Socrates:

When you invoke ek-sesthai, Platohagel, what do you take it to mean?

Platohagel:

To stand outside oneself—to be displaced from the ordinary center of identity.

Socrates:

Good. And note carefully: this “outside” is not madness by necessity. It is not dissolution, but de-centering. One steps out of the narrow ego without vanishing altogether.

Now consider: if the soul precedes the body, then ordinary ego-consciousness is not the source of mind, but a local station within it. Ek-sesthai names the moment when that station no longer claims sovereignty.

Platohagel:

So ecstasy is not escape from the self, but encounter with a larger one.

Socrates:

Exactly. Modern speech reduces ecstasy to emotional excess. The Greeks meant something far more exacting:

to be drawn beyond the habitual standpoint so that truth may appear.

Plato already knew this. In the Phaedrus, madness (mania) is not pathology when it comes from the gods—it is instruction. Jung later recognized the same pattern clinically: transformation requires a temporary loss of the old center.

Ek-sesthai and Individuation

Socrates:

Tell me: can individuation occur without ek-sesthai?

Platohagel:

No. One must leave the old identity to integrate the unconscious.

Socrates:

Yes. Individuation is not self-construction; it is self-displacement followed by re-ordering. The ego must step aside long enough for the deeper psyche to reveal its structure.

This is why dreams, visions, crises, and symbols feel destabilizing. They are not polite. They do not ask permission. They remove you—temporarily—from your accustomed coordinates.

That removal is ek-sesthai.

Body, Soul, and Ecstasy

Socrates:

Now return to the mind-body question. If the soul were produced by the body, ecstasy would be an error—a malfunction. But if the body is the soul’s expression, ecstasy is a re-alignment.

In such moments:

the body loosens its dominance, the ego’s narrative suspends, and something prior speaks.

Not verbally, but symbolically.

Platohagel:

So ecstasy is evidence, not anomaly.

Socrates:

Evidence of depth. The psyche demonstrates that it is not exhausted by sensorimotor loops. It can step beyond itself because it was never confined to the body alone