“Mysticism is about the possibility of ecstatic life. For the last couple of centuries, with obvious exceptions like Nietzsche and, more recently, Georges Bataille, philosophy has more or less successfully inoculated itself against the kind of experiences of ecstasy we find in the mystics. It is time to reintroduce the virus.
Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us. And sadness does cling to us. Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force, a violence, which drains our energy and dissipates our capacity for belief and for joy. The world deafens us with its noise; our eyes sting from the ever-enlarging incoherence of information and disinformation and the constant presence of war. We all feel, we all live, within the poverty of contemporary experience. This is a leaden time, a heavy time, a time of dearth. As a result, we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.”
-Simon Critchley from “Mysticism”
