Ritual Rapture

Happiness takes effort.

May 21, 2025

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Pan NYMPHS DANCING TO PAN'S FLUTE Art - by Joseph Tomanek (1889-1974 ...

A year or so ago I wrote an article about how we need to grow up and be happy. (You can read that one here.) Our society has become quite comfortable with being lazy in regards to joy. “Normal” in this post-modern nightmare seems all-too-often to look like pale, anorexic white people who never smile, remain forever indoors, drink too much coffee and post on instagram incessantly. We study war but not peace. We sure as hell know how to complain and gather information to back up our angst, but we seem to neglect ever researching the root causes of happiness. It’s as if being a depressed, phone-addicted consumer of podcasts seems to some to be the peak of the human experiment. Well, forgive my often overly opinionated, rambling mind but I think this modern phenomenon resembles a big ol’ pile of horseshit. Such thinking has to end.

I get it, these times don’t exactly make it easy for us to be happy-go-lucky. We are literally watching entire peoples be systematically erased from the human story in real time, with taxpayers’ money paying for it. The United Nations humanitarian chief just issued a devastating warning for babies inside Gaza, suggesting that 14,000 are at risk of dying in the next 48 hours alone unless life-saving food and supplements manage to find their way into the war-ravaged strip. Americans willingly vote known rapists who encourage such evil into places of power. The planet is literally dying because of us. And all most do is post memes reflecting their disgust on Instagram. It’s depressing, downright deplorable and we are right to feel remorse about this. But we aren’t off the hook. We all play a part in all of it and if we overlook this fact we only but increase our apathy by ignoring direct participation, pretending we are helping by simply complaining, conveniently overlooking the fact that it is our responsibility to shift gears. Which means we need to change. Us. Me. Now.

Looking at our societal demons is scary. Realizing we ourselves are the monster is even worse. Coming to terms with the fact that for most of us in the modern world it isn’t just “the other” who is responsible for the mess we are in but it is we, all collectively continuing to feed the very beast devouring us now by continuing to buy what it sells us, by remaining stubbornly attracted to its bizarre version of beauty and ironically enjoying what it has tempted us into finding pleasures in.

I sure don’t like to admit that there is a donald trump in me. When I notice parts of me lusting for the mediocre, life-killing shit modernity persistently seduces us with, I can easily fall into an awkward spiral of self-hate. It’s depressing as hell to realize how easily this culture-of-death can convince us to harm the planet we love. But looking in the mirror is what we gotta do. It’s time to get real.

Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us by Walt Kelly | Goodreads

Life is indeed quite grim right now, and we mustn’t pretend otherwise. Yet so too are these times overflowing with beauty. An awakened mind requires us to recognize both the bad and the good, the profane and the sacred, the dark and the light and learn how to find the Middle Way meandering between it all. Life is wildly complex. This is the way it is.

We can wax poetic about some grand era before now when people supposedly lived harmoniously with nature, spending timeless days making love and frolicking with deer through lush forests filled with birdsong. But the fact is, life has never been easy. Life is hard. This is the first truth the Buddha offered his disciples and it’s a truth that is shared by most intact cultures the world over, expressed in a thousand different songs. The difference between “now” and “then” is only that we use to have a stronger capacity for dealing with grief. Modern skin has grown thin.

"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution"

Emma Goldman

To live is to grieve. It’s part of the game. Yet for the awakened, everything is cause for celebration. Life may be rooted in sorrow, but so too, is life filled with rapturous splendor. You can’t have one without the other. And for anyone wishing to truly be of service in these particularly trying times, an ability to sustain joy is paramount. An existence anchored firmly in anger and despair will not only result in failure and burnout but will rot your very soul. An awakened life requires ecstacy. Which is precisely why Gautama Buddha included Pīti (JOY) in the Seven Factors of Awakening. No enlightened activity or being sprouts from perpetual despair. Despair as mostly understood today is an alarming insult to the imagination. All the great social movements of the past, although simultaneously rising from unbearable hardship, were ignited with a rapturous creativity fueled by JOY. Without joy, we are as dead as modernity.

Rapture (pīti)
Rapture, or joy, is a natural somatic and emotional state that spans a wide range of wholesome pleasurable experiences. It can arise as a physical/energetic thrill that moves through the body, or a more emotional delight and uplift that pervades the body and heart. Rapture is a common side effect of concentration, and in the context of meditation is considered wholesome and important to develop. In daily life, rapture can be felt in moments when we are safe, engaged in a wonderful activity, and the mind relaxes enough to connect deeply with the joy and ease that are present. Rapture and joy are healthy.
One of the most important insights that Gotama, the Buddha-to-be, had before his awakening was that the rapture and pleasure of embodied meditation was “not to be feared.” This tells us that we don’t need to worry about becoming attached to joy or rapture, or think that it will lead us away from the path of clarity. Quite the opposite, rapture is an indispensable factor on the path to deep stillness, insight, and awakening.
Sean Oakes

All our actions start with ourselves. First, we must cultivate joy within our own mind. This is no simple task for most adults. As social media loves to remind us, life offers many reasons to forget how special existence is. Once we have grown through the bliss of childhood, for most, genuine happiness takes real effort. As discussed in previous weeks, we must be disciplined and mindful of how we generate wholesome energy and commit to returning to a place of activated rapture. Joy does not simply erupt within us without reason any more than Rome simply dismantles itself. The kind of change we wish to see requires right effort. In this case, right effort means training ourselves to be happy even in difficult times and skillfully allowing the fruits of our personal practice to spill over into how we engage with the greater world.

Last night, after my daughter fell asleep, I read a fantastic *article by

Jamila Bradley

, entitled, Joy Is a Strategy: The White Leftist Struggle with Spirit. It whispered winds through so many anxious wings fluttering in my mind of late that a meandering mountain range of little goosebumps spontaneously arose all over my white leftist skin. Joy, like peace, indeed, like home, is something we do, not merely something we sit back and consume like lazy colonizers of hope. We must strategically, collectively, invoke the Spirit of Joy in all that we do, and habitualize doing so with the same effort most modern day “leftists” bitch about politicians.

None of this is to shame us for not being the Dalai Lama at all times. It takes time. All we are doing in this little series of essays is shed a wee bit of light on how we might shift gears somewhat in order for our good intentions to grow deeper roots and thus potentially sprout something a bit more beneficial than we have experienced over the last few thousand years. We are dreaming big. And moving slow.

The sunset last night in Krabi, Thailand

…

Sometimes I go days without feeling joy consciously. I slip into the doom scroll and forget to be present with my rapidly growing daughter. I long for the paths I didn’t choose and the people I could have been. I can get so into my overly pessimistic head that I literally walk barefoot along a white-sand beach under the most glorious sunset ever beheld and all I see is the ocean of ignorant people around me, perched up like beached whales, so hypnotized by their phones that they don’t see the beauty around them... The irony totally lost to me as a judge everyone, including myself.

But once in a while, the practice I’ve cultivated for decades works in my favor and I become light-heartedly aware of my absurdity and laugh. Suddenly all the people staring at their phones seem so beautiful to me. In these moments, even the polluted ocean seems crystal clear. My daughter and I then fall into sync and we run alongside the shore together, hand and hand, into an impossibly beautiful sky, lost in a state of beneficial rapture.

We can do this and we must. Below you will find a link to a Buddhist practice for cultivating Joy. I intentionally skirted around any specifics this week because, I must confess, I’m not an expert on how to actualize this one. I have struggled with depression for most of my life. I know deep inside me that Joy is one of the most important factors to cultivate in these time. We need to prioritize embodied joy if we are ever going to truly bring about positive societal transformation. And we can’t just steal what others have done. We need to cultivate something appropriate for us all, here and now. But I haven’t fully figured out the riddle myself. Maybe you have some ideas? Maybe a dream has come. If so, please, do tell. We all would love to hear from you.

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