On ecstasy, agony, and orgasm
Notable takeaways from recent psychedelic encounters.
Ecstasy is not reserved for joy—all emotions can be ecstatic. One can experience ecstatic grief, ecstatic fear, ecstatic boredom, ecstatic curiosity. To be in ecstasy is to allow oneself to be completely consumed by the emotion, whatever it is. It is to merge completely with one’s immediate felt experience. Notions of “good” and “bad” seem to go completely out the window when one is in ecstasy, as do the boundaries between “experience” and “experiencer”. It no longer makes sense to say “I'm experiencing grief” or “I’m experiencing fear”— it’s much more like, “grief is experiencing me”, “fear is experiencing me”; or, “I have become Grief”, “I have become Fear”. I like to imagine that this ecstatic dimension is where we experienced all of our emotions as infants—hence why we were shrieking and crying and laughing all the time! To be in ecstasy, in all of its very many forms, is our fundamental birthright.
Not only are the mind and the body not separate (eat your tar-soaked heart out, Descartes)—but, consciousness itself seems to be entirely non-localized and distributed throughout the body. On a heavy enough dose of a psychedelic drug, one can quite literally “get out of one’s head” and start “thinking” with one’s stomach, fingers, feet, etc. Sometimes we call this “intuition”, “gut feeling”, or “embodied wisdom”. We in the west are taught to identify so heavily with our thoughts and opinions—the “knowing” that lives in our heads—that we completely neglect these non-localized, embodied forms of consciousness. This is a particularly sinister form of alienation that the psychedelics seem to address with great efficiency.
There is perhaps no greater sin than deceiving oneself. I’m using “sin” here in the classical, biblical sense—that which will be punished by the Divine when one is brought to judgment. The places where one is hiding from oneself, the tender spots over which one has erected a complex web of lies and deceptions to make life “more bearable”—these are the places where so much of the suffering takes place. Our self-deceptions are far more insidious and much trickier to identify than those deceptions that have been forced upon us by the outside world. It is also disturbingly easy to fall into a convoluted sort of love-relationship with our delusions (I like to call this “Self-Stockholm Syndrome”). One of the most seductive self-delusions that I note within myself and among my peers/clients is the idea that one is a worthless piece of shit (known clinically as “depression”). I will dedicate a much longer standalone post to the remarkable work that the psychedelics do to deconstruct this tragically common delusion.
Once we begin the process of getting free from our own self-delusions, we encounter a much more fundamental and timeless Truth that exists within us, and we can just hang out there, we can get comfortable with it. It’s really quite a nice place to be, but the journey to arrive there, the “burning off of impurities”, can be unfathomably painful! I like to think of this pain as a brutal, but ultimately benevolent, teacher.
Chaos is order, order is chaos. Remain too faithful to one, and you will be forever haunted by the other. The same can be said of many apparent opposites—joy and suffering, good and evil, care and indifference. To get comfortable in the ambiguous, ambi-valent space and note the startling similarities between apparent opposites, to do away with binary logic—this seems to be one of the many things that psychedelics are trying to “teach” us.
Laughter can be orgasmic. Tears can be orgasmic. Orgasm is an expulsive function of the energetic body that allows for a “re-setting” of sorts. Orgasm (like ecstasy) is not reserved for the sexual domain, nor is it even necessarily an inherently “pleasurable” experience. I am increasingly aware of these little “micro-orgasms” that are happening within me and around me all the time: dogs often shake violently in brief moments, and appear to be somewhat “reset” afterwards. Many of us feel immense relief after sneezing, which is, allegedly, equivalent to “an eighth of an orgasm”.
Back in April, I had an encounter with DMT where I experienced what felt like a sorrow-orgasm. I wept and shook violently as I allowed many months’ worth of post-breakup sorrow to excise itself from my energetic body. It was unimaginably intense, and to my poor unassuming friends it looked as though I was in hell. It certainly wasn’t “pleasant” by any means, but it was exactly what I needed at the time, and I was deeply grateful to have been given that opportunity for orgasmic release. I felt afterwards as though I had shed a layer of skin.
To cultivate a relationship with Truth in an aggressively superficial culture that traffics almost exclusively in deceptions, projections, and images is a terrifying undertaking. It is also perhaps the most important thing that one can do with one’s brief time here on spaceship Earth.