Harder Thoughts

ecstatic reveries

Last week’s Provocations was a toe in the water. In that post I laid out one of the most important philosophical ideas that I have come across in my intellectual and spiritual journey. That was the idea of relational ontology. In laying it out, I decided just to write what was in my mind and see how you all responded.

I had such a good response to that article that I thought I’d try out the same approach this week.

So here’s another dose of Neilcore philosophy. It’s about another one of those ideas that has shaped everything for me. But it’s much more difficult to grasp than last week’s effort.

So let’s briefly recap the basics. The area that we are talking about, in academic philosophy, is called ‘ontology.’ Ontology is about existence: what can we say about the manner in which things exist?

It’s extremely obscure and difficult territory. Philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre in Europe, and Abhinavagupta in India, all spent a great deal of time and effort plumbing the depths of this obscurity. Most people find it extremely tedious and hard to understand.

I’m down for trying to change that and to make it practical and interesting. But I’m not promising anything. So strap in.

Alignment with Reality

Last week we talked about existence in terms of relationships. The idea there was that maybe there is a sense in which relationships are ‘prior’, at least in the ontological sense, to things and people. This was about the “ground” of existence. There are good reasons, both philosophically and scientifically, to think that this extremely counter-intuitive proposition could be true.

This week we go a little further. If the ground of existence is relationships, then what is the “manner” of this relationally mediated existence? How do things exist if they exist relationally?

The answer that I’ve got is that, if you take the relational view, things exist in a perpetual state of ecstasy. This is how all things exist: ecstatically.

And, further, if the purpose of life is to be aligned with reality, with how things actually are, then we have here a clear takeaway. According to this theory, the purpose of life, the life lived aligned to reality, the purpose that shapes both spirituality and ethics - is to experience ecstasy.

Carnal and Spiritual

It’s hard to imagine a person who wouldn’t want to live in ecstasy.

But what does that word mean? I don’t know what you think of when you think about ecstasy, but here’s what comes immediately to my mind: music, sadness, love, sex, solitude, MDMA. And then, after that, I think about spiritual seekers, and how they frequently describe their peak experiences as ecstatic: union with the divine, ego death, transcendent bliss, the non-self, the void, and so on.

It has always struck me that there might be some connection between the first list of things - the ordinary, mundane, carnal idea of ecstasy and the second list - the elevated, spiritual and transcendent idea of ecstasy.

What you find, when you plumb the depths of various philosophical theologies and spiritual traditions, is that many of these traditions do, in fact, bind carnal and spiritual ecstasy together. And they do this not with something superficial, like “hedonism” but with something profound, like “the nature of existence itself.”

Christian Ecstasy

To get the connection between ecstasy as spiritual transcendence and ecstasy as carnal pleasure, you have to first grasp the idea of ecstatic ontology.

Ecstasy as a philosophical idea has been central for me since 2003. I was in my third year at Moore Theological College, studying to be an Anglican priest. There I met a teacher by the name of Robert Doyle who taught Christian doctrine and is one of three teachers that have completely changed my life.

Not because I particularly liked him or believed his conservative brand of Christianity. It was because he introduced me to two key ideas in Christian thought: the Trinity and the Incarnation. But he didn’t do it in the usual “throw-your-hands-up-its-all-a-mystery” kind of way. Rather, Robert took us deep into philosophical theology, into the intellectual apparatus that the early Christians developed to explain these difficult ideas.

And, it turns out, at the very centre of the Christian doctrine of God, you find the concept of ecstasy. In fact, the early Christians were so bold as to suggest that ecstasy is the foundation of the entire universe, because God is an ecstatic being. And therefore all beings are created for ecstasy.

I don’t believe in that Triune God anymore but the idea that existence itself is ecstatic has stuck with me.

So what is it? Philosophically speaking, ecstasy is the experience of being outside yourself. To get this, you can simply look at the English word ‘ecstasy.’ It has two parts: “ex” + “stasis.”

Stasis is a Greek word that originally meant ‘standing’. So ex-stasis means that you no longer stand ‘inside’ yourself - you stand ‘outside’ yourself.

Ecstatic Relations

So what happens when you get rid of the Christian part of this theory, and take it as a companion idea to the idea of relational ontology?

Well, this is where the magic happens. You find yourself able to explain the nature of existence itself without an infinite recursion where you search for but never find the ultimate ground of existence, and you find yourself with a specific understanding of both spirituality and ethics.

I’m going to skip all the technical details here and take you straight to the end. If you want me to explore the details, let me know in the comments. But the end of all of this hand-wringing over the concept of existence is, well, I think it’s magnificent. (Don’t ask me if I think it’s true. Let’s just stick with “magnificent.”)

If existence itself is relational in its ground and ecstatic in its mode, then you get the following. People exist by virtue of their relationships to other things. The relationships communicate existence between people and things. Think of a relationship between any thing/person and any other thing/person. And then think that this relationship lends to those persons and things the property of existing.

But more than this. It lends to them the property of existing outside themselves, existing ecstatically. In other words, the truth of your existence as an individual, separated being, is that you exist ‘in’ the people you know, the tree in the garden, the fantastical pegasus.

For me, this explains the connection between carnal and spiritual ecstasy. These are experiences that bring to consciousness the underlying structure of reality itself, the ecstatic and relational ontology of the universe. And it seems completely unsurprising that this experience is pleasurable. What could be more pleasing, more ultimate, than that.

And this is why I love the Tantrism of Kashmir. With its idea of embodied liberation, and the way it connects the highest spiritual ideas, like the union of consciousness and energy, to the most gritty realities, like soil and earth, it is the closest I’ve found to a spiritual system that truly captures the nature of reality and our place within it.

Neil