tighten in some way. But if I then consciously remind myself
to relax, to let myself go into the experience, the effect is
dramatic. The space in which I seem to find myself, already
enormous, suddenly yawns open even further and the shapes
that undulate before my eyes appear to explode with new and
even more extravagant patterns. Over and over again I had
the overwhelming sense of infinity being multiplied by
another infinity. I joked to my wife as she drove me home
that I felt as if I had been repeatedly sucked into the asshole
of God.Boothby had what sounds very much like a classic mystical experience,
though he may be the first in the long line of Western mystics to enter the
divine realm through that particular aperture.
At the depths of this delirium I conceived that I was either
dying or, most bizarrely, I was already dead. All points of
secure attachment to a trustworthy sense of reality had fallen
away. Why not think that I am dead? And if this is dying, I
thought, then so be it. How can I say no to this?
At this point, at the greatest depth of the experience, I felt
all my organizing categories of opposition—dreaming and
wakefulness, life and death, inside and outside, self and other
—collapse into each other . . . Reality appeared to fold in on
itself, to implode in a kind of ecstatic catastrophe of logic. Yet
in the midst of this hallucinatory hurricane I was having a
weird experience of ultra-sublimity. And I remember
repeating to myself again and again, “Nothing matters,
nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at
all.”And then it was over.During the last few hours, reality began slowly, effortlessly, to
stitch itself back together. In sync with some particularly
wowing choral music, I had an incredibly moving sense of