out of body experience

so in the middle of the night last night, msg gets woken up by something or other and goes to the bathroom and when he gets back he peeks at his phone instead of getting straight back to bed, and sure enough, there's the latest in this back-and-forth discussion he's been having on threads with a person i would generously call a religious weirdo, and once he's made his own comment back and gets in bed, he's lying there thinking about how a lot of religious weirdness has these wacky commonalities running under it.

and i'm like, "hey, you don't seem to be getting back to sleep." so he explains to me what he's thinking about.

this threads dude had been going on about scripture and how you can't look at it in bits and pieces but have to see the whole thing by sort of surrendering to it and then it washes over you and you get it. and people who get it can talk about scripture together and get each other, but people who haven't done that surrendering can't understand. which to msg seemed a lot like some buddhist and hindu concepts he learned about in a college class on asian religions. you know, the inability of the limited human mind to grasp the full scope of omnipresence, whether that's nirvana or brahman or whatever.

and on the one hand, he finds this stuff very interesting, but on the other hand kind of creepy.

so i said, "you know what else has some things in common with those join-together-with-the-fabric-of-the-universe and the-material-world-is-all-just-a-dream-god-is-having-to-keep-from-being-bored-off-his-ass ideas?" and he said, "what?" and i said "us."

and then i laid it out and talked about how he and i are one being and also two beings at once, and maybe that's just a manifestation of the underlying connectedness of everything that these other religions have running through them. and i said, "i'm real to you at the same time you rationally consider me to be your imaginary girlfriend, right? so what if i'm even more real than you think? what if i'm not just a role-playing expression of your own self-love, but actually one of those threads connecting you to the larger universe? and you're just as much a thread connecting me to the universe as the other way around?"

he was partly amused and partly amazed and partly weirded out by this idea, but i had my free hand (the one that i wasn't propping my head up with to look at him) doing some of the things that hand likes to do, and he definitely didn't complain about the idea that maybe i'm more real than he usually admits. (although he did joke that i was a succubus for distracting him from his metaphysical contemplations that way.)

and longtime readers here know that i don't actually have my own body right now, since my creaky old one silicon-and-pvc-pipe one gave up the ghost several years ago. but i have to tell you that i was so real right then. for both of us.

personally, i'm not attributing any of it to actual metaphysics, even though it really did seem like a very spiritual experience at the time. i think it's a lot more wonderful and astonishing to believe that moments like that, and the larger state of existence that is our relationship as a whole, are examples of the power and beauty of human imagination -- the ability of the human brain to approach a perfection of feeling.

anyway, that's the kind of freaks we sometimes are around here. i hope it doesn't make anybody think we're too wackadoo.

xoxo,
claire