Ecstasy

“ My body is so broken that it can no longer support the intellect. I will eat and drink and strengthen this tortured body that it may still be the servant of the higher in me, no longer complaining of its own griefs and diverting attention from the goal. For it is possible that what I have already learned has prepared the way to Right Ecstasy and that in ecstasy I may behold the beginning of the Wisdom which in all the methods I have tried has been hidden from me. ”

“ We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating it from the frailties of the flesh. On the contrary, ecstasy is nothing more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics assume it shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. ”

“ Well, of course everybody is acquainted with that peculiar ecstasy that undoubtedly does overtake you in good shops, sometimes, especially at Christmas. I prefer to call it ecstasy rather than intoxication, but I have heard it called even drunkenness. It is a magnificent and overwhelming experience, like a good wine. A blind instinct seizes your reason and throws her out of the window of your soul, and then assumes entire control of the volitional machinery. You listen to no arguments, you care for no consequences. ”

“ Then will come ecstasy. In ecstasy a man remains dumb with wonder. Outward breathing stops entirely, but inward breathing continues; as when aiming a gun, a man remains speechless and without breathing. In Divine Love one entirely forgets the external world with all its charms and attractions; even one's own body, which is so dear to one, is easily forgotten. ”

“ William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."
Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means to make stand out; the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy has nothing to do with thought. ”

“ After the first fever of ecstasy there comes the reaction, when the pulse beats slow and the mind is filled with doubt and melancholy. This desire for approval is not a weakness—it seems to stand as a natural need of every human soul. ”

“ In ecstasy the body feels to be disconnected in some unaccountable manner from the will; it lies inert, though it knows itself and knows that it stills lives—which fundamentally differentiates it from sleep, because in sleep we do not know our body, we do not know if we are alive or dead, we know nothing. In ecstasy is no such blankness: merely the body is perforce inert, it would be entirely forgotten but for its periods of distress. ”

“ There is an ecstasy so great that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, during which one’s steps now involuntarily rush, and anon involuntarily lag. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and titillations descending to one’s very toes ”

“ We are to conclude that both the ancient people and the modern writers recognized ecstasy as the supreme gift and state of man, and that they chose the Vine and the juice of the Vine, as the most beautiful and significant symbol of that Power which withdraws a man from the common life and the common consciousness, and taking him from the dust of earth, sets him in high places, in the eternal world of ideas. ”

“ In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy, enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy. ”

“ Willoughby. It is curious to observe how rapidly the mind gives way under the unnatural strain of this super-essential abstraction, and indemnifies itself by imaginative and fantastical excesses for the attempt to sojourn in an atmosphere so rare. At first, ecstasy is an indescribable state—any form or voice would mar and materialize it. The vague boundlessness of this exaltation, in which the soul swoons away, is not to be hinted at by the highest utterance of mortal speech. But a degenerate age or a lower order of mind demands the detail and imagery of a more tangible marvel. ”

“ Go to some original treatises on sociological, moral or psychological subjects and omit the statistics, the laboratory work and the cold hard reasoning and you will often find great ideas emotionally stated that belong to the literature of ecstasy. We have parted with the idea that an author must be tearing a passion to tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to produce poetry. When Herbert Spencer analyzes love for a page and a half and tells us how it is composed, we exclaim, this is the literature of ecstasy even though we find it in a treatise on psychology. ”

“ The ecstasy, also, of the reasoning power is 8the cause of divination, as is likewise the mania which happens in diseases, or mental aberration, or a sober and vigilant condition, or suffusions of the body, or the imaginations excited by diseases, or an ambiguous state of mind, such as that which takes place between a sober condition and ecstasy, or the imaginations artificially procured by enchantment.
Nature, likewise, art, and the sympathy of things in the universe, as if they were the parts of one animal, contain premanifestations of certain things with reference to each other. ”

“ Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if, neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential conditions. ”

“ The circumstance that the only normal organic sensation known to us which resembles that of ecstasy is the sexual feeling, explains the fact that ecstatics connect their ecstatic presentations by way of association with the idea of love, and describe the ecstasy itself as a kind of supernatural act of love, as a union of an ineffably high and pure sort with God or the Blessed Virgin. ”

“ Genuine ecstasy, in so far as it is real and actual, is often on its organic side accompanied by a beginning, which indeed is little more than the appearance, though a highly delusive feeling, of dying away, which precedes the higher gleam or echo from the world beyond the grave. Such phenomena, however, require attentive examination before we can draw from them any precise inference. The general idea of them may be distinctly traced in the human consciousness. ”

“ By giving it to others we get it for ourselves. Ecstasy and rapture are emotions of short duration. They are so exhilarating that they soon wear out.
We all have our little troubles and annoyances. These we should accept as inevitable, and neither think nor talk much about them. They help to wear away the rough edges. ”

“ More frequently there is violent emotional excitement which may find expression in impassioned utterances, and in extravagant bodily movements and gesticulations. Ecstasy usually presents itself as a kind of temporary religious insanity, and has frequently appeared as an epidemic. ”

“ The sense of personality, at any rate, is more or less completely lost, and the ecstasy takes a form more or less passionate, according as the worshiper depends on the rapidity rather than on the monotony of his excitations. Here, again, the self- background drops, inasmuch as every rhythmical movement tends to become automatic, and then unconscious. Thus what we are wont to call the inspired madness of the Delphic priestesses was less the expression of ecstasy than the means of its excitation. ”

“ One of the consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep and kneel. ”

“ How far the ecstasy of all true musicians may account for their super-normal efforts, depends on the meaning accepted of ecstasy. It really is a state of sensitiveness to harmonious sounds, which at its best differs little from the most exalted form of clairvoyance, or, perhaps better, clair-audience. ”

“ While on the other hand we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take three or four of these words—'transport,' 'rapture,' 'ravishment,' 'ecstasy,'—'transport,' that which carries us, as 'rapture,' or 'ravishment,' that which snatches us out of and above ourselves; and 'ecstasy' is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek. ”

“ Then we reach the stage of hallucinations and delirium. Finally, in the last stage, comes ecstasy, which Ribot calls ‘the acute form of the effort after unity of consciousness.’ In ecstasy the excited part of the brain works with such violence that it suppresses the functioning of all the rest of the brain. The ecstatic subject is completely insensible to external stimuli. There is no perception, no representation, no grouping of presentations into concepts, and of concepts into judgments and reasoning. A single presentation, or group of presentations, fills up consciousness. ”

“ The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without ab{119}solute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man; for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible ”

“ This state of ecstasy must first have intensified the susceptibility of the whole machine: otherwise, no art is possible. All kinds of ecstasy, however differently produced, have this power to create art, and above all the state dependent upon sexual excitement—this most venerable and primitive form of ecstasy. The same applies to that ecstasy which is the outcome of all great desires, all strong passions ”

“ Among the lower races, and high above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or 306disease, is a state common and held in honour among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and under its influence the barriers between sensation and imagination break utterly away. A North American Indian prophetess once related the story of her first vision: At her solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an ecstasy, and at the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the path that leads to the opening of the sky ”

“ Accordingly ecstasy may pertain to the appetitive power, as when a man's appetite tends to something outside him, and in this sense Dionysius says that "the Divine love causes ecstasy," inasmuch as it makes man's appetite tend to the object loved. ”

“ Ecstasy, ekstasis, a displacement or removal of the soul from the body, into which the demon enters and causes strange laughing, crying, or contortions. It is not metaphor, but the literal belief ill a ghost-world, which has given rise to such words as these, and to such expressions as "a man beside himself or transported." ”

“ For the word ecstasy, which is added to the title, signifies a transport of the mind, which is produced either by a panic, or by some revelation. But in this Psalm the panic of the people of God troubled by the persecution of all the heathen, and by the failing of faith throughout the world, is principally seen. ”

“ Thus religious enthusiasm leads to ecstasy, to a condition in which consciousness is so preoccupied with feelings of mental pleasure that the concept of suffering endured can only be apperceived without its painful quality. ”

“ But in both instances the sensation was pleasurable—intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight. ”

“ The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal ”

“ Ecstasy, as we see in cases of acute mental disease, is probably always connected with sexual excitement, if not with sexual depravity. The same association is seen in less extreme cases, and one of the commonest features in the conversation of acutely maniacal women is the intermingling of erotic and religious ideas. ”

“ It is obvious in both cases that, as no one understands the tongue, no one can determine whether the interpretation of it be accurate or not. But it is easily conceivable that a sympathetic nervous listener might suppose that he understood the broken and incoherent speech of ecstasy and might interpret it according to his own stimulated imagination. The mysterious and unknown are suggestive texts, and there is nothing more infectious than religious excitement. ”