Eric began his non-lecture by announcing that he was going to try to give a "last lecture," in which he would try to explicate the outer horizon of his current thinking, as well as the primary themes that undergird and lend force to all of his work as a professor.

Eric then began his inquiry into the nature of ecstasy by posing the question, “What makes life deeply worth living?”  Following Camus, Eric said that this question (like Hamlet's "To be, or not to be?") is the most fundamental and most significant psychological question, especially since all of psychology's more detailed analyses procede implicitly from it.  This fundamental question may also be reworded as, “What overriding theme underlies all the particulars of our life and makes them important?”  Eric's first answer was, “The actual experience of life itself!,” and he accordingly advised us that "The point of life is to drink in the wide river of all that life is.”  However, he also admitted that his own personal preference is to be in “a state of utter and exquisite rapture pretty much all the time.”  “I ’m a very simple soul,” he said, “I consistently prefer to feel the wind of ecstasy rippling over my soul, my flesh and my relationships with others.”

Eric believes that humanity's age-old preoccupation with sex and love indicates something about what we are.  “Why has sex fascinated humanity so intensely for so damn long?,” he asks.  He then continued, “Perhaps our moments of sexual ecstasy indicate something about our the structure of our very existence.  Could it be that we are born to the condition of the erotic?  Our nature itself is erotic, and our moments of good sex are just making it obvious.  We are beings whose capacity for Eros runs to the very core of our being.  Consequently, any moment - including this one - may become infused with Eros for any of us, and at any time. There is nothing that is not a gateway.”  Accordingly, he suggested that “Perhaps it's possible for us to LIVE erotically - to have the beauty and pleasure that marks ecstatic experience be the main theme of our lives.”  This echoes Daniel Helminiak’s maxim: “What is, is what should be.”

Eric finds that ecstasy is a “bearer of wisdom.”  He argues that our moments of ecstasy point to what matters in life.  In addition, he claimed that "ecstasy is integral to thinking and knowing well.”  Similar to Daniel’s argument that to challenge the notion of God is to acknowledge spiritual existence, Eric believes that “the fact that this idea may seem strange by the prevailing cultural standards is itself a kind of meta-strangeness.”  For example, he recalls being transfixed by math classes in his youth, and infers, “Thinking and knowing attain full fruition when they become an ecstatic affair.”  In fact, he thinks that everything in life can be “a gateway to the untold beyond.”  One’s moments of abiding pleasure help define what it means to be alive - “The point is to learn to make love to the universe.  . . .  We are all kites caught in the wind of ecstasy.”

Eric believes ecstasy to be a form of social praxis, as well, citing Maslow and the Existentialists’ notion that ecstasy does not exist apart from the world of others.  But he finds the suppression of ecstatic experience to be the prevailing social norm.  Because of that suppressive tendency, Eric finds seeking and valuing such experience to be intrinsically revolutionary and transgressive.  Eric challenged society’s norms of repressing our pursuit of life’s ecstasies in favor of production, accomplishment, and conformity to the image of a “responsible adult.”  On the other hand, "This is not a hedonistic implosion,” he argues, "because there is no such thing as individual ecstasy,” pointing out the contagious nature of all moods.  In that vein, he cited the inaugural address of Nelson Mandela, who said, “As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”  Eric maintains that social activism is not about “living a life that sucks in the service of making others' lives suck less,” but rather in finding our own ecstatic course in life, which then automatically moves others to realize a corresponding, empowered, ecstatic life.  In fact, Eric argued that this may be the real root of any form of "empowerment."  He accentuated that all of this requires courage, a revolutionary attitude, and a “creative lovemaking with the world.”

“Cultivating a capacity to experience boundless ecstasy is important to our training as psychologists,” Eric proposed.  Furthermore, he argues that it is important to be always questioning the depth of one's ecstatic experience, as a way of entering into a life-praxis of ever-shifting ecstatic process.  Where ecstasy is concerned, “There’s a sky above the sky.  We can have faith that even our greatest ecstasies and sayings have even greater ones beyond them.”

Eric concluded by indicating that we all have many, many excellent, convincing reasons not to center our lives around the pursuit of ecstatic experience.  On the other hand, he outlined a tripartite path toward cultivating ecstasy in one's life: “1) Life actually demands very little of us, 2) Life asks mostly that we follow the trail of personal and collective fulfillment as faithfully as possible, and 3) Every moment of ecstatic perfection is also a gateway into the untold beyond.  Eric ended by suggesting that his "last lectured" embodied an element of the unreasonable and the impossible, but that "The most important thing about being human may be our deep, ecstatic yearning for the impossible."