The ecstatic state is all well and good when you experience it. We're all striving to experience it all the time, through bits and pieces in food, sex, drugs, exercise, honest work, religious ceremony and ritual, musical performance, literary and philosophical works, works of art, and through business conquest and warmaking (yes even these two). I'm not sure exactly what this state is, beyond this metaphorical white hot center located between life and death. Yes, this is a state one experiences as one pursues life, and as one pursues life one defies death; the birth of something implies the death of another, as nothing is created or destroyed.
Experiencing this ecstasy is a wonderful thing, but in an interconnected social world, it isn't much use if you are the only one experiencing it. You can try to explain it to others and get people excited, but in the end they won't understand you, because understanding requires a subjective experience of something like it. On the contrary, the further out you go, the higher you soar into this ecstasy, the further advanced your alienation from your community becomes, with communication eventually breaking down, which is a very lonely affair. So in conjunction to pursuing intellectual and physical pleasure, you must have it so that others can pursue the same thing, so that it can be shared, and this too is a part of life.
What you have to do, if you get it, is find out how to share it. This involves generating symbols, artifacts, physical rituals and behaviors which point to and conjure up these states of ecstasy to be shared, which requires discipline to ensure that all of these things are effective. But all of this itself has to be carried out in the midst of a social movement which proceeds towards some aim for the purpose of living. The symbols, artifacts, and behaviors are all biproducts generated from this state, for the purpose of sharing and sustaining the state, but they are not the state itself. This distinction accounts for the way in which all great states, all collective experiences, ideas, and movements die.
The original subjective experience is but a moment in time, but all of the symbols, rituals, artifacts, and ideologies that are generated from that experience remain, so that subsequent traditions continue to circulate and exercise those things in increasingly closed circuits, its adherents climbing over each other in a vast game of leapfrog to possess the remaining symbols of power and wealth, its limited shape further carving out deeper ruts to become trapped in.
Not that I have a problem with these closed, traditional circuits. If they are sustainable, if their energy is evenly shared and preserved, they make a fine engine for living, and of course, building ever more complex circuits upon them. But as a given circuit becomes unstable from energy oscillations, or hemorrhages the last of its energy, well, then it is time to break free and see about generating a new one.
