Ecstasy

and spirituality

In the late 1990s I was living a rather difficult life. Well, at least by comparison to the one I live today.

I was in a a smallish coal city, Newcastle, just a few hours north of Sydney. It was difficult for an Arts graduate majoring in Linguistics to get a full time job, so I was pulling things together as best I could with a range of odd jobs - lawn mowing for a friend’s business, casual work in a CBD petrol station, and part-time outreach work for the local Baptist Church.

All of these jobs involved odd hours. Mowing lawns started at 7am, graveyard shifts at the petrol station start at 10pm, and my outreach work the Church started at midnight because the people I was trying to help were the local street people - sex workers, heroin addicts and mobsters.

It’s fair to say that my consciousness, my waking experience of life, was filled with tension, stress, and various deprivations of diet, sleep and exercise.

In the midst of all of this, I had one of the most elevated experiences of my life. I remember waking up one Sunday morning, hazy and discombobulated like I always was.

But when I opened my eyes the bedroom was filled with an extraordinary light. And when I opened my ears, I heard something extraordinary streaming rather tinnily into the room from the black AM/FM radio next to the bed.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the effect of Sarah McLachlan’s song Angel on me in that moment. As I write this I want to resist using the word “spiritual”, but I don’t really have any other word for it. I was borne along, as it were, spiritually transported to a place where everything, absolutely everything, was finally OK.

I felt a moment of ecstasy.

Ecstasy and Tantric Philosophy

In Trika Shaivism you find ecstasy everywhere. Its practices are designed to give rise to ecstatic experience. Its metaphysical system is built around a single concept of ecstasy. This is the relationship between Shiva and Shakti, between unmanifest and manifest awareness.

There is a lot to unpack in this complex world of Tantric philosophy and spiritual practice. Let me give just one thought to take away.

At the heart of Trika Shaivism is a proposal. This is a proposal that connects the structure of conscious experience with the structure of everything that exists. If you want to live in a way that reflects the way the world actually is, then you need to understand this common structure.

So here it is. Consciousness is ecstatic. I’m using a formal definition of ecstasy here, where ecstasy means that something has its being (stasis) outside itself (ex). Ecstasy = Ex-Stasis.

Taking this definition, here consciousness is structured in the following way: it exists not within itself but outside itself.

And then comes the truly stunning claim: because consciousness is structured in this way, everything that exists is also structured in this way.

The effect of this is that everything that exists exists dynamically. Your universe - the one that you actually experience, is constantly moving, transforming, recoagulating somewhere new. There is no static ground in which anything can exist, there is only the movement towards another existence, the one that sits just outside, just over there.

Some of you might get that immediately, and others will find it more challenging. Don’t worry if you don’t get it.

Just remember me lying in bed one morning in the late 1990s, momentarily taken outside of my ordinary experience, transported from the world of hardship and anxiety that consumed me. Momentarily somewhere else, someone else, something else.

That experience, and others like it, are the experiences that most closely capture how things actually are. The ecstatic structure of existence is mostly hidden from us, and then there are these times when it is unveiled, exposed, directly accessible.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in those moments we experience a hard-to-describe happiness, the ecstasy of being itself.

Neil