Otherworldly ECSTASY
Listen to an interview with Dr. Jenny Wade on "Inside Sex with Extatica."
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Four Elements of Love: Water © Justine Tot Tatarsky |
Think you've had sensational sex? Developmental psychologist Jenny Wade discovered a population of people who have had truly out-of-this-world experiences while making love.
The line that divides sexuality from spirituality is thin--if it exists at all. So says Corte Madera developmental psychologist Jenny Wade, who claims that for a significant proportion of the population mystical experiences happen in the bedroom every day.
Wade, who specializes in studying naturally occurring altered states of consciousness, recently completed a study concluding that as many as one in every eight to 12 adults "can suddenly, without any warning or preparation, find themselves in otherworldly realms when making love as though God's lightning bolt of grace had illuminated the bedroom, transforming everything." Following an unexpected experience of her own, she wanted to find out whether others also may have "stumbled into extraordinary experiences during sex."
Wade conducted extensive interviews with people who said they'd had unusual experiences in the course of making love when they were not drinking, using drugs or practicing techniques like Tantric yoga to induce an altered state during sex. The 91 subjects in her sample were normal adults, most of them reared in traditional Judeo-Christian homes, none with special training or knowledge of esoteric erotic arts. Wade says the experiences described by her subjects are indistinguishable from descriptions of mystical states achieved by shamans and spiritual adepts in contemplative Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
"People need to know about these incidents because lovers, unlike spiritual seekers, are not trying to bring them about, and they are not prepared for the consequences, which are usually positive but can also be devastating," Wade says. "I call the spontaneous altered states that occur during lovemaking transcendent sex because people seem to go beyond, or transcend, the boundaries of the natural world and the normal limitations of self. They find themselves catapulted into a different reality, or, if they remain in the recognizable here-and-now, are participating in events that are normally impossible, such as floating out of their bodies or communicating directly and wordlessly with the minds of animals, for instance. These happenings are so counter to normal experience that the vast majority in my study viewed them as having a spiritual origin. They believed they had tapped into divine forces. Most reported very positive personal transformation subsequently, very similar to the changes reported by near-death experiencers."
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Beauty and the Beast © Justine Tot Tatarsky |
Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., of Kentfield, a renowned investigator of the near-death experience, gives Wade's research high marks. "Jenny Wade is recognized as being one of the top researchers in the field of transpersonal psychology, and indeed teaches a course on research methodology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology," says Ring, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut, and author of Heading Toward Omegaand Lessons from the Light. "Her work for her book, Transcendent Sex, is a model of careful and thorough qualitative research, and her findings, though presented in a way to engage the educated reader, are based on solid and impressive scholarship."
I interviewed Wade in San Rafael the day before she left on tour for her new book, Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil. Arriving a few minutes early, I realized with some trepidation that I was about to do something a gentleman isn't supposed to: ask a lady to tell a virtual stranger about her sex life. Journalism has its perks.
In your book you say you decided to research this subject following an experience in bed that changed your life. What exactly happened?
I was making love with a partner I'd been with for about six months or so when the bedroom I was in began dissolving. I watched in amazement as the right-angled white walls and ceiling of the familiar room transformed into those of a round pink chamber with a silver Greek key border near the ceiling. Was this just some weird fantasy or daydream? Suddenly I was no longer in any room with my lover at all, no longer sheltered in his house from the snow blanketing the wintry Northeast but standing on the sun-bright shores of a sandy beach, squinting at the glittering waves...rushing toward me. I was surrounded by vivid sea creatures, fish and octopi. Bemused, I wondered if I had somehow been swept into the water from the beach, but gradually I realized the sea creatures were not real, but images...Images painted in the unmistakable style of frescoes from the ancient civilization of Crete, a culture about which I knew nothing. It didn't matter. I was filled with the most exquisite rapture and bliss I had ever experienced.
Eventually I found myself back in the familiar bedroom, still making love. My lover had apparently noticed nothing. Had I lost my mind? How long had I been "away"? I had never slipped out of reality before. I didn't say anything about it, rather ashamed to let my lover know I had strayed so far from his attentions and feeling pretty crazy about it to boot. But I never forgot it either. On other occasions during sex, more strange things happened. Always I was filled with ecstasies a thousand times larger and more compelling than even the most intense orgasm. One day, I couldn't contain it any more and began laughing uncontrollably. I had gone into the "no-thingness of nirvana," which seemed exquisitely funny, absurd and perfectly natural all at the same time. When I could speak, I had to tell my lover what had happened.
He looked at me oddly, and then confessed that he also, after a lifetime of sex, had been having some strange things happen when he was in bed with me. But his experiences were nothing like mine. We both had been afraid we were losing our minds, but if so, it was the most glorious experience in all the world, one that opened each of us to ecstatic and spiritual realms we had never dreamed existed.
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