Author: Matthew Sanderson
Category: Phenomenology and Existentialism, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology
Word Count: 1000
Kissing someone with whom you are falling in love. Dancing and singing along at a concert. Being “in the zone” while playing sports or creating art. Meditating until thoughts and desires cease and your mind becomes still. Seeming to encounter a spiritual being or reality.
These are examples of “ecstatic experiences.” “Ecstatic” comes from the Greek word “ekstasis”—ecstasy—meaning “to stand outside oneself.” When we seem to joyfully “lose” or transcend or go beyond ourselves, those are ecstatic experiences.
This essay introduces some philosophical issues about ecstatic experiences.[1]
1. Types and Structure
There are many examples of ecstatic experiences, such as:
- romantic ecstasy, where we seem to become “lost” in our partner during erotic activity;
- bodily ecstasy, like an exhilarating rush from intense exercise or pleasure from eating delicious food;[2]
- aesthetic ecstasy, such as feeling absorbed in the beauty of art or nature;
- religious ecstasy, such as mystical experiences where you feel “one” with a spiritual reality.
No matter what form they take, ecstatic experiences all involve feeling as though you “lose yourself.”[3] This doesn’t mean getting physically lost, but rather mentally losing your sense of self. So, ecstatic experiences involve a shift in perspective from normal experience.
In ordinary, everyday awareness, we are typically aware of ourselves as separate from everything else.[4] We are conscious of a basic difference between ourselves and objects, everything that’s not ourselves. Also, we feel largely in control of our thoughts and behavior. So, overall, we have possession of ourselves—“a hold on ourselves.”
In ecstatic experiences, we seem to undergo a loss of self, what philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) calls an “unselfing.”[5] This consists of losing self-awareness, or just becoming much less self-aware, and feeling as though we lose control of ourselves: e.g., involuntarily shaking and shouting; feeling “swept away” and unable to focus on anything else, etc.[6]
We lose ourselves because our mental attention finds something else—our romantic partner, a song—totally captivating.[7] It pulls our attention away from ourselves, causing an “out-of-self” experience. Ecstasy can then seem to involve a loss of boundaries separating subject and object, where we feel like we become “one” with what captivates us—sometimes even with everything.[8]
It’s important to note, however, that while ecstasy seems to involve lessening or even eliminating our sense of self, we nonetheless remain present in the sense that we are aware of our experience.
2. Ecstasy, Meaning, and the Good Life
People are interested in ecstatic experiences because they often consider them some of the most profoundly meaningful and valuable experiences of their lives:[9] they feel they benefit significantly from the experiences.[10] While ecstatic experiences involve a loss of self, they also lead to a return to self and, many think, a return to a better self.[11] For instance, people often feel that, upon returning to themselves, they become more content, loving, compassionate, etc., as a result of ecstasy’s unselfing.[12]
Perhaps, then, a good life should include at least some ecstatic experiences, and a life without any such experiences might be significantly lacking. Some even suggest we should try to engage in an ecstatic way of life: regularly seeking ecstatic experiences and working to become more psychologically open to them.[13]
3. Ecstasy and Reality
Sometimes ecstatic experiences lead people to reconsider their beliefs about the reality of who we are and our relation to the world: they influence their metaphysical views.[14] Ordinarily, we might think that the “real you” is self-enclosed: a separate, self-aware individual, different from everything else. Indeed, in ordinary awareness, reality in general seems to consist entirely of distinct, individuated beings: e.g., people, objects, etc.
Ecstatic experiences can challenge this understanding, suggesting that who we really are is not sealed off from the rest of reality.[15] Ecstatic experiences can make it seem that we are interconnected with what ordinarily appears separate from us—love, beauty, nature, other people, God, or perhaps even with everything.[16]
4. Ecstasy and Truth
Some people think ecstatic experiences reveal some deeper truth about reality (e.g., that we are connected to something greater than ourselves) that is inaccessible to ordinary awareness.[17] For those who have experienced profound forms of ecstasy, it can feel nearly impossible to doubt what they seemed to experience—e.g., this type of belief of “oneness”—given the feeling of certainty during the experience.
But just because people feel that ecstatic experiences tell us the truth about reality doesn’t mean they really do. One major reason for doubt is that it’s possible to understand ecstatic experiences as nothing more than quick “hits” of dopamine in your brain that produce an illusory sense of interconnectedness.[18]
However, all human experiences can be understood as brain events, and yet that doesn’t cause us to doubt sense perceptions, for instance. Furthermore, like non-ecstatic sense perceptions, ecstatic experiences seem to be forms of perception that reveal some important truths about reality, and so perhaps they should be trusted too.[19]
However, non-ecstatic sense perceptions seem to reveal a different reality than ecstatic experiences—a world of separate rather than interconnected things. This raises the question of whether we can ever figure out which experience—ecstatic or non-ecstatic experience—is telling us the truth about reality.
5. Conclusion: Ecstasy’s Dangers
While ecstatic experiences can be profoundly significant to people, one’s life probably shouldn’t be wholly or primarily devoted to ecstatic experiences:[20] constantly pursuing ecstatic experiences could easily become a form of “escapism” or avoidance of real-world responsibilities, or worse.[21]
Ecstatic experiences can improve a person’s happiness and character, but they can also make people worse, even immoral.[22] For instance, getting high on drugs while neglecting one’s child is immoral and self-destructive ecstasy. And it’s possible to feel ecstatic while engaging in acts of violence towards others.[23] So, the moral value of ecstatic experiences is largely dependent on the type of ecstasy and context of the experience.[24]
While you have probably had ecstatic experiences before, you may not have thought so deeply about them. Philosophizing about these experiences raises thought-provoking questions and helps us appreciate their importance in our lives.
Notes
[1] This essay summarizes ideas and arguments primarily from four relatively recent books that discuss ecstatic experiences: Jules Evans’ The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience (2017), Christopher Hamilton’s Rapture (2024), Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy (2024), and Louis Roy’s Transcendent Experiences: Phenomenology and Critique (2001). While philosophers have traditionally equated ecstatic experiences solely with religious (e.g., mystical) experiences, these authors view ecstatic experiences as a larger class of experiences that includes both religious and non-religious or secular types of ecstasy.
While this essay is focused on more recent works, arguably the philosopher who devoted the most attention to ecstatic experiences was French thinker Georges Bataille (1897-1962). For an accessible entry point to Bataille’s thought, see his book Inner Experience (2014/1943).
[2] For an introduction to mysticism, see Philosophy of Mysticism: Do Mystical Experiences Justify Religious Beliefs? and William James on Mystical Experience, both by Matthew Sanderson. For an introduction to the philosophy of romantic love, see What Is It To Love Someone? by Felipe Pereira. Hamilton (2024: pp. 97-114) argues that romantic or erotic activity such as kissing is a type of ecstasy.
Critchley (2024) discusses many examples of aesthetic ecstasy. A classic example of aesthetic ecstasy is the experience of the sublime, i.e., a perceptual encounter with what seems to be infinite in size or power. For an introduction to the sublime, see Immanuel Kant’s Theory of the Sublime by Matthew Sanderson. Bell (1914: pp. 17-20) says aesthetic experience (i.e., the experience of beauty and other aesthetic qualities) is a type of ecstasy. Nietzsche’s concept of Dionysian aesthetic experience is a type of ecstatic experience; for an introduction to this concept, see Friedrich Nietzsche on Tragedy: Why Do We Like Tragic Art? by Matthew Sanderson.
Roy (2001: pp. 9) describes four main types of ecstatic experiences: the aesthetic (“the sense of being part of an encompassing whole”); the ontological (“feeling intellectually secure and grounded in a being that lies beyond contingency and nothingness”); the ethical (“an apprehension of a value, such as justice, solidarity, kindness”); and the interpersonal (“the sense of a special presence…consist[ing] in the certainty that love is validated by the very fabric of the universe, against all appearances to the contrary.”)
Critchley (2024: p. 4) mentions several types or causes of ecstasy: religious practice, art, poetry, sex, and intoxication.
[3] Evans (2017: pp. x-xii), Hamilton (2024: p. 3), Critchley (2024: p. 3), and Roy (2001: p. 3) all say the defining characteristic of ecstatic experiences is what seems like a loss of self or losing yourself. Critchley (2024: p. 3) says, “What I am calling ecstasy is a way of surpassing the self, of being held out there outside the confines of your head and the feeling of delight, pleasure or glee that accompanies that experience.”
[4] Another way to understand ordinary experience is that we feel like we are at the center of our experiences, that we occupy a first-person perspective that functions as the “command center” of all of our experiences. For instance, we feel like we are at the center of our experiences in the sense that the entire world seems to revolve around us. In ecstatic experiences, on the other hand, we feel “decentered,” i.e., at least partially removed from that center perspective. For instance, we feel thrown outside of ourselves, and thereby removed from our normal center of command. “Losing yourself” in ecstatic experiences means, then, losing our place at the center of our experiences—losing control of our experience, in the sense that it doesn’t feel like we have control over ecstasy or over ourselves when experiencing it. However, the paradox of ecstatic experiences is that we do still experience them from a first-person perspective; we are still the center of the experience, if only very minimally, at least enough to “witness” the experience and understand on an implicit level that it is happening to us. Evidence of this is that if someone asked you what you experienced, you could say, “I had an ecstatic experience.” The ability to refer to “I” arguably indicates that you were still present for, and the center of, the experience. Thus, ecstatic experiences are, paradoxically, first-person experiences of feeling thrown outside of our first-person perspective; they are feeling decentered as experienced from the center of the experience.
[5] Iris Murdoch coined the term “unselfing” in The Sovereignty of Good (2013/1970: pp. 84-85).
[6] Evans (2017: p. x) says that ecstasy’s loss of self is a loss of self-awareness, “when our consciousness expands beyond its usual self-obsessed anxiousness into a more peaceful, absorbed and transcendent state of mind.”
[7] Hamilton (2024: p. 3) says that ecstatic experiences involve highly focused attention and perhaps even a feeling of “oneness” with what captivates the experiencer. Critchley (2024: p. 7) writes that ecstasy involves a “radical openness and concentrated presence” of mental attention.
[8] Roy (2001: p. 3) views ecstatic experiences as ways we connect with “the infinite.” Evans (2017: p. xii) points out that experiencers can feel “one” with everything in an ecstatic experience: “In profound moments of ego-loss, people feel deeply connected to something greater than them—nature, the cosmos, humanity, God—to the extent they go beyond any sense of ‘I’ and ‘you’.” Critchley (2024: p. 4) writes that in ecstatic experiences “the self fades away into a larger and more capacious environment or space for being” and ecstatic experiences “allow us to push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy…” Critchley (2024: p. 9) writes that ecstatic experiences involve “giving ourselves up, as much as possible, giving ourselves over to that which is larger than the self, outside the self: a pliable ground of love that is prior to the will.”
[9] If people feel that ecstatic experiences are some of the most meaningful experiences in their lives, this might suggest that philosophers should consider ecstatic experiences when reflecting on the meaning of life. For an introduction to philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, see Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? and The Meaning of Life: What’s the Point?, both by Matthew Pianalto.
[10] Evans (2017: pp. xxii-xxiii) argues that people typically find ecstatic experiences to be healing, inspiring, socially connecting, and/or meaning-bestowing. Critchley (2024: p. 5) writes, “Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us…[Ecstatic experiences] give us some relief from misery, from melancholy, from heaviness of soul, from the slough of despond, from mental leadenness.” Critchley (2024: p. 3) writes that ecstasy provides experiencers with “a sheer feeling of aliveness…[that] can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.” Critchley (2024: p. 15) writes that in ecstatic experiences “we are freed from the prison of melancholy and doubt. We are at peace and at rest.”
[11] Critchley (2024: p. 3) notes that ecstasy is “about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever be fully lost [i.e., there is always a return to the self following ecstasy, and even during ecstasy a self remains present.]” Hamilton (2024: p. 3) views ecstatic experiences as consisting of both the loss and return to the self: “a loss of the self, a being taken out of oneself, and at the same time an intense return to the self—an awakening to the self that is also the self’s freedom or liberation.” This liberation, Hamilton says (2024: p. 3), is “a kind of freedom from the burdens of individuality.” Roy (2001: p. 5) also considers the return to the self part of an ecstatic experience; he calls it “the fruit” of the experience in the sense that it is the positive benefit of the experience on the self. Evans (2017: p. xi) argues that ecstatic experiences relieve the suffering that comes from being a self: “Our egos have evolved to help us survive and compete…But the self we construct is an exhausting place to be stuck all the time. It’s isolated, cut off by walls of fear and shame, besieged by worries and ambitions, and conscious of its own smallness and impending mortality. That’s why we need to let go, every now and then, or we get bored, exhausted, or depressed.”
[12] Some ecstatic experiences might count as what philosophers call “transformative experiences” in cases where they drastically change (i.e., transform) experiencers. For an introduction to the philosophy of transformative experiences, see Transformative Experiences: Can Life-Changing Choices Be Both Rational and Authentic? by Felipe Pereira. A contemporary example is the use of ketamine, which can cause ecstatic experiences, to treat depression, ptsd, and other mental health conditions. For a scientific explanation of the therapeutic benefits of ketamine, see Allison Wells, “Ketamine: A Rising Star in Mental Health Treatment,” Anxiety & Depression Association of America, April 25, 2024.
[13] Hamilton (2024: pp. 4-5) suggests we should perhaps seek to live an ecstatic or rapturous life, not just occasionally undergo ecstatic experiences. Hamilton (2024: pp. 4-5) writes: “…I think that there are certain lives that are, so to speak, lived under the sign of rapture or in the spirit of rapture. I think of these as emblematic lives, visions of the possibility of life by which we might be nourished and, perhaps, enabled to make space for, be better able to welcome into our own life, moments of being, moments of rapture.” Critchley (2024: p. 5) says he is most interested ultimately in “the possibility of ecstatic life” rather than episodic, momentary experiences of ecstasy. Critchley (2024: p. 4) says he is interested in “what it might mean to lead a released [i.e., ecstatic] existence.” Critchley (2024: p. 15) writes that ecstatic experiences “can and must be continually repeated, renewed, and re-enacted on the stage of our lives.”
[14] Critchley (2024: p. 11) writes that ecstatic experiences seem to involve a “transfiguration of self and world.”
[15] Roy (2001) argues that, given that we can experience ecstasy and a feeling of interconnection with something larger than ourselves, ecstatic experiences at least show that our consciousness is open to something greater than the self. Critchley (2024: p. 3) writes that ecstatic experiences “allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there [i.e., see reality clearly] and stand with what is there ecstatically.”
[16] Evans (2017: p. xxiv) says that in ecstatic experiences, “We feel connected to nature, to the cosmos, and perhaps to God in some form or other, and this can give us a sense of identity beyond the ‘I’, and the hope that perhaps something in us survives beyond death.”
Ecstatic experiences might have other metaphysical implications as well. For instance, because ecstatic experiences can seem to involve transcending space and time—because they feel like they occur in a timeless moment (i.e., time seems to stop or slow way down during the experience), and because they appear to erase the spatial boundaries separating subject and object—they might have implications for how we understand the metaphysics or true nature of space and time. For an introduction to metaphysical issues related to space and time, see Time Travel by Taylor W. Cyr, as well as Philosophy of Space and Time: Are the Past and Future Real?, Philosophy of Space and Time: What is Space?, and Philosophy of Time: Time’s Arrow, all by Dan Peterson. To take another example, because ecstatic experiences involve a loss of self-control, this might suggest that we have less control over ourselves than we often think, which might have implications for how we think about human free will. For an introduction to the philosophy of free will, see Free Will and Free Choice by Jonah Nagashima and Free Will and Moral Responsibility by Chelsea Haramia.
[17] It would seem to be a defining or essential trait of ecstatic experiences that they tend to come with a sense of conviction and even certainty on the part of experiencers that they are “real,” that what people seem to experience is indeed what they really experience. Thus, William James (1902/2004) argued that ecstatic experiences typically have a “noetic quality,” meaning that they feel to experiencers like genuine states of knowledge. To express the same idea, Jones (2016) says that ecstatic experiences feel as though they are “cognitive.”
[18] Evans (2017: p. xv) highlights that ecstatic experiences can be understood as nothing more than brain events that are all in the experiencer’s head, so to speak: “In a materialist world-view, there are no spirits or gods out there. Ecstasy is a mental delusion. The universe is a giant lava-lamp of matter, beautiful but inanimate, ruled by mechanical laws. The human body is likewise a machine, which somehow produces consciousness in the brain. Spiritual explanations of physical or psychic phenomena are ignorant and childish.” Evans (2017: p. xx) also discusses how “we can explain ecstasy as alterations in our neural chemistry, in our brain functioning and our autonomic nervous system. We know that giving people chemicals can trigger ecstatic experiences…We know some ecstatic experiences are connected to brain disorders, like migraines and temporal lobe epilepsy…However, just because ecstatic experiences affect the brain and body, that doesn’t mean they are nothing but neurochemical processes.”
[19] James (1902/2004) and Wainwright (1981) both argue that if we consider sense perception to be veridical, and if ecstatic experiences are also types of perceptions or fundamentally perceptual in nature, then we have good reason to believe ecstatic experiences are veridical as well.
In philosophy, experiences that seem to be true are called “seemings.” The view that what seems to be the case should be accepted as such unless there are good reasons for doubt is called “phenomenal conservatism.” For an introduction to phenomenal conservatism, see Seemings: Justifying Beliefs Based on How Things Seem by Kaj André Zeller and Richard Swinburne on Religious Experience by Matthew Sanderson.
[20] To be clear, Hamilton’s suggestion (2024: pp. 4-5) that it’s good to live a rapturous or ecstatic way of life is not saying we should be wholly or primarily devoted to ecstasy. In fact, Hamilton (2024: p. 5, Hamilton’s emphases) denies this is even possible: “[ecstatic] lives, for sure, no doubt have their fair share of the ‘cotton wool’ [ordinary, non-ecstatic experiences] that characterizes the life of the rest of us. This is why I speak of them as lived in the spirit of rapture: the idea here is not that of the experiences of a life that could be characterized as permanently marked by rapture [i.e., ecstasy], as if the person in question lived always in such a state, but of a life as, so to speak, colored by, lived in the light of, the notion of rapture.”
[21] Evans (2017: p. xiii and xxiv-xxv) points out that ecstatic experiences can be a form of escapism: “…the most common risk in our culture is that we become unhealthily obsessed with the ecstatic. Modern spirituality can become all about the peaks, the rapture, the ‘God-like hours’.” Evans (2017: p. xxvi) writes, “I’m not suggesting Western civilisation should become a permanent festival of ecstasy. That would be dangerous escapism, not to say impractical.”
[22] Hamilton (2024: pp. 5-6) points out that living an ecstatic life does not necessarily mean you are a “morally admirable person.” Evans (2017: pp. xii-xiii) argues that there are healthy and unhealthy (including immoral) types of ecstatic experiences.
[23] Evans (2017: p. xiii) points out that people can feel ecstatic while committing acts of violence.
[24] Evans (2017: pp. xii-xiii) argues that we should think of ecstatic experiences as generally or inherently amoral or morally neutral given that people can undergo them during immoral activities (e.g., acts of violence) and the danger that they can lead to fanatical and other problematic beliefs and states of mind (e.g., dogmatism). Evans (2017: pp. xxv) writes, “Context has a decisive effect on the outcome of ecstatic experiences, and on whether they’re healthy or toxic [e.g., moral or immoral].”
References
Bataille, Georges. (2014/1943). Inner Experience. SUNY Press.
Bell, Clive. (1914). Art. Oxford University Press.
Critchley, Simon. (2024). On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. New York Review Books.
Hamilton, Christopher. (2024). Rapture. Columbia University Press.
James, William. (1902/2004). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Barnes & Noble Books.
Jones, Richard H. (2016). Philosophy of Mysticism: Raids on the Ineffable. SUNY Press.
Murdoch, Iris. (2013/1970). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge.
Roy, Louis. (2001). Transcendent Experiences. Toronto University Press.
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About the Author
Matthew Sanderson is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at West Shore Community College in Scottville, Michigan. He specializes in philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and 19th and 20th-century continental philosophy. philpeople.org/profiles/matthew-sanderson
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