At the peak of our technological affluence, these young people renounced the cherished values of Western civilization—the values of property and status. Richness of experience, they maintained, was far more important than things and money, in pursuit of which their parents were miserably and dutifully trapped in squirrel cages.
Mysticism, in the form of realizing that one’s true self is the Godhead, is something Western society would not tolerate. After all, look what happened to Jesus.
Ecstasy is the sensation of surrendering to vibrations, and sometimes to insights, that take you out of your so-called self. By and large, “self” as a direct sensation is nothing more than chronic neuromuscular tension—a habitual resistance to the pulsing of life.
We do not resist the vibrations, pulses and rhythms of nature, just as the yachtsman does not resist the wind. But he knows how to manage his sails and, therefore, can use the wind to go wherever he wishes. The art of life, as we see it, is navigation.
Frequent plunges into ecstasy transform one’s normal consciousness. The everyday world becomes luminous and transparent. The chronic neuromuscular tension against the world disappears, and thus one loses the sensation of carrying one’s body around like a load. You feel light, almost weightless, realizing that you are one with a planet that is just falling at ease through space.
A child emerging into the world is the vibration spectrum becoming aware of itself in a particular and partial way, since human senses are by no means responsive to all known vibrations. (We do not see infrared or gamma rays.) To the baby, these vibrations make neither sense nor nonsense. They are simply what is there. He has no problem about giggling at some or crying at others, since no one has yet taught him which vibrations are good and which are bad. He just goes along uncritically with the whole buzz, without the slightest notion that it is one thing and he another.
You cease to be a central thing upon which experience is banging, scratching and being recorded. Thus, the center of awareness becomes one with all it perceives. You and the world become identical and this disappearance of oneself is, to say the least, a blissful release.
This way of interpreting reality does not contradict the scientific way any more than the colorlessness of a lens rejects the colors of flowers. On the contrary, it restores a whole dimension of value to life which your passion for objectivity neglected and, by comparison, your exclusively scientific universe seems a desiccated, rattling and senseless mechanism. Though it was self-centered, in the largest sense, it left out man himself. We have put him back—not as a definable object but as the basic and supreme mystery.