Essay:   Is ecstasy normal?

    Reading The Madness of the War on Drugs: A Tragically Flawed Policy’s Ecological & Social Harms, the authors, Michael Stewart and Ethan Nadelmann, point out that the “myth that we should be drug-free is based upon its own myth: the idea that somehow we all pop out of our mother’s wombs as perfectly balanced chemical creatures.” (They continue. . .) “I’ve heard that some users of heroin and some patients who respond well to Prosac use the exact same words to describe their experience of those drugs: “This is the first time I’ve felt normal” (196). It’s not hard to imagine someone reading a Rumi poem saying or thinking or feeling the same thing. Maybe not, This is the first time. . .but, This feels normal.  

    Of course, how a Rumi poem makes one feel depends on the person, but let me suggest a few adjectives: Good. High. Happy. Buoyant. Peaceful. Inspired. Hopeful. Joyful. And now, may I ask, Why shouldn’t these feelings be normal?

    We are conditioned to think that feeling even slightly ecstatic (good, joyful, inspired, high-on-life) is abnormal, and maybe it is in a culture where the work ethic, based on the elusive goal of “getting ahead” or the belief that competition between neighbors is healthy, is still the center-piece of our way of life, and the much glorified American dream. In fact, we live in a Darwinian world where stiff competition among friends and allies is encouraged while conflict, and ultimately war, is the normal way for countries to resolve differences. . .That’s the Middle World; the Middle World is messed up. Ann Drake explains the roots of our troubled souls this way:  The tension between our desire to deny the violent nature of our society while living within it, coupled with the tension of wanting to believe we are better than others (while all the time fearing we are not), results is a sado-masochistic underpinning to our collective unconscious. (Drake, Healing of the Soul, 2003, 119)  

(Note: Though Darwin’s legacy, the gospel of natural selection, provides us with a grand justification for waging war under the banner of might makes right, according to Rupert Sheldrake , Darwin was less impressed with the powers of the Heavenly Father than with those of Mother Nature, who he unabashedly personified. In Her, Darwin saw “the source of the forms of life”(Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, 1991,71). It’s just that he was mostly impressed by her dark side. “Her fertility impressed Darwin deeply, but he made her destructive aspect the primary creative power”(71).)  

    Can we postulate too levels of “normal”?

    Maybe, if we search our collective memory, we will recall a time or an epoch in our pre-history, (our pre-agricultural / industrial history) when it was normal to be happy (as well as to experience all the other human emotions!). . .not as children, but as full-fledged adults in the world. We know how that feels, because we have been there, and not so long ago. I am not referring to a mythical paradise equivalent to the primordial childhood of man, evoking a powerful residual yearning for the long-lost days of innocence. 

    Until very recently, say, two hundred years ago, the Australian Aborigines existed in a world where happiness and feeling good were normal, typical emotions. It was a world where the human contribution for keeping the universe copasetic and fertile (inter-specially) was huge, and assumed. . .For example, they were responsible for maintaining the epic song lines that linked Dreamtime with ordinary time and awaken(ed) “the vital life-powers that exist within the country” (Hume, Ancestral Power, 2001, 78) as well as awakening their ancestry. . . .”There is (was) a reciprocal relationship between the tangible and the intangible”(78), as well as between species. . .Again, just for the sake of comparison, “In traditional Aboriginal communities song was one of the most important vehicles of communication”(96). Imagine that!

    Sometimes, on road-trips, I will be surfing radio stations and happen to tune in to a show where the announcer is accepting dedications. People call in with a song that is meant to communicate a strong or delicate emotion or sentiment to a lover or friend who is, hopefully, listening. This is a funny way to use music for communication and I wonder how the Aborigines would react to this strange custom. Every time I witness this type of musical wooing or reaching-out, I picture the person on the receiving end being strongly affected, but that is just my soft heart wanting things to work out. . .It’s really a tough situation when people need to use the airwaves to communicate important emotions across the great divides between hearts.

    But, to get back to the main argument, you don’t even need to go back in time to discover a  happy, or copasetic culture. The Aborigines (or what’s left of them) still exist with enough of their culture intact for some anthropologists and astute observers from other fields of inquiry to respectfully piece together their way of life and to marvel at the complexities and profundity of their relationship to the Earth. Even though the Aborigines are probably unique, in the sense that they are the original human inhabitants of the Australian continent and their culture has survived longer than any accurate way of measuring, I’m inclined to think that a sense of harmonious living, depth and even joyfulness come with the territory of any indigenous cultural ethic based on reciprocity with the spirits of the land. . .Whether we are talking about a community indigenous to the rainforest, or a pre-1492 North American tribal community,  reciprocity was the ethic of the hunter-gatherer. Reciprocity is also the ethic of our wisest most centered life-teachers, but what I’m trying to express here is, we know this. . .which is why we respond like a plant to water when we are reminded of what we know. (Reciprocity, simply stated, means, “If you take something, you give something in return. . .(thus) awakening a greater sense of gratitude in life and for life. . .Nature gives to you and you receive, and thus you give back to Nature and it receives. This timeless ritual cycle assures the connectedness “of all energies of the universe” (Andrews, Animal Speak, 1997, 230, 222).)

    This is not to say that prehistoric hunter-gathering communities were benign or invisible to nature-as-super-power but neither was their presence adversarial, competitive or malignant. Their effect on the environment was at one extreme an innocent affirmation of their total dependence on nature, and at the other, an experimental tapping and creative, sometimes masterful, reflection of nature’s consummate intelligence. Such communities depended for their survival on maintaining a simple or complex symbiotic relationship to the universe. “The Earth’s laboratory was available to hunter-gatherers over the greater part of human existence during which environmental knowledge” (which was also hunted and gathered) “was transmitted in cosmologies and myth” (Stuart, Shamanism, Nature Conservation and International Law: The Journal of Shamanic Practice, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2009,11), not to mention via first hand-experience through potent initiation rites.

    With very little prompting we remember a time when things weren’t so messed up and chopped up and full of pain and confusion and dissatisfaction. Our hands remember, our hearts remember, our feet remember, our skin and hair and muscles remember. Most of our organs remember (in the sense of re-membering, putting the world and the body back together after dis-memberment) . . .So, the deeper part of us, the part of us that isn’t caught up in the Middle World, is no stranger to feeling “high-on-life”. Ecstatic thinking should not necessarily be associated with forgetting oneself, but rather with finding oneself or coming home to oneself, or returning to normal!

    The other way that Rumi / Barks help us to experience ecstasy as normal, besides awakening us to our inherent capacity to be joyful and amazed, is by modeling what a person is like who is in love with love, in love with God, in love with life. . .”In short”. . .writes Leslie Wines in her biography of Rumi, “Rumi’s work responds to an increasing need many of us have for an instinctive and mystical response to the ordinary events of life, and for a more joyful daily existence”(Wines, Rumi, 2000, 19).