Chris and transcendental consciousness

I was doing some online reading about meditative practice and therapy, and came across the website and books by Dr Elaine Aron on the subject. I enjoyed the article that touched on meditation, and the search for 'enlightenment' or 'transcendance' which is acknowedged in most spiritual and psychoanalytic traditions as being a significant goal in life, if not the ultimate goal. But in a separate newsletter, she discussed something very timely for me, something that coincided with a birthday, and memories. She wrote about David Tresan's article in the Journal of Analytical Psychology on the history of consciousness and transcendance, which, to all appearances, is fascinating, but is couched in a professional language that is beyond my ken. One of the things she takes away from his research is something that I have long understood intuitively, but had difficulty finding words to express. As an individual, it is hard to reach transcendance--ego and Self intersect on an axis, but the ego cannot fully experience the Self, because we must search for archetypes and symbols with which to label the experience of it, and in doing so we limit it. But, as part of a dyad (a physically intimate couple, a therapist and a patient, long-term platonic partners, friends, ascetics, etc) "whose members are working on and in a very inward-focused sort of relationship, as well as working on themselves, it is possible to generate a transcendent state of consciousness as a field between them. That is, the two have moments of being deeply aware of participating in a shared transcendental consciousness. There are fewer and fewer thoughts and images, those that do occur are compellingly deep, yet only a few of these seem to need to be spoken. And whatever does arise seems to be shared almost synchronistically."

I once experienced this without the years of work part, and it was deeply fulfilling, but I was unprepared, and unaware of how incredibly significant that shared experience of consciousness was. I'd caught glimpses of it in the past, and I thought, as my usual fears drove me on to experience a different relationship, that it would be something that I would be able to reclaim, preferably with someone else, when I was older. I was a silly young woman, put off by other's perception that the palpable level of awareness between Chris and me meant that he and I were lovers when we were not. And Chris would not deny it when asked, he always said it was "more than that, much deeper", which fed people's misapprehensions, and drove my then-boyfriend nuts--so I stopped spending time with him. But Chris and I had never so much as kissed intimately. We'd slept at each other's houses, even shared the same bed more than once, but always partly clothed, and without any 'impropriety'--I don't recall that we ever even cuddled. But I recall how very beautiful he was to me, almost luminous, and that I was profoundly attracted to him, but not in even a remotely sexual way...we talked for endless hours in his study, we used to sit together in comfortable silence and that meditative awareness would rise between us, that awareness that turned hours into a moment and always, always left us glowing with...life, joy, love, pleasure, confidence...all those things that are only words and can't begin to encompass the magic of what flowed between us. We had a Great Love, but it wasn't a romantic one, and at the time, I valued sex more than that Love. Foolish me.

I remember when Jane, Lorrie and I stood together talking at his wake a few years afterwards, and the things people said to us and to each other, seeing "Chris' women together". Jane and Lorrie had both been his lovers, and Lorrie and I were both good friends and fellow students at Smith when Chris died. His mother took me aside and cried and said Chris had always loved me most and she'd always wished he and I would get back together, because he was so happy then. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it wasn't like that. His sister Desi, even our friends Keough and Dowd, told me that Chris was never the same after we'd stopped seeing each other. Paul got leave from the Navy for the funeral, and that night and drove me home and said he'd wanted to ask me out after Chris and I 'broke up', but he hadn't because knew that it would hurt Chris. And I told him that Chris and I had never dated, that we had never been lovers. He didn't believe me. He reminded me that I used to sleep at his place all the time. I told him it was because I would visit him after work and we'd get to talking too late and we'd fall asleep. I can still remember the incredulous, disbelieving look on his face, I remember him saying something like: Kelly, I know you. You are the most sensual person I've ever met. You can't tell me you and Chris never slept together...you both glowed after your all-nighters. I told him that Chris was dead, why on earth would I lie? And we had this argument sitting in his car, him insisting that Chris was in love with me and that everyone knew that was why he had moved 3000 miles away. Everyone but me. And it devestated me, because the unspoken and reproachful words hung there, that if he hadn't moved away he would still be alive. The fight went out of me, then. It ceased to matter to me, what the small-minded idiots thought. Chris was truly gone. Gone. And what the others thought would not change, because that link between me and Chris had been so strong and so obvious that for them there was only one interpretation of it. They didn't want to understand, and since it was unexplainable, I let them think what they wanted. To this day, 9 years after his death, I have not asked any of them what Chris told them, and I haven't bothered clarifying. I still send his mother and his sister letters two or three times a year. I still hope some day I'll find someone to share that level of...transcendental consciousness with.

I still miss you, Chris. Happy Birthday.