Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy — “to stand outside” — comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

Every word is an Ark of the Covenant around which we dance and shudder, divining God to be its dreadful inhabitant. You shall never be able to establish in words that you live in ecstasy. But struggle unceasingly to establish it in words. Battle with myths, with comparisons, with allegories, with rare and common words, with exclamations and rhymes, to embody it in flesh, to transfix it! God, the Great Ecstatic, works in the same way. He speaks and struggles to speak in every way He can, with seas and with fires, with colors, with wings, with horns, with claws, with constellations and butterflies, that he may establish His ecstasy. Like every other living thing, I also am in the center of the Cosmic whirlpool.

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over.

To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

Find ecstasy within yourself. It is not out there. It is in your innermost flowering. The one you are looking for is you.

"Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth."

[From: 19 Lessons On Tea]

Happiness! Can any human being undertake to define it for another?

Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.