ECSTATIC MEANING

Of course ecstasy is a physical state, maybe something like an orgasm or a drug high.  Rats crave it.  So do humans and most other mammals, but it’s not clear that other animals get that way.  If it’s something physical, they probably do, since we evolved out of them.  Maybe a songbird in a mating and territory song frenzy.  No one knows whether a bull elephant in musth is feeling anything good -- his actions are outright dangerous and look like rage though the scientists say it’s sex. Even in humans it can be hard to separate sex and rage, down there in the ancient dark brain there are no words for. 

Clearly “ecstasy” (oh, yeah, it’s a drug and all that) is a mental/emotional state, claimed by emotion-based institutional religion as well as “spiritual” individual experience.  Clearly, it is experience-based, not related to dogma except for bookish prescriptions about how to get into that state.  But it’s attractive and impressive enough for people to go seeking institutions and leaders who promise to create the state.  To the individual person it is very real.  It feels privileged.

Pentecostal groups include ecstasy in their meetings, in what could pejoratively be called “self-hypnotism.”   In the Christian tradition “it marks the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and their transformation from frightened and confused people to men who would face martyrdom for what they believed.”  Sounds Islamic to me.  Actually, it is characteristic of any human movement based on intense emotional states, particularly those dependent on drugs like peyote or ayahuasca or psilicibin -- or come to that -- alcohol.  Even adrenaline as in battle or extreme sports or something as risky as walking a tightrope or driving fast or “base jumping.”  Photos of people about to be killed as martyrs or criminals often look dazed and transported, like a mouse confronting a cat, and probably in just about the same blood molecule state.

Pentecost is this Sunday, May 24, 2015.  Rev. Mark Woods is a Baptist minister and journalist.  He says,“Pentecost is from the Greek word 'Pentekostos', which means 'fifty'. It's the 50th day after the Sabbath of Passover week and in Judaism is called the Feast of Weeks (Leviticus 23:16).”  It’s traditionally a good day for baptism or joining a church.  Or starting summer.

Some exotic practices are attached to the Pentecostal movement, which is popular on Native American reservations and often expressed in other denominations.  It is the flame on the cross at the entrance of Methodist churches.  Strangely, though it is an individual experience, it becomes a force for joining a community.

A number of phenomena are associated:  one is speaking in tongues, a kind of babbling that’s interpreted as an unknown language (a bit of a contradiction in terms.)  Another is snake-handling which ought to boost adrenaline.  The idea is that God is protecting the handler of the rattlers.  Partly because such things are considered weird and dangerous enough to justify stigma and persecution, they are tagged with scripture quotes but also by claiming that they are from contact with a supernatural world: a great wind, a huge fire, or bones that come alive -- all human metaphors that are exaggerations of the real.  Supersized.  Other.

Clearly, if you take the drug called “ecstasy” but more technically MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine)  which is the chemical found in the synthetic "club drug" ecstasy, a drug with stimulant and hallucinogenic effects, you are likely to trigger a flood of serotonin.  The catch is that it’s only borrowed against the future and therefore causes depletion of serotonin which is pretty painful, maybe damaging.  “Drug” levels in the blood are meant to swing back and forth between more and less, not too far in either direction.  If that loop is addled -- either too much or too little -- behavior is affected and may take the person into extremes of high and low that persist, keep rolling though unwanted.

The problem with the ecstasies of emotion or the reciprocating despair is in the tension between the life of an individual and the life of the community, which can also be both intensified or destroyed.  Power and fittingness in the culture must allow the self-regulation that is located in the pre-frontal “ethical” cerebrum.  That is, the ideas and practices that promote survival of self and group, even if a powerful charismatic leader is encouraging everyone to jump into a volcano in order to get to Heaven.  (End of the World Syndrome.)  The fancy of being a “Saving Remnant,” opposed to the rest of a depraved world, is a direct route to terrorism.

Hope makes stigmatized minorities vulnerable to ecstatic states of mind, the ethical/emotional reward for a religious context.  If that can be successfully recorded in dogma, housed in institutions, and rewarded with prosperity, then you’ve got yourself a church at least, maybe a denomination, and possibly a world-changing conflagration people call “religion.”  The political power, as we see, is enormous and can destroy whole populations through violence or sheer disruption, sending masses of people into the “deserts” or seas to starve and die.  

I’m interested in all this, how it happens, and how vivid metaphors change the way we interact with the world and other people.  A denominational seminary is likely to oppose the ideas, because they are disruptive and challenge loyalty.  “Just follow our rules.”  But a university with a strong comparative religion program will be friendly, up to a point.  Many fear that without a boundary, “religion” can become destructive, as history has shown again and again.  Art, I might reflect later, has fewer boundaries because it is considered harmless unless it begins to show icons as cartoons or -- what is “Piss Christ,” the crucifix standing in urine?  Deconstruction, iconoclastic or oxymoron?

Claiming specialness on the evidence of access to another world -- either supernatural or poetic -- can provide a sense of safety that may not be realistic but can satisfy an individual that they need not struggle anymore.  Christians' claim that their access to another world amounts to the denial of death, because those with the privilege will reincarnate -- literally become meat again.  

Making a metaphor this real introduces a lot of problems, as even Osama Bin Laden realized when he told only one wife of his many earthly spouses that she could be his wife in Paradise.  (So much for all those promised virgins.)  Then there’s the “monkey’s paw” dilemma in which a person torn apart by machinery comes back to life in the same ghastly state as he was in when he died.  Someone went to the trouble of figuring out how much physical space each human occupies and discovered we’d have to be piled up in layers if we’re all going to be reincarnated at the same time on this planet.  In philosophical circles, this is called “misplaced concreteness.”

What people know on this planet is what supplies the metaphors of religion with ideas, thought projections.  But in the very beginning, it is pre-verbal felt meaning at the animal level, rooted in ecology, that supplies the emergence of cultures of survival.  Individuals fit themselves into these patterns or, if they can’t, search out or invent new patterns either as a part of the whole or by finding a new basis of community.  It might be small and unique, in which case it is likely to be unknown, or if it responds to a felt need, it might eventually sweep the continents, as a new religion.

We are told, in fancy language, that there are two approaches to the understanding of religion: one is at the level of theories about existence, and the other is a matter of simply “doin’ it:” praxis.  In the best of all possible worlds, the two fit together.  But the human brain is still newly evolved and the planet is full of both limits and possibilities. Some of us get high on ideas, but they aren’t always in words.