Ecstasy
The most important aspects of the ontology of reality are dualities, including light and dark, good and evil. Duality is also the rudimentary substrate behind all material phenomena like insideness or outsideness, smooth or rough, soft or loud, dimensions like up or down or right or left, forward and backward in temporality, creativity of greater complexity and entropy, feminine vs. masculine, etc. These dualities are responsible for and are the ontological substance behind everything. The semantical labels people are inventive with to define dualities are social constructions, and there will always be neutral gray zones between the dark and the light. If you have a dotting of bright glittering stars in the sky among an expansive black soft sea of nothingness, the distinctive boundary between where the star ends and the darkness begins is not knowable materially since it necessarily exists at a point of infinite smallness, infinity not possible to exist in a formulated conceptualization since all our methods of material knowing (whether they be linguistic, spatial, mathematical, or other symbolic ways, etc.) only find infinity to be an inscrutable, abstract, nebulous formlessness that is foreign to us (there is an association between formlessness and the infinite in mystical and esoteric philosophy since it is only when one enters the cessation dhana or rather the nothingness that permeates all of existence that one can “comprehend” what infinity is since the infinite cannot and will not be truly understood as a limited form unless that form is known to be identical to all other objects; this is the basis of nondualist religions).
An infinitely small sliver of reality being the line between all duality necessitates the differences between dualities are either undefinable and nonexistent, in reality but unknowable, or in reality but knowable through unconventional methodization. As examples, people report instances of infinity while in advanced states of ecstasy and enstasis. In these states, the mind is capable of infinite calculative potential, and this would only be possible if the infinite division within finitude could exist mechanistically. The term I found looking for one related to this topic is “xeno machine”, a xeno machine being an instrument in possession of infinite computive ability in a way that is hypothetically physically possible in the spatial order of infinite lengths making up a finite object (for example ½, ⅓, ¼, … all the way down to the endless number itself would result in 1/infinity, an uncountable amount of which could be used for extreme power if possible to utilize). This is the mathematical explanation for how ecstatics can have infinity in their phenomenological self-examination of reality if the mind and its physical correlate in the body are to stay in link.
With dualities, reality is as a systemization from simplicity to impossible complexity as an interconnected holistic web of life and non-life, interacting with creativity and destroying, chaotic entropic strange attractors and formed crystallized orders, peace and violence, good and evil, love and hate.
But this issue complicates, a result from postmodernism in many cases, by moving the model from duality to trinity. It is not just male and female; it’s male, female, and gender-nonconforming / nonbinary / genderqueer / both / neither. It’s not just good and evil; it’s good, evil, and gray areas from cultural differences. It’s not war and peace; it’s war, peace, and sitzkrieg or cold war. And you could say the same thing for mathematical physical systems in a case where chaos is the established order or if order unexpectedly appeared out of a pool of chaos or if there is a feedback loop where order and chaos are switches in the relationship of which one is dominant. The removal of duality with the gray areas can even apply to emotions like love and sadness or hate or fear when it comes to heartbreak.
And yet, none of this disproves the existence of dualities. Of course the words are social constructions, but the objects we refer to themselves exist. The nature of what they exist as is a mystery, as is all of the universe itself. Individuals of interconnectedness explicate that the physical and mental worlds of dualities are illusory and the highest transcendent domain of reality within and without is Spirit, which unifies and is all. This informative statement suggests the duality between duality and nonduality is itself illusory since the claim is that Spirit is all things, illusory or not.
The conception the physical world is illusory or a projector screen of consciousness playing deceptive images is important. We will look at how the duality between the material cosmos and the post-material beauty and transcendence of the formless hypercosmos glimmer a light that elucidates how the nature of all this can work for us as we attempt to use it for our own paths.
Visuals of light and dark swirling around and fighting is the mainstream dual archetype that has existed in many societies, good and evil working to overcome each other in a balance. The Gnostic Christians, who believed the material world was a duplicitous and evil location whereas the spiritual world of divinity was enlightening and liberating, articulated this dichotomy in an iconoclastic fashion: the true God exists in transcendence and an evil lesser god called the demiurge has domain over physicality, this demiurge being the mainstream Christian god yahweh of the Bible. Other religions with a focus on dark vs. light are Zoroastrianism and Manachaeism, with Zoroastrians teaching darkness will fail to overcome the entire world and good will win the struggle. This desire for good, for something mystical and divine, possesses omnipresence in certain corners of the societal system. People want out. To reach ecstasy is to have consciousness of this transcendence, which mystics sometimes associate with pure white light.
But that is not the only option. Many altered states of consciousness exist, and many ideological perpetuations of advocacies for these differing states stream throughout the interweb of the societal system. Mysticism, by one definition, necessarily entails henosis. But what altered state of consciousness or what ecstasy a person pursues is a dependence on how someone approaches the issue of duality.
Someone who seeks henosis or merging with the Absolute and who desires not just intellectual philosophizing of what reality is but rather present consciousness of the ontological fabric of the cosmos itself, being and having cogitative, direct, perceptive, witnessing comprehension of what isness is in a way that would be considered empirical if physical rather than immaterial, has paths to that. For people that value the existences and beauties of dualities and material illusionary stories, there are paths to that. If someone values light or if they value darkness or if they value any other pretty color for that matter, there are ecstasies they can reach.
There are what I call Light Ecstasy and Dark Ecstasy; they are distinctive because of the direction of their mysticism. The entrenched form of mysticism is Light Ecstasy, moving upward into an elevated state of awareness of Light, a world of pure white light or a non-physical non-computing “world” of clear characterless Nothingness that is subjective with zero objective regions within it. This is the cessation dhana. The people who move toward this value monistic lack of duality: the leaving-behind of the nature of duality as the phenomenological parts of their experience.
Dark Ecstasy is when a person stays in the windy darkness of the material world and has the profoundness of it. Darkness here, to be more specific than the false concept the material world is bad, refers to magic states, to a significant or subtle positioning, where the ecstatic has not completed a unifying into Light or Nothingness but rather has developed into a place where the self is in emotional arousal and power and is obsessed with the ontological separations and procedural instances and fears of the world or has gone far enough to reject them in favor of another part of the dualities within their mind. These ecstatics have more emotional investment in the systemic complexities of the world and are okay with experiencing the full non-inter-identical range of emotions: joy and the light emotivenesses or fear and the dark emotivenesses people possess.
Light Ecstasy is very specific and does not refer to all psychic deaths. Rather it refers to complete cessation or transportation to the world of pure white Light, which few have done. Pseudo-practicers of this would be spiritual people who almost get there but do not dissolve themselves completely. Rather they have cognizance of what it means because they do have the elevated consciousness necessary to have perception of why all are identical, but they are not dissolved into that deep meditative space.
Romantic beauty is ecstasy.
