THE ECSTATICS: IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE

By Yasuhiko Genku Kimura

© 2019

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. —Pablo Picasso

A truly new future is created by the Ecstatics in ecstasy.

‘Ecstasy’ means ‘to stand (static) out (ec)’. 

The Ecstatics are those who stand outside. They stand outside of the time-bound self and the paradigm-bound system. 

The ultimate in creativity is that creativity which creates entirely new perceptions and conceptions of reality. That creativity is the highest expression of the human imagination. That is the creative imagination of the Ecstatics.

The Ecstatics are gifted with the ability to imagine the unimaginable. Their gift is not something given at birth but something earned through great effort. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, an Ecstatic, said: “Everything that is worth thinking has already been thought; one must only try to think it again.” 

In order to “try to think it again,” we need to have already thought and to know “everything that is worth thinking.” In order to think again and imagine anew, we need to have fully known and mastered the old, the tradition, the paradigm.

To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much. ― George I. Gurdjieff

When we thus know all, we come to the boundary of the knowable and encounter with the unknowable. How can we know that something is unknowable? We can only know that something is known or unknown, but we cannot know that something is unknowable in the same way. How can we know that something is absolutely impossible? We can know that something is possible or impossible in the relative sense, but we cannot know that something is impossible in the absolute sense.

When we encounter with the unknowable at the boundary of the knowable, it transforms us to who we never have been, while it still remains to be unknowable relative to the paradigm in which and as which we operate and exist. 

When we encounter with the impossible at the boundary of the possible, it transports us to where we never have been, while it still remains to be impossible relative to the paradigm in which and as which we operate and exist.

When we thus encounter with the unknowable or the impossible, we are transformed to be an Ecstatic at the boundary between the knowable and the unknowable, and the possible and the impossible. We stand outside of the time-bound self. We stand outside of the paradigm-bound system. We simply stand out, alone and free, and become an Ecstatic.

George Spencer-Brown states in Laws of Form (1969):

A thing is not possible unless it is imaginable, and we could never confirm that it was possible unless it appeared in actuality. Thus, what is possible will always be found to exist, and its actual existence will be discovered soon after its possibility has been imagined. What exists [as a possibility] is formally constructed by postulating the imagination of a hypothetical being about the construction of different existences. A totally different being will construct a completely different existence.

Thinking and doing follow being. Our thought and action follow who and what we are being. To construct a new perception or conception of reality (“completely different existence”), and to act to manifest that new reality, we need first be a “totally different being.” An Ecstatic is that totally different being. ‘Think Different’ thus follows ‘Be Different’.

Further, when we know all (per Gurdjieff), we realize that we ourselves have become the very problem that prevents us from evolving further in our knowledge, consciousness, and being. We realize that our being has become the paradigm which we must transcend in order to evolve any further. We thus find ourselves thrown into an existential predicament (a predicament is a complex of problems in which a solution to one problem contradicts or nullifies a solution to another problem):

“I am the problem which I must solve in order for me to evolve further, but I am unable to do so, because it is the problem itself that is trying to solve it. The presence of the problem in the very act of solving it negates the possibility of any solution. So long as ‘I’ exist, there is no solution and there is no evolution. There is not going to be ‘my’ evolution so long as ‘I’ exist, but if ‘I’ no longer exist, then whose evolution is it? Who or what is it that is going to evolve, if there is to be any evolution at all?”

Collectively humanity faces this existential predicament as well. Only few realize that we are the problem that are preventing a new kind of future from emerging. We have become our ontological paradigm (how we are being), epistemological paradigm (how we know and think), and praxeological paradigm (how we act and relate), which together create a host of problems, a predicament, that cannot be solved. Further, instead of allowing new generations to develop new kinds of consciousness, in the name of education we program them with our old, moribund, dysfunctional paradigms.

Yet, to choose to let go of your familiar self-identity and all that you know—to choose your absence instead of presence, your nonexistence instead of existence—is the most difficult thing to do. It is doing that is not-doing. It is doing that is un-doing. It is not only the most difficult thing but also it is in fact an impossible thing to do.

Paradoxical though it may sound, however, our evolutionary new solution, new transformation, and new future will come only through an encounter with the impossible of this kind. When we encounter with the impossible, if we can stay with its presence, following it wherever it leads without ever letting it out of our consciousness, without ever letting it go, a revelation will come from a source outside of ourselves. We then can begin to imagine the unimaginable and generate a new perception of reality hitherto unperceived.

The solution, the ultimate solution, is never an answer but the initiation of a quest in the intimate presence of the impossible. The unimaginable that we begin to imagine is at first a question that we have never imagined or thought to ask. The unimaginable is the question that we have never asked before, the asking of which ipso facto transforms us. The quest is eternal while answers are temporary. By becoming this quest, instead of being a body of known answers, we become the Ecstatics who are the transdimensional portals for the arrival of a new future.

Life is the eternal present in the temporal, and every moment of the now is the momentum of the eternal. From the eternal, with the momentum of the eternal, the Ecstatics create in time a future that will end, while the non-ecstatics, namely, the rest of humanity, repeat the future that has already ended.

The ancient Hindu cosmologists synthesized various personifications of the Hindu Deity into the Trimūrti (tri;three, mūrti; form), the threefold Supreme Deity, symbolizing the eternal regenerative process of the universe, consisting of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva in which Brahmā is designated as the creator, Viṣṇu as the preserver, and Śiva as the destroyer-transformer of the universe.

The Ecstatics embody in their being and consciousness the Trimūrti. They are the trinity of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. Therefore, they know that the future they create will end and be creatively transformed into a new future in this eternally regenerative universe. The Ecstatics are the precursor of Homo Deus to come.