The Future of Ecstasy

It wasn't until 30 years ago, in the 1960s, that there began to be any widespread realization that ecstasy is a legitimate human need--as essential for mental and physical health as proper nutrition, vitamins, rest and recreation. Though the idea had been foreshadowed by Freud and stressed by Wilhelm Reich, there had never been anything particularly ecstatic about psychoanalysts, or their patients. They seemed, on the whole, emotionally catharticized and drearily mature. Ecstasy, in the form of mystical experience, had also been the objective of a growing minority that, since the beginning of the century, had been fascinated with yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Vedanta and other forms of Oriental meditation; and these people were always rather serious and demure.

But in the Sixties, everything blew up. Something almost like a mutation broke out among people from 15 to 25, to the utter consternation of the adult world. From San Francisco to Katmandu, there suddenly appeared multitudes of hippies with hair, beards and costumes that disquietingly reminded their elders of Jesus Christ, the prophets and the apostles--who were all at a safe historical distance. At the peak of our technological affluence, these young people renounced the cherished values of Western civilization--the values of property and status. Richness of experience, they maintained, was far more important than things and money, in pursuit of which their parents were miserably and dutifully trapped in squirrel cages.

Scandalously, hippies did not adopt the ascetic and celibate ways of traditional holy men. They took drugs, held sexual orgies and substituted freeloving communities for the hallowed family circle. Those who hoped that all this was just an adolescent quest for kicks that would soon fade away were increasingly alarmed, for it appeared to be in lively earnest. The hippies moved on from marijuana and LSD to Hindu chants and yoga, hardly aware that mysticism, in the form of realizing that one's true self is the Godhead, is something Western society would not tolerate. After all, look what happened to Jesus. Mysticism, or democracy in the kingdom of God, seemed arrant subversion and blasphemy to people whose official image of God had always been monarchical--the cosmic counterpart of the Pharaohs and Cyruses of the ancient world. Mysticism was therefore persecuted alike by church and state and the taboo still continued--with assistance from the psychiatric inquisition. Admittedly, the hippies were credulous, undiscriminating and immoderate in their spiritual explorations. But if the approach was fumbling, the goal was clear. I have before me a faded copy of the summer 1969 bulletin of what was then California's revolutionary Midpeninsula Free University (now the world-respected Castalia University of Menlo Park), which bluntly affirms that "The natural state of man is ecstatic wonder; we should not settle for less."

Looking back from 1990, all this is very understandable, however inept. The flower children knew what their parents hardly dared contemplate: that they had no future. At any moment, they might suffer instant cremation by the H-bomb or the slower and grislier dooms of chemical and biological warfare. The history of man's behavior warned them that armaments which exist are almost invariably used and may even go off by themselves. By the end of 1970, their protests against the power structure of the West (which from their standpoint included Russia), combined with the black-power movement, had so infuriated the military-industrial-police-labor-union-Mafia complex known as the establishment that the U. S. was close to civil war.

Happily, it was just then that the leading scientists, philosophers and responsible statesmen of the world abruptly called factionists and politicians to their senses. They solemnly proclaimed an ecological crisis and put it so bluntly that the world almost went into panic. Ideological, national and racial disputes were children's tiffs in comparison with the many-headed menace of overpopulation, totally inadequate food production, shortage of water, erosion of soil, pollution of air and water, deforestation, poisoned food and utter chemical imbalance of nature. By 1972, no one could refuse to see that all extravagant military and space projects must forthwith be canceled and every energy diverted to feeding and cleansing the world. Had this not hap pened, I could not be writing to you. Civilization would not have endured beyond 1980 and certainly would not have taken its present direction. For we have gone a long way in persuading people that "the natural state of man is ecstatic wonder."

Because ecstasy was rare, crude and brief in your day, I should perhaps try to define it. Ecstasy is the sensation of surrendering to vibrations, and sometimes to insights, that take you out of your so-called self. By and large, "self" as a direct sensation is nothing more than chronic neuromuscular tension--a habitual resistance to the pulsing of life; which may explain why nonecstatic people are correctly described as uptight. They are what Freud called anal-retentive types and commonly suffer from impotence and frigidity, being afraid to let themselves go to the spontaneous rhythms of nature. They conceive man as something apart from and even against nature, and civilization as an architecture of resistance to spontaneity. It was, of course, this attitude, aided by a powerful technology, that brought about the ecological crisis of the early Seventies and, having seen the mistake, we now cultivate ecstasy as we once cultivated literacy or morality.

Do not suppose, however, that we are merely a society of lotus-eaters, lolling on divans and cuddling lovely women. Ecstasy is something higher, or further out, than ordinary pleasure, and few hippies realized that its achievement requires a particular discipline and skill that is comparable to the art of sailing. We do not resist the vibrations, pulses and rhythms of nature, just as the yachtsman does not resist the wind. But he knows how to manage his sails and, therefore, can use the wind to go wherever he wishes. The art of life, as we see it, is navigation.

Ecstasy is beyond pleasure. Ordinarily, one thinks of the rainbow spectrum of light as a band having red at one end and violet at the other, thus not seeing that, violet is the mixture of red and blue. The spectrum could therefore be displayed as a ring or concentric circles instead of a band, but its eye-striking central circle would be where pale, bright yellow comes nearest to white light. This would represent ecstasy. But it can be approached in two ways, starting from violet: through the blues and greens of pleasure or the reds and oranges of pain. This explains why ecstasy can be achieved in battle, by ascetic self-torture and through the many variations of sadomasochistic sexuality. This we call the left-hand, or negative, approach. The right-hand, or positive, approach is through activities that are loving and life-affirming. Since both approaches reach the same point, it must be noted that ecstasy is always a pleasure/pain experience, as when one weeps for joy or as when there is a certain hurt in intense sexual orgasm.

Pure ecstasy cannot, therefore, be long endured, for, as the Bible says, "No man can see God and live." But frequent plunges into ecstasy transform one's normal consciousness. The everyday world becomes luminous and transparent. The chronic neuromuscular tension against the world disappears, and thus one loses the sensation of carrying one's body around like a load. You feel light, almost weightless, realizing that you are one with a planet that is just falling at ease through space. It's something like the happy, released, energetic feeling one gets after a splendid experience of love-making in the middle of the day.

Continuing the story, you will remember that even as early as 1968, the hippie style of life was, in a superficial form, becoming fashionable in society at large. Beards and longish hair were increasingly noted upon stockbrokers, doctors, professors and advertising men. Men and women alike began to sport sensuous and psychedelic fabrics and free-form new styles were observed in the highest levels of society. Less publicized was the fact that in these same circles, there was a great deal of experimentation with marijuana and LSD and a surprising number of successful businessmen became dropouts, fed up with the strain and the dubious rewards of maintaining the uptight posture.

At the same time, various aspects of (continued on page 212)Future of Ecstasy(continued from page 184) hippie life and the vaguer, more generalized revolution of youth against the is uptight culture began to interest a new generation of film makers and dramatists--young men and women who had already acquired mastery of the techniques a of camera and stage and, therefore, brought imaginative discipline into the quest for ecstasy. Fully realizing that their ever-growing market was a population under 30, they gave a rich and precise articulation to the ambiguous aspirations of the young. They began to replace the old-fashioned, leering style of bawdy film with elegant masterpieces of erotic art. Studying all the new disciplines of sensitivity training and encounter groups (which, by the beginning of 1969, had spread from California and New York to some 40 centers all over the United States and Canada), they distinguished truly spontaneous behavior from merely forced imitation of how people might be expected to behave when relieved of all inhibitions.

This point needs some expansion. The encounter group, as it evolved in your time, was a situation in which the participants were encouraged to express their genuine feelings about themselves and one another, barring only physical violence. A variation was the encounter marathon, in which the group stayed together for 48 hours, sometimes in the nude to encourage the act of total exposure of oneself to others. But in early experiments, it was soon realized that certain people would fake openness and naturalness, often affecting hostility as the sure sign of being genuine. The problem was that, because very few people really knew how they felt naturally, they would act out their preconceptions of natural and unrestricted behavior, and act merely crudely and lewdly. The encounter group was therefore augmented by sensitivity training, which is the art of abandoning all conceptions of how one should feel in order to discover how one actually does feel--to get down to pure experience, free from all prejudices and preconceptions of what it is "supposed" to be. The focus is simply on what is now. This is, of course, extremely disconcerting to the habitual role player whose social intercourse is restricted to a finite repertoire of well-rehearsed acts.

The new generation of film makers and dramatists took the experiences of sensitivity training and encounter out onto screen and stage, broke down the barrier of the proscenium arch, made the theater less and less a spectacle and more and more a participatory experience. In film, they produced highly sophisticated versions of the primitive light shows of the Sixties, so that audiences became totally immersed in pulsations of sound, light and pattern. In the early Eighties, they used geodesic domes to cover the audience with the screen and get them to dancing with and in paradisiacal films that surrounded the spectator with patterns of iridescent bubbles, animations of Persian miniatures and arabesques, vast enlargements of diatoms and Radiolaria, interior views of intricately cut jewels with landscapes beyond, tapestries of ferns, flowers and foliage, gigantic butterfly wings, Tibetan mandalas, visions of the world as seen by flies, and fantasies of their own which, though anything but vague in form or wishy-washy in color, escaped all possible identification. Such involving presentations were hypnotic and irresistible; even the solidest squares became like those Ukrainian peasants of the Ninth Century who, on visiting the cathedral of St. Sophia in Byzantium, thought they had arrived in heaven.

The new theater, above all, had everyone rocking with laughter at the attitudes and postures of the uptight world--so much so that, quite outside the theater, it became totally impossible to preach, orate, moralize or platitudinize before any young audience. One was met with derision or, even more unsettling, with smiling eyes that said, "You've got to be putting us on." These developments of screen and stage had much to do with a subsequent advance in psychotherapy: it became the real foundation of an art-science of ecstasy which--not that I like the word--we now call Ecstatics.

Early in 1972, two psychiatrists--Roseman of Los Angeles and Kotowari of Tokyo, then working at UCLA--came up with what we now know as Vibration Training. Like most honest psychiatrists, they felt that their techniques were only scratching the surface and that they were burdened with obsolete maps, assumptions and procedures based largely on the scientific world view of the late 19th Century, which looked at the mind in terms of Newtonian mechanics. Roseman and Kotowari reasoned that the foundation of all experience is a complex of interwoven vibrations of many wave lengths, dimensions and qualities. As white light manifests the seven-hued spectrum, so the total spectrum of vibrations has behind it the mysterious E (which=MC2). In their view, a child emerging into the world is the vibration spectrum becoming aware of itself in a particular and partial way, since human senses are by no means responsive to all known vibrations. (We do not see infrared or gamma rays.) To the baby, these vibrations make neither sense nor nonsense. They are simply what is there. He has no problem about giggling at some or crying at others, since no one has yet taught him which vibrations are good and which are bad. He just goes along uncritically with the whole buzz, without the slightest notion that it is one thing and he another.

But as time goes on, his mother and father, brothers and sisters teach him how to make sense of the show. By gestures, attitudes and words, they point out what is baby and what is kitty. When he throws up or soils his diapers, they say, "Ugh!" When he sucks on his bottle or swallows Pablum, they say, "Good baby!" They show delight if he smiles, annoyance if he cries and anxiety if he runs a fever or bleeds from a cut. In due course, he has learned all the rudiments of their interpretation of what the vibrations are doing and has taken note of their extreme resistance to interpreting them in any other way. Thus, when he asks the name for what is, to him, a clearly shaped area of cry space in a puddle of milk on the table, they say, "Oh, that's nothing." They are very insistent upon what is worth noticing and what isn't, upon wiggles allowed and wiggles forbidden, upon good smells and bad smells (most are bad). The baby has no basis for arguing with this interpretation of the vibrations and, as he grows up, he becomes as fixated on the system of interpretation as his instructors.

But have they given him the correct, or the only possible, interpretation of the system? After all, they got it from their parents, and so on down the line, and who has seriously bothered to check it? We might ask such basic questions as whether the past or the future really exists, whether it's really all that important to go on living, whether voluntary and involuntary behavior are genuinely different (what about breathing?) or whether male and female behavior, in gesture and speech, are necessarily distinct in the ways that we suppose. To what extent is the real world simply our own projection upon the vibrations? You have lain in bed looking at some chintz drapes adorned with dauby roses and, all at once, a face appears in the design. As you go on looking, the area surrounding the face begins, if you don't force the process, to form a logical pattern; and the longer you look, the more the whole scene becomes as clear as a photograph. Could we, then, through all our senses, be making some collective projection upon the vibrations, passing it on to our children as the sober truth?

Roseman and Kotowari did not carry their ideas quite that far. Their point was simply that our conceptions of the world are much too rigid and our neuromuscular responses to the vibrations extremely inelastic; that, in other words, we are exhausting and frustrating ourselves with unnecessary defensiveness. They constructed an electronic laboratory where vibrations of all kinds could be simulated, then began to expose themselves and some selected volunteers to various forms of low-energy vibration that would ordinarily be annoying. They (continued on page 239)Future of Ecstasy(continued from page 212) tried tickling sensations on various sensitive areas of the skin, the rocking motion of a ship in rough weather, slowly dripping water on the forehead, sounds of fingernails scratching on a blackboard and of squeaky wheels, discordant combinations of musical tones, irritating and incomprehensible melodies, toilet noises, rasping voices with terrible accents, voices that were unctuously insincere, going on to groans, weeping, screams and maniacal laughter and, finally, all kinds of electronically produced shudders, needles and pins and nameless sounds. At the beginning of each session, the subject was put into a mild hypnotic state with the one suggestion that he simply give in to whatever vibration is aroused, letting his organism respond freely in whatever way seemed natural. If, for example, a stimulus made him feel like squirming, he was encouraged to squirm as much as he liked and really get with it.

As might be expected, people began to acquire a taste for these formerly taboo vibrations and their now uninhibited and often convulsive responses began to take on an erotic and sometimes ecstatic quality. The doctors supplemented sonic and tactile vibrations with video: strobe lights, vivid color movies of falling through space, of revolting messes accompanied with appropriate smells, of explosions, approaching tornadoes, monstrous spiders, hideous human faces and of people running through endless crystalline corridors as if totally lost in the mazes of the brain. They then tried low degrees of electronically induced pain, following Grantley Dick-Reid's discovery that labor pains could be reinterpreted as orgiastic tensions, and found that, with a little practice, subjects could tolerate relatively intense degrees of this stimulus--even though writhing and screaming quite unashamedly, yet without giving the doctor any signal to stop.

The researchers also worked with a 24-speaker, 360-degree sound system that surrounded the subject with stereo music of the strongest emotional impact played from 24-track tapes. They had mechanisms for atomizing all kinds of perfume, incense, natural flower scents and the beneficent aromas of gardens, fields and forests. They used exquisite and innocently performed erotic movies, filmed kaleidoscopic patterns of jewels and of iridescent whorls of weaving smoke and mock-ups of unbelievably vast temples and palaces rich with fretted screens and polychrome sculpture. The subject would be visually, aurally, olfactorily and kinesthetically led through their enormous courtyards, gardens, galleries, naves and sanctuaries to the accompaniment of angelic choirs, sonorous trumpets, double-bass-throated bells and gongs and unearthly chants and hymns, until the journey reached its climax in a holy of holies where he might be confronted with a remarkably beautiful goddess or a colossal aureole of rich and brilliant light into which he would be finally absorbed--to find himself soaring bodilessly in clear-blue sky, like a sea gull. Sometimes they accompanied this climax with electrical stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain.

It should be noted that, through all this, the gadgetry was, as far as possible, installed in a separate room, away from the subject, who lay in a spacious neutral chamber with walls that could be decorated in any way desired by light projection. Those who volunteered for a course of this treatment discovered that their responses to the ordinary, everyday vibration system were radically changed. Almost all uprightness had disappeared, for they had learned how to reinterpret and actually dig the vibratory sensations hitherto called anxiety, fear, grief, depression, shame, guilt and a considerable degree of what they had known as pain.

It was as if the science of electronics had thus far just been waiting for something important to do. From every continent, electronic buffs got in touch with Roseman and Kotowari with suggestions and requests for information and it was only a few months before similar laboratories were set up in cities all over the world. Shortly afterward, such corporations as Bell Telephone and Varian Associates began to design miniaturized versions of the equipment, which could be mass-produced, so that by 1979 it had become the major technique for psychotherapy and a large research center for the two doctors was established at Castalia University.

The general effect was that uptightness came to be recognized as a sickness, like alcoholism or paranoia, so that more and more people began to be increasingly comfortable in a world where truth and reality were far less rigidly defined. They stopped looking for rocks on which to stand and foundations for building their lives, dropping all such metaphors of fortification and stony solidity. They realized that the world, the vibration system, is more airy and liquid than solid and they reacted to it as swimmers, sailors and airmen rather than as landlubbers. They found security in letting go rather than in holding on and, in so doing, developed an attitude toward life that might be called psychophysical judo. Nearly 25 centuries ago, the Chinese sages Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu had called it wu wei, which is perhaps best translated as "action without forcing." It is sailing in the stream of the Tao, or course of nature, and navigating the currents of li (organic pattern)--a word that originally signified the natural markings in jade or the grain in wood.

As this attitude spread and prevailed in the wake of Vibration Training, people became more and more indulgent about eccentricity in life style, tolerant of racial and religious differences and adventurous in exploring unusual ways of living. Present time became more important than future time, on the reasoning that there is no point in making plans for the future if you can't fully enjoy their results when they, in turn, become part of the present. By and large, we stopped rushing and found that with less haste, we had more speed, since rushing sets up a whole multitude of antagonistic vibrations. We got out of uptight clothes--trousers, girdles, neckties, hard shoes and other contraptions for trussing and binding the body, as if to say, "Now you really exist and will not fall apart." We shifted into every variety of colorful sarong, kimono, sari, caftan, burnoose and poncho and wore them on the streets and for business. We equipped our homes with spacious Japanese bathtubs or saunas, where we all sat and relaxed after the day's work. These tubs were made so that six people could sit with hot water up to their necks; and, of course, one did not wash in the tub itself but took a shower first. Several of my friends in California had them back in 1968, but now they're everywhere.

Absence of rush gave us a very new and different approach to sexual relations. You must understand that despite the ecological crisis of the Seventies, technology gave us an enormous amount of leisure. By 1985, there were no longer nine-to-five jobs. The whole world began to run on Greenwich mean time and work hours today are staggered throughout each 24-hour period, amounting in all to about ten hours a week--unless, of course, one is an enthusiast for doctoring, engineering, scientific research or carpentry, in which case he can work as long as he likes. Under these circumstances, we no longer speak of sexual relations as sleeping or going to bed with someone. After all, why wait until you're tired? Furthermore, late-night or early-morning sex in bed tends to restrict the relationship to simple fucking, so that the whole thing is over in from two to twenty minutes. Men in a hurry to prove--what?

We take our time. The man and the woman take turns to manage the occasion, the one acting as servant of the other (although this is no rigid pattern and the arrangement may also be mutual). One begins by serving his beloved a light but exquisite meal, which is usually eaten from a low table surrounded with large floor cushions. It should be explained that today most men know how to cook and that for many years people have been keeping their legs limber by sitting on the floor. For the meal, the couple wear loose and luscious clothes and often the cooking is clone at the table over an electric Permacoal or ordinary charcoal fire. As is now customary (and, I should add, quite legal), a water pipe is brought to the table after the meal for the smoking of marijuana or hashish, since it is now recognized that any alcohol other than light wine or beer is not conducive to sexual ecstasy.

So as not to interfere with conversation during the meal, music is not played until the pipe is brought. Vibration Training has abolished mere background music and it is now considered extremely bad taste not to listen whenever music is played. The music may be recorded, but sometimes one or two friends, or even the children of the couple, come in at this time with instruments and play for an hour or so while the pipe is smoked; and, after the serving partner clears the table, the couple adjourn to the bath for showers and a half-hour soak in the big tub. The serving partner then gives his or her companion a complete massage on a special pad provided in the bathroom. (Toilet facilities, I should note, are always in a separate room.) While the one who has received the massage takes a short rest, the other lays out a thick, fold-up floor pad by the table, setting beside it a basket of flowers, a box of jewels and a make-up kit. Sometimes a pair of tall candlesticks is placed at each end of the pad and incense, in a burner with a long wooden handle, is set on the table.

The other person is then escorted, naked, from the bathroom and seated on the pad, and he or she is then adorned with jewels--usually an elaborate (but nonscratchy) necklace with matching wrist and ankle bracelets. The incense burner is lifted by its handle and used to perfume the hair and, thereafter, make-up is applied decoratively and imaginatively to the eyes, lips and forehead, and often to other parts of the body. The forehead, for example, is usually adorned with a small "third eye" design such as is used among Hindu dancers. Flowers are then set in the hair and, perhaps, hung around the neck in the form of a lei. The serving partner usually puts on his or her own adornments immediately after the massage, during the rest.

Both are now seated on the pad, facing each other. One of the benefits of Vibration Training is that it allows almost everyone to have a good singing voice, for the blocks against producing a clear tone have been removed. Therefore, it is now quite usual for lovers to sing to each other, with a hummed chant or with articulate words, sometimes using a guitar or a lute. It is thus that, before bodily contact begins, they caress each other with their eyes while singing. Some people prefer, at this time, to play such games as checkers, dominoes or ten-second chess, the winner having the privilege of proposing any form of sexplay desired. From this point on, almost anything goes, though the mood established by the preparations is often conducive to a long, slow form of sexual intercourse wherein the couple remain joined for an hour or more with very little motion, keeping the pre-orgasmic tension as high as possible without aiming at the release of climax. I realize that, back in 1970, most men would consider this ritual affected and ridiculous and term the whole business a good honest fuck spoiled. Looking back, it is amazing to realize how unconscious we were of our barbarity, our atrocious manners, our slipshod cooking, our uncomfortable clothes and our absurdly graceless and limited sex acts.

Something more should be said about our use of psychedelics. Today these substances are given the same kind of respect that has always been accorded to the very finest French wines. Anyone, for example, who smokes them throughout the day is regarded as a crude guzzler incapable of appreciating their benefits. They are not used at ordinary parties amid chitchat and gossip but only under circumstances in which the fullest attention may be given to the changes in consciousness that they confer. Thus, they are taken more as religious sacraments than as kicks, though today our religious attitudes are not pious or sanctimonious, since only very ignorant people now think of God as the cosmic stuffed shirt in whose presence no laughter is allowed.

I well remember the first great hemp shop that was opened in San Francisco around 1976. It was essentially a long wooden bar with stools for the customers. On the bar itself were a few large crocks containing the basic and cheaper forms of the weed--Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Indian Ganja and Domestic Green. But against the wall behind the bar stood a long cabinet furnished with hundreds of small drawers that a local guitar maker had decorated with intricate ivory inlays in the Italian style. Each drawer carried a label indicating the precise field and year of the product, so that one could purchase all the different varieties from Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, India and Vietnam, as well as the carefully tended plants of devout Cannabinologists here at home. Business was conducted with leisure and courtesy and the salesmen offered small samples for testing at the bar, along with sensitive and expert discussion of their special effects. I might add that the stronger psychedelics, such as LSD, were coming to be used only rarely--for psychotherapy, for retreats in religious institutions and in our special hospitals for the dying.

These latter became common after about 1978, when some of the students of Roseman and Kotowari realized that the sensation of dying could be reinterpreted ecstatically as total self-release. As a result, death became an occasion for congratulations and rejoicing. After all, "You only die once" (as the slogan went), and if death is as proper and natural as birth, it is absurd not to make the most of it. Even today, the science of geriatrics is far from conferring physical immortality, though it is increasingly common for people to pass their 100th or even 150th birthdays. Our hospitals for the dying are the work of our most imaginative architects and are set about with orchards and flower gardens, fountains and spas, and we have utterly forsaken the grisly and hollow rituals of mid-century morticians. Even the young have been taught to contemplate without creeps and shudders the prospect of their annihilation, by means of exposure--in the course of Vibration Training--to intense light and sound, followed by total darkness and silence.

And we now have something completely new. You will remember that in 1969, Dr. Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland discovered and measured gravity waves. This led, in 1982, to a method for polarizing the force of gravity that has revolutionized transportation, abolished smog and so redistributed population that densely crowded cities no longer exist. Three physicists--Conrad, Schermann and Grodzinski--found a way of polarizing a material similar to lead so as to give it a negative weight in proportion to its positive, or normal, weight. This material can be attached to the back of a strong, wide belt, carrying also the requisite electronic equipment, plus directional and volume controls, thus enabling the wearer to float off the ground or shoot high into the air. At low volume, one can take enormous strides, a mile long and 50 feet high at the peak, or float gently through valleys and over the tops of trees without rush or noise. At high volume and dressed in a space suit, one can soar into outer space or travel easily at 300 miles an hour at 4000 feet. Needless to say, every such outfit is equipped with a radar device that brings one to a hovering halt the moment there is any danger of collision. Much larger units of the leadlike material are attached to freight and passenger aircraft, and the silent ease of vertical ascent and descent has freed us from all the hassle and inconvenience of the old airports.

But we are not in a hurry. As a result, negative gravitation has given us everything for which we envied the birds and it is much used for the sport of lolling about in the air, for sky-diving and dancing, for "sitting" on clouds and for reaching homes now built on otherwise inaccessible mountaintops and in secluded valleys. You will remember the reports of the ecstasy of weightlessness given long ago by spacemen, sky- and skindivers. Now this is available for everyone and we literally float about our business. As Toynbee foresaw, civilization has become etherealized; grass grows on the highways and earth has been relieved of all its concrete belts and patches.

Of course, the main problem of the ecstatic life is comparable to fatigue in metals: It is impossible to remain at a peak of ecstasy for a long time, even when the types of ecstasy are frequently varied. Furthermore, consciousness tends to repress or ignore a perpetual stimulus--such as the sea-level pressure of air on the skin. This has given us a new respect for mild asceticism. Since the ecological crisis, enormous numbers of people have taken to gardening and we cultivate fruits and vegetables on every scrap of arable land, using large Fuller domes as hothouses in winter, which itself is much milder than it used to be, thanks to world-wide climate control. Millions are therefore up by six in the morning (your time), digging, hoeing, weeding and pruning. At the same time, we eat much less in bulk and no longer expect disgustingly overloaded plates in restaurants. Not only is our food more nutritive but we also find our stamina and muscle tone much better for lack of stuffing ourselves. Despite the advantages of negative gravitation, we walk and hike almost religiously, for with our wealth of gardens, the landscape is worth seeing and the unpaved ground is easy on the feet. Ample time and absence of rush likewise encourage patient and highly skilled work in all types of art and craft. You would, I suppose, call us fanatical hobbyists--a world of experts in whatever one loves to do, from athletics to zoology.

We are much aware of little ecstasies--the sensation of carving wood with a really sharp chisel, timeless absorption in making carpets as glowing as the finest Orientals, laying down and polishing parquet floors in various natural colors of wood, bottling dried herbs from the garden, unraveling tangled string, listening to wind bells made of sonor (a new and marvelously resonant metal), selecting and arranging painted tiles for a chessboard, expertly boning a fish, roasting chestnuts over charcoal in the evening, combing a woman's hair or washing and massaging a friend's feet. As soon as we freed ourselves from the mirage of hurrying time--which was nothing more than the projection of our own impatience--we were alive again, as in childhood, to the miracles and ecstasies of ordinary life. You would be astounded at the beauty of our homes, our furniture, our clothes and even our pots and pans, for we have the time to make most of these things ourselves, and the sense of reality to see that they--rather than money--constitute genuine wealth.

We also cultivate something oddly known as the ecstasy of ordinary consciousness--related, it would seem, to the Zen principle that "Your usual consciousness is Buddha," meaning here the basic reality of life. We have become accustomed to living simultaneously on several levels of reality, some of which appear to be in mutual contradiction--as your physicists could regard the nucleus as both particle and wave. In your time, the overwhelmingly orthodox view of the world was objective; you took things to be just as scientists described them, and we still give due weight to this point of view. Taken by itself, however, it degrades man to a mere object: It defines him as he is seen from outside and so screens out his own inside vision of things. Therefore we also take into account the subjective, naïve and childlike way of seeing life and give it at least equal status. It was, I think, first shown by a British architect, Douglas Harding, writing in the early Sixties, that from this point of view, one has no head. The only directly perceptual content of the head, he wrote, especially through the eyes and ears--which are directed outward from the head--is everything except the head. Once this obvious but overlooked fact becomes clear, you no longer regard your head as the center of consciousness; you cease to be a central thing upon which experience is banging, scratching and being recorded. Thus, the center of awareness becomes one with all it perceives. You and the world become identical and this disappearance of oneself is, to say the least, a blissful release.

This way of interpreting reality does not contradict the scientific way any more than the colorlessness of a lens rejects the colors of flowers. On the contrary, it restores a whole dimension of value to life which your passion for objectivity neglected and, by comparison, your exclusively scientific universe seems a desiccated, rattling and senseless mechanism. Though it was self-centered, in the largest sense, it left out man himself. We have put him back--not as a definable object but as the basic and supreme mystery. And as the Dutch philosopher Aart van der Leeuw once put it, "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."