The necessity of romance & ecstacy

"Jump!" Comes a lone cry from below followed by a great collective exhale from the crowd. The man wavers and his body sways forward, but he catches himself before losing his balance entirely. The cop on his belly spurts forward, cursing the bystander under his breath, the rope tied around his waist catching through is shirt as it cinches his waist. "Jump!" Another voice joins in, and then another. The crowd goes wild as they catch sight of the cop, and the air is filled with the electric mantra of "jump, jump, jump!" The man sobs, deep and ragged, before he closes his eyes and raises his arms out parallel to his body, readying himself for his flight of death. The groundswell of chanting ceases just as suddenly as it began as the crowd catches its breath at the sight of the cop leaping out into space and catching the man in mid-air. A great, ecstatic cheer swells the air, like the roar of a football crowd at the sight of a ball clearing the goalpost, then ooh’s and ah’s as the two, rescuer and leaper, dangle from the rope. The roof is suddenly swarming with blue uniforms, and the crowd begins to thin as the instigators of the death mantra disappear.

What’s happened to our society, that people would cry out such a thing as "jump" to a broken human being? Is it a sickness? In a sense, yes. In a sentence, it is ecstasy gone awry.

Say the word ecstasy aloud in a crowded room and you’re likely to evoke x-rated thoughts in those within earshot. But ecstasy is as natural, fundamental and vital a human function as breathing the air around us. It is a function that cannot be denied. Suppress the experience of ecstasy in healthy, creative, feeling ways, and ecstasy will eventually break out in distorted or dysfunctional ways, eventually affecting society at large.

Our natural, divine ecstasy can be found in the sensuous world of feeling inhabited by poets, artists, songwriters and dreamers. These people bring to us a life felt only through our senses, seen only in the world of spirit. The ecstasy Michelangelo experienced as he created the Pietà may seem to be an entirely different sensation than the ecstasy of a gang war "thrill kill", but in fact, it’s the same emotion - one allowed to come through the sensuous world, while the other breaks out from its prison into the spiritless, sensual world.

Never confuse your sensuous world with the sensual world. There is a tremendous difference between the two.

By dictionary definition, the word "sensuous" means to be keenly aroused by things of beauty, luxury and refinement, while the definition of "sensual" means an overindulgence of food, sex, drugs, etc. The sensual world is a world destitute of spirit, a world seen all around you in an array of forms such as the desperate chasing after empty pleasures or the pursuit of money for money’s own sake.

But ah, the sensuous world. Here is a world vastly different from the spiritless world of the sensual. Living a sensuous life, your world is enhanced by keen awareness. Here is a world that fairly explodes in a rich profusion of beauty, of intense arousal where even the simplest touch of a finger drawn lazily across the bare skin of a lover’s back in the early morning hour causes the lover to awaken filled with a heightened awareness. Both lovers, all of their senses keenly heightened, hear God’s birds singing as if the bird itself was perched just outside the window specifically to serenade them in their loving. In their heightened states, the colors of the world are painted in more radiant hues; eyes are bluer, skin is creamier as the sun filtering through the drapes dances off their bodies. Luxurious feeling. Joy. That exultation of spirit, gladness and delight is theirs.

Keep ecstasy in their lives and these lovers will go through their daily lives filled with joy - that wellspring of exultation of the spirit that gladdens their lives and fills them with delight.

But is it really all right for us to lead such joyful lives on a daily basis? Or is that all nonsense that only exists in romance novels? After all, joy leads to ecstasy and uh oh, in this society there is a general, official and especially religious attitude toward us having sensuous feelings or sensations outside of the bedroom that might lead to ecstasy. Could too much be dangerous? Would we not live in reality - that thinking nature of ours.

Society does give us permission to think, doesn’t it? In fact, society will reward you for thinking, complete with diplomas on your wall for practiced thinking. But for heaven’s sake, get serious and don’t feel overly much.

It’s very dangerous when a culture closes down feeling, and hardly anyone knows there is a problem because what they define as feeling is actually unhealthy emotional outpourings. It is an undisputed fact among clinical psychologists that if a healthy, ecstatic impulse is not lived out, then it goes back down inside of us and tends to develop ugly, anti-human qualities. What should have been a natural human impulse transmutes into an animalistic, sensual impulse, eventually breaking out in dysfunctional ways that over time may affect an entire society, such as the Oklahoma bombing.

Thinking is what brings clarity and objectivity to a person or a society. But thinking doesn’t provide us with our sense of value. Only feeling can bring a sense of value and worth to a person. Such is the chief function of feeling. Without feeling there is no value judgment - there simply cannot be. Our self esteem comes not from what we think of our selves. It comes from how we "feel" about ourselves. Feeling is the sublime part of a man and brings warmth, gentleness, relatedness and perception to a relationship. It is the divine feminine nature existing in both a man and a woman. Feeling is the sublime art of having a value structure and a sense of meaning and belonging. It is the part that brings love to us.

We’ve paid a high price for the cold, precise, scientific world we live in where romance is considered a dalliance and romance novels are often scorned as simply unrealistic (yet Stephen King and Dean Koontz are considered fun, thrilling reading - think about it). We’ve ended up with nations of wounded beings where men and women suffer their woundedness quite differently. Men drink or overwork. Women eat and overwork. Men war and abuse. Women retreat and isolate. Countries that are scientifically-oriented are more likely to break out in ecstatic disorientation if the people in it do not fill their lives with ecstasy through their feeling natures - through poetry, music, creativity and romance.

Did I say the word ROMANCE? Oh, another silly word in a highly intellectual society, isn’t it? Or is it?

Did you know that the first romantic notions of love in western society came from the 12th century? It was in France that a new religious movement put a female in as a religious godhead. As a way to counteract this movement, the church put Mary back into Catholicism, gifting her with the many powers of the ancient pagan goddesses. The new religious movement was suppressed, and it went underground. Thus romanticism came from this underground observance of the goddess. Eventually, it resurfaced in the courts of kings and queens, where evidence of it could be found in the chivalric reverence for women. The chivalrous knights would often be in love with their queen or princesses, but this romantic love was never consummated sexually because it was the myth of love.

Romance, however, was the first step of the evolution of the spirit of man to truly understand the energy of divine love. Romance in a relationship allows us to touch the face of God. Romance and ecstasy mixed, allows us

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