Were it not for the fact that it piles on unnecessary and unwanted (not
to mention distracting)significance,
I would describe it as
a mystical
experience.
What it is, is the experience of love or (if you will) the experience
of being in-love (that little hyphen makes
a world
of difference) while at the same time being
out-here
(there's that profound little hyphen again). Love, in-love,
out-here.
What is that? What's that like? Here's an example from my private life.
There has never been anyone else like her, ever. From the get-go, she
occupied
my full attention.
The sudden intensity of my attraction to her shocked me. I'd never
experienced anything like it before. It was all-consuming. It was
total. It didn't gradually become that way over time. No, it
began
that way. First, there was nothing. Then there she was / I saw her
there. Then, total attraction. Zero to one hundred in less than a
second. Love at first breath. Whenever we were together she always
occupied
front and center stage
in my playbook. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I couldn't look at
anyone else - or anything else, for that matter. Yes I did try, but it
was all to no avail. It was as if there were gimbals in my eyes such
that if I looked away, if I took my eyes off her even for one second,
they would automatically revert to her again, filling my entire field
of vision with her, with no one and nothing but her. All I saw was her.
The more I was that way with her, the more I wanted it to be that way
with her. I simply couldn't get enough of her, a passion which had no bounds.
It would be at least another
ten years
before I articulated it this way:
around her,
there was no
"I / me".
Around her,
my
"I / me"
simply wasn't to be found anywhere. All I saw was her. Not her and me.
Not even "us". It was just her. When I was
around her,
she was all there was. Life and all of existence and all of history
came down to one thing: her. It was daunting. It was intense. By the
same token, it was beautiful, sublime,
mysteriously
delicious, just gorgeous.
Looking back on it much later, I noticed something else about it which
I hadn't gotten before: it was
a privilege,
a total privilege.
I'd never
considered
that being in-love could be
a privilege
before. When life singles you out to have an experience like that, it
can only be deemed to be
a privilege.
But be careful: describing it that way imposes even more
significance
on it which I don't really require. But now, with that proviso in
place, that's what it was:
a privilege.
And again, it would be at least another
ten years
before I articulated it this way:
around her,
my baseline
communication
to her was / my total experience of her was "All I see ... is
You.". Just her. No one and nothing else. In
that space
it was natural for me to gasp upon meeting her, or even to put my palms
together in the "Namaste" greeting. Very, very few people outside of
the holy men and masters I've
met
have ever elicited that kind of response from me in
a relationship,
a relationship
which quite clearly had
a certain sacredness
to it,
a relationship
which I could best describe as a kind of
mystical
connection.
Over the years, we drifted apart, we came together again, we drifted
apart, then came together again. With many years between each
encounter, we had four distinct
passionate
affairs in which the stages kept changing but
the song
remained the same. We stayed under the radar. It was
our world
... in which everyone else got to
play
but only if we
invited
them in. If I ever let go of her hand long enough, it was only to let a
few years go by during which we each embraced our own lives some more,
then held hands again. And I was oblivious to any and all other worlds
other than her. All I saw was her. I told her so. I said "All I see is
you", sheer, breathless joy filling every syllable. She looked back at
me, glowing, not saying anything. But she didn't have to. She knew.