Ecstatic States and the Ecozoic
by Laura Lee, Vice President and Director of Research and Outreach, Cuyamungue Institute.

In my recent interview with Brian Swimme on his new book, Cosmogenesis, I was taken with how widely and enthusiastically science is hearing the call to embrace the Universe, our planet, and ourselves, as living systems on an evolutionary journey. Our journey is but a microcosm of that of the Universe, pushed and prodded by the same evolutionary forces at play. While science and technology break open the bandwidth for the Universe to share its story, we also have a direct line, by journeying within using a practice known as “Ritual Body Postures”, an age-old body-mind practice that activates a waking dream state of consciousness through postures in the context of ritual developed by the late Anthropologist, Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman (see Felicitas Goodman – Ecstatic Trance: Ritual Body Postures (cuyamungueinstitute.com). 
 
Over the millennia, Humankind has found many ways to open our conscious bandwidth to the evolutionary force of the Universe. I just happen to find that Ritual Body Postures (RBP) are particularly easy and accessible to everyone. However we approach the Great Work described by Thomas Berry, our unfolding, evolutionary Universe wants us to become responsible members of the web of life, to be in dialogue with us, as it has much to show and teach us, as it shapes us into the change-makers it needs us to become.

The term “Ecozoic era”  was coined by Thomas Berry in conversation with Brian Swimme for their book The Universe Story in order to describe the geologic era that Earth is entering – when humans live in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth and the Earth community. We find two primary ways that the Universe tutors us and equips us in our Ecozoic practice. We leave each Ritual Body Posture session filled with some measure and combination of all the attributes of flourishing: joy, creativity, emotional resilience, compassion, empathy, generosity, peace, connection, a sense of awe and wonder. The other way we are tutored and equipped is through visionary journeys.The journeys which are not projected visions, but rather received visions, run  the gamut from the inner screen lighting up, and any combination of inner senses be they auditory, growing hot or cold, a sense of moving up, down, forward, spinning, expanding or contracting, to direct knowing, are experienced much as if we are in a dream. We often see a story play out in our mind’s eye, and we are at the center of it, taken on these journeys. In this state, we are fully aware, with eyes closed, that we are in the midst of a “waking dream”. This is an apt descriptor, as lab tests of this practice reveal simultaneous Beta plus Theta brain waves, accompanied by a surge of the well-being beta-endorphins.
 
This visionary capacity is a birthright encoded in our DNA. There’s no outside agent, nothing ingested, but only our own endogenous inner technology. Our ancestors of long ago knew that with a simple ritual, we can knock on the door within, the site of our deepest connection with the Universe. We find with this “call and response” the loving Universe is eager to forge a personal, intimate relationship, one that ensures we all have a way to call home. Think of this as our inner GPS which leads us out of the cold, towards reclaiming our right relations — within ourselves, with our community — the entire ecosystem– and the Universe at large. 
 
In our RBP practice sessions, we are often in a group, and share our journeys, one by one. Often these sharings show us we were each given a piece of one larger puzzle, with surprising cross-correlations. These correlations indicate that while our visions arise through the imaginal realm, they are gifted to us, not written by us. When laid out in full, our visions reveal a multi-faceted page from a Cosmiccurriculum, a shared story and dream experience, one akin to Berry’s vision of a new story and role for us humans. This is where we have direct experience, that impacts us far beyond the psychological, as Berry said, of “all the archetypes of the collective unconscious … especially in our understanding of the symbols of the Tree of Life, the heroic journey, death and rebirth, the mandala and the Great Mother.” We are shown in no uncertain terms, through direct experience, how we are part of the whole, inextricably twined. 
 
In my thirty years of my involvement with the RBP practice, I have heard thousands of participants’ journeys, each with such a wide range of experiences. We find so often in our journeys that boundaries dissipate as we become one with some part of our Mother Earth: a mountain range where we turn to living stone, the Tree of Life with our toes deeply sunk into the ground, our trunk growing tall enough to touch the heavens, and as our arms branch out in full leaf among the stars. We become an ocean where we descend so deep, we enter a great void, where everything and nothing rest in full potentiality. I’d like to recount one of my own journeys, where Gaia, herself, was my guide as I dissolved into a single molecule of air. Exhilarating in the freedom, I was soon falling in a drenching rain, swept here and there on the wind, and soaking the earth. Next, I was taken up the trunk of a tree, breathed back out through shimmering leaves, and then taken on a roller coaster ride through more waterways, above and below ground, to the ocean, which became the Great Mother’s womb. It is one thing to image the Earth’s hydrology cycle, and quite another to live it, and journey on a joy ride with fellow water molecules. This vision was conveyed to me through two sets of eyes. One was as witness to the grand picture, where I felt a sense of knowing what was happening. The other, could be best described as being immersed in the scene I was viewing, careening along with a “go-pro” camera. What a beautiful way to get to know a molecule of air, this elixir of life, the element that flows within us so abundantly, exchanged in every breath with our atmosphere. We are part and parcel of Earth’s lungs and respiratory system. Our body is her body. Our consciousness is part of a vast Universal Mind.  
 
Journeying in this way can become a true “communion of subjects” experience, like the maternal embrace of a mother with her children. Quite literally, the Universe enfolds each of us and sees through our eyes’, while allowing us to see through her eyes. In fact, she wears so many eyes: the elements, animals, plants, minerals, air, water, fire, ether. We’ve seen through these eyes and many others. Nearly all of our participants report a vision of a single eye filling their inner screen of awareness, one with intelligence and recognition as it locks us into a gaze. Often we find the center of that eye is the Milky Way, slowing spinning. 
 
We can know symbols intellectually, and we can know them experientially. When we enter into the feeling/thinking state of trance, a sort of synesthesia occurs, where our senses become cross-wired. This is an ecstatic state, which can be defined as “stepping outside our day to day ‘stasis'”. It’s when we loosen the knots of our blinders and boundaries that we can merge with the Universe, to feel its full force and majesty, its living heartbeat as our own. These are the bonding experiences in which we are embraced by the Earth, and her community of life systems. We in turn embrace her. To love our planet is to change our destructive behaviors, and become caretakers and responsible members of the Web of Life. There are many avenues, on many levels, to know our planet. All pathways are valuable, all have their role. Some are more fun than others!
 
Today’s traditions more often bring us away from rather than towards our most fundamental aspects. So let’s not overlook the practices that have served humankind to do just that. Our institute’s founder, the late anthropologist Dr. Felicitas D. Goodman, retrieved this Ritual Body Posture practice from her field work and research into early cultures, and distilled it down to its essential elements for us today. She decoded select ancient artifacts as ritual instructions, depicting a human sitting or standing in simple postures. Let’s try one we find the world over. Place your right hand on your heart, your left hand on your belly. You are sitting in a healing posture, connecting your heart to your solar plexus. For the full activation of the ritual posture, my husband Paul and I ceremonially lead a universal ritual of acknowledging the directions, accompanied by the monotone rhythmic beat of skin drums or shakers, humanity’s oldest instruments.
 
Words are inadequate to name or to describe the visions that ensue from this practice. Though viewed with a bit of skepticism in our culture today, these practices were once commonplace in more ancient cultures, held sacred in the era when we honored and enjoyed not just the linear and rational thinking so highly prized today, but a far richer, holistic scope of feeling/thinking. Today, the hints and hallmarks of our journeys can be found in the art and folklore and mythology of the cultures that originally gave us these ritual instructions. We so readily take to these experiences, because in some way they’ve always been a part of our ancestral memory bank, which today we may call the “Noosphere.” Now is the time to power up, both individually and collectively, for the next great evolutionary leap. Direct experience of the Universe through this ecstatic practice can become a tool that helps guide and prepare us for the Ecozoic Era. 
 
Laura Lee, Co-Director of the Cuyamungue Institute
www.CuyamungueInstitute.com
November, 2023
 
We invite you to join in any of our experiential sessions weekly over zoom, which are free and open to all. Reach out to hello@CuyamungueInstitute for your invitation.