The Oddities Of Ecstasy
Ecstasy is something totally outside daily experience. It transcends us, throwing ourselves into a world of beauty and wonder and terror. Ecstasy breaks all boundaries, destroys preconceptions, reshapes the world in a frightening instinct. It is that moment when things become clear that weren't, that the world around you changes into itself, that everything you've ever believed is charged with new significance or destroyed as meaningless.
Ecstasy defies easy description. It is that moment when your soul reverberates with the Universe, and no words can describe that. But we try, oh, we try. We build religions and boxes of words to shove transcendant ecstasy into, and try to contain that ecstasy into safe parts of our lives. We want it in the box where we can pull it out when we want to bask in it again, and shove it back away when it's not convenient. But we can't. Ecstasy transforms all or doesn't come to us. It exists in a place out of words, out of easy understanding.
I cannot say what ecstasy means. The words we have don't describe it. It must be experienced, and each person's experience will be different. Or perhaps they're all the same, but we perceive it differently. We can open our lives for it and never find it, or we can run ourselves to the ground and have it appear out of nowhere. It is a gift and sometimes a curse that blows us away.
Ecstasy needs to be welcomed into our lives. It makes us more ourselves, more powerfully changed by the world around us and more powerful to change the world. We need to make space for ecstasy, even while admitting that ecstasy cannot be shoehorned into specific space, forced into time that's convenient for us. We have to allow our lives to change, to look at more than day-to-day concerns.
There are ways to welcome ecstasy into our lives. We have to give ourselves time for ecstasy, time that allows for our world to change in ways we can't predict and control. We have to allow for change and chaos, to accept the change that will happen to our lives and still seek it knowing we won't know what will happen until it's too late. We have to let go and accept that the Universe is bigger than we are, and just allow what will happen to happen. We cannot control. The best we can hope for is that the transformation is something we accept instead of resisting.
Questions:
Do you allow room for ecstasy in your life? Do you try to keep it boxed?
Could you accept transformation if it happened to you? Do you want it?
If ecstasy came to you, what parts of your life would have to change? What box of words would it open?
Ecstasy defies easy description. It is that moment when your soul reverberates with the Universe, and no words can describe that. But we try, oh, we try. We build religions and boxes of words to shove transcendant ecstasy into, and try to contain that ecstasy into safe parts of our lives. We want it in the box where we can pull it out when we want to bask in it again, and shove it back away when it's not convenient. But we can't. Ecstasy transforms all or doesn't come to us. It exists in a place out of words, out of easy understanding.
I cannot say what ecstasy means. The words we have don't describe it. It must be experienced, and each person's experience will be different. Or perhaps they're all the same, but we perceive it differently. We can open our lives for it and never find it, or we can run ourselves to the ground and have it appear out of nowhere. It is a gift and sometimes a curse that blows us away.
Ecstasy needs to be welcomed into our lives. It makes us more ourselves, more powerfully changed by the world around us and more powerful to change the world. We need to make space for ecstasy, even while admitting that ecstasy cannot be shoehorned into specific space, forced into time that's convenient for us. We have to allow our lives to change, to look at more than day-to-day concerns.
There are ways to welcome ecstasy into our lives. We have to give ourselves time for ecstasy, time that allows for our world to change in ways we can't predict and control. We have to allow for change and chaos, to accept the change that will happen to our lives and still seek it knowing we won't know what will happen until it's too late. We have to let go and accept that the Universe is bigger than we are, and just allow what will happen to happen. We cannot control. The best we can hope for is that the transformation is something we accept instead of resisting.
Questions:
Do you allow room for ecstasy in your life? Do you try to keep it boxed?
Could you accept transformation if it happened to you? Do you want it?
If ecstasy came to you, what parts of your life would have to change? What box of words would it open?
posted by Vieva @ 8:35 AM
3 Comments:
At 1:39 PM,
Anonymous said…
Funny you should write about this while I'm steeping myself heavily in Feri work . . .
Feri is an ecstatic tradition; that transcendent thing is one of its goalstates. Dealing with Feri requires an acceptance of transformative experience; it's a very disruptive-to-reality set of work. (Which is one of the reasons that Feris are cranky and, ah, differently social.)
Also, I have for a long time metaphorised myself as a Cultist of Ecstasy. This is a gaming riff -- a type of character in the game Mage: the Ascension. When I'm healthy, that is the headspace where I live.
One of the bits of Feri work for this quarter is the Four Fires, and one of the fires is divine ecstasy. It's also the only one of mine that's currently healthy. :P (Last time I did a diagnostic on it? I got 'The Lovers'.)
Iron Pentacle work is also ecstatic, and that's what I'm doing at the moment . . . .
At 5:11 PM,
Anonymous said…
I have a slightly different view of ecstasy, just thought I'd offer it as a different perspective.
I see life as made up of ecstasy. We don't let it in so much as let it out, or at least that's how it seems to me. For me, music -> ecstasy.
I've done a /lot/ of work with mood-tailoring and creation with music over the course of 10-15 years, and I have had some truly (adjectives fail) moments. I don't know if music works the same for everyone else as it does for me, but for me it's like plucking the strings of the soul. Once in a while you hit that perfect note, or tone, or rhythm, or melody, or combination of all of the above and something inside goes 'YES! That! Right there, THAT's what I'm talking about.'
Ironically, most people I hear describe the moment (however they come by it) as tranquility or serenity. It's not so for me. I'm not the quiet, meditative type. For me, that moment is like being one with the moment, with all of the infinite billions of things that are going on in the universe at any given time. Being in the zone, in the groove, the eye of the storm and the storm at once. Flow.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to fill the holes in the Thunder: Perfect Mind and set it to music.
At 1:30 PM,
Anonymous said…
Oddly, I have more trouble replying to this post than I thought. I feel shy, embarrassed---as if asked to discuss sex in public. Not that I find all ecstatic experience sexual in nature (though some is), but it is on that level of "difficult to say" for me. I think about the color I would turn if someone said of me, "Oh, yeah..her, she is an Ecstatic."
Why? Because the idea is tainted with the concept of being a bit cracked like old saints? Possibly. But more, I feel, because it saddens me to be a minority. I think it should happen to more people. Not that overwhelming bliss is part of my daily life--it isn't. I don't get a supersized dark chocolate 65% cocoa bar in my daily diet, either. But I do get bite of chocolate a day. And in my non-golf green perfect yard, walking on some task...some little surprise of absolutely ordinary and utterly extraordinary beauty will capture my eye and there is a flash in my soul.
A bite of ecstasy and bliss, just a tiny ephemeral taste of it. Gone before I can say what exactly that flavor was, even. Looking at a bee and feeling it crawl across my fingers isn't ecstasy, really---but its a connection, like a static charge that pops your finger tips is electricity even if it is not on the power grid.
We need to look for the daily dose and not expect to be knocked out every time......but every touch of it reaches into the recesses of the soul and re-lights the Big Ones, that keeps the Flame alight through any storm.
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