Luminalogue

Chronic Ecstasy

Image Source: giannakali, Beyond Meds

"Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill." Rob Brezsny

Recently, a friend published this quote on FB.  Chronic ecstasy.  Chronic.  Ecstasy.  A strange juxtaposition.  Chronic, often associated with the less healthy form of constancy—as in chronic pain.  And ecstasy, often associated with the less healthy form of drug-induced high—as in rave culture drug of choice. 

My initial response was one of both affirmation and caution.  Yes, chronic ecstasy is indeed a learnable, even valuable, skill, and yet, chronic ecstasy without discerning engagement is simply self-indulgent escapism. 

This is especially true with regards to meditation.  If you’re a meditator, then you probably already know that ecstasy is a pleasant part of the territory.  At some point in a meditation practice, we usually experience some extraordinary states of bliss—natural highs beyond any drug-induced ecstasy. 

And if you’re not yet a meditator, you’re probably thinking, drug-free ecstasy?  Yes, please, I likes me some drug-free ecstasy.  After all, who doesn’t want some ecstasy? 

The trouble is that the drug-free ecstasy can be just as addictive as the drug-induced kind, leading to more escapist than enlightening meditation, causing us to seek out a particular euphoric experience instead of embracing the whole truth of what is.  It’s kind of like a meditative drug-induced stupor.  It can feel good, but we’re not really all there. 

After such ecstatic experiences, we often find ourselves mistakenly judging the quality of our meditation by how we feel during our practice.  We get attached to “achieving” ecstatic states, becoming disappointed when we don’t “achieve” particular ecstatic states during or beyond our meditation, as if ecstasy (or achievement) paves the path to enlightenment.

Yet, if we habitually seek out, or simply slip into ecstatic states readily and repeatedly without full awareness, our meditation practice begins to look more like blissing out than blissfully being with the truth of experience.  We begin to inhabit the murky territory of good sits as good trips.  In so doing, we mistake the transient effects (ecstasy, discomfort, restlessness, etc.), for the practice (sitting and being with what is, focusing attention on the breath, etc.), and the long-term results of practice (greater awareness, equanimity, contentment). 

Lacking discernment or more discriminating awareness, some meditators even conflate the repeated experience of ecstasy with enlightenment.  Unfortunately, as long as there is an “I” getting high, there’s only false en-lie-tenment rather than any genuine awakening.  Chronic ecstasy, thus, becomes merely the ignorance of bliss rather than the eternal bliss of being fully present and alive with the nature of who you really are and what is.

After all, just because you can access a light show in your mind doesn’t mean that you’re enlightened.  It just means that you’re enjoying some good trips along the way.  The purpose of meditation is to realize who you are and what is.   Genuine bliss arrives when we learn to be just as we are rather than as we think we should be. 

If you meditate merely to take the bliss-trip, you just end up in Lala Land, chronically ecstatic without a care or a clue.

 

  

 

One-Moment Meditation

Marty Boroson's wonderful, playful introduction to general meditation.

If Dr. Seuss Met Eckhart Tolle

Scott Kalechstein's clever, humorous teaching, If Dr. Seuss Met Eckhart Tolle.

The Altar of This Moment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Place everything you can perceive--
Everything you can
  See,
  Hear,  
  Smell,
  Taste,
  Or touch,    
Upon the altar of this moment
And give thanks.

It is over so soon,
This expression,
This single moment of your precious life,
This one heart
pounding itself open
with fear or wild joy,
   
This one breath rising
in the cold winter air   
smoothly and gently
or coughing and sputtering,
 
Bow, while you can, before
This one taste
Of afternoon tea
Warming its way to your belly,
Or the fragrant orange
exploding its sweet juice
in your grateful mouth.
 
You have to love
The antics of your mind,
Imagining life should only be sweet.
The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.
It is whole, like you,
Before you think yourself to pieces.
 
Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,
And give special thanks for such grace
That wakes you up from sleeping through your life.
Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,
Yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.
 
In this one moment,
Your eyes meet mine and there is
a single looking.
What is peering from behind our masks?  
Can it touch itself across the room?
 
Place your palms together;
Touch your holy skin.
In another moment it will shed itself.
What will you be then?
What were you before you had two hands?
What are you now?
 
You cannot capture That
and place It on the altar of this moment.
It is the altar,
And this moment’s infinite expressions,
And the Seeing,
And its own devotion to itself.
 
You are That.
 
 
 
© Dorothy S. Hunt
San Francisco, California

Presence: It's about Time

"...But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us.  Us, the most fleeting of all..." 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Many of us regularly travel by air through different time zones, mindfully orienting ourselves to the time of our departures and arrivals at our various destinations, sometimes feeling like it takes awhile to truly arrive, body, mind, and spirit. When we fly, we are particularly attentive to the condition and experience of traveling through time. We navigate clock time—Pacific time, Mountain time, Central time, Eastern time, Atlantic time. We set our watches and schedules, adapting our sleep, meals, and meetings, so we can be on time wherever we are in time. Some of us even have watches that display multiple time zones, so we can more easily attend to the different time zones that constitute our worlds.

Yet, how many of us recognize that we are always traveling through time, experiencing different time zones from moment to moment? At any given moment, we are experiencing the multi-faceted nature of time—simultaneously traveling through past, present, and future, then, now, later, before, after, navigating digital time, analog time, calendar time, biorhythmic time, seasonal time, daytime, nighttime, dream time. We experience the elasticity of time, living years that pass in the blink of an eye, and minutes that hold eternity, and encounters that even seem to transcend time, depending on our experience of the moment. Our history and our potential are present in every instant.

Here's a thought experiment:

Yoga: The Original Integral Practice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all powers of our human existence into a means of reaching divine Being…” Sri Aurobindo

"You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state." Sharon Gannon

"Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union - the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul." B.K.S. Iyengar

In all of the excitement about integral practice (not just the one in a kit, but the whole kit and caboodle), it seems to me that yoga—fully practiced beyond the reductionist emphasis on Hatha-yogic postures—serves this rather well. As a yoga practitioner for the last twenty years, I have found that yoga fulfills what most people seem to be seeking in this quest for integral practice—a comprehensive method for engaging Spirit in our lives.

Maybe I’m an integral Luddite [grin], but I love being part of such a rich, global tradition exemplifying five thousand years or so of practice, especially one that requires so little—a willing body, heart, and mind. No bells (dumb or otherwise, but if you're into gear, there's no shortage of mats and straps and props for you), no whistles (although with practice you’re likely to hear the sounds of the universe, the music of the spheres). Wireless and portable. Pure simplicity with enough complexity to continue to evolve through centuries of practice.

I’ve taken it with me around the world and it’s never failed me. That said, I appreciate any offering that inspires people to embrace Spirit in the world—and I have even been known to lift a weight or two with some regularity. So without dismissing the value of ITP, ILP and other more recent self-transformative endeavors, I simply invite you to consider the relevance of what came before by offering this relatively brief and decidedly un-academic introduction to what may be the most useful and original integral practice that I know: yoga.