

like artists collaborating on a work of complex beauty.

In orgasm

the man is urged to absorb the female sexual secretion. Reversing

instinctual patterns in which the man ejaculates into the woman,

the lovers are taught to do something different, to rest instead,

relax in the female reponse. No longer responsible for "giving"

his partner an orgasm, the man simply becomes part of it. While

turning his own organs and fluids into offerings, the man receives

the mysterious female essence as the culmination of the sexual act.

Drinking this nectar of pure being, couples are able to realize

the union of bliss and emptiness. "This is the best diet, eaten by

all Buddhas," reads the Candamaharosana Tantra. The sexual tantras

affirm the more traditional view of meditation, painting it with

a different brush. Our habits and instincts obscure the underlying

reality, they suggest. Most couples engage in sex without realizing

how much more subtle and all-pervasive their pleasure could be. So

also do we go through our lives without experiencing so much of

the joy available through the simple nonactivity of being. Sexual

yogis learn to stop doing, the male defying instinct to make

himself into an offering so that he can appreciate the profundity

of his partner's arousal. So too can we learn how to stop proving

ourselves and surrender to the more magnificent world in which we

live. The uncensored use of sexual imagery in the center of the

mandala drives home the message: reinvigorate daily life with the

wisdom of meditation! All of the passions can be transformed! Do

not separate your intimate emotional life from your spiritual life!

I work as a therapist. I talk often with people who come to me

with difficulties in relationships.

I often am struck by how useful the mandala

imagery can be in working through difficulties.

The key always is finding a new way to deal with them.

The rituals and art

of Tibetan Buddhism help. Richard Kohn

found that some mandalas and temples share

a surprising feature.

On the periphery of

the inner circle, there are doorways that represent

the transition

points between unenlightened and enlightened states of mind.

Animal-headed goddesses

guard these entrances. What are they doing? They strike

sexually provocative poses. What do they represent? Buddhists on

the Tibetan plateau one thousand years ago may have been saying

something about what it takes to awaken the mind. What were they

saying? With voluptuous female bodies and heads of birds or beasts

of prey, they represent transitional figures, neither human nor

animal, neither sacred nor profane.

Sexual, aggressive,

each figure held four implements

symbolizing the meditator

being seduced, overcome:

a hook that draws in, a lasso that ties up,

a chain that binds, and a maddening bell. These represent ritual acts:

summoning, tying, binding, and intoxicating. There is a double

meaning. The meditator must tame passion yet be tamed by it. He

must invoke the deity with whom he wishes to merge yet also be

overcome by her. He must "pass through" the difficult emotions

that could be provoked by an animal-headed goddess.

These figures

came to mind when working with

a 38 year-old artist named Joe.

Joe despaired of ever being able to marry

his current girlfriend. Appealing and accomplished,

with a long history of emotionally engaged relationships

that had yielded much

exaltation and much sorrow,

Joe had come to a point where he knew

too much about himself to enter into a new

relationship without already seeing the seeds

of his own discontent. A passionate lover and

devotee of female beauty and charm, Joe was never happier than

when caught up in the excitement of a

new relationship. But when the relationship stopped being perfect,

when his partner lost her temper once too often,

became emotionally unavailable,

showed selfishness or immaturity,

or became less than totally admiring,

Joe would become so frustrated and angry that he would turn from

a sensitive lover into a teasing

older brother and gradually

undermine the trust of the relationship. Enraged and resentful

at his lover's withholding, Joe found it impossible to maintain

his passion for her. His aggression led him to become sexually

frustrated and demanding

instead of energized and appreciative.

His relationships collapsed

under the weight of his own outrage,

and he remained frustratingly disoriented

within the labyrinth of his own passions.

His current relationship seemed to be following just such

a scenario. Joe was having trouble getting through the door of his

own mandala. 

He was being obstructed by his anger.

He had not yet found a way of using his passion

to tame his anger, nor was he able to subvert

his resentment into the cause of desire.

The animal-headed goddesses

were emblematic of a transformation

Joe had not figured out.

As transition figures from outside

the mandala to the inside,

they symbolized the possibility of using anger

to find bliss. But for Joe, they were still blocking access to the central

couple. The peripheral phenomena of the mandala unfolds from the

center, as petals grow from the interior of a flower. The center

represents the purest and most concentrated version of the energy

of the mandala, yet the outer phenomena carry the seeds of that

purity. The animal-headed goddesses embody both the seductive

and the aggressive energy needed for the passionof the central

couple. To reach the center,

one had first to become the periphery.

Joe was having trouble tapping this energy. He could not locate

the goddess, nor could he become her. He was locked into anger

and resentment. He could not see that behind that anger lay desire

for the very women by whom he felt betrayed.

"Polymorphous perversive infantile sexuality"

is the most important missing

ingredient in an otherwise satisfactory

but sexually uninvigorating relationship.

An old concept in psycholanalysis,

used to describe the early sexualized behavior

of young children, Otto Kernberg applied it to adults too,

talking specifically about aggressive

components of sexual excitement. This is what Joe needed help in

permitting.

By becoming locked into his anger, Joe became

stuck in it. He needed to "recruit aggression in the service

of love." He needed to stay fluid enough in his responses to blend

his anger into his desire. He kept the two emotions separate, and

he isolated himself as a result.

In sex the frustration of separation

can be calmed. The resentments of disappointment can

be drowned. The most primitive instincts, the impulses that are

taboo, can be acted out in the pursuit of union: sucking, biting,

teasing, prohibiting, surrendering. Just as a child needs her fears

held and calmed in her mother's understanding, so too a lover

needs her clamor for reunion contained by a passionate response.

Passion is a vehicle for containing the incendiary mix of anger

and desire. Anger loses its aversive quality and becomes raw

excitement. As lovers attack each other's boundaries and yield

to each other's desire, they enter a territory in which emotions

of separateness pulse as one. I see the lovers at the heart

of the mandala. They embody mature sexual love that is able to fuse

tenderness, passion, love, and erotic desire. For the Buddhists

on the Tibetan plateau, I know that they symbolized a more general

capacity to bring the bliss of orgasm to bear on the everyday

world. Joe was able to achieve neither because of his inability

to get through the outer doorway.

Joe could not approach

the copulating figures at the center without stumbling over his own

resentment. The metaphoric goddesses were not letting him pass.

I never talked with Joe about these images. Yet I did focus

attention on his anger and resentment. For Joe was letting his

anger get in the way of his ultimate satisfaction. He was using

it as a reason to avoid marriage. The mandala principle suggests

this is unnecessary. Joe needs to learn a new way of relating

to his angry responses. Joe grew up secretly vowing never to

yield to a woman's power. He

wanted at all costs, he would say, to avoid appearing weak

or dependent. There is no way to experience desire, however,

without yielding some amount of control. By its very nature,

desire affirms that the loved person is just slightly out of

reach and that we need them. Most of us have had the experience

of too much availability diminishing desire. For Joe, this was

a big problem.

He found that he unconsciously resented whomever

he was most attracted to because of the power that his desire

conferred on them. He envied their ability to tempt him. When

they disappointed him, which was virtually inevitable, his

resentment would flower into rage and he would become self-

righteous or spiteful. He was so vigilant in avoiding dependency

that he never learned how to work

with these emotions.

Complicating this picture, Joe started to see, was the fact that he chose

girlfriends who became frightened and withdrawn when confronted

by his rage. These women, who had,

as a rule, grown up in repressed households

with very little display of aggression,

were unable to help Joe with his anger

because they were so intimidated by it.

They could not be his goddess

at the doorway, summoning, tying,

binding, and intoxicating Joe's aggression. Joe's compromise was

to favor relationships that hinged on his being admired, but that

did not involve much in the way of reciprocity. Joe could be at

the center of the mandala by himself but not with another. So Joe

could not make use of the anger and resentment inevitably shadowing

his desire. As we talked about this,

I began to see that Joe feared

that his anger would destroy his girlfriend.

He was withdrawing, not just out of frustration,

but out of fear that she could not tolerate

how bad he was.

This led him to withhold his aggression

in sex so that together

they did not get the chance to transmute anger

through passion. Joe did not have faith in his girlfriend's love

for him. He did not believe that her love could survive his

aggression. But he was not giving her a chance! In his desire

to avoid such a confrontation, Joe attempted to control his lover.

He wanted everything to be perfect in his relationship, he withdrew

when it could not be perfect. In order for Joe actually to

enter the center of the mandala, he had first to learn how to work

with the disturbing feelings aroused by his lover's autonomy. In

writing about mature sexual love,

Kernberg highlighted the capacity to tolerate

one's lover's being separate.

"The beloved presents himself or herself simultaneously

as a body which can be penetrated

and a consciousness which is impenetrable." The rock band

Nine Inch Nails sing

a song that sounds vulgar, since they keep repeating

"I want to f*k you like an animal!"

again and again and again, until in the end they conclude,

"it brings me closer to God." The song is called "Closer."

There is always separation even in the

most profound union. "Love is the revelation

of the other person's freedom." This revelation is almost always

painful because it confronts our most possessive desires. A mind

rises up and rebels at an unskillful attempt

to subdue it in meditation.

So also a relationship will fall apart if the partners

are not respectful of each other's differences. No matter how

much we yearn for complete attunement, this is not what we need.

Just as a young child needs to be left on her own in the presence

of her mother, so that she can discover

her own vast unknowability, so too we continue

to need that freedom to be alone

in the midst of intimacy. It is that continuing

unknowability that fuels intimacy.

There can be intense pressure in a couple

to override differences and eliminate separateness,

the insistence on complete

attunement has a suffocating effect.

Attraction is based in otherness and difference as much

as recurrent harmony

and satisfaction. Separateness and connection make each other

possible. They are not mutually exclusive. One recoils from the

revelation of one's lover's freedom, as does Joe. We are like

Freud's friends shrinking from the terrifying transitoriness

of the flower's bloom. Joe insists on holding on. Or Joe simply

withdraws, abiding in the familiar delusion of premature closure,

instead of trusting our love's ability constantly to reassert itself. Indeed

at the heart of Joe’s familiar delusion of premature closure is

his clinging to a sense of density but Joe isnot dense,

where not being dense means there is nothing about Joe

that involves anything like an unchanging, simple soul--:

what makes a relationship as much a spiritual

teaching as traditional forms of meditation. Both confront Joe

with his refusal to let go, and with his expectations about how

things are supposed to be. Both demand the confidence that we will

survive our own worst impulses. Both reveal the essential

unknowability and nondensity of self and other

while providing a means to

revel in it.

In his actual discussions and arguments

about the normative ramifications of

really giving up belief in souls

(let us call these ramifications "the Rams") Parfit focusses on

(A) potentialincreased separation within the life of a single person

rather than

(B)decreased separation between distinct people.

That is to say, Parfit took the A Train.

Let me explain this "trains" idea (Derek-- do you think I should keep this in the final version??)

Perhaps the effect would be small. Maybe the shifts

would help

us abandon feelings of separation and alienation from

each other and indeed to bridge a similar

detachment from our own

emotional states such as

anger and desire. We might both find ourselves more

completely involved with both our lovers and our own

emotions, while also, amazingly, finding new freedoms

at the same time. This is what the goddesses represent.

The goddesses at the doorway of the mandala teach

us about harnessing primitive aggression and frustration in the

service of passion and appreciation. "It is not such a long

stretch from disappointment to empathy."

Can we allow the feelings of outrage

and envy that are the inevitable consequence of our lover's

freedom to serve our relationships? Tantric Buddhism makes

liberal use of sexual metaphors because the methods employed

in passion and in meditation to convert disappointment to

empathy are so similar. Rather than treating such feelings as

enemies to be defeated, both require learning how to summon,

tie, bind, and intoxicate like the goddesses at the temple doors.

This is a metaphor for appreciating and living with nondensity.

While I was working with Joe on passing through the doorways

of the temple goddesses, my son had a dream of being mauled

by a huge tiger. He woke up his sister and she comforted

him. He told me about it the next morning as I was getting

myself ready for an appointment with Joe.

"Try making friends with that tiger," I suggested offhandedly

to my son. "He might have a present for you or something."

"I heard a voice in the dream, Daddy," my son then told me.

"From someone who wasn't there. It said, Look into its eyes."

My son's dream was the key to Joe's predicament. Rather

than avoiding the disturbing mix of desire and aggression

that the goddesses represented, Joe had to look into their

eyes. With their voluptuous bodies, their provocative stances,

and their bird-of-prey features, they perfectly embodied

the mix of feelings that Joe's girlfriend had engendered

in him. Intolerant of how frustrated her otherness was making

him, Joe had shut down his love and inhibited his desire. He

had stopped idealizing her the way he once had because it always

made him feel too insecure to adore someone who could be so

disappointing. Joe was reluctant to admit this was how

it had to be. His love for his girlfriend meant he could not

be in complete control. Given this predicament, there was no way

to avoid feeling vulnerable, and no way to avoid feeling angry

or hurt. Worse yet, there was no way

absolutely to ensure she could tolerate him.

But Joe's aggression did not have to be such a

threat. If he could let his anger rise and fall without

shutting down, if he could submerge his outrage in the passion

of his sexual relations, if he could admit to envying

the very person whom he needed, then his relationship could

survive. By looking into his goddess's eyes, Joe could love

her with a terrifying splendor. It was not exactly how he

would have thought it should be, but it certainly was real.