Smoldering Joy
This week we’re re-calibrating our compass by soaking in the testimony of those whose hearts have been pierced by extreme ecstatic joy. The following is excerpted and adapted from the forthcoming revision of our book, Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire.
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Sacred Ecstatics calls for the return of the extraordinary ecstatic experience that gives birth to the fully awakened mystic, shaman, saint, healer, and spiritual teacher. This overwhelming and life-changing personal encounter with the source of all mystery is a super-charged sensate experience from head to toe, a heartfelt immersion in the greatest bliss. Surpassing all understanding and explanation, such inspired ecstasy touches the roots of your being and leads to an instant rebirth of identity, purpose, and everyday presence in the world. Those who experience it regard this as the definitive moment of their lives—it is what initiates and makes you ready for the most incredible life possible, one filled with joy and mystery.
Bucke offers the testimony of a woman simply identified as C.M.C., born in 1844, who received this kind of pinnacle spiritual experience:
The sense of lightness and expansion kept increasing. . . the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me . . . and more strange than all, there came to me a sense of some serene, magnetic presence—grand and all pervading . . . And still the splendor increased. Presently, what seemed to be a swift, oncoming tidal wave of splendor and glory ineffable came down upon me, and I felt myself being enveloped, swallowed up.
I felt myself going, losing myself . . . Now came a period of rapture, so intense that the universe stood still, as if amazed at the unutterable majesty of the spectacle! Only one in all the infinite universe! The All-loving . . . I was on the great highway, the upward road . . . with deathless hope in the heart and songs of love and trust on the lips. I understood now, the old eternal truths, yet fresh and new and sweet as the dawn . . . Every longing of the heart was satisfied, every question answered, the “pent-up, aching rivers” had reached the ocean—I loved infinitely and was infinitely loved! The universal tide flowed in upon me in waves of joy and gladness, pouring down on me as in torrents of fragrant balm.
The infinite love and tenderness seemed to really stream down me like holy oil healing all my hurts and bruises . . . There is nothing in the universe to compare with it—such joyous repose and sweet unconcern—saying to us, with tenderest love: All is well, always has been, and will always be. The “subjective light” (it seems to me) is magnetic or electric—some force is liberated in the brain and nervous system—some explosion takes place—the fire that burned in the breast is now a mounting flame . . .
In my experience the “subjective light” was not something seen—a sensation as distinct from an emotion—it was emotion itself—ecstasy. It was the gladness and rapture of love, so intensified that it became an ocean of living, palpitating light, the brightest of which outshone the brightness of the sun. Its glow, warmth and tenderness fill the universe. That infinite ocean was the eternal love, the soul of nature and all of one endless smile. (Bucke 1969, 326–28)
Compare the fire, electricity, and waves of emotion felt by C.M.C. with the account Paramahansa Yogananda gave of the “smoldering joy” that accompanied his experience of samadhi:
All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated . . . until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken . . . An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes . . . The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras.
Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster; fire became firmament . . . Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful amrita, the nectar of immortality, pulsed through me with a quicksilver like fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding as Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor . . . (Yogananda 2015, 94)
Our Joy is Here to Stay
These testimonies emphasize an experience of intense emotion along with a surrounding light, vibration, and electricity that also dwells and swells within. Experiential descriptions of this extraordinary bliss are often minimized or even found missing in religious teaching in favor of emphasizing ideological interpretation and/or scientific reductionism. There arguably has been a push in recent times to remove religious experience from religion and the spirit from spirituality.
Religious scholar June McDaniel (2018) concludes in her important book, Lost Ecstasy: Its Decline and Transformation in Religion, that religious ecstasy “has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion” by those who seem hell-bent on trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experience as “a symptom of ignorance, fanaticism, and superstition” or “a symptom of psychiatric ailments, brain misfirings, epilepsy, and even calcium deficiency” (59).
In spite of all the attempts found in practically every religious, spiritual, and secular tradition to quash it, sacred ecstasy has still awakened, healed, renewed, nurtured, highly excited, and totally remade diverse seekers throughout history and all over the world. It is here to stay and cannot be kept at bay by those too fearful of or embarrassed by religious emotion and embodied devotion.
Let’s ignore any demeaning talk and boldly aim toward the higher fire that burns stronger than the cold-hearted naming and shaming. If you long to be spiritually cooked by sacred ecstasy then remember you’re in good immortal company, surrounded in all directions by the wise and soft-hearted yet powerful, no-nonsense healers, soul singers, smiling shamans, seiki dancers, musical mystics, God trackers, n/om doctors, holy spirit ambassadors, and sacred vibration capacitors who pray with the same spiritual steam and longing dream of St. Augustine:
“May the live coal of Your Love grow hot within my spirit and break forth into a perfect fire; may it burn incessantly on the altar of my heart; may it glow in my innermost being; may it blaze in hidden recesses of my soul.”
— The Keeneys, December 10, 2018