We know to seek stillness in the face of adversity and to draw strength from it. Yet many of us forget, or do not even think, to seek stillness also in the face of ecstasy.
Although we seek ecstasy, we fear also its power to overwhelm us. We move its locus into the mind, seeking ways to control it. Our ability to neutralize the power of ecstasy in our lives is extraordinary, and we hardly remark it, so identified are we with suffering and so sure that its transcendence is the path to source. The tantric way, of course, is to seek awareness in the face of all overwhelming emotions and passions, regardless of how they are labeled by our minds.
To my mind, this does not represent a withdrawal from experience or a dilution of ecstasy in an ocean of equanimity. That the meditative state is one of equanimity is a widespread and profound misunderstanding. A state of equanimity can probably be cultivated by prolonged training of the mind, but such mortification of the mind is as far from the core of the mystical experience as any form of “mortification of the flesh” is from somatic trance: they are both comparable asceticisms and both are life-renouncing.
The reason we seek stillness is to allow us to enter into the ecstatic experience more completely: acknowledging that, in fact, we are (or something within us is) ambivalent about union with the divine. We seek stillness in all circumstances of life to set aside fear and to replace illusion with reality; by which I do not mean some sanitized, undifferentiated reality, but the actual expression of spirit in the particulars and peculiarities of our human experience.
If you are anything like me, when you are down and facing challenges you meditate like crazy, you seek the light; yet when the fog starts to lift it’s back to business as usual. If this is so, then it has an important consequence: it means the universe has no way to awaken you other than to send you adversity. A key to cultivating a meditative attitude to all of life and allowing joy, not only adversity, to serve as a messenger is to remember that, however ecstatic the moment may seem, there is more beyond it that we are not experiencing; and we are not experiencing it because we hold back from it out of fear. This fear is not really any different to the fear we experience under circumstances which appear to threaten us: in both cases, it is the ego trying to hold on to the position it has usurped in the flow of our lives, and whether it impedes our enjoyment of life or our serenity in the face of adversity it separates us from the flow of source and the power inherent in it to change and direct our lives. As we become gently aware of this fear, we can begin to unmask it and cultivate pleasure, instead of suffering, as the gateway to ecstasy that it is meant to be.