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RAPTURE - TWO TYPES OF FEELING GOOD
CONTENTS
It is possible to make a very good argument that there are two complementary ways of
'feeling good'. Although the idea is quite a straightforward one, it is not a way of looking at
things that we tend to be familiar with, and in fact it isn't a dichotomy that we find mentioned
either in psychological literature, or in textbooks on psychopharmacology in relation to the effect
of psychoactive drugs.
The two ways of feeling good can be set as follows:
Type- 1 = Euphoria
Type- 2 = Ecstacy
The differences between Type-1 and Type-2 feeling good is that the first involves a view of things
that is familiar (i.e. relevent to our normal way of looking at the world), whilst the second
involves a view that is profoundly unfamiliar - not only is it utterly irrelevent in terms of the
framework of understanding that we are familiar with, it is also irrelevent to any meaning-framework that we might bring to bear. Another way to explain 'irrelevance' would be say that
what is perceived does not have a logical correspondence to any set of rules that may be used to
explain the unprocessed data of perceptual experience; the reality is not reflective of the rules, in
other words.
What we are basically saying is that 'familiarity' is a function of self-referentiality: the
processed information, when makes its claim upon my conscious attention, agrees with the set of
rules that I have (unconsciouslessly) been using to process it. This is circular logic, a sublimely
fatuous argument. I arbitrary select a standard, and stick to it grimly ever after, and when you
challenge me why I always do things this way I conveniently forget, by some quirk of
unconsciousness, the fact that it started off as an arbitrary act of choice on my part, and start
speaking in terms of sacred, time-honoured precedence - an unquestionable, unchallengeable
authority has sneakily entered the picture. Beforehand, all ways were equally special, which is to
say that none were special, afterwards, by virtue of the choice made, this one particular pattern
becomes special, exalted above the rest. This 'specialness' I now use as evidence of divine
authority. There are two things we can say about this sneaky circle of logic:
[1] The reality it shows has the feel of something that is deeply familiar, i.e. completely
obvious or self-evident. Everything is above-board and on show for everyone to see. There is a
'closure' about this reality - there is simply no space given to whatever mental maneouvering
would be needed to ask questions about its validity, that possibility is foreclosed on us. Everything
has to be accounted for within this framework, there isn't the perspective that would be needed
to see beyond it.
[2] The choice behind the reality, which is to say, my own role in constructing it, is very
effectively concealed from me. The rules that I am using to process information have become
totally invisible to me; I automatically assume that the assumptions which I have had to make in
order to get a definite handle on reality, are not assumptions at all, but absolute truth. Assuming
means 'making oneself unconscious,' it correspondes to what James Carse calls 'self-veiling'.
What we have said so far does not seem to have any immediate bearing upon the question
of 'feeling good'. How on earth do we bring euphoria, or ecstacy, into it? We can start by
outlining what we mean by the terms. Type-1 Feeling Good is a sort of 'basking' - a sort of
'wallowing in reassurance'. Another way to think of this is in terms of flattery, or 'humouring'.
A flatterer spots our biases and plays up to them, favouring them; he or she slyly agrees with us
whilst pretending all the time that they are speaking from an unrehearsed, objective, or
independent viewpoint. This makes us feel good, but the basis of this 'feeling good' is false - the
person is telling us what we want to hear and therefore it is not an independent verification of our
beliefs.
Our primary bias is our notion of who we are, our identity. Connected with this are a host
of secondary biases, our thoughts, our beliefs, our values and our opinions - our general picture
of the world, in other words. We use our picture (or map) to orientate ourselves and make sense
of stuff, and to support the most important bias - which is our idea of ourself. In the end, our
ideas about the world and our ideas about ourself come down to the same thing - it is all the same
set-up. We experience Type-1 feeling good when the universe agrees with or validates this
structure: "I am right!" I say, and I feel secure and highly pleased with myself. Similarly, when
things 'go right' for us (when goals are achieved) we are likely to experience euphoria. In
addition, certain psychoactive drugs are well known for their ability to produce euphoria by
making us feel good about our selves - they 'massage our egos,' so to speak. Alcohol, valium,
cocaine, amphetamine, and heroin all do this. The chemist who first synthesized heroin coined the
name because after taking it he felt like a hero - he felt all the satifaction that a person feels after
succeeding against all the odds (goal attainment) without actually having had to do a thing, other
than take the drug.
Essentially, euphoria is to do with particulars, with getting 'the details' right. There is a
loving attention to definite and specific facts, either to an ideal way of doing things, or to some
sort of ideal form. When I am euphoric I find my mind repeatedly going over the same old
ground, I am repeatedly taking satisfaction in the 'rightness' of what I am thinking. Euphoria is
a celebration of form, a delight in the definite - it equals 'luxuriating in the known'. One way of
doing things is lovingly cherised and protected. This corresponds to 'game-paying' and the
security of knowing all the rules, and therefore we can say that Type-1 feeling good is associated
with playing a game. Certainty (or predictability) is the hidden pay-off of game playing - on the
face of it games are to do with risk (i.e. the uncertainty of knowing whether we will win or lose),
but underlying this apparent uncertainty is the 'super-reinforced security' of never having to
question the framework of meaning within which winning and losing take place; after all, winning
and losing both confirm the validity of the game. Thus, the 'rightness' of goal-attainment is
secondary to the 'rightness' of having a framework within which that goal makes sense.
Euphoria is essentially an obsessive cast of mind because it is very interested in a specific
set of details (a particular game), and not at all interested in anything that has nothing to do with
the game. Euphoria is about feeling good within a narrow little world, it is about being safe, and
being protected from any sort of challenge. For this reason euphoria will make me a boring person
to be with: I am not at all open to anyone else, I am not really interested because 'I have already
got it'. Not only that, but I keep on coming out with the same tedius stuff, implicitly assuming
that everyone else shares my passion for it. The hall-mark of 'revelling in the definite' is not only
manifested by those using euphoriant drugs, but is also found in people who are in a state of non-drug related manic elation, which is where, for some reason, 'Type-1 feeling good' reaches a non-adaptive extreme, and is therefore classified as a mental illness.
The message that Type-1 feeling good is giving us is: "Keep doing that, that is good;
don't look anywhere else - this is where its at. Don't change your game, OPTIMIZE it,
INVEST in it....." This has the effect of conditioning (or programming) us - therefore, Type-1
feeling good is associated with PATTERN-MAKING. If something feels comfortable, reassuring
and rewarding we stick with it, we don't look beyond it. Basically, we close our horizons, we stay
in our 'comfort zone'.
Euphoria doesn't last though - it always evaporates. The buzz wears off, the honeymoon
ends, and when this happens we start to see the price that we have paid. This is like waking up
one morning and realizing that the person you are married to is an unnattractive tyrant; what is
more, the relationship is not something you can just walk away from - you aren't free any more.
The flip-side of euphoria is entrappment: we are now wedded to a particular pattern or structure,
and this translates as confinement, dependency, lack of choice, stagnation and depression. Just
as euphoria is based upon closed horizons and the endless reiteration of the known (going round
in circles) so too is depression. The difference is, though, that in depresson we are not reaping
satisfaction, but horror.
This type of enjoyment - which we shall refer to as 'ecstacy' - is harder to get a handle on
because it happens as a result of 'letting go' of a particular framework, rather than consolidating
it. It has nothing to do with setting boundaries and focussing upon specifics; it has nothing to do
with 'seizing' stuff, with making the unknown into the known. This is the reason that most of us
have much less experience of Type-2 feeling good, we tend to look for our pleasure within a
known framework - we do what we always done, in other words. This is the whole point: you
cannot purposefully obtain ecstacy, it doesn't occur as a result of goal-orientated behaviour.
Usually, for most of us, because we are conditioned to grasp for pleasure and avoid suffering, the
only way that we can encounter the ecstacy of letting go is on the other side of a pain barrier,
which is one of the few times when we get to be in a place where we didn't want to be. This pain
might be physical uncomfortableness, or mental anguish, or fear, or it might simply be pure
boredom and stagnation. It is negativity of one sort or another, negativity which we would have
avoided if it were at all possible! This is why the alchemists spoke of finding their 'raw material'
in the dung pile where no one else thought to look.
THE CYCLE OF 'FEELING GOOD' AND 'FEELING BAD'
Negativity is fueled by our attempts to resist or avoid it; the desire to escape negativity,
or destroy it, is actually the root of negativity. This is perplexing to say the least, although
usually it is not perplexing because we are simply unconscious of the conundrum! Krishnamurti
speaks of 'resistance': because we don't see that negativity is caused by resistance, we resist
negativity. Resisting doesn't just mean pushing stuff away, it is also our response to stuff we like;
basically resistance means being biased - we love one possibility and hate the other, we are
attracted to one side of the coin but repelled by the other. Because we automatically resist, we
never leave the cycle of pleasure and pain, or the cycle of euphoria and depression; we stay on
the merry-go-round, and when we feel good we forget about the times we felt bad, and when we
feel bad we wish we could be back in the feeling-good part of the cycle, and the fact that we are
not only makes us feel worse! In our heads we separate the two, we don't acknowledge the way
in which they are linked. We do this socially too - the media endlessly projects images of rapture
and euphoria, which is to say, people looking perfect and 'ideal' and having marvellous lives;
what it doesn't show is the counter-balancing images of despair, dullness and depression. This is
the classic pattern of denial: we live for our moments of rapture, and ignore the rest of it; the
boring and depressing part of my life is written off as trash, because I know (or assume) that the
'really good stuff' isn't in it, and the 'special' moments are celebrated because I know (or
assume) that this is where the 'good stuff' is. This is resistance, and resistance is why we get stuck
in our patterns. It is also why we so rarely get to experience the type of happiness that has
nothing to do with resistance, the type we can't strip-mine.
To escape the cycle we have to stay in the 'feeling bad' part of the depression/euphoria
cycle without resisting it in any way, we have to cultivate an 'even mind'. This is remarkably
difficult because it goes against the grain - we tend to get confused and tangled up because we
are so used to doing things purposefully. The trouble is that doing stuff on purpose is resistance
because there is an outcome that we desire, and an outcome which we object to. Another way to
explain this is to say that resistance equals 'a game', and in a game there is always 'winning' and
'losing'. As long as I think in terms of winning versus losing I am trapped in my game, and
trapped in the cycle of 'up' and 'down'.
WHEN THINGS DON'T FEEL RIGHT.....
The first manifestation of ecstacy is a feeling of things not 'being right; essentially, what
is happening is that we are edging out of our comfort zone. Things are not under control any
more; the universe is not flattering me, it is refusing to acknowledge my game, it is not allowing
me the security of feeling orientated. My 'idea of myself' is unsupported and therefore it ends up
ringing totally false in my ears. This is a bit like what happens if I hear someone repeating my
name to me over and over again - the sound of my name takes on a mocking, persecutory quality
after a while, it undermines me. Flattery turns into jeering. There are many ways for this 'not
rightness' to initially manifest itself: it can be physical pain, shame or guilt, embarrassment, fear,
or even boredom, as we have said. These are feelings we know well enough, at least we think we
know them - in reality we have never hung around long enough to really find out....
The process that we are describing here is perfectly straightforward, what is happening
is that all of my familiar structures and routines are being falsified; what seemed self-evidently
normal and correct now seems suspect, my known world is found to be hollow and unfulfilling.
There is nowhere for me to rest in comforting unconsciousness, instead of this I am thrown back
on myself. Nothing fits, nothing is right, I keep trying out approaches and they all fall flat; the
routines which I previously used, quite automatically, to protect myself against anxiety, no longer
work and so I am in trouble. The level of discomfort rises - I really don't like what is happening
to me here, and there is nothing I can do to ease it. I am profoundly uncomfortable and ill-at-ease,
and the root of this distress is the growing awareness of the awful truth that there is no 'escape,'
no safe direction to head in. It is not just that things are going wrong, where the really serious
discomfort comes in is in the 'not-rightness' of losing my orientation altogether.
So far the description of this 'dislodging' process doesn't sound great. Who would want
that? It is in fact because of the very unpalatable nature of the process we are describing that very
few people get to find out what lies on the other side of the experience. Type-1 feeling-good is
basically a seductive trap, and Type-2 feeling-good is the complete opposite: it is profoundly
unattractive when first approached, but liberating if we stick with it. As Heraclitus noted, it is a
fundamental property of the universe to be 'trickster-like,' and if we don't see through the surface
of its trickery we are doomed to spend out lives chasing pleasure and reaping pain. Another way
to put this would be to say that the universe only reveals its true nature to those who don't jump
to conclusions, i.e., to those who don't take things at face-value. When we become aware of the
operation of this 'trickster principle' we start to see that the uncomfortableness of existential
insecurity is actually the gateway to ecstacy, ecstacy being the feeling of utter release that comes
when I give up trying to exert control.
Control is a double-sided game: on the one hand we are trying to obtain success within
the terms of reference which we have started out with, on the other hand, we are secretly
maintaining our 'context of meaning' without letting on to ourselves that this is what we are
actually doing. The attempt to maintain one's verifiable reality by holding onto an arbitrary
framework of reference, and refusing to see that it is arbitrary, is a tortuous and costly business;
we pay a heavy price in terms of wasted energy, lack of freedom, and repressed fear, and when
the whole self-defeating endeavour is dropped the resulting sense of wonder and delight is
inexpressible. It is like the story of the man who kept banging his head on the wall - when asked
why he did this he replied "Because it feels so good when I stop....!"
Fear disappears because, contrary to expectations, nothing terrible happens. The ever-present frustration of being confined and tied-up vanishes because there is no more self-limitation.
There is, similarly, an experience of tremendous, uncontained energy because the struggle which
Alan Watts called the 'war within the soul' is over with, and energy no longer fights itself. There
is delight and wonder at the marvellous benediction of 'inner-meaning' that has revealed itself,
without having to be created, or maintained, or justifed, or verified in any way. This is an
unmanufactured situation, in contrast to the previous situation which was a hollow, anxiety-ridden
simulation. Ecstacy, then, is characterized by lack of fear, lack of the necessity for self-deceit, lack
of limitation, lack of containment of energy, and lack of inauthenticity of meaning. It is not the
'feeling good' of flattery, but the 'feeling good' of truth, which hurts at first, but which is good
in the end.
LETTING GO OF THE LTTLE PICTURE
It is also possible to differentiate between euphoria and ecstacy by saying that the former
is the pleasure that that originates in focussing on the 'Little Picture' (the details), whilst the latter
is the joy that comes when one gets the 'Big Picture' (the whole). Ecstacy is not derived from the
validation of the specific, it results from the abandonment of the specific. The 'message' that
ecstacy gives us is one of affirmation rather than confirmation, but the thing of it is, is that the
universe cannot affirm my true self without ruthlessly falsifying my false self, the 'distraction'
which I am hanging onto in grim desperation. Since we are attached to being who we are not,
there is suffering involved, and because of this suffering what usually happens is that we totally
distract ourselves in the attempt to hang on to what is being threatened, and for this reason there
is no time for an understanding of what is going on to arise; there is only fear. When we do 'stay
with the experience', then there is learning, and the process of falsification / affirmation is allowed
to take place. The process may be outlined as follows.
I decide to make the experiment of not running away, of letting things
get out of control. As I hang about in this uncomfortable space the degree
of discomfort increases, and at the same time this happens the 'tendency
to react' that I feel intensifies, because this is a conditioned response to
pain. When the urge to react is not acted upon, I am plunged into a new type
of discomfort - the subtle discomfort of not being in control. If I had reacted
in some way I might still be in discomfort, but I would have distracted myself
from the knowledge of what is going on here; because I am not distracting
myself, I am now starting to understand the way in which the process is
working.
The message is that every move I make is the wrong move, every way
I think is the wrong way, and as a result of this global falsification my idea
of myself starts to take on a phoney sort of an air.
I have a reportory of tricks up my sleeve, unconscious ways of making
myself feel better about things, and I notice myself trying them out. None of
them work, none of them help solidify my experience of myself. All of my
habitual responses are inappropriate, and in fact they only serve to bring
home the point that up to now I have been living in a cocoon of false
reassurance, a cocoon that has now been unwound. The effect of this
realization is to bring me face to face with the fact that there is no escaping
reality. There in an 'unavoidability' factor involved - reality is actually
unavoidable, 'real' and 'unavoidable' go together; there is nowhere to hide
in consciousness. There is an awareness clearly present in that split
second: on the one hand there is the possibility of unlimited fear if I do not
'let go' of my mind (if I do not relinquish my attachment to the 'little picture'),
and on the other hand there is the possibility of unlimited bliss if I do......
As we have said, this insight can be either thrilling, or terrifying, or a mixture of both. It
is usually terrifying in the first instance: because I have spent so much time avoiding (so that it is
second nature to me), this has re-inforced the notion that what I have been avoiding must be awful
to an unimagineable degree. Because the fact of my avoidance has itself been avoided, out of
anxiety, this puts the final seal of rejection on unconditional awareness. The more I have invested
in euphoria, the more the prospect of ecstacy will terrify.
ESCTACY AS LIMITLESS AFFIRMATION
It is at this point, if you stay with the process, that something totally unexpected happens.
When you really and truly understand that any angle you try is the wrong angle, that every
approach you take is inappropriate, that actually there is no right way to conceptualize reality,
then along with this flash of insight comes the abdication of the interpreting, manipulating rational
mind. Rationality is, at this point, redundant. For the first time, instead of trying to do something
with the overwhelmingly momentous experience, you just let it happen. Up to now by far the
greatest part of everything that you have ever thought or done has been defensive, part of the
Great Denial. The 'fear of finding out' which had been the secret driving force has now gone, and
all the energy that was tied up in it is released. All the anxiety that you have ever felt up to this
point can be traced to the ultimately futile effort of the limited perspective to assert itself over
limitlessness, the effort of the finite self to keep from finding out that it is infinite, the effort of the
game-player to veil from his/her self the nature of the game........
For the game-player to be able to play there must be rules - there has to be the polarity
of YES and NO. This is what gives form to the game, we need rules so there can be a game in the
first place. Universal affirmation, in effect, says YES to everything without exception. It doesn't
discriminate, all possibilities are allowed, everything is included. This 'rule' of all-inclusivity is not
at all the same sort of rule that we would be familiar with in games because it doesn't exclude or
prohibit any thing: there is no YES versus NO. Instead, because everything is affirmed, there is
no contrast, no boundary, and therefore there is no more individual existence. Because every-'thing' is possible, no-'thing' is possible. Thus, limitless affirmation reveals itself to be a kind of
Super- 'NO'. This super negation negates the ordinary NO just as thoroughly as it negates the
ordinary YES, both are equally falsified, both are shown up as being unreal.
It is at this stage that we usually recoil in horror at the infinite depths of nihilism which
we imagine ourselves to have glimpsed. We like the confirmation afforded us YES/NO, we
certainly don't want anything to do with the likes of universal affirmation/super negation. That
sort of thing just isn't on at all....! What we are reacting to, however, isn't the Negating of reality
itself, but the Negating of the game, which is to say, our idea of reality. From the point of view
of our conceptualizations, the super-negation really is a nasty, nihilistic piece of work - there is
no doubt at all about this, the SUPER NO really does spell the end of the rational mind. As far
as reality itself goes, though, to talk about nihilism is quite laughable, since reality is not a positive
(thought-created) phenomenon. The only way that we can grasp reality (from the position of
rationality) is to see it as SUPER NO. That's what it looks like to the mind. Reality itself (as
opposed to our thoughts about reality) is not threatened by SUPER NO because it is SUPER NO.
Emptiness, as the Buddhists say, cannot be injured by emptiness. The degree to which we object
to the super negation, and call it nihilism, is the degree to which we identify with rationality; our
automatic objection demonstrates our failure to understand the difference between map and
territory, menu and meal, model and reality. It is the 'default' process of automatically identifying
with rationality which is truly nihilism, since identification does not ever allow us to glimpse what
is real. As James Carse says, instead of allowing the silence of nature to speak for itself, we
impose obedience on nature by speaking on its behalf. Being 'unconscious,' (being in the state
of passive identification) means that we take our projections to be reality - we project a meaning
on the world, and then say that this meaning is independent of us.
We can summarize the above by saying that euphoria always requires a context, whilst
ecstacy is always 'context-less'. We may also say that euphoria equals PATTERN-MAKING,
whilst ecstacy equals PATTERN-BREAKING. In terms of 'consciousness versus
unconsciousness,' we can say that euphoria occurs in conjunction with falling into
unconsciousness, which is the state we seek in avoidance. Ecstacy, on the other hand, is
synonymous with the process of coming into consciousness, which is a reversal of avoidance, i.e.
acceptance. In terms of love, we can say that euphoria is linked with conditional (biased, or self-orientated) love, whilst ecstacy is associated with unconditional (unbiased, or self-less) love.
PATTERN-MAKING
- conditioning
- handing over autonomy (giving up freedom)
- identifying with projections
- creating familiarity
- falling into unconsciousness (craving oblivion)
PATTERN-BREAKING
- de-conditioning (de-automatization)
- re-instating autonomy (accepting freedom)
- withdrawing projections
- ending familiarity
- coming into consciousness
Knowledge of euphoria and its flip-side, depression, is common to us all. Knowledge of ecstacy is much rarer - we tend to stick to our comfort zone, even when it has turned into a prison. Negativity can serve as the gateway to the freedom of ecstacy, but usually when we feel bad we intensify our efforts to find comfort, i.e. unconsciousness, or 'oblivion'. If and when things get 'too bad', we can always refuse the experience, and will ourselves into oblivion. This is no solution really, since it was unconsciousness that was the problem in the first place! As Jung says, unconsciousness is the 'original sin' - the primary source of all psychic distress. Unconsciousness equals suffering. Waking up is achieved, according to Gurdjieff, through conscious suffering, i.e. suffering is accepted rather than being passed on. When we pass suffering on, it is either acted out and transmitted to those around us, or repressed, and stored up for the future.