by Antonio T. de Nicolas
Scientists have long known that epileptics during their seizures sometimes experience what they describe as a spiritual ecstasy. A recent article in Newsweek noted that scientists have identified the region of this ecstasy as the limbic area of the brain—home to emotions, religious feelings, and some seizures. We also know that those under the influence of drugs claim similar ecstasy. Some patients classified by the medical establishment as psychotic or delusional also claim to have experienced such ecstasy. How can we separate true religious ecstasy from an induced trance or a hallucination? The true mystical experience from the pathological experience? And more to the point, is there any true description of mystical ecstasy we can understand or that we can assimilate into our own experience? Pathologies leave only claims and clinical records. Mystics, on the other hand, leave us epistemologies. The mystic’s experience can be retraced; it is possibly repeatable by others; and to a certain extent it can be taught.
Few mystics have made a career of describing their ecstasies. Moreover, orthodox religion has been slow to accept the mystic in its midst. Rather, a saint’s mysticism is often treated as an idiosyncrasy of the saint in question. In Christianity, for example, Christ’s crucifixion is given much more emphasis than his transfiguration—his ecstasy. Similarly, the ecstatic incident that changed Paul from a persecuting Jew to a leading Christian is considered less important than Paul’s letters. We find similar examples in Hinduism and Buddhism, even though mystical experience is promoted and encouraged in these religions. The literature of ecstasy in the Eastern traditions is very skimpy; mostly we are told only that there are ecstasies. Even Tantra, a tradition that focuses on the epistemology of an experience of That which is not “I,” is shy about describing ecstasy. Nonetheless, eternity in the Tantric tradition is fashioned on the model of the state of the lover just before reaching the point of orgasm.
Individual mystic writers, like those of the Vedic Upanishads, or more modern mystics like those of sixteenth century Christian Europe, or Hindu writers like Ramakrishna in nineteenth century India, are more explicit and daring. Moreover, modern neurobiology seems to support their claims. Through laboratory experimentation we have been able to establish not only the structures of emotion in the limbic system, but also their connection to the frontal lobes and the heart (Pearce; Pert). These are the same structures that the mystics had intuitively and experientially discovered millennia ago. Here are some examples of how they described what they found.
From the Rg Veda:
The sages, searching in their own hearts with wisdom,
Found in Non-Existence the kin of Existence (l0.129).The whole world is set in your substance,
within the cave of the heart, within the ocean,
within your life-span (4.58).
The Katha Upanishad:
Him who is hard to see, entered into the hidden,
Set in the secret place [of the heart] dwelling in the
depth, primeval—
By considering him as God, through the Yoga-study of
what pertains to Self,
The wise man leaves joy and sorrow behind (Valli 2.12).When all the desires lodged in one’s heart are set free,
Then a mortal becomes immortal.
When all the knots of the heart are cut off here on earth,
Then a mortal becomes immortal!
There are a hundred and one channels in the heart,
One of these passes up to the crown of the head,
Going up by it, one goes to immortality.
The others scatter in various directions!
The measure of a thumb is the size of the inner soul,
forever seated in the heart of creatures ( Valli 6.14-17).
From the Philokalia:
Whenever the soul, paying no attention to external
things, is concentrated in contemplation, then a kind of
flame surrounds it, as fire surrounds iron, and makes it
wholly incandescent. The soul remains the same, but can
no longer be touched, just as red-hot iron cannot be
touched by the hand (Ilias the Presbiter 3.2.105).
From the Gathas:
What you have disclosed through Inner Fire,
What you have promised through Asha,
the Divine Law for the discerning Soul,
O Mazda, to us clearly explain,
let the words come from your mouth
to help us transform all living men (Yasna 31.3, in Henning).
From the Bhagavad Gita:
I am seated in the hearts of all
From me are memory, wisdom and their loss (15.15).Undivided, yet standing as if divided among beings,
And as destroyer and producer of beings.
[I am] Light of Lights . . . beyond darkness,
[I am] knowledge, what is to be known,
and the goal of knowledge.
[I am] seated in the heart of all (13.16-17).
It is in the Bhagavad Gita where we witness the first personal account of mystic union, as Arjuna is taken up by the power of ecstasy:
If in the heavens
There would come to be the light
of a thousand suns rising together,
It would be like the light of that great Self (11.12).I behold in your body, Oh God, all the gods,
And likewise, crowds of different beings. . .
And sages all, and celestial serpents (11.15).
I behold you, O Lord and Form of all,
With many arms and stomachs, mouths and eyes;
And see no end, nor middle nor beginning to You,
O Universal Form (11.16).The moon and sun as your eyes,
your mouth a glowing fire,
Burning this universe with your radiance (11.19).Having seen your great form, with many mouths
and eyes, O Strong-Armed,
With many arms and thighs and feet,
With many bellies and terrible tusks,
The worlds tremble, and so do I (11.23).Just as moths with great speed
Enter the flaming fire and perish there,
So also these creatures with great speed
Enter your mouths to meet destruction (11.29).You lick and devour with flaming mouths
entire worlds from every side;
Your terrible light-rays fill the entire world with radiance and
scorch it . . . (11.30).Tell me who You are . . . (11.31).
In 1856, in a Kali Temple just outside Calcutta, Ramakrishna, a Hindu priest of only twenty years, writes his version of this experience in modern terms:
There was an unbearable pain in my heart, because I couldn’t get a vision of Mother [Kali] . . . In my agony, I said to myself: “What’s the use of living this life?” Suddenly my eyes fell on the sword that hangs in the temple. I decided to end my life with it. . . . Like a madman I ran to it and seized it. And then—I had a marvelous vision of the Mother, and fell down unconscious . . . It was as if houses, doors, temples and everything else vanished altogether; as if there was nothing anywhere! And what I saw was an infinite shoreless sea of light; a sea that was consciousness . . . shining waves, one after another, coming towards me . . . raging and storming upon me with great speed. Very soon they were upon me; they made me sink down into unknown depths. I panted and struggled and lost consciousness (quoted in Isherwood 65).
The growth of Sufi poetry in the West, particularly through the mysticism of the Sufis in Andalusia, Spain, brings a more personal approach to mystical experience and a closer narrative of its path. Prayer is now accompanied by “illuminism,” dejamiento (abandonment), and “quietism.” Inner prayer and recollection, practiced not in churches but “conventicles,” raised the hackles of Inquisitors and caused them to sharpen their weapons against the new fashions. But the Inquisition left for us, almost in spite of itself, models of receptacles of divine love. Some were even canonized and named doctors of the Church. The most notable were Ignatius de Loyola, Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross), and Teresa of Avila, notwithstanding the fact that John had Moorish roots and Teresa was the granddaughter of a converso, a Jew who, under pressure, had converted to Christianity in Inquisitorial Spain. While the Church has always known about Teresa’s roots, the facts of her background have become more generally known only recently. Islam has also spawned its share of mystics; for example, Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Abu Sa’id Ibn-l-Khayr. Here are some narrations left behind by the Sufis:
Take one step
away from yourself—
behold! —the Path!
(Abu Sa’ id Ibn-l-Khayr in Llewellyn).The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you
Not knowing how blind I was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They are in each other all along (Rumi in Llewellyn).Oh Lord, nourish me
not with love
but with the desire for love ( Ibn ‘Arabi in Llewellyn).True ecstasy is the conjunction of light
with light, when the soul of man meets the divine Light (‘Abdu’-
Qadir Al-Gilani in Llewellyn).Love has come and it flows like blood
beneath my skin through my veins.
It has emptied me of my self
and filled me with the Beloved.
The Beloved has penetrated every cell of my body,
Of myself there remains only a name,
everything else is Him (Rumi in Llewellyn).
Ignatius de Loyola, soldier, sinner, founder of the Jesuits, saint, came to the spiritual late in life. It all started with an ecstasy by the river Cardoner, as Ignatius writes in his Diary of a Pilgrim:
The road ran long next to the river. Moving along intent on
his meditations, he sat down for a while with his face
towards the river which there ran deep. As he sat, the eyes of
his understanding began to open; not that he saw a vision,
but (he came) to understand and know many things, matters
spiritual and those pertaining to faith and to studies. This
took place with such great clarity that these things appeared
to be something completely new. It is impossible to explain
the particulars he understood at that time, though they were
many, other than by saying that he received great clarity in
his understanding. This was such that in the whole course of
his life, through sixty-two years, even if he put together all
the many gifts he had from God and all of the many things
he knew and added them all together, he does not think they
would amount to as much as he had received at that one
moment (quoted in de Nicolas, Power of Imagining 12).
Perhaps no other lines of mystical poetry are quite as memorable as Juan de la Cruz’s “The Dark Night”:
>O Night! O Guide!
O night more loving than the dawn!
O night that joined
Lover with Beloved,
Beloved in the Lover transformed!I lose myself and remain,
With my face on the Beloved inclined;
All has come to rest,
I abandon all my cares
There, among the lilies, to die
(from “Dark Night” 5, 8, quoted in de Nicolas 103-104).
Meanwhile, East or West, male or female, no other writing on ecstasy is more personal, more didactic than that of Teresa de Avila. For this sixteenth century woman, contemplation ends or begins in the fourth degree of prayer—prayer of rapture and union in which the whole complex of self-body-world takes part. Joy is of the greatest intensity, and the soul and the body are drained of powers:
The spirit rises higher than ordinary and joins with love; the
detachment from creatures is deeper and more subtle, but
these instances last a very short time (Life 18, 2).The whole body complex ceases to live by itself and lives as
if sensitized by someone else (Life 18, 14).
Teresa describes her spiritual raptures as overcoming the body:
The natural body heat fails the body, the body gradually
grows cold, and there is no remedy to avoid this (Life 20, 3).For in the pain that is experienced in these impulses, the body
feels it along with the soul, and both seem to have a share in it
. . . The (soul) desires only to die in this solitude (Life, 9).
This suffering and this death, however, bear along with it great happiness, or as Teresa says, “It is arduous, delightful martyrdom” (Life, 20, 11). We are still left, however, with the question, what is ecstasy? What happens in an ecstatic state? Teresa tells us in the most daring and sensuous terms:
I saw close to me an angel in bodily form . . . not very large,
but small; very beautiful, his face a flame, he must have
been one of the highest angels . . . In his hand I saw a golden
dart, long, the tip red with fire. This dart entered my heart
many times and reached my insides; in drawing out the dart
it seemed he was taking my insides with it; he left me all
inflamed in great love for God. The pain was so deep that it
made me moan; and it was so excessive the sweetness this
unbearable pain plunged me into, that there was no way for
me to stop, nor was the soul satisfied with any less than God
himself. (Life 29, 13)
A further testimony of the transformation, through ecstasy, of the body of these mystics is the fact that some of their bodies did not decompose after death. This was the case for Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz. But the most universal testimony we are all able to see is the testimony of the communities they left behind, and the testimony of their own body of writing that affects us spiritually—in some cases, to the point of ecstasy.
References
Comfort, Alex. I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion. New York: Crown Publishers, 1979.
De la Madre de, Efren and Steggink, Otger, eds. Santa Teresa de Jesus. Obras Completas. Madrid, 1962.
de Nicolas, Antonio T. The Bhagavad Gita. York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, 1994.
_____. Meditations Through the Rg Veda. York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, 1976.
_____. Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loyola. Albany N.Y: SUNY Press, 1986.
_____. St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1995.
Henning, M., trans. The Hymns of Zarathustra. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1992.
Hume, Robert Ernest. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. Translated from the Sanskrit. Second ed., revised. New York: Oxford University Press, 1931.
Isherwood, Christopher. Ramakrishna and His Disciples. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1965.
Lincoln, Victoria. Teresa: A Woman. A Biography of Teresa of Avila. Albany N.Y: SUNY Press, 1984.
Llewellyn, Vaughan-Lee, ed. Travelling the Path of Love. Sayings of Sufi Masters. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1995.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton. Evolution’s End. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992.
Pert, Candace B. Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Saint Nicodemes, the Nagiorite, and Saint Makarios, Metropolitan of Corinth, comp. Philokalia , vol. III.
Trans. by G.E.H. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
A Vignette on the Most Famous Ecstasy
One of the most famous artistic representations of ecstasy is the marble statue of St. Teresa by the Italian artist Bernini. The artist represents the rapture of Teresa’s vision as the angel enters her heart with a flaming arrow. The following poem is an attempt to capture this moment and the steps in Teresa’s life that lead up to it. The poem briefly evokes the progressive spiral of her ascent and ecstasy using the saint’s own words.
A Woman’s Measure: Remembering Teresa de Avila*
I measured my life
in thimbles of love
squeezing from memory
Sunday preachers
as I moved their images
about in my mind
at those times
when I was praying
to You.Love of men
in a woman’s measure.
You taught me later
to measure it in cups,
as You came to me
in portions of
sky,
water,
fields
quieting my soul
like a still pond
with memories of
fall
summer,
winter,
spring,
as I turned my soul
face up like a mirror.Love of the world
in a woman’s measure.
Finally You came upon me
to stop all measure
in the form of an angel
the body of a man
the face like a flame
carrying in your hand
a dart of gold
the tip burning red,
and You caressed
my heart with it
penetrated inside
would not let go
till my body
grew red with the fire
penetrating my heart . . .The pain was so deep,
so soft,
it made me groan,
I heard myself moan
for the pain not to stop
but plunge me deep
into that bottomless sea
where at last I could feel
the exact measure
of my woman’s desires
for You.Desire of the world,
love for men,
love of God
at last joined
within a woman’s measure.
*From The Sea Tug Elegies and of Angels and Women. Mostly, by Antonio de Nicolas. New York: Paragon House, 1991.