Collective Ecstasy and Shared Sorrow

Mirabai danced in ecstatic states, sometimes with crowds, sometimes alone. Her bhakti collapsed the boundary between self and other, individual and divine. In contemporary collective grief—thousands mourning together, sharing songs and stories, gathering in spaces—we glimpse this ecstatic dissolution. The individual self becomes porous; we feel held by something larger. This is not mob mentality but genuine mystical experience. When we weep together for a public figure, our tears connect us to something transcendent. Mirabai teaches that this is not dangerous; it is a doorway. The practice is to enter it consciously: to feel the collective emotion fully while remaining aware of its nature. We can let our individual boundaries soften without losing our integrity or critical faculties. Shared sorrow becomes a form of communion. In this state, we remember our interdependence and our shared mortality. The death that divides us—some knew the person, some did not—becomes something that unites us in the recognition of universal loss.