A Recipe for Ecstasy

If the title caught you that’s because you were duped. But this is not a trap. I will reveal the secret recipe for ecstasy but you’re going to have to feel some pain before we get there. The real question I want you to ask is, “What is pain?”

All life is pain because pain is an info-electric language inside a limbic network. Pain is the only true sensation we have. Every other sense rides on top of pain’s roadway. Every nerve transmits information through an action potential of shock. Your body is wired with billions of cattle prods flooding the loudspeakers every time you slack off.

What we call pleasure is really pain’s prediction. Pleasure is not the cessation of pain, but its anticipation. We derive pleasure from our ability to surf the action potentials as they roll into our harbor because we know what to expect when it comes. This is flow state where we dance to the rhythm of our pain. This gnosis yields us an electrical profit we horde.

The body is one big casino with four major tokens. These are dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin. These chemicals are the currency of the body. Dopamine is more of a fuel than a chemical of happiness though. Our eyes stop working if dopamine doesn’t flow. Dopamine is better understood as influence. All of our happy chemicals are managed through inhibitors. It’s a complex economy of give-and-take much like any free market.

Inside the body, none of these currencies buy happiness. These tokens grant us time inside the hypothalamus’ pleasure dome. This place is the fountain where dopamine flows. Its river is powered by pain’s predictability. Every system manipulates and negotiates independently with every other system for time in the pleasure dome.

From birth, we are immersed in a black lagoon of shock. We adapt to billions of acidic tingles as if breathing underwater. Pain is the tip of a needle in the dark. It’s an attack from an invisible creature but there’s nowhere to run when pain strikes so close to home. In the lagoon pain is all we have to echolocate our way through the dark. We discover a world from its bunker. We build a cosmology off the hues we learn to swallow.

I hurt myself today to see if i still feel. I focus on the pain. the only thing that’s real.

Our first breath is pain. Our first drink is pain. Our first sight is pain. Our first sound is pain. The only thing that saved us was our helplessness in the dark. Pain was our only compass. It tied us to its mast and christened our spine to a black sea. And so we learned to sail her to our advantage. We discovered an entire world from her rudder.

The religious experience is an advanced form of pain. We call this ecstasy and it is the transmogrification of pain into a higher form. Ecstasy is an intimacy with pain’s gnosis. All pain becomes pleasure the moment it crosses this horizon. All of this happens inside you. None of it comes from an external cause. Ask yourself, “When does the tickle become assault?”

Pain is the drum we stretch to listen to god. God is every spectrum pounding on our skin at once. Its unfiltered beat melts our face off. We are learning to squint in the source. He is every ray streaming in most-def. He is the microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma.

God is divine radiation. or radiance. It takes great pains to receive him.

~James

This article was written as part of my Valentine’s Day presentation tomorrow night with AeonByte’s Finding Hermes Group.