Ecstatic Technique: Stepping Outside Yourself
…An alternative name for this blog could be Ecstatic Technique…
“Narcotics are a vulgar substitute for the pure trance,” Mircea Eliade argues in his compendium of global shamanism, Shamanism: the Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951). In Eliade’s view narcotics are decadent, an imitation of what was once purely mystical. While this omission of the narcotic—or suppression?—follows the reactionary tradition in the academy to avoid those topics not sanctioned by enlightenment thinking, (like the esoteric, the irrational, magic, occult, and most definitely mind-altering substances) it is an omission that is also familiar to certain eastern traditions for whom the reliance on a psychoactive substance to achieve enlightenment is discouraged, if not prohibited altogether: like they advise in Zen, don’t take a helicopter to the top of the mountain. Zen also says chop wood, carry water—but this is not very romantic (which I think is the point).
For the believer Eliade, what is “purely mystical” is the universal symbol and archetype, so that the ecstatic shamanic passage goes from the profane and ordinary world to the extraordinary world of the Jungian archetypes—as if the very bottom of reality were stocked with a Tarot deck’s major arcana. IMO this is ass-backwards. It is as if Eliade is smuggling Jung’s Christianity into the shamanic underworld.
But while Eliade may not be much less benighted than Lord James Frazer—for whom the archaic mind is primitive, that is bat-shit crazy—I will accept his non-pharmacological conditions, and in the spirit of Zen, suspend pharmakeia—for the time being. Because obviously there are a whole host of non-drug-based techniques by which one may arrive at a similar—if less cinematic—ecstatic result; that is, to step outside of the realm of the possible; to pass beyond the limit, from this world to the other world—which is in this one. If your ego is a stack of defenses arrayed against an unthinkable reality, then should you find a path, any exit at all, outside the castle (that is the world of appearances) chances are you will encounter a reality that you heretofore could not imagine, let alone think about. So it’s best not to ascribe too much definition to the ecstatic, except that it is something that people do, and have done, all the time, since time immemorial.
Paths, ladders, sky-ropes, winding vines, jumping out the window, or just a trap door that appears under you when you least expect; the strange result of imagining techniques of ecstasy without the explicit use of, well, ecstasy, is that ecstasy begins to appear everywhere; no longer the domain of Buddhists, heads, or mystics weirdos, the ecstatic becomes endemic to human experience. Like for example accidental bouts of ecstasy such as having a high fever, or falling in love, near death experience, or the low-frequency vortex of jouissance. And then of course the more intentional states, like the creative trance of the artist, vipassana meditation, psychoanalysis, willed-insomnia, fasting, surfing, all-night dancing—and so on.
Eliade describes the shamanic initiation as a crisis, and this is perhaps more to the point; not that you have to become a shaman to practice these techniques, mind you, but rather that either the ego itself is the crisis, and so you have to get out of there—by any means necessary—or the crisis is finding yourself already outside the castle walls. The truth of either of these scenarios is that our manifest psychic defenses, to which we naturally cling for dear life, are themselves rickety and provisional; not so much a castle as a make-shift lean-to; they will not last and sooner or later are going to give out, and so ecstasy, of one kind or another, is waiting for you, over the far hills—or just around the corner—like some strange angel.
If the East refers to the left-hand-path as the lightning path—or the helicopter path—many of the techniques of ecstasy are a long slow path—psychoanalysis not least among them. So slow in fact that my ego-as-castle metaphor is not quite adequate. McKenna disparaged meditation for being too long and boring; I think meditation is ecstatic precisely because of this boredom. But an ecstatic meditation practice makes the idea of the limit so subtle as to be barely there at all.
Some Zen practitioners argue that the state of nirvana, of nonduality, is the mere act of a sitting meditation. TBD on that one: but after some years of my own meditation practice I will admit that during each sit I do pass a kind of limit, but one so mundane as to heretofore go unnoticed: I pass from a state of active thought, into a state of empty perception in which it seems as if the very symbolic order (all those archetypes) were suspended or lifted away, as on a clutch, and the perceptual world becomes highly strange, unfamiliar and trance-like: this suspension gets more profound every time it happens: perhaps more so because it does not—necessarily—happen overnight, but rather over years.
This leads me to assume that one may pass into an ecstatic state without knowing it, and that half of the technique is becoming aware when it is happening; the development of an ecstatic literacy…?
Cloud World (#3), 2014, Aaron Morse
