Ecstasy and Integration

Psychedelic drugs, and other psychiatric drugs, along with modern psychiatry and psychology themselves, are one single, monstrous creature of World War II and the Holocaust. "Ecstatic integration" is actually a term which might mean solving insanity, criminality and war. 

One need only google "the joy of the knife" and read a bit about Nietzsche's termination of Western philosophy and reason, to know that Jules Evans is spot-on when he writes that joyfully celebrating the rape and murder of innocents is "...another sort of ecstatic experience, perhaps the oldest -- celebrating the bloody humiliation and desecration of your enemy." 

And I recall, even with vestige guilt, the response of my own hero W. T. Sherman, to an aide's question about how it could ever be possible to deal with young Confederate radicals who would never stop fighting: "Kill them. Kill them all."

One also need only read rapturous descriptions of LSD experiences, published as early as 1959-61, to understand that a psychedelic trip can be "ecstatic" either in the sense of union with God, or love of pure cruelty. Ecstasy is extreme emotion which overwhelms a person, whether heavenly or satanic. It is a disconnection ("ex-") from any and all standing or held position ("-stasis") in reason.

Young Israelis high on MDMA and psilocybin at the Supernova music festival in the desert, and Hamas terrorists who slaughtered them to parade mutilated bodies and captives for cheering crowds in Gaza, were comrades on that Saturday: literally brothers and sisters in holy ecstasy!

Integration, whether in psychology or mathematics, means bringing or connecting separate things together, solving them, making them one. 

Any rational aspiration for ecstatic integration must begin with recognition that the set and setting of planet Earth requires constant alertness and constant willingness to resist irresponsible surrender to ecstasy. Whatever wonderful or monstrous experience we have, we must reconnect that, to the shared purposes of every human being in the world. Ecstasy is only acceptable if and when it can be integrated, if and when we can be one. 

I do not believe that Western medicine holds or can produce knowledge which will enable us to solve insanity, criminality and war. That was the delusion which settled over us in 1945; it was our reaction to the black gate and the hot mushroom cloud. It was a continuation, or one more surrender to ecstasy. Biology is a wildly entertaining game, but it will never reduce a living person to a mere brain, or to any particle. 

Ecstatic integration will never be produced in a test tube or seen under a microscope. We must become ethical individual beings who can freely come together and cooperate in creation.

As I am writing this article, I am told that a nephew and his children are finally in the air back to Chicago, from Israel. It was a traumatic several days for them, but they will be home in time for shabbat.

Adonai eloheinu adonai echad.