To be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual.” ~ Adam Gopnik

A few human beings might assume that losing control in an ecstatic experience is the other of being rational. But if we recollect the truth that we don’t even know what attention is, or why we dream, or what occurs when we die, or even what it manner to be rational, we might come to be so humbled by means of “no longer understanding” that we free ourselves into falling into it.

Falling into “no longer understanding”:

I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject. It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’ Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’ Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’ Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’ Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’” ~ Rob Brezsny

Losing manipulate inside the irrational is virtually an intensive and counter-intuitive way of bolstering our rationality. To the volume that we can understand the reality about something is directly proportional to the quantity that we are able to efficiently interpret the popular laws unfolding round us.

Occasionally this might imply getting out of our own manner. From time to time it is the ignorant self, the uninitiated and culturally-conditioned ego, that stops us from forming a valid opinion approximately the way the sector is interconnected and interdependent.

In such instances – if we're certainly permitting the obstacle to be the course – ecstatic enjoy can be used as a device to dissolve the subconscious “wall” that has been erected among Self and Cosmos. Ecstatic enjoy will become the mental leveling mechanism that gets us out of our own manner, so that we can have true studies as interconnected beings in an interdependent cosmos.

Assume: the vintage Zen Proverb approximately the empty cup. The ecstatic revel in empties our cup. It allows us to “now not understand” so that we're “empty” sufficient to renew our know-how. “I don’t know” frees us right into a nation of prepared studying. Education with the aid of perpetual astonishment is the aspect. “I don’t recognize” simply so I can be astonished by way of knowing some thing new.

From loggerhead to fountainhead:

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.” ~ Patti Smith

Ecstatic experience has gotten a terrible rap because human beings are afraid of losing manage, or dropping their minds, or being taken into consideration loopy, or being ostracized by means of the “tribe,” or any quantity of limiting psycho-social rationalizations. As Iris Murdoch stated, “we are tension-ridden animals. Our minds are continually lively, fabricating an tense, commonly self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil, which partially conceals our international.”

Introducing ecstatic experience into our lives facilitates to reveal the concealed international. Whether or not it’s thru deep solitude and meditation at the same time as fasting, or through tribal ritual dance, or having an out-of-body revel in, or the use of mind-altering entheogens, the enjoy has a decalcifying impact.

Some thing undefinable peels off the floor of reality, taking with it which means, labels, and words. It’s a kind of eco-ego-melting, wherein spontaneous “I” melts into improvisational “now not-I” and the numinous third-eye opens.

Granted, there is a satisfactory line between ecstatic experience and extremism. All things sparsely, of course. However more importantly, all matters in moderation to include moderation. That’s the trick of ecstatic revel in. It’s both the gold within the poison and the fly within the ointment. It churns settled dust into dusty jouissance. It transforms our consolation sector into a rubber band that flexibly expands for a time before it snaps again to “fact.”

Ecstatic experience gets us off the hook of self-seriousness and cultural-seriousness for some time, so that we will experience honest authenticity before returning to the each day grind. Indeed, it has the electricity to unmask the animal interior us, revealing all the howls and toothy menace, all the feral hungers and orgiastic passions, as a reminder that existence can be lived on cause and with motive instead of the mundane, robot-like, cog-bop-cog daily grind, grinding our lives into apathetic indifference.

Chop wood, carry water –with zest:

After the ecstasy, the laundry.” ~ Jack Kornfield

But, having a self-shattering revel in is best half of the warfare. One have to explicit the revel in by hook or by crook in a cathartic reconciliation, otherwise it becomes repressed and calcified, a vain organ.

However if it is self-actualized it has the ability to create chronic magic, whether or not within the shape of elixir for the tribe or within the form of artwork, tune, poetry, and dance for the general culture. It stands to cause, a gift given gives more than a gift ungiven.

It's far on this feel that numinous enjoy begets numinous enjoy. Artwork stimulated by ecstatic experience begets more ecstatic experience. The wild and inclined open coronary heart of the person who dared to lose manage and revel in the first-rate in the normal, begets the fountainhead-like overflow of creative cultural concord (art). The seed of the first-rate is planted inside the settled loam of the ordinary, and the formally dearth and banal texture of the human condition will become ripe with flourishing and Eudaimonia.

The power of ecstatic revel in is observed both in the dissolving of stuffy and outdated cultural patterns and within the planting of imaginative and creative seeds that have the ability to replace and empower the cultural dynamic.

Ultimately, the art of losing manage allows us realise how little manipulate we should start with, and how taking our restrained manipulate too significantly could have stifling, creativity-killing, creativeness-wilting outcomes on our lives. Permitting ourselves to lose manage every now and then helps us put things into proper perspective.

That that is wholesome and that that's dangerous will become vividly contrasted, and we're better able to decipher the underlying styles of the tremendous thriller. This makes us greater adept at adopting valid opinions which can be based totally upon healthful accepted laws as opposed to strictly base our reviews on previous man-made legal guidelines that have a tendency to be bad.

Just like the tremendous Hunter S. Thompson stated, “human beings are the best creatures in the world that claim a God, and the only residing issue that behaves adore it doesn’t have one.