The Addiction of Ecstasy - Part I

Some seekers get into the mode of looking for just the right teacher (or teaching).
…
Others of us get into the habit of trying to reproduce our most enticing spiritual experiences… We transcend “ordinary reality”, only to find ourselves right back where we started.

Mike Slack - Life on the Path: Getting Past Spiritual Addiction

Sound familiar?

The Experience of Enlightenment

Three characteristics of expanded consciousness are being, bliss, and consciousness.

We experience a pure sense of timelessness. It isn’t that we don’t experience time, but we do become aware of eternity. Time - now, before, later - becomes something that we can dip into at any point. Time’s arrow becomes time’s ocean. Each instant is present, with awareness of any given point depending on our focus.

We experience a sense of pure consciousness. It isn’t that thought ceases to exist. It may, but it may not. It is that we cease to identify with thought. The mind becomes known from a broader perspective. We realize. We know that we are not our mind. I am angry and I am happy become objective facts for us to observe rather than just to experience. Once having touched this state, never again do we totally fall under the spell of the illusion that we are simply a psycho-physical complex.

We experience bliss. You like sex? It’s second rate. You enjoy drugs? You’re only touching the tip of the iceberg. No physical act, with the possible exception of direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain, can compare to the bliss you can experience during an expanded state of consciousness. It rises from the inside out and is stimulated from the outside in. Heat, cold, the touch of a breeze, the rustling of the leaves in the tree, all conspire to increase your ecstasy. The tightening focus of your attention raises it even higher.

Then you move. The feeling drains away. Shades of it imbue you for a few minutes, days, sometimes weeks. You again exist within time. I am angry again becomes an experience more than an observation. And you want to go back. You want to experience again that state of being, bliss, and pure awareness.

You’ve just got the first taste of the addiction of ecstasy. Some people never get past this pursuit of ecstasy. As Mike points out in the quote at the top of this post, they go from teacher to teacher, technique to technique searching for new ways to bring back that feeling. I know what he’s talking about. As the saying goes - Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

A Bolt From the Sky

The addiction of ecstasy is the result of a misapprehension and a type of spiritual childishness. We compartmentalize that experience of enlightenment, seeing it as something totally separate from our day to day life. It is almost impossible not to do so. It is so overpowering, so outside the realm of our previous experience, that we cannot help but feel that it is totally other, a complete break from the normal world with no points of contact in common with it. This compartmentalization becomes part of the basis of talking about the higher self and the lower self, the divine and the physical, and in many respects, good and evil.

And the experience is not at our beck and call. Repeat the exact same activity that occurred when you experience ecstasy and you may arrive at the same state, you may not. In itself, this is one the the factors that keeps us searching to repeat it. It’s the same mechanism that hooks a gambler or a sex addict. Looked at from a behavioral perspective, one of the best ways to maintain a given behavior is to reinforce it sporadically.

No wonder so many people have attributed enlightenment to grace or a gift from god. It’s experience seems to be both beyond their control and at the same time a total break with what has gone before.

But it isn’t. That’s the subject of the next article in this series.

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