All journeys raise the same questions: Where am I going? How will I get there? By what means and what route? The process is the same whether you are going to San Francisco or the stillpoint — the still-point at the core of who we are. There are plenty of ways to go to San Francisco: you can fly, walk, drive, take a bus or train. And there are plenty of ways to get to the stillpoint: through martial arts, yoga, Zen meditation, vision-questing, golfing, running, fly-fishing.
I get there by dancing. I remember being a wild child of the sixties, having to dance or die — letting go of everything I thought, felt, or knew to be true as some kind of jazz riff seized my bones. I spent long nights in my living room, the music at full volume, eyes half closed, making love to the beat. Swooning to the rhythm, I felt as if I’d met the ultimate lover. In ecstatic rapture, I surrendered to something old and mysterious.
Maps to Ecstasy implies that ecstasy is a place and that we can get there with a good set of directions. The key to entering this place is some radical form of surrender, a ritual shattering. For me this has taken place on countless dance floors, when the music was really pumping and I stopped caring about what anybody else thought of my dance, my hairdo, my brain, or my butt. Through dancing I navigated the badlands of endless headtrips and found my way back to the stomping ground of my own two feet. Through dancing I discovered that when you put the psyche in motion, it heals itsel