From the Archive - Ecstasy and Sushi
Everyday ego dissolution
I recently came upon a collection of writings I did about ten years ago on a blog I called Zenteknica. The essays looked at cultural, scientific and artistic creations from the perspective of various concepts in the Zen dharma, as least as I understood them.
I thought you might be interested as a change of pace from my usual newsletters. (Let me know!)
Hope you enjoy. Have a great weekend.
-Paul
Humans have a natural need for ecstatic experiences. It is the source of many traditional rituals, it fuels our communal celebrations of music, dance, and sport, and it is the driving force behind most behaviors that become compulsive and addictive.
“Ecstasy” of course derives from “ex-stasis”, or “out of stasis”. It is a place of freedom from constraint. (We cannot properly call it a “state”, since states are by definition static. ) Escape from the self is a precondition for healthy self development, for only through ecstasy can we see the true dimensions and limitations of the ego.
Lacking the traditional tribal rituals of earlier eras of humankind, modern civilized society channels our ecstatic impulses into controlled settings of the dance floor, the sports arena, the battlefield (and other dangerous environments), and the church. Our drive for sex, the most pleasurable and terrifying of ecstatic experiences, is infantilized, repressed, shamed and horribly re-directed.
Since there is no accepted society-wide route for growing into and through ecstasy, each person creates in his or her life a unique game plan where their self can both grow and dissolve. It usually involves some regimen by which the self allows itself surrender to music, intoxicants, sex and/or Big Mind (aka God). As they grow into adulthood most people develop their own strategies for including these experiences in their life, without screwing up the other things they love and care about, such as family, careers and possessions. When it comes down to it, of course, many people will put their fixed loved objects at risk in order to fulfill their need for ecstasy.
The problem with tribal-based ecstatic experiences is that they usually do not directly affect the quality and gravity of the ego. A wicked arms merchant or serial domestic abuser, not to mention the garden variety neurotic most of us are, may temporarily assuage their perversions through drugs, sex or other means, and falsely conclude that their lives possess an overall integrity.
Meditation provides ecstatic experiences through a different and essential mechanism: not via self-escape, but by diminishing the experienced mass of the static self. A rocket ship attempting to leave the gravitational pull of Jupiter requires immense amounts of energy, while one that is lifting off from the Moon requires, relatively speaking, a mere push in the right direction. We find that as we drop away our identification with the self, the less fixity and persuasiveness obtains to the ego, and the more any experience, even everyday experiences, can become ecstatic.
In the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the great Japanese sushi chef, whose single-minded focus on his craft is equivalent to Zen meditation, at one point talks of spending every waking hour of his life working with food, preparing sushi for his customers and developing new recipes. Then he smiles and says: “I am ecstatic ALL THE TIME.”
The introspection of meditation is designed to diminish self-clinging that creates the illusion of mass in the self and thus makes ecstatic experience far more available, and less subject to the manipulations of social engineering, which sanction only those ecstasies that it deems safe and controllable.
Sit in meditation and free yourself. If your practice is sincere, you will rarely feel bored or trapped again.
