Mark Matousek - Sex Death Enlightenment

More praise for

SEX death enlightenment

As a prized writer and editor at Andy Warhols Interview magazine in the mid-80s, Matousek hobnobbed with celebrities. But after a few years he began to feel oppressed by the shallow, glittery milieu. The chief distinction of Matouseks spiritual journey is the harrowing background against which it is set: The traumas of his childhood and the surreal sufferings of his friends with AIDSutterly down to earth, even inspiring. Kirkus Reviews

Mark Matouseks Sex Death Enlightenment is a soul-searching and soul-awakening testament of a genuine spiritual journey for our time. He delves into the deepest parts of the spirit and the flesh, faces the tough questions and problems without flinching, and emerges with faith and insight. Dan Wakefield, author of Returning and New York in the Fifties

As Mark Matouseks exhilarating memoir, Sex Death Enlightenment , proves, disgust with and even terror at the hollowness of a life spent manufacturing glitz can send one screaming down the highway toward the holy even faster then doing time in an ashram. That is only the first of many astonishing discoveries available to the openhearted, even those who work at (or read) slick magazines with celebrities on the cover. Esquire

Mark Matousek tasted the intensity of the surface, the glamour, the unrelenting rush: scratching the surface, he found more surfaces, in an endless, self-reflecting high that finally broke under its own weightlessness, and propelled him, often against his will, on a remarkable journey of spiritual self-discovery. This is the story of that extraordinary journeyfrom surface to depth, from exterior to interior, a spiritual odyssey that is truly of our time, genuine in its care, redeeming in its grace. Ken Wilbur, author of A Brief History of Everything

Can a man who has been put through the wringer by lifeactually write a memoir free of self-pity? Mark Matousek has done it. Even more remarkably, he has written a book about (spiritual) fulfillment without once sounding flaky.youll find it hard not to admire a man so determined to find a deeper meaning in a difficult life.Prose that sings.Matousek comes to a realization of lifes wonders in a scene that will leave no reader unmoved. People Magazine

With the speed and brilliance of a meteor.it is bound to elicit comparisons with Robert Pirsigs amazing 1974 memoir, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , for its narrative of a man seeking his place in the world by attempting to synthesize Western culture and Eastern spirituality..Almost compulsively readable. His perseveranceand the truce wrested from his strugglemuch like the story of Jacob wrestling with the angelwill inspire many readers. Echo Magazine

This is a candid and courageous account of one mans search for spiritual meaningan inspiring book, full of hope. Andrew T. Weil, M.D., author of Spontaneous Healing

This strangely compelling book opens and opens into unexpected depths. Sex Death Enlightenment is the story of a bold, skeptical, down-to-earth soul willing to be educated by the hardest things in the world, willing to look into the face of despair and death and come up from that black and bitter embrace changed, open-hearted, eager to live. Mark Doty, author of Heavens Gate

S E X

D eath

Enlightenment

A True Story

Mark Matousek

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

Rhinebeck, NEw York

Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story 2020 by Mark Matousek

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-948626-25-5

eBook ISBN 978-1-948626-26-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943155

Cover design by Lisa Carta

Book design by Colin Rolfe

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street

Suite 304

Rhinebeck, NY 12572

(845) 876-4861

monkfishpublishing.com

For Carole Snyder

Beloved friend and sister

Dark enemy, you who brace us in the fight

Let me, in the few days left to spend

Devote my strength and weakness to the light

And so be changed to lightning in the end.

Marina Tsvetayeva

Contents

Preface

There are few things more disconcerting for a writer than meeting the ghost of your much younger self in the pages of a decades-old memoir. You feel a smorgasbord of emotions watching this character as he wrestles with the drama of his existence: embarrassment, empathy, horror, affection, gratitude, disbelief, pleasure, regret. Its like running into a distant relation who looks like you, never gets old, and tells the same story again and again.

When S ex Death Enlightenment was published in June 1996, I believed it would be my last book. I was infected with a fatal virus and thought Id be dead within a few years, which gave me very little timeand one shot onlyto communicate the story I wanted to tell, about a selfish, cynical, New York social and professional climber confronting his own mortality, going on a spiritual adventure, and returning home a different man. The word catastrophe comes from the Greek for to turn around, which is exactly what disaster did for me: stopped me in my arrogant tracks, forced me to face my buried pain, and thrust me into exploring questions Id done my best to ignore until then. Who was this person I called myself? Why did I feel like such an impostor? What was this longing at the pit of my stomach for something I had no words for, this hunger for mystery, truth, and connection that began in childhood and then became buried under ambition, greed, and anxiety? Was there a purpose to life, I needed to know, and what about a divine Creator? Did such an intelligent force exist, or was this nothing more than a fantasy of the collective human imagination in need of a comforting opiate fix?

These were the questions I pursued in extremis, and because Id found some intriguing answers and had mysterious experiences I could not deny, I wanted to write a book for hard-headed, skeptical people like myself who dont believe in fairy tales but are inquisitive enough to keep an open mind. When this journey begins, my character is an insecure egomaniac convinced that his flat-Earth view of things is more or less accurate. By Chapter Five, hes shocked into seeing he knows almost nothing, that miracles happen, and that life does, indeed, have a purpose: to awaken to mysteries beyond comprehension, including his own essential nature. In order for this to happen, though, hell need to tell the whole truth as he knows it and face himself without turning away.

I wanted to write a spiritual book for worldly peoplea doubt-filled, genre-busting, hybrid memoir that combined sacred and profane, holy and irreverent, sublime and ridiculous, as theyre mixed together in real life. But how to describe metaphysical insight without sounding fatuous, flaky, or fake? Having returned from India with my mind blown to pieces, with a converts zeal to spread the good news, Id made a fool of myself on several occasions attempting to describe what happened to me in esoteric, pretentious languageand I knew that approach would fail on the page. My challenge was to describe what had happened, including the otherworldly parts, as plainly and truthfully as possible, in hopes that readers dubious of such experiences might feel intrigued enough to take their own journey beyond the limits of their rational minds.

I threw myself into writing in a basement room on Charles Street in the West Village of New York City, in June 1994. I arrived before seven oclock every morning and pounded away on my old Selectric until my eyes were falling out of my head and my legs were cramped from not moving for hours. I was working on a ridiculous publishing deadline (fourteen months to deliver a completed manuscript), but more than that, my health clock was ticking louder by the day. I had no clue how to write a memoir, so I made a list of what seemed to be essential moments for telling the story and committed to drafting a scene a daywhich, like my deadline, was absurd. The list was twice as long as it needed to be (who knew?) and I tore through it, scene after scene, day after day, Monday through Saturday for a year. I covered the walls of the dreary little room with pinned-up piles of color-coded paper, cut into various configurations, covered with rows of messy single-spaced type, until the room resembled the inside of a frantic brain turned inside out.