Episode 126 - Ecstasy
Transcript
Ellie: 0:11
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:14
The podcast where two professors find a way to talk about medieval saints and club drugs in the same episode.
Ellie: 0:22
Woo. I'm Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:24
And Woo. I'm David Pena Guzman.
Ellie: 0:28
I don't know how much that woo translated. It sounded a little forced. It sounded like we don't go to the club anymore and are trying to remember what it was like to be out past midnight in the olden days. Speaking of which, David, you had the brilliant suggestion of starting this episode with a song that many millennials will likely know. And if you are not a millennial. You may or may not know it, but you will now know it. This is from the HBO TV show, Summer Heights High
Summer Heights High Song: 0:57
Ecstasy, Ecstasy, E E. E ecstasy, She's a naughty girl with a bad habits, bad habits for drugs. She's a party girl with bad habits. Bad habits for drugs.
David: 1:19
I think I'm that girl. When I first watched this in college, I have to say, I low level identified with Mr. G, the super flamboyant high school theater teacher who is the creator of this musical. And this song just sent me, 'cause it's so funny in the context of the show and just the image of this girl who's got a bad habit. A bad habit for drugs and you know, you have to watch it. So I recommend to our listeners that they watch it because the visuals are just as good as the music.
Ellie: 2:04
Yeah. So without getting into too much of the content of the show, much of which is likely cancelable in 2025 this is a show put on at a high school by the theater teacher, Mr. G, and it's called Mr. G, the musical. And on stage is a high school student pole dancing, and she's Jessica, the subject of it who is, you know, doing ecstasy at the club. So David, in addition to just like loving this song, I was down for us to play this at the beginning, in part because I feel like it gets at the way that ecstasy, which is a colloquial term for a drug which we'll talk about later, but also moreover, the name of a state, a state of ecstasy, which doesn't require drugs to get to, exists at the margins of what is considered acceptable in society. Right? Jessica is portrayed as a party girl with a bad habit. And the song is all about ecstasy.
David: 2:59
Well, and it's not only that she has a bad habit for drugs, it's also that in her case, drugs mixed with sex and sexuality. As we were told at the beginning of the musical, she's what you would call, a slut. And so there is also this association that the musical taps into between the drug, ecstasy, the dangers of sex, and also the sexualization of young adults in a really weird way that I think also reflects larger fears and paranoias that our culture has about E, the drug.
Ellie: 3:34
Yeah, and she's not even a young adult. She's fully a teenager. But this idea of young women as being particularly susceptible to ecstasy, obviously in this case it's the drug, but as we'll talk about with the medieval mystics more the state of ecstasy. There's a long tradition of that, this association of women with ecstatic experiences and the way that those ecstatic experiences take us beyond our ordinary everyday lives, whether it's because they're considered divine, whether it's because they're considered expressions of quote unquote insanity, or whether it's they're considered the product of drugs.
David: 4:09
And also because they suspend or displace our normal way of experiencing our bodies and our subjectivity because, if we think about the etymology of the term ekstasis, it comes from the Greek root ek stasis, which means standing outside of oneself. So it has a sense of being beyond or outside the normal parameters of who we take ourselves to be in everyday experience.
Ellie: 4:35
Both raising us above the human, I would say towards a divine, but also maybe taking us beneath what's considered to be human towards a raw erotic experience. Something like jouissance and or something that's forbidden.
David: 4:50
And I think you see that actually in the musical of Mr. G because at one point, Jessica, the main character, expresses her bad habit for drugs by constantly saying in a repetitive, but very intense way. I want it bad. I want it bad. Which I think emphasizes this connection between ecstasy and desire that, as you point out, can lead us above to a supra human state or bring us down to an animal corporeal existence.
Ellie: 5:21
Today we are talking about ecstasy.
David: 5:24
How do Christian mystics explain the sense of merging with the divine?
Ellie: 5:29
Are ecstatic experiences rare or might they be pervasive in our society?
David: 5:34
And what does rave culture have to tell us about the link between music, sensation, and Ekstasis?
Ellie: 5:44
Philosopher, Simon Critchley recently published a book called Mysticism, and that was kind of the impetus for this episode, David, was that you and I learned of this book. I actually studied with Critchley for a little bit when I was in grad school at my year in New York at the new school, my romanticized year. And yeah, so we got his book on mysticism and we were like, you know what, why don't we do an episode on ecstasy? So this book has a lot about medieval Christian mystics, many of whom I was deeply into in my before my romanticized New York era. I had my romanticized high school mystic era, and also talks about ecstatic experience outside of a religious context as well.
David: 6:28
I can only picture you, Ellie, in New York at this time maybe developing your own bad habit for God knows what in the big city.
Ellie: 6:37
Oh no, that was not, that's not my vibe. At 25, I was like a PBR girl,
David: 6:41
really, well actually you stayed at PBR girl for a long time.
Ellie: 6:46
Yeah. I'm like, you knew me then. I was cheap as hell.
David: 6:49
I know you were Mr. G. I was Jessica. The roles were gender reversed in our case.
Ellie: 6:54
what? I don't think that works.
David: 6:58
Maybe. But let's get back to Critchley
Ellie: 7:01
I like to go to the clubs, don't get me wrong, but I was definitely not doing ecstasy at the clubs. I was drinking a single beer over the course of four hours, but having a great time.
David: 7:09
You see, I was doing ecstasy. That's why I'm saying I was Jessica. But thinking about this tradition of early Christian mystics, many of whom were women hence that association of mystical, ecstatic states with the female body, Critchley makes a number of really interesting observations about the nature and even the purpose of ecstasy. One that I had to mull over for quite some time after finishing this book is his claim that ecstasy gives us a certain kind of joy. So it is an effective experience at the limit of emotion and sensibility that is not just about the intensification of feeling, it is about the vindication of existence. So for Critchley ecstasy is ultimately an experience of surrender where we give ourselves over to something larger, fundamental, primal. We could call it God, we could call it being, we could call it existence. And in that act of surrender, we come to find a reason for being both in the sense of a justification for the fact that existence is, but also a justification for our continuing to exist in the realm of being. And I just have not really seen that connection between ecstasy and the legitimation of existence, which I thought was great.
Ellie: 8:30
Yeah 'cause what is established is a connection between ecstasy and surrender, which is also something that gets thematized here. But that extra step that you're talking about, I think speaks to one way of thinking about existence. So let me say a little bit about what I mean by that. The idea of ecstasy as surrender is generally associated with ecstasy as a loss of self. What happens in ecstatic experience is that we lose our sense of self by merging with something greater than us in religious mysticism that's considered merging with the divine. I think if you hold that, the self as we usually think of it, is an illusion and we're too attached to our notion of self. I mean, that's definitely Critchley's view. He says, we have too much self in this
David: 9:15
We suffer from too much self.
Ellie: 9:17
Yeah. Then of course, it stands to reason that you would say, well, you actually have a better connection or a more authentic relation to your own existence through ecstasy than you do through the everyday experiences that entrench this vision of the self.
David: 9:32
You mentioned Ellie union with the Divine as one of the primary ways in which we make sense of what's happening in these ecstatic states, but in the Christian tradition of mysticism, there are in fact multiple ways of making sense of what's happening in these moments of surrendering to something greater than the self. One way to understand what ecstasy entails is to foreground a sense of emptying out of that which lies within the self. So you find this understanding of ecstasy, for example, in the writings of Meister Eckhart, a mystic who wrote about the ecstatic state bringing about an evacuation of the soul. It's almost as if you're pouring out your soul in this moment and emptying yourself of that essence that connects you to the divine. So this is a model of ecstasy as self impoverishment, where you relinquish something fundamental about yourself. In fact, the most fundamental thing about yourself, which is the soul. Another conception of ecstasy highlights the relationship between ecstasy, the body and suffering. So if we think about, for example, the writings of Angela of Foligno, a female mystic from this period, here, there is a sense that the suffering flesh is the essence of ecstasy. That when we enter into an ecstatic state, what we are feeling is something like the pain of crucifixion or the throngs of carnality. And finally, another way of thinking about what ecstasy is, is to see it as the becoming body of spirit. The becoming spirit of body. So in moments of ecstasy, spirit and body, so God, and in this case, humans make a connection where the typical metaphysical distinction between that which is created and that which is uncreated is overcome. And that's what we get in the writings of Mer of Magdeburg.
Ellie: 11:38
Each of these different views of ecstasy hinges on different ways that we conceive of both the self and God as well as their connection between the two. Because for instance, if you think about ecstasy as emerging with God, then you have an idea, Critchley suggests, that there is God and there is you, like your separate substances or at least beings, and then you're becoming one. Whereas that idea of emptying a version of which we get in Meister Eckhart. Not only means an emptying of one's own soul, but also according to some mystics, the emptying of God as well. So it's not a merging of two substances to becoming one in the mystical religious sense, but actually about avoiding out of both self and God, where God is conceived of as an abyss, a picture of ecstasy as an intuition of nothingness.
David: 12:31
Yeah, and I think for many of us, these distinctions are somewhat alien, precisely because as Critchley points out, our understanding of mysticism is largely anachronistic. Where retroactively, we look back at all these experiences of all these mystics and we just group them under this one category, which is the mystical state, which then just bulldozes over the different ways many of these mystic theorized what exactly was happening to their minds and bodies in these moments of intense affect.
Ellie: 13:04
I would understand it a bit differently from that, David, because I don't read the various ways of understanding ecstasy here as indicating that these mystics were necessarily having different experiences, I actually think we should take seriously the idea that they are different ways of expressing one state, the state of ecstasy, and that that state can be conceived of differently depending on what your metaphysics of the self is and what your theological picture is, but no matter what your metaphysics and theological picture are, ultimately ecstatic experience takes us outside of the limits of language as well. So we have something really interesting going on in the religious mystics where they're trying to get at something that words actually can't grasp. But, they're very often using words to describe it. One of the things that really struck me about Critchleys book is that he points out that the first ever autobiography written in English was written by one of the medieval mystics, a woman named Marjorie Kempy Kemp Kempy, sorry, I don't speak old English, but you get the idea. So there's this paradox where ecstasy is a state that's beyond words, but very often mystics are using words to describe it, as well as the fact that the words they're writing are often in an autobiographical context. So they're actually using I to describe a loss of I.
David: 14:27
Oh wow. That autobiographical point is super interesting because it does raise the question of what genre would one use to describe one's experience of standing outside of one's self, right. Autobiography seems contradictory in many ways and incompatible with the very experience that it tries to capture. But I wanna stay with the argument that you made, Ellie, about how there can still be just one mystical experience. And here I do think I see it differently because how you make sense of the experience, I think also determines how you experience the experience itself. And so for example, if you are a mystic who understands mysticism in terms of the intensification of bodily suffering, I think that experience is different enough than the experience that is conceptualized as the emptying of the self to warrant calling it a slightly different form of mystical state or ecstatic state one that foregrounds more or less the body. And in connection to that, I also think that there can be very different triggers for ecstatic experience that also should lead us to adopt a more pluralistic understanding of these states. So, for example, Critchley points out that some of these experiences are brought about by rituals, other ones are brought about by liturgical practices, others are brought about by manipulations of the body. And even though we now call all of these religious experiences, it might be that we are just doing so for convenience rather than, because that's the best way to capture the phenomena.
Ellie: 16:16
Have you had a mystical experience of ecstasy?
David: 16:19
Not a mystical one, but Critchley also says that there are non-religious experiences of ecstasy. So if we go in a non-religious sense, then yes. And I also said, I've done ecstasy itself. So
Ellie: 16:33
Well, we'll talk, we'll talk later in the episode about the relation between the drug and the state.
David: 16:37
Wait, have you.
Ellie: 16:39
I have, I mentioned earlier in the episode that I was really into the Christian mystics when I was younger, and as many of our listeners probably know, I grew up Christian and I was very devout. Not in a like social political sense, like I was never conservative Christian at all. But I would pray every morning, every night. I would like be bored in class and pray. I was very, I was like a very serious Christian yeah. In the model at least, like I self-styled kind of after the Christian mystics, and that was partly brought about by some very intense mystical experiences that I had as a teenager and those experiences were at Christian camp. They were mainly alone, and I got kind of freaked out by them afterward because one of the things that ultimately really dissatisfied me about Christianity was the way that there's a sort of cycle between ecstatic experiences and feeling like you're far from God and what I perceive to be, maybe this is unfair, but what I perceive to be an association of those mystical experiences with virtue. And not feeling them as meaning that I wasn't good enough. And so I think it played to kind of black and white, like you're either good or you're bad thinking. That has been something I've spent much of my adult life trying to overcome. You do see some of those descriptions of the loss of mystical experience in the Christian mystics as well. I forget who it is, but Critchley mentions that there's one medieval Christian mystic who talks about there being a sort of hangover after the mystical experience, and I feel like. I certainly, yeah, maybe I don't know exactly what all the mystics we're talking about, just because as a teenager I had a few special experiences at camp, but I think I've come to see those experiences as meaningful, but also not being ones that indicate how like good or not good I am as a person. And that's I think why I've been drawn as an adult to different ways of thinking that are sort of like, oh wow, you had a peak experience. Cool. Good for you. Now let's get to the daily work of the stresses of living.
David: 18:50
Yeah. No, but I think this also speaks back to that question of language and how do you talk about these experiences that happen on the margins of language and concepts, because I am tempted to say that your experience of mysticism when you were a teenager was probably already colored by whatever theology you brought to the scene, and so somebody with a different worldview that also had what we call a mystical experience. Maybe would've had a different experience altogether, even if externally they seem the same. And that has to do with a larger point that's often made in the literature on ecstatic states, which is that the meaning of an ecstatic state is always ambiguous when the state is happening, right? The meaning is very frequently. Constituted retroactively as we process, and it's also shaped by what people in the drug world call , setting. And so I want to maintain this notion that the expectations, the setting, the theology that you bring to the scene, push the experience in one way or another, leading to a variety of experiences.
Ellie: 19:58
I get that you're saying that, I'm just wondering, does that mean that there's no experience of ecstasy? Because one way of understanding what you're saying is that you actually don't think that ecstasy is a phenomenon at all.
David: 20:08
No, I think there is something real that that term captures, and that is the standing outside of the self. But for example, in the same way that I wouldn't wanna confuse like a high on a psychedelic drug with an out of body experience that happens in a psychiatric context, I still can nonetheless identify some parallels between them. In this case, the fact that the traditional boundaries of the self seem to be rewritten and replaced with somethingmore porous.
Ellie: 20:34
I see. Okay. Well, I wanna get into one such description of ecstasy a little bit, which is that of St. Theresa of Avila, who, you know, is a very, very important Christian mystic. And one thing that many have pointed to in Theresa of Avila's work is the way that the experience of ecstasy seems kind of sexual in some ways. She describes being pierced by a long spear of gold with fire at the end. And of course, there's the very famous Renaissance sculpture, St. Theresa and Ecstasy. Oh God. Is that Michelangelo? I'm, I took this class in college. Bernini. Oh my gosh. Oh, okay. My former college art history self would be very ashamed to me. Yes. Bernini, the incredible sculpture of St. Teresa having what looks like an orgasm while being pierced by the angel in this ecstatic experience. But I went back to St. Teresa's words herself in addition to the long spear of gold passage that I mentioned. Not all of them I think can be understood in terms of arrows, but there certainly is for many a close link between erotic experiences and ecstatic experiences. Perhaps that makes sense a little bit when you think about all of these nuns celibate nuns having these experiences in their cloisters. But anyway, she writes, I wish that I could explain with God's help, the difference between Union and Rapture or Elevation or Flight of the Spirit or transport for they are all one. I mean that these are all different names for the same thing, which is also called ecstasy. It is much more beneficial than union. Its results are much greater and it has very many other effects as well. So she's distinguishing union on the one hand from rapture, elevation, et cetera, which she describes as ecstasy. And the reason is that she goes on to say, union doesn't have an internal variation to it. It's just like, okay, you merge with something and then you're one. But she says the ends of rapture are of a much higher nature and their effects are both inward and outward. There's a transformation that ecstasy achieves that union does not.
David: 22:45
And I wonder whether one way to capture that difference really is affect. Because one of the things that we see in ecstatic states that doesn't need to be part of the finites becoming one with the infinite is that intensification of joy, that sense that you are experiencing happiness greater than which nothing can be thought.
Ellie: 23:09
And David, I know you're interested in thinking about this beyond a religious context. One of the places that Critchley goes to in his book is Experiences of Music. I'm curious what you thought about that.
David: 23:18
Oh, I really like those sections of the book because Critchley is very clear that ecstasy is not limited to a religious context. You can get it in nature, you can get it in art, you can get it in poetry, and you also can get it in music, which he calls. Sensate ecstasy. So, you know, the meaning of that term is kind of interesting because it presupposes that there can be ecstasy without the senses.
Ellie: 23:42
Non sensate. Okay.
David: 23:44
Yeah. So some kind of like joy that is so transcendental that it doesn't even touch or contact the body. But Critchley does say that it is incontestable that mysticism begins with the rise of Christianity in monastic institutions. But he also points out that even though that is its origin story, eventually it transcends its own origin because as religion starts losing its central place in social life, as society becomes increasingly more secularized, especially with the rise of modern science and the enlightenment and so on. The context of the monastic institution starts to take a back step, but the experience of mysticism that it originally begat was transformed into something else. And he calls this aesthetic experience. And so originally the experience of ecstasy that was monastic exits the monastery in the form of poetic experience and later the experience of art more generally. And so this notion that in art, in music and in poetry, we also can find our own entry point into those experiences that people like Theresa of Avila had through religion. That's a point that's very appealing to me because I have had those limit experiences. It's just that I cannot call them mystical in the same way that you can to those experiences of your early teenage years. Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more. Or at our website, overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance a fair wage.
Ellie: 25:39
If you think of ecstasy as a religious experience, it seems like something that not everyone has access to. It's reserved for certain people. People who believe and not only believe, but also have access to those monastic or cloistered environments that we were talking about in our last segment. And reserved to certain states, even the most intense Christian mystics, the ones who were levitating. There's some trippy stuff in the Critchley that we actually didn't talk about, so if you wanna learn more about that, read the book. But they're like levitating, crying uncontrollably, et cetera, et cetera. Even those people still also had experiences that were not peak, right? And so if we think about ecstasy in those terms, it seems like a rare thing. That's why it would be considered part of a peak experience rather than part of everyday life. But one thing that also came up in our previous discussion is where the lines should be drawn between ecstasy and other forms of experiences. And we talked about how ecstasy can refer to a lot of different kinds of experience. At least on David's view, I'm not so convinced. But also now I think we can think a little bit about how ecstasy may or may not be different from seemingly related states. And I know, David, you did some research in particular on what makes ecstasy, ecstasy versus mania. So hit us with the insights that you gleaned.
David: 27:04
No. Yeah, and this is a way for me to of course, clarify some of my own thoughts about this, but also to vindicate this sense that I already had, that I want to maintain some differences, even if it's not easy to do so in an absolutist way. So, to make a long story short, this has a lot to do with the rise of psychiatry in the 19th century. And this question that emerged in psychiatric circles about how do we differentiate the states that we see in religious believers, these states of ecstasy, whether they're union or emptying, however they're conceived that suggest an intensification of affect and feeling and happiness. And then the states that we see in a psychiatric context of what in the late 19th, early 20th century was called Abnormal happiness. Now we call it
Ellie: 28:00
manic
David: 28:01
states.
Ellie: 28:01
Hmm. And you can see why distinguishing between those two things would be really important if you're a religious believer. Because otherwise, if you accept the idea that some people have mental illness or other mental health struggles and that that can manifest in, you know, kind of intense states, then you need a way to distinguish that from your religious experience. Because the first one would be due to quote an abnormality as you just mentioned. Whereas the second one would be due to God.
David: 28:29
Yeah, that's right. And I think both people who were experts in medicine and also religious figures were equally interested in maintaining that distinction because the religious people didn't want to be characterized as quote unquote, mentally unwell for having these religious experiences, but also people who were advocates for mental health at the time didn't want. Those who experience mania or abnormal happiness in the onset of illness to be treated as if they are the victims of some demonic possession.
Ellie: 29:00
yes, of course, they needed to get treatment for what they were experiencing, and you're not gonna get treatment if you're considered a saint or a demon.
David: 29:06
There is a particular psychiatrist in the early 20th century, a German British psychiatrist by the name of Wilhelm Mayer-Gross , who wrote an influential thesis on the subject, and the title of his thesis was the. Phenomenology of Abnormal Emotions of Happiness. So he was really interested in what's happening when people are really, really happy, i.e. manic, and how do we differentiate that from other related phenomenon. And I just wanna mention a couple of the ways he comes to differentiate between intensified happiness and ecstasy in the more technical sense of the term. To begin with, he says that the experience of ecstasy tends to overwhelm our inner experience so that we essentially move inward to ourselves. So it's very different than the sense of becoming one with something greater. What he means by inner really is that there is an intensification of the individual and a separation of the individual from other people. Whereas usually in abnormal happiness or manic states, people tend to be driven to interact with others. Also an important distinction between the two is that the ego dissolves in the case of ecstasy, we talked about the etymology, so that makes good sense. Whereas in manic, or happy states, the ego is actually quite strong. It becomes strengthened and we become much more assertive when we're really, really happy. So our relationship to our own self goes in very different directions. And the final distinction that I wanna mention here, Ellie, is that in ecstasy. Our attention falters, especially our attentive grasp of external reality, right? Like when you're in a moment of ecstasy, whether you are Theresa of Avila or you know somebody clubbing doing literal MDMA.
Ellie: 31:07
Jessica in Mr. G the musical.
David: 31:09
Yeah, you are not really paying attention to what's happening around you. Whereas in manic states and happiness, consciousness actually becomes much more world directed, and our attentive grasp of reality remains intact. So in many, you still pay attention to the world as you normally might.
Ellie: 31:31
I don't know if he gets into this or not, but certainly in mania the world, as I understand it shows up differently. You're looking often for patterns that aren't there. You're seeing meaning in things that you might not otherwise see, meaning in you are often engaging in impulsive behaviors or more inclined to engage in impulsive behaviors, sometimes spending money recklessly or doing things that you might not otherwise do. Whereas as far as I understand from the accounts of mysticism in a religious context, ecstasy, even if it's described as emerging, like it's something that involves maybe an inward turn, either happening alone or with other people, but setting you apart from other people. Even, you know, the levitating nun after communion, who's around a bunch of other nuns, like she's not focused on any of them while she's levitating.
David: 32:28
I suspect that part of his answer would have to do with the way in which our affect is differently activated in both of those circumstances, because he believes that when you're in a state of ecstasy, you enter into a kind of calmness, almost this oceanic boundlessness that as he says, is free of inner turmoil. Whereas in a state of mania, you have an increased sense of agency and strength and potency and capability. And if we think about those two, as you know, defining features of these states, it would explain that when we feel calm, collected, and in a state of repose, we would experience the world differently than when we feel our ego capacities suddenly strengthen and ready to strike.
Ellie: 33:20
So we have an affective difference, a state of calm versus like what we might call a state of being hyper alert, hyper confident, et cetera. And it seems like that also maps on to a different experience of the self as well, because one of the features of many manic states, I don't know about all manic states. I'd have to get my sister, who's a therapist to confirm this, but is a heightened sense of self-confidence, whereas with ecstasy, as we know, regardless of what form your ecstatic experience is taking, what defines ecstasy as ecstasy is that etymologically standing outside of oneself, or better put, I would say a loss of self.
David: 34:02
Yeah, and I think this also has to do with the relationship between each of these, let's say, emotional states and other emotional states. Because one argument that Mayer Gross makes and you know, I'd have to think more about what I think about this, but it seems, to cohere with how I think about the phenomena is that ecstasy is such an intense feeling that it overwhelms and it drives out other emotions. So when you're in the throes of ecstasy all you can feel is that ecstasy. But when you're in a manic state, it is possible that you also have other feelings, other emotions. So I can be really happy and also stressed out at the same time. But when you're in a true, ecstatic state, everything else is driven out of the self such that it engulfs you and it dominates you.
Ellie: 34:56
This gives me an opportunity to bring up some other forms of ecstatic experience. Inducing phenomena that are really popular today, especially in my community of Los Angeles, and those are ecstatic dance and breath work, both ecstatic dance and breath work have a big following among kind of like new age spiritual communities in LA. I have not tried ecstatic dance myself, so I have no opinion on it, but I have done breath work a couple of times, which is not exactly pleasant at first because it basically requires that you put yourself into a state of hyperventilation. But doing this, I mean, it can be a profoundly therapeutic experience and putting yourself into that altered state without the use of drugs, without the use of anything except your own breath. And you know, you do need to have a knowledgeable guide there. I did it at first in a therapeutic context. It was like a group therapy thing. And it was wild. I had like full on visions. Okay, I'm about to sound so LA right now. I had full on visions of my ancestors and it felt very therapeutic. Now when I talk about having visions of my ancestors, I mean like I was picturing my grandpa, so it's not like I had visions of past lives, but this was such an intense experience that really was immensely cathartic and I would say did lead to a kind of ecstasy. And that's something that a lot of people report as well. Do we, do we think that's like ecstasy, ecstasy. I mean it definitely wasn't mania. It's a very different kind of experience than mania. It definitely has that, that emptying out of self. I also found it very physically uncomfortable. In addition to the hyperventilation, I have like really intense jaw tension and oh my gosh, that came out so strongly. I got like the crab claws where your hands. Yeah. And same with my feet. And, yeah, it wasn't exactly pleasant.
David: 36:57
The thte thing about many of these experiences is that they're not really like hedonically positive, right? They're just moments of intensity. But you know, are they or are they not real ecstasy? That's a question that I'm really, really interested in because I do believe there are these ordinary ways of triggering ecstatic experiences, including experiences that we sometimes don't qualify as ecstatic, only because they don't fit the framework of the mystical state, right? This very high end contact with the divine.
Ellie: 37:29
Well, I mean, I think in the two times I've done breath work, it was considered to be a facilitation of an experience that is meant to be intense. But yeah, it was every day in the sense that the first time I did it, it was with my therapist in a group therapy context. And the second time it was at my local yoga studio.
David: 37:45
Exactly. So they're mundane settings. And the explanations maybe don't invoke, theological concepts, although they could. And you know, there is a book by a philosopher by the name of Marghanita Laski from 1980 called Everyday Ecstasy that talks precisely about this. The book talks about all these experiences that Laski calls Adamic in the sense that they bring us back to the state that Adam was in before the fall in the Garden of Eden. I don't know why they're called Adamic, but not like Eva's not
Ellie: 38:20
evic, maybe evic didn't have the same ring.
David: 38:23
Yeah, no. And she talks about all these ways in which we do have everyday ecstatic experiences, such as our experience of natural scenes of beauty, like looking up at a mountain or looking down into a canyon. She talks about sexual intercourse, right? Like sexual orgasm is a form of everyday ecstasy. I'm not sure how everyday it is for most of us, but pretty regular, you know, she talks about, our experience of beauty in works of art, echoing what Critchley says about the relationship between mysticism and art, but also about other things that are even more mundane, like our experience of food, our experience of rhythmical movements such as walking, running, riding, swimming, which can sometimes put us into a kind of ecstatic, exalted state, especially when they involve high levels of fatigue, which maybe bring those kind of close to your experience of breath work. Right, you described it as something physically demanding that brings you to the limit of your sense of
Ellie: 39:30
self. But I feel like that that experience of breath work is so different from the other things that you were talking about. I mean, I love most of the things you just listed. I love a good walk. I love good food. A hell of a lot more than that, and I love looking at art. I don't know that I would say I've had.
David: 39:46
I love that you left out sex.
Ellie: 39:48
Oh, oh, sorry. I actually forgot that was on the table. Let's leave that aside for now. Let's, talk about things you can, well, no, nevermind. Um, but with those experiences, I don't, I wouldn't describe them as ecstasY.
David: 40:04
Why not?
Ellie: 40:05
Because I would say when I'm enjoying a walk or enjoying a great work of art, I've maybe had one or two experiences of what I would call ecstasy in front of a work of art, but not many more. And I've seen a lot of art I would not describe, I love food. Like there are a few things that bring me greater joy than a good meal, but I would describe that as like joy, pleasure, definitely not as ecstasy. I just feel like it doesn't fit the bill for me.
David: 40:28
I see. So I kind of agree with you about some of these examples. Like I, I have had semi orgasmic experiences of food, and so that one does speak to me, but I agree with you about the walking and the swimming.
Ellie: 40:41
Dude, imagine. Imagine you lose a sense of self entirely while you're on a walk. Like that's not go well. You've got to be stationary for that to
David: 40:49
happen. Or also in the context of some sports, and I hear, I have to quote Laski, who is British, notably in Britain, cricket.
Ellie: 41:00
Play cricket to get ecstatic experiences. Folks, that's your one way ticket to St. Theresa of Avila level ecstasy.
David: 41:06
Yeah, but you know, there are others that I didn't mention that I think are more convincing. She mentions the experience of giving birth, which she says can bring you to the level of rapture that she's written about in connection to mysticism in other books. But in general, I agree with you that she doesn't quite give a very good definition of ecstasy to explain why something like swimming would be in the same space as maybe our experience of nature. But I think it has to do with the fact that she's really trying to trace moments of punctuated intensity in our lives independently of where they happen.
Ellie: 41:46
I just don't know that we need to call that ecstasy. I'm actually perfectly fine with living a life where ecstatic experiences are occasional. I think that's what makes them ecstatic experiences and maybe that doesn't apply to sexual experiences. I definitely think some sexual experiences can be ecstatic, and I also think that there can be sexual experiences that are really wonderful, life-affirming, pleasurable, that don't necessarily meet what I would consider to be the level of ecstasy. Like I wouldn't even say every orgasm involves ecstasy.
David: 42:22
Oh, really? I would say that about orgasm. I think almost by definition, I think it's, it's such a punctuated moment of intensity that disorients you. I agree with you about the other ones, and so we might need to think about what is it that you and I are missing in walking and swimming that maybe it, it really does have to do with the intensification of sensory experience or with the deregulation or the displacement of the self. I think that's what's not there.
Ellie: 42:50
Yeah, I think that's exactly what's not there, is the displacement of the self. And I would say that intensification of experience too, even with like a very intense level of mindfulness, I don't think you get ecstasy. What you get is a deeper attention to your experience and that deeper attention to your experience shows you the richness of it, but it doesn't necessarily bring about that felt sense of ecstasy, right? There's no one affect, emotion or state that's gonna be brought about by attention to your experience.
David: 43:18
I agree with you, and I think Critchley's concept of surrender can do great explanatory work for what we're trying to explain here, because in experiences of attending to our experience, we're not relinquishing control. If anything, we are exercising it. We've now alluded to the fact that we're gonna talk about the drug ecstasy a few times, and I think the time has come for us to talk about MDMA.
Ellie: 44:02
Ecstasy. Ecstasy.
David: 44:04
He'sa boy with a bad habit. Yeah, that's me. But I wanna talk about ecstasy because I do think it raises further questions about the ecstatic state, about its triggers, about its phenomenological profile, but also because it brings it into dialogue with a domain of life that we haven't yet touched upon, which is party culture. And I learned a little bit about the history of ecstasy from reading this book called Generation Ecstasy, where the authors talk about how one theory of the origin of ecstasy is that it started in the early 19 hundreds, right before World War I as a dietary supplement of all things for German troops. Yes.
Ellie: 44:50
Nuh uh. All the Berlin Club kids can thank the German troops from many years ago. Little did Berghain know it owed its troops so much.
David: 45:02
Well, I mean, Berghain does have a weirdly militaristic aesthetic, so I'm not sure that they would even bulk at that.
Ellie: 45:08
Girl, I've never been, never tread the line too, too intimidating.
David: 45:13
I mean, I went in so courageously and I left intimidated. But the reason that they were looking into this molecule, into this substance for the military was because of its function as an appetite suppressant. So the idea is that you would give what we now call ecstasy to the troops and they wouldn't be hungry for a long time and they would be able to fight for longer.
Ellie: 45:39
Whoa,
David: 45:40
Yeah, of course.
Ellie: 45:42
David this is blowing my mind.
David: 45:44
Tis Yeah. This didn't ultimately pan out. And you can just imagine that this is probably the worst drug that you could give military troops if you want them to engage in war. They're
Ellie: 45:53
like walking around, like grinding their teeth, like eyes wide open and like touching each other's, you know, forearms.
David: 46:01
Well, and the author of the chapter in this book that I read in connection to this points out that actually in the 1990s, they gave ecstasy to a number of military and paramilitary agents in the armed conflict in Nicaragua. And it kind of broke things down because then the people that were given ecstasy started reporting loving everything including their enemy. So it is the anti conflict drug par excellence. But in terms of the history, the reason that I said it's one theory is because they were using something very similar to ecstasy, but not exactly identical in terms of its pharmacological composition to what we now use as ecstasy. So from the 1910s all the way to the 1960s, the drug kind of recedes into the background until interest in it is reawakened in 1960s, San Francisco, where a number of people started doing work on ecstasy for therapeutic purposes. The idea was that you could give this to people going to therapy and it would enable them to work through difficult emotional blockage. What ended up happening now from the standpoint of the subsequent evolution of the drug is that. After the 1960s, people discovered an unexpected synergy between this drug and electronic dance music kind of by accident. So somebody took a drug that they were supposed to take for therapy when they were listening to electronic dance music, and they realized that they go together really well. And it is here that we see the beginning of rave culture with ecstasy being the drug that defines really the experience of being on the dance floor. The reason ecstasy works so well with electronic dance music has to do with its effects on the central nervous system. We know that when you take ecstasy, it activates your dopaminergic system. It leads to a spike in dopamine in your brain, which activates the motor system, right? It gives you energy, it makes you euphoric, and so when you're feeling energetic and euphoric, you wanna dance. And so if you have the kind of music that makes you move, it goes really well with that drug. Aside from that, it also activates serotonin, which you know, gives you a positive feeling of wellbeing. And recently, and I think this is a really important point about the chemistry of ecstasy. Recently we have discovered that it also activates what are known as one B receptors in the brain, which are receptors associated with repetitive action. So when those are activated, you wanna do something over and over again. And electronic dance music has a kind of repetitive structure to it that. Combines and kind of enhances the effects of the drug. So they are mutual enhancers, the music and the drug.
Ellie: 49:03
Wow. This is so interesting. You mentioned earlier in the episode the importance of set and setting. You've just given us some interesting rationale for why ecstasy pairs well with rave culture and with the music that we find in rave culture. I. I also think that some of the research that I did emphasized how the rave experience itself in turn, catalyzes experiences of ecstasy, whether or not you actually take the drug ecstasy. So we first found this article together while we were researching this episode David called The Flesh of Reaving. This article was really compelling because it offers a phenomenological way of understanding what's going on with the ecstasy of raves. Ecstasy, the author suggests, and this is more the state than the drug, although certainly like the drug can help facilitate the state, does not require, he says a mystical explanation because the format of raves inherently yields indescribable experiences. And some of the things that he focuses on there are the music, which as you mentioned, tends to be repetitive and it doesn't have a lot of representational elements to it, such as words, and so it has a kind of meaninglessness to it, at least if we're thinking about like our everyday language that allows you to connect with in a different way. There's also often in raves, visual fragmenting due to lasers and fog, and you have overall an impression of sensory overload that gives you the feeling of being one with the music and with the crowd. So it's a different kind of loss of self than you get with St. Teresa of Avila. It's actually, I might even be more outer directed than Mayer was talking about as you brought up his research on ecstasy versus mania. But there's this sense of merging, of having what one person writing about rave culture that the flesh of raving author mentions of experiencing a feeling of collective organism.
David: 51:02
Yeah, the fog machines, the lasers, the repetitive music, the enclosed space all of that definitely coheres with my experience of raving while on ecstasy. And, you know, you pointed out that according to the author of this article, the format of the rave produces an ecstatic experience independently of whether or not you take the drug. But I want to counter that with the following claim from the author of my chapter who says that the reason raves have the format that they do is because they were responding to the introduction of Ecstasy, the drug.
Ellie: 51:41
Oh.
David: 51:42
There is this quote that I just have to share with all of you about why the music at a rave has the musical quality and structure that it does.
Ellie: 51:51
This is from Generation Ecstasy.
David: 51:53
Yeah, from Generation Ecstasy. So the author writes the following house, and techno producers have developed a drug determined repertoire of effects, textures, and rifts that are expressly designed to trigger the tingly rushes that traverse the ecstatic body processes like EQing, facing, panning and filtering, which are always of adding texture to music in a rave, are used to tweak the frequencies, harmonics and stereo imaging of different sounds, making them leap out of the mix with an eerie three dimensionality or glisten with a hallucinatory vividness.
Ellie: 52:33
Hmm.
David: 52:33
So if you think about the properties of the music, those were introduced precisely to enhance the effects of the drug. It just so happens that they can also bring us into an ecstatic state without the drug as well.
Ellie: 52:48
Wow. Okay, maybe this is my time now to share. I mentioned earlier that I was not doing ecstasy when I was 25 living in New York City because all I could afford was A PBR. But I will grant now that we're reaching the tail end of our episode, that I have done ecstasy a few times since and I've had like some really mid experiences. Yeah. Like, I don't know, like a music festival or like a bachelorette party, both of which were fun, but not because of doing that drug. But I did have what I would consider a mystical experience on Molly, so also M-D-M-A-A couple of years ago.
David: 53:29
Ooh, I wanna hear this.
Ellie: 53:30
I was at my friend's cabin. We were with, I was with three friends, one of whom is my partner, my partner and also my friend. And then two my other friends and is one of their cabins. And we were listening to some amazing music, like of the type that we're talking about. So we're listening to electronic rave music, but we were just also chilling at a cabin with like psychedelic carpet and a beautiful view of the stars. We put some mattresses out on the patio and all just like laid down and looked at the stars together, and I started to feel the Molly kick in. What followed was truly incredible. For one, I had had at that point a cartilage piercing in my upper ear that had not been not infected the entire time I got it. Like I had an infected cartilage piercing for years. And my friends were always like, yeah, I'm sure you know about this. My friends were like, Ellie, you need to get rid of this.
David: 54:23
This is literally a red flag on your head.
Ellie: 54:28
Truly. Like all my loved ones knew they couldn't touch me anywhere near that ear. And then I'm finally on Molly, my friend Kelly goes to cuddle with me and I was like, oh, be careful of my ear. And then I was like, you know what? It is time. So I abscond upstairs to where I was staying in the cabin. Just leave my friends. I go upstairs, I proceed to ceremonially, take out the cartilage piercing to instant relief. I. And then I opened a book of philosophy and started reading philosophy. Sorry, I'm sorry. You just got the ick from me, David. And then I wrote in my journal and I looked at an atlas and I did that for hours and my friends all thought that I went to bed, but it turned out I was just upstairs like by myself having an incredible time.
David: 55:12
This sounds like a bad trip to me.
Ellie: 55:16
David, it was so meaningful. It was so meaningful. It happened when I was like just starting research on my book and I feel like it's helped carry me through.
David: 55:24
I just, I just can't imagine reading a book while on ecstasy. Because I associate precisely with that euphoric increase in energy that is at odds with how I need to be in order to read. Also, you know, when I have taken ecstasy, I really feel a heightened sense of synesthesia. And so I can just imagine trying to read and then having other sensory modalities activated while reading like colors or tactile sensations or auditory hallucinations that would make it impossible for me to really immerse myself.
Ellie: 55:59
I will say I did try to read Nietzsche on mushrooms one time. It was not a good scene. Would not recommend.
David: 56:06
I Um, think ecstasy in any reading, is just not going to be part of my spiritual and sensate journey.
Ellie: 56:17
You'll, you'll stick with the club.
David: 56:19
In the near future. Yeah. I'm to become, you know, the authors of the article that I read mentioned that we become one giant ear when we're on ecstasy, we're just like this receptive
Ellie: 56:29
Talk about Nietzsche. That's what Nietzsche says. We've all become in the age of like too much scholarship.
David: 56:34
Just a massive ear. Yeah. Or it also reminded me of, is it Emerson who talks about becoming a giant transparent eyeball? Yeah I don't remember who. It's one of the American transcendentalists. But,
Ellie: 56:44
We gotta wrap up. We don't have time to figure it out. People can correct us in the comments.
David: 56:48
Yeah, whether ear or I, it's clear that the drug does bring us to that experience of surrender that is central to so many mystical states.
Ellie: 57:03
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David: 57:13
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Ellie: 57:28
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