I have just started reading _Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy_ by Barbara Ehrenreich. The introduction really speaks of our Western rational squashing of the ecstatic, from the views of anthropologists and psychologists and psychoanalysts. I have some experience of the ecstatic from my rock days, especially with the Grateful Dead. I also remember going to the festival at the local Greek church in St Louis. I wound up drinking a some beer and getting into the famous Greek line dance, a la Zorba the Greek. It went on for hours, til very early in the morning. I drank a huge amount of beer, but being in August I sweated it all right back out. I was not sick or much hung over the next day. And it all seemed to just keep happening, perhaps best thought of as flow. And I found energy I didn’t know I had. Nor at any point did I feel really drunk, just pleasantly conscious. Makes me wonder how much we have lost. The book will inform me in detail.
so good to see you posting again, and really glad that you’ve got connected with a church.
lee