Crossing the Barriers to Ecstasy
Part Three: Cultivating Ecstatic Emergence
Today is Pentecost Sunday in the Christian Liturgical calendar, often called the birthday of the church. If there is one descriptive word we could give to the first Pentecost, it would be “ecstatic.” If the church was, indeed, born in an outpouring of ecstatic joy that looked to onlookers like drunken behavior — times have changed!
Sacred ecstasy has not only been dismissed in past centuries, it continues to be impeded by a number of barriers and hurdles in our culture and religious traditions. This presence of energetic ecstasy is not a pursuit of happy feelings or wild behavior, but a vital experience and aspect of consciousness necessary for our spiritual evolution into greater liberation and enlightenment.
But many of us may feel blocked or have a hard time moving into this experience. Why is that? Here are four of the ways that the sacred ecstatic is being minimized or dismissed today in many, if not most Christian circles.
1. “Be careful not to feel too good.”
Christians are warned against too much joy, especially ecstasy. After all, you don’t want to look like Pentecostals with their shaking, babbling in tongues, and passing out on the floor. Or the warning is framed in the form of, “How can you sit around, navel-gazing and feeling euphoric when people all around you are suffering so greatly? The world is hurting, and we need to be out there helping.”
Of course, the answer to this is that we can do two things at once – and they are related. Having regular moments and times of deep joy that energizes us to be the hands and feet, voice, and heart of Jesus to the world today.
Theologian Howard Thurman penned the famous quote, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
2. Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritually sophisticated people may also be afraid to feel too good lest they are spiritually bypassing. This refers to any way in which we use our spirituality to bypass painful emotions, like despair, anger, disappointment, jealousy, or loneliness. Bypassing is spirituality that loves the light but avoids its heat. It’s the shadow of spirituality that needs to be recognized.
However, experiencing ecstasy does not need to be put into opposition to facing painful feelings and self-defeating patterns. I have found personally that I have needed both mystical sacred ecstasy and professional therapy for my repressed, buried wounds. Extreme joy gives me relief from pain and the energy to tackle my inner challenges. Both my spiritual journey and twenty years of off and on therapy (I had three months of EMDR therapy last year at age 82) have helped me face my unresolved issues and find healing.
3. New Movements within Christianity
The relatively recent development of Deconstructed Christianity, New Thought, Religious Science, and Eastern meditative traditions, all have something to offer the Christian tradition. However, by themselves, they fall flat. They settle for mind-centered spirituality that seldom gets lift-off. More and more people are finding these do not touch the inner emotional heart center of their being where joy, bliss, and ecstasy lies dormant.
These movements, from an integral viewpoint, all suffer from the pathology of transcend and negate rather than transcend and include. When transcendence to a new level occurs, there is a tendency to reject, not just the outmoded elements of the previous altitude, but to reject all of it. This negates essential building blocks of the previous stages that the emerging stage is built upon. It hijacks the gifts of the preceding stages that are valuable at any stage.
For SBNR (spiritual-but-not-religious) and postmodern cultural creatives in the Christian tradition, this often shows up in being allergic to the very idea of God’s personal presence, as well as that of Jesus, Mary, and other guides. This results in an impersonal spirituality that does not satisfy the deep needs of human personhood. We are inherently and deeply made for a meaningful relationship with a few other significant beings, both in warm, flesh and blood bodies and those now in their alive and warm but spiritual bodies. The presence of such companions brings us comfort, joy, and blissful belonging.
4. Internalized Patriarchy
The most subtle and pervasive barrier to experiencing ecstasy today is due to resistance from patriarchal attitudes. This results in the internal suppression of the feminine, including emotions, the relational collective, eros, and the body. As long as men see women as less “emotionally regulated” than men and as competent as men, we all are invited to repress our feelings, emotional connections with others, and bodily sensations besides genital ones.
Historically, meditation and contemplative prayer have come down to us from celibate men living in Christian and Buddhist monasteries that are a collection of individuals who do not have personal relationships with either men or women! Talk about a patriarchal set-up! This is also a legitimate description of the female-excluding Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church priesthood and hierarchy down through history and today.
Mind-centered meditation and prayer is a patriarchal product. It intentionally and damagingly neglects the collective, the body, emotions, and erotic feelings. Whole-Body Mystical Awakening is designed to go in a different direction that embraces the integration of the masculine and feminine.
HOW TO LET ECSTASY EMERGE IN US TODAY
Set your intention
I owe much of what I write here to Bradford Keeney and his teaching on Sacred Ecstasy. Most of us, like good modern folks, approach spirituality through cognitive means. We seek the right thought, belief, spiritual law, or theoretical understanding, assuming that it will help bring the desired change. However, there is another road that takes you straight into the spiritual heat. It begins by clearly and enthusiastically stating that you want to enter the baptism of spirit and fire. It’s common for people to be embarrassed about desiring, feeling, and expressing sacred ecstasy. But the cost of looking sophisticated is that you never get to experience the joy and fulfillment of spiritual delight.
Sacred emotion
The heat of sacred ecstasy is not possible without sufficient sacred emotion, especially the longing for a personal relationship with the divine. Keeney points out that we are unable to move into ecstasy without a strongly felt personal relationship with a beloved other, someone embodying the originating force of creation. Rather than get sidetracked by philosophical arguments concerning definitions and explanations for or against a personal God, we implicitly recognize the practical, natural resource offered by relating to God as a loving parent, close relative, soul mate, or best friend.
A helpful tool is the spiritual thermometer. There is a time and place for cooler temperatures that include contemplation, conversation, and intellectual workouts that sharpen the mind. However, we live in a time when stillness, mindfulness, tame talk, and cool composure are overemphasized at the expense of shaking bodies, singing voices, untamed expression, and ecstatic emotion.
In our WeSpace groups, when we move into our heart space by thinking of someone we love, that is a form of warming up our spiritual temperature. Do whatever warms you up spiritually.
In my own times, I like to sing the old hymns (slightly amended at times) that I grew up with. One of my favorites is “My Jesus I love thee. I know you are mine. For you all the follies of ego I resign.” Or “Day by day, day by day, O, dear Lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day.”
Those may not work for others, as we all pursue and embrace that which cultivates the stirring in our hearts.
Hang around people who experience ecstasy
If we are never around anyone who experiences ecstasy but only those who think those that do are weird, that dampens our openness to experiencing ecstasy.
The secret of enlightenment sleeps in us all, and it can be awakened by the energetic field and touch of one in whose body it is already awake and active. Hence the importance, even necessity, of awakened guides from this side or realized saints from the other side. Spiritual warming is also more optimal inside a group. When more than one person gathers to practice with this intention, the fire is more likely to be caught and spread among everyone.
Connect to the mystical web of sacred energy fields
With so many people quarantined at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, there has never been a better opportunity to discover the oldest worldwide web ever created—the first network that connects all things on both sides of the mystical veil, the mystical web of sacred energy fields. Ecstasy is “connection”—shifting beyond our usual self-absorbed ego and feeling deeply connected to all things, to nature, to the universe, to other people, and to God.
This quantum web of sacred energy is real and life-giving. It is more felt than seen or understood because it is pure, sacred sensing, feeling, and emotion. Don’t forget that this emotion is not like any typical emotion. It is inspired by a personally felt relationship with divine mystery. This feeling may begin with a sense of wonder and awe that brings goosebumps to your skin, or it may become a deep and tearful feeling of appreciation and gratitude that something vast and great watches over and cares for you. In its more elevated ecstatic forms, sacred emotion feels like a direct contact experience with God, where you are lit by sacred fire, full of bliss.
