Vagina Read Free

may indicate that, at least in orgasm, women may experience this oceanic feeling in a unique way. Recent MRI research, by Janniko Georgiadis and his team, showed in 2006 that regions of the female brain that have to do with self-awareness, inhibition, and self-regulation go quiet for women briefly during orgasm. 10 This can feel to the woman involved like a melting of boundaries, a loss of self, and, whether exhilaratingly or scarily, a loss of control.
    Generally, many neuroscientists over the past thirty years have confirmed that James was biochemically correct: there are indeed changes in the brain that correspond to the experience of “the Sublime.” Tremendous benefits—a greater sense of love, compassion, self-acceptance, and connectedness—have been shown in people who have cultivated those states of mind, as psychologist Dan Goleman’s work on “emotional intelligence,” in his 1995 book with that name, and the Dalai Lama’s work on meditation, have shown. Western researchers have also demonstrated that meditative bliss states can involve opioid release. All women, as we will see, are potentially multiorgasmic; so the mystical or transcendental potential of female sexuality described above also allows women to connect often, and in a unique way, even if just for brief moments, with experiences of a shining, “divine,” or greater self (or nonself, as Buddhists would say) or with a sense of the connection among all things. Producing the stimulation necessary for these mind-states is part of the evolutionary task of the vagina.
    Philosophers have spoken for centuries of “a God-shaped hole” in human beings—the longing human beings feel to connect with something greater than themselves, and which motivates religious and spiritual quests. As seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal put it: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and unchangeable object; in other words by God himself.” 11
    Scientists have teased out the fact that this longing, this hunger to fill an “infinite abyss,” is a neural capability we are all born with, an innate ability to experience and connect with something that feels, subjectively, like transcendence. The Dalai Lama’s work on meditation, along with that of Dan Goleman, Lama Oser, and the E. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, suggests that specific sites in the brain light up when subjects experience a meditative state; Stanford neuroscientists, too, are finding the neurology of bliss. 12 Typically, in this mind-state, one feels, among other things, that all is well with oneself and with the universe, and the vexations and limitations of the ego fall away. Artists have produced some of humanity’s greatest works of music, painting, and poetry following such experiences.
    So I will make the case throughout this book that there is a version of this connection with “the Sublime”—even if it, too, like Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” is simply a neurological trick of our magically complicated human brain wiring—that women can experience during and after certain moments of heightened sexual pleasure. I maintain that this feeling is critically linked to an experience of self-love or self-respect, and a sense of freedom and drive. This is why the issue of whether or not female sexuality is treated with love and respect is so very crucial. Such moments of heightened sexual sensibility lead to a woman’s awareness that she is in a state of a kind of perfection, in harmony with and in connection with the world. In that state of consciousness, the usual inner voices that say the woman is