The Experience of Ecstasy

Can we recognise timelessness in a temporal world?

Do you play a musical instrument? Then you know that to become any good, you have to diligently practise for years. At first you struggle with basic coordination: your fingers won’t do what you want them to do. Then you master a few chords; you play some triads and arpeggios. You learn scales and their modes. You begin to improvise solo lines over chord sequences. You work on your technique, to make your tones sound more fluent, varied and expressive. The more proficient you become in your practice and theory, the more your attention is freed up to focus on actually making music. Playing a musical instrument requires endless hours of disciplined work — work that, if you wish to keep improving, is demanding and often frustrating. Slowly you move from mastering the craft to practising the art. But you have to put in the effort — there is no way around it.

Improvisation is one of the most challenging tasks, which is why there aren’t that many genuinely great improvisers around. When you improvise, you have to bring everything you know together to then spontaneously combine the elements in a new way — and you have to do it all at the same time, in real time. It is an endeavour which requires thorough musical knowledge, supreme physical skill, abundant creativity, coordination with other players, mental concentration, and — of course — a great ear. It is as much a trial as it is a joy: you strive for perfection, but nothing ever turns out perfect. Nor is there one right way. Rather, there are indefinitely many ways. You set out with some ideas of what to play, but you don’t know the eventual course beforehand. In short, improvisation is like life itself.

I started playing guitar when I was twelve or thirteen. Initially I played only acoustic guitar, but after some years I finally bought an electric one. Acoustic and electric guitars are very different animals; what sounds good on one doesn’t necessarily work well on the other. I soon realised that the electric guitar was my tool of choice; it was, for me, the ideal mode of expression. Especially when played through a high-gain amplifier, it produced fat distorted chords as well as smooth single notes; either played very fast, in sparkling cascades, or with long sustain, modulated with bending, vibrato, harmonics and other techniques — to make them sing, moan, cry, scream. Even the slightest touch of the strings is enlarged into a deafening sound — every act of the will, no matter how small, thus causes an outsized effect in the world. Such a guitar is a roaring lion: and it is your job to tame and control it for your ends.

Mastering the beast is a struggle, and you never quite play it the way you want to. If there is a Platonic ideal, all earthly endeavours are only ever more or less imperfect approximations. This physical world is inert and heavy, and it places countless obstacles in the path of realising the abstract flawlessness of pure music. There are days without inspiration, when the fingers are slow and stiff and you keep exercising only because you are committed to the work. But there are also days when the imagination flows freely and the hands are willing tools of precision.

And then there are those rare instances where everything comes together in a miraculous union, when you and the guitar and the music are one. That particular day I was playing with a new set of strings; they were maybe a couple of days old and therefore were in that perfect condition in which they were still maximally clear and resonant but nevertheless sufficiently stretched to hold their tuning. My fingers were gliding over them with the accuracy which comes from long practice and with the speed which, in turn, comes from great accuracy. While the shiny steel of the strings was glittering under my fingers, the notes were tumbling out of the amplifier.

I was no longer playing — I was swept up in the music. The only reality was the music, and the music was the only reality. It was a moment of ecstasy — a moment in time and yet also a moment of timelessness: a moment that was beyond death.

After I had returned to everyday reality, I felt something like disappointment. Not about the highpoint I had just experienced — but about the fact that, like all other experiences, it had passed. Even if it had been for this one moment alone, life would have been worth living, regardless of any suffering that would inevitably have to come with it. But now that my life had climaxed and I had fallen back down again, had this been all there was to it? To be sure, other moments of ecstasy may still have awaited me — but what significant difference could they make when in the end they were all bound to be ephemeral?

The question that had impressed itself on me, then, was this: if even the most ecstatic moments — those moments of timeless reality — were not powerful enough to decisively propel me into some orbit beyond the temporal world, then was there anything that ever could? If we were creatures who were forever striving to reach Heaven, was our nature such that we were destined to fall back to Earth again? Had it perhaps always been illusory to think that some aspect of us need not perish along with our earthly existence?

It is easy to betray the highest in us. Outside those rare episodes of ecstasy, we may suspect that there is nothing truly timeless about them, but that they only make us temporarily forget about time. Perhaps they are even some form of madness — or, at any rate, something that belongs to ancient tribes, to shamanic trances produced with the help of mind-altering drugs and wild dancing. Perhaps our brains have developed beyond such archaic highs and thus rendered them inaccessible to the sober rational mind. Perhaps the old gods, once so familiar to our ancestors, are now lost to us.

Or perhaps it was me who had misunderstood all along. Perhaps it was perfectly true that the reality revealed in our ecstasies never dies. Perhaps it was not reality that had moved on in time, but only my earthly self. Perhaps I had always been mistaken to think that it was for me to possess reality. Perhaps it had, on the contrary, been reality that always possessed me. Perhaps this human being was in truth reality’s way to come to know itself through that being’s experiences in time. And, once the human vehicle had been discarded, reality would awaken to itself — like a dreamer waking from a dream. Perhaps it was never for me, the persona in the dream, to know. Perhaps the human being I took for myself was only the dreamt, not the dreamer. Perhaps it was for the dreamer to wake up and to come to know.

Still, even if the dreamer should be fast asleep, he is wide awake in the self of his dream: he is awake as me. And so my craving for reality is his craving, because we are in the end one and the same. Meanwhile I shall struggle on in this harsh world and make the best use of the time I’ve been given: what I can make no sense of may hold the very key to what the dreamer is looking for.