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On peak experiences

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A discussion in a graduate seminar (on delay of gratification) last week somehow lead to my trying to a disentangle a Zen parable about a father who kept seemingly reacting nonchalantly to all these seeming tragedies befalling his son, which then turned out to be blessings, which then turned out to be tragedies, and so on.. but instead of being able to explain why a story about the wisdom of equanimity and acceptance of the fact that we never know the full situation doesn’t actually imply that we shouldn’t care or act in response to positive/negative events in our lives, I just kept telling my professor that he didn’t really understand what this meditation teacher friend of his had been trying to convey with this story, and then mumbling something about how it’s not something that can be expressed in ordinary language and feeling very embarrassed that I felt so strongly compelled to keep point out that people weren’t thinking about it “right” even though I couldn’t actually think about it “right” at that moment either, I just had some sort of memory of being able to think about things like this in a different way, where all the logical inconsistencies people were stuck on were just not at issue. Then I got even more stuck trying to explain why the labels “bad” and “good” aren’t really helpful.

We also talked about the value of what I like to call “peak experiences,” both positive and negative, and about the phenomenon of these extreme outdoorsmen who put themselves through torture again and again even though it’s utter hell doing it, because the high of having survived is so great afterward, precisely because it was so hard. Some of the meaning clearly comes from the difficulty and the pain. Which led to childbirth, which led back to me, the only person in the room who had actually experienced it. Someone was saying, oh, but you can just do that without all the pain now, now women just get the drugs. And I said I didn’t and people were impressed. I know a lot of other women who’ve had natural births but I guess it’s still a choice that can be shocking. I didn’t have some dreamy hypnobirth orgasmic experience — it was the most excruciating thing I’ve ever experienced. Bloody, messy, screaming, thought I would die, spent days afterward in this state of amazement about just how intensely painful it had been. And now, even in light of hearing stories about relatively pain-free births, I wouldn’t change mine at all and would do it all over again. There’s even a part of me that really yearns to… not just in the sense of wanting another child, but in sense of wanting to experience another birth.

It’s difficult to disentangle how giving birth changes your life from how having a child changes your life, but even our professor, a father, said that the decision to have a child (something some of the other women in the class admitted they had been contemplating) isn’t what people think it is, it never exactly makes sense because it’s not just a choice to create someone else but to become someone else. Once the child is there you are not the person who made the choice anymore. You are a parent. I was nodding along to this and various other stories he told about how, for a new father, faced with the choice between saving his newborn or his spouse from some mortal danger, there is a real dilemma, but for the new mother there’s often no dilemma at all, the very question is laughable. Of course you save your baby. These are things people say, things I found myself saying, how it’s not just that you realize how much you can love this one person, but this whole capacity for unconditional love that you never knew you had opens up, and the realization that you really, truly care about another being more than yourself is utterly life-altering, and you just don’t know what all these tropes about having kids really mean until you experience it. Just like the zen stories, you can’t tell people what they mean, you can’t even tell yourself what they mean from memory, you have to experience a different way of thinking, your mind has to shift.

Reading Gilead, which is written as a letter from an aging father to his young son, has made me realize I need to re-read everything I’ve ever read dealing with parent-child relationships. I might actually need to re-read everything I’ve ever read, period. Because I’m not the same person I was when I read it all before. And lately I’ve had some of these urges to reclaim some of “who I was before” — maybe through work, or through clothing, or doing some things that don’t completely revolve around my daughter. I guess it seems like something I need to do, as a feminist, a modern woman, a professional, I don’t know.. it’s like I need to purposefully not let myself be defined by this one role I play. I feel like there’s pressure among progressives to think of motherhood as just that — a role — rather than a state change that now applies to my whole being, in any context, whether the baby is in the room or not. But the thing is, it IS a state change, and that I can’t be the old me again, and honestly I don’t even want to… though, still, it is pretty awkward finding myself in a classroom setting talking about what it’s like to have a natural childbirth, to experience unconditional love, to reevaluate your whole relationship with your own parents, and to experience the utter mortification of feeling surges of anger toward this being you love to the end of the earth, which can sneak up when you haven’t slept in weeks or months in those early days of parenthood.

Another topic that came up was heroin — how some users claim that first time they shot up was the most intense pleasure they’d ever felt in their lives, eclipsing everything ever, rendering everything meaningless except seeking to have that experience again. Would it be rational to choose to experience something like that, knowing you’d have to live the rest of your life knowing you’d never experience it again. My position was that, yes, if there were a way to experience that just once while somehow being completely sure that I could avoid becoming a junky (which, for what it’s worth, I think is impossible), I would do it. I don’t think peak experiences render other experiences less valuable, and I do think they have the capacity to impart insight. But I admit there are forms of suffering (and pleasure) that can lead to damage as well as some insight (lots of drug-related things would fall into this category, I assume), and I’ve certainly become a lot more risk-averse as a result of having a child.

But birth is, of course, another example of one of these peak experiences. I think before having a baby all my peak experiences were spiritual, and of course giving birth is very much a spiritual experience too. The entire passion and resurrection are contained within it. Would Jesus on the Cross have asked for an epidural? I don’t think so.

It’s funny, what could be considered dangerous, reckless, vision-seeking — I mean, yes, recreational drugs are a more obvious case, but meditative experiences have their iffy side effects too. Like spending months lurking on message boards for people discerning religious vocations, planning their postulancies, discussing such deep matters of the soul as which order’s habit is the most elegant. Honestly, a lot of them were teens who’d been brought up in a context I couldn’t fathom. But there were others, people more like me, who’d had something happen to them that they couldn’t explain. How many people who choose a life like that are chasing some glimpse of God they saw once, a vision that eclipsed everything ever, leaving them seeing their purpose in life from an entirely new angle? A conversion. That’s what giving birth is, too, it’s a conversion experience, in the fullest sense. And what happens to the heroin user who abandons everything else in search of the next hit? I don’t know; maybe that’s another thing that needs to be experienced to be really understood.

My teacher — gosh this was such a strange class — also asked at one point why, if Catholics really believe that the bread and the wine are the literal Body and Blood of Christ, they would ever want to do something like EAT them. Isn’t that some kind of cannibalism? Isn’t it GROSS? Isn’t that what mortification of the flesh is all about? And all I could come up with on the spot (why I’ve appointed myself the designated representative of both Zen AND Catholicism in the psychology graduate seminar is another question worth pondering) is that Catholics do it because Jesus TOLD them to, at the Last Supper. Which is true, but kind of a silly answer. I think part of the reason here also has to do with conversion, a state chance that occurs at both a spiritual and physical level — I often thought of communion in a prettier way when I went to church regularly, with this beautiful sense of having God within you, not metaphorically but physically in your belly, not unlike pregnancy in some ways — but there is definitely a level of horror there, of sacrifice, not just being on the receiving end of a great grace but playing a role in, even being the cause of, great suffering — accepting that, participating in it, being transformed by it.


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