Ecstasy is Steiner's name for breaking outward through the sense-world into a realm of spiritual beings, at the cost of losing Ego-consciousness.
Ecstasy (Ekstase) in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's strict technical name for one of the two ways a human being can break out of ordinary consciousness, the outward way. Steiner set it out in the Vienna lecture cycle of March 1910, published as Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119), where he described the sense-world as a tapestry with something hidden behind it. In ecstasy that tapestry crumbles and dissolves, and the soul flows through it into a world of beings and happenings found nowhere in the physical world. Its defining defect is exact: Ego-consciousness fades in the same proportion as sense-perception fades, so the ecstatic sees a spiritual world but keeps no firm centre from which to judge it. Steiner treated ecstasy as a possible condition and never as a goal, and he set the mystic's inward compression into the Microcosm as its mirror opposite. Readers today meet the same outward journey in Mircea Eliade's account of shamanic soul-flight.
Ecstasy, in the strict sense Steiner gives the word, is neither rapture nor absorption. It is a real widening of the human being outward, past the boundary that colours, sounds, and scents normally set around us. Steiner names the price in the same breath as the experience: the Ego, poured out over the Macrocosm, can no longer say where it ends and where the world begins.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us picture the Ego of man as a drop of coloured liquid. Assuming that we had a very tiny vessel just able to contain this drop, the drop would be visible by its colour. But if the drop were put in a large vessel, let us say in a basin of water, the drop would no longer be perceptible. Apply this analogy to the Ego which in the state of ecstasy expands over the Macrocosm, and you will be able to conceive that the Ego feels itself becoming weaker and weaker as it expands. When the Ego spreads over the Macrocosm, it loses the faculty of self-awareness, rather as a drop loses its identity in a large vessel of water. So we can understand that when man surrenders himself to the Macrocosm, the Ego is lost.
What it Means Today
The closest modern parallel is not a psychological theory but a work of comparative religion: Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, published in French by Payot in Paris in 1951 and issued in Willard R. Trask's English translation by Princeton University Press in 1964 as volume LXXVI of the Bollingen Series. Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions who taught at the University of Chicago, built his account of shamanism on the word Steiner had used in Vienna in 1910. The shaman, for Eliade, is defined not by what he believes but by a technique, a controlled departure in which the soul is held to leave the body and travel. His central distinction is the one Steiner's audience had been given four decades earlier: the shaman commands the spirits he meets, while the possessed man is commanded by them. Steiner said the same thing in his own vocabulary, that in ecstasy a man comes under the control now of one being, now of another, and seems to be disintegrating.
Thalira synthesis: read together, Eliade and Steiner make ecstasy a question of ballast rather than a question of access, since the door in the sense-tapestry has always opened easily and the only thing worth asking is whether the traveller returns able to speak. That is why Steiner's own schooling in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (GA 10) runs the other way round, strengthening the I first and opening perception second.
Where to Read More
- Macrocosm and Microcosm, GA 119, the Vienna cycle of March 1910
- Find Macrocosm and Microcosm at SteinerBooks
- Religious ecstasy (Q8096310) on Wikidata
- Dionysus: God of Wine, Ecstasy, and Sacred Madness
- The Dionysian Mysteries: Ecstasy, Death, and Rebirth in Ancient Greece
- Shamanism by Mircea Eliade: A Complete Guide to Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy