Dear Kids,

The ecstasy into which I was plunged upon my arrival in Boston was as intense as the gloom that enveloped me upon my departure...both were overwhelming and indescribable.

Yours as ever, Nemo
--Windsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland

Approve me or diapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day. I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries. I don't steal money, I don't hit anyone. What will you charge me with? I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.
--Mirabai, Mirabai Versions

The idea that the soul will join with ecstatic just because the body is rotten -- that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
--Kabir, To Be a Slave of Intensity

Greek ekstasis meant ``standing forth naked," a word for the state of mind ensuing in a religious trance when the consciounsness was stripped away, leaving only the essential self.
--Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

And you, enigma, you lost and brilliant:
no matter to what distance you removed yourself,
even this distance, even now, you remain
a dense and inescapable event.
--Melinda Mueller, Ashes #20

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
--Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Essential Rumi

Ecstasy

[ the ecstatic ]


Ecstasy Dreams


Joy is when the kids are choosing teams
and your brother chooses you to be on his side
even though you are the smallest.
--Jane Moncure, Joy, What is it?


The so-called permissive society, which graciously permits freer expression of sexuality and liberal social protest and promotes more humane (not human) conditions for prisoners and mental patients, is nothing more than a mystifying spectacle designed to perpetuate a far deeper repression of ecstasy, a repression of creative suffering and joy, of madness and the free assumption of risk even to death -- in short the repression of revolution in each person and for all people.
--David Cooper,The Grammar of Living

     
Now incense fill the air
and delight follows delight,
quiet supper in the carpet room,
music twangling from the Orient to my ear,
old friends at rest on bright mattresses,
old paintings on the walls, old poetry
thought anew, laughing at a mystic toy
statue painted gold, tea on the white table.
--Allen Ginsberg, After Yeats
 
One hopes to control the unconscious, but the past masters in the art of self-control, the yogis, attain perfection in samadhi, a state of ecstasy, which so far as we know is equivalent to a state of unconsciousness.
--C.J. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious


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