“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
The World Cup has recently finished, to the delight of some and disappointment of others. I remembered the first professional football match I went to, taken on the back of a motorbike by a friend of my father, a Sikh gentleman known to me as Mr Choudhary to watch a team in what was then Dacca, East Pakistan. It was an extraordinary experience as you might imagine for a 10 year old boy. The second professional match I went to was to watch West Ham with their wonderfully erratic team which included three of Englands world cup winning team, one of the first high profile black players Clyde Best and two of my favourite players Billy Bonds and Trevor Brooking.
Apart from the football which I loved what made the deepest impression on me was to be taken out of myself and into the consciousness of the crowd. This was an ecstatic experience (Exstasis – from the Greek meaning standing outside oneself) to feel the boundary of my own awareness extend out of my body into the crowd. To become one out of many.
Stuart Pearce described in an interview how he was taken out of his body after scoring a penalty against Spain in Euro 96. He had missed a crucial penalty in the 1990 world cup and so to step up and take another at such a critical moment and then score was an act of sacrifice and redemption. He took the risk of failure on behalf of himself and many others
This capacity of human beings to experience themselves as an individual in a body with a personal history and identity but also to be aware of and participate in a consciousness that is not limited by a physical body is an extraordinary thing. It can take many forms and take us to many places. Once taken outside of ourselves many things are possible, we can experience the unitive energy of love or the descent into a destructive mob consciousness. Through peer pressure we can be pushed into behaving in ways that are quite at odds with our everyday character, through association with the wise and compassionate we can be inspired and lifted out of our bounded self.
Humans are able to participate and experience many different states with many different possibilities. These may be temporary or they may become fixed in us. An early experience in the martial arts was one of the things that helped me see how it was possible to be taken out of myself and into extraordinary possibilities. Extraordinary in that it was outside of my normal level of skill and awareness. I was competing in a Judo bout against a stronger and more experienced opponent and felt almost helpless, then a moment came when I became aware of myself throwing him effortlessly. I felt my own body and his as one, the smoothness of the movement ; and I was in the experience whilst also watching it from the outside. A joyful feeling came into me and I saw and felt differently. This altered state is something that came to me and was a given experience. I can work toward the conditions that might enable it to return by continual practice but am not able to turn it on and off at will. If it were to become my everyday capacity I would have arrived at a different station.
The Arabic words for these descriptions are hal and maqam, sometimes translated as state and station. These terms give us the idea that we can experience different states which are temporary and given, and attain different stations which are stable and not readily disturbed.
The long hours of repetitive practice and dedicated training in any art or discipline can often seem mysterious. Why do we do it? One reason is that the rapture of being alive has been experienced through that art or discipline and what is innermost and precious has shown itself in a physical dimension. This makes sense when we see the pursuit of ecstasy through drugs, music, violence or physical stimulation without care and practice. The experience of bliss, of truly being alive is being hunted and if we were to understand better the science of ‘states’ we would know which were healing and which were poison.
What am I really looking for in my life and in my practice ?
