book or having a conversation. It’s a kind of experience which culminates in ecstasy.’
Healthy and toxic transcendence
Everyone seeks ways to turn off the ego’s chatter and feel a sense of connection to other people and the world. However, there are better and worse ways of reaching this state. There is healthy transcendence, which improves our life and our society, and there is toxic transcendence, which damages us and our society. Any method of letting go, however innocuous, can become problematic. We could become addicted to switching off the mind with a bottle of wine every night, or junk TV, or a spliff, or Valium, or porn, or heroin, or violence. One in four people in the UK is obese, one in twelve suffers from alcohol dependency, millions of Americans are addicted to the $10 billion opiate-painkiller industry, and we’re all addicted to the internet.6 The actor Martin Sheen, a recovering alcoholic, has said that addiction is really a misdirected search for transcendence, connection and love. Aldous Huxley called it downward transcendence – we turn off the mind, but in an unhealthy way.
How we let go, then, is a question of fundamental importance for us and for our society. Do you let go in ways that are healthy or toxic? Does our society offer us good ways of losing control, or does it offer only shallow and toxic forms of transcendence? The critic Susan Sontag warned of the ‘traumatic failure of modern capitalist society . . . to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending moments . . . The need of human beings to transcend “the personal” is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly.’7
Learning to lose control
I work at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, at Queen Mary University of London. I’m fascinated by how our inner lives are shaped by our culture and history. I wrote my first book, Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations, about how Greek philosophy inspired cognitive behavioural therapy, and how it still helps many people through difficult periods of life, including me. I’ve spent the last few years working to revive Stoic philosophy, teaching it in schools, prisons and even a rugby club. But I decided I can no longer call myself a Stoic (despite getting a Stoic tattoo on my shoulder in a moment of rashness) because it misses a lot out.
Stoicism insists the way to flourishing is via rational self-analysis and self-control. That’s often true, but not always. There is something to be said for those moments when we lose control, when we surrender to something greater than us, even if it means going beyond critical rationality. The Stoics had little positive to say about romantic love, or intoxication, or music, dancing and the arts in general – all of which involve moments of ecstatic surrender. Their philosophy lacks rituals, myths and festivals, which have helped humans find ecstasy over the millennia. And Stoics have never been great at community. As we’ll see, one of the important functions of ecstatic experience is to connect people to one another in love. Midway through my life, I decided to go beyond Stoicism and search for the ecstatic. As an introverted, cerebral, bachelor academic, I wanted to loosen up and learn to let go. I was looking for a greater connection to other people, and also perhaps to God . . . or, at least, for some form of ego-transcendence.
Over the last four years, I’ve ventured way beyond my comfort zone. I attended a week-long tantra festival. I put myself through a ten-day Vipassana retreat, where we meditated for ten hours a day. I joined a charismatic Christian church for a year, and learned to speak in tongues. I went on a rock and roll pilgrimage to Memphis and Nashville, and sang gospel at the church of Al Green. I taught myself lucid dreaming, debated the reality of elves with a roomful of psychedelic scientists. I even went to a 5Rhythms ecstatic dance workshop. It’s been a long, strange ride. I wanted to discover how other people find ecstasy in modern Western culture, a culture in which the traditional route – Christianity – is in decline, judging by church-attendance figures. I interviewed many people about their preferred route to ego-loss, using online surveys and through conversations with experts, including the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi; the Bishop of London; the musicians Brian Eno, David Byrne and Sister Bliss; the author Philip Pullman; and the hypnotist Derren Brown.
Western culture’s problem with ecstasy
I’ve decided that Western culture has a problematic relationship with ecstasy, and this narrows and impoverishes our experience of reality. In 1973, the anthropologist Erika Bourguignon undertook a survey of 488 societies around the world, and found that 90 per cent of them had institutionalised rituals for achieving ego-loss.8 Western society is very unusual in its lack of such rituals and its denigration of non-rational states of mind. That’s a consequence of the Enlightenment, and the shift from an enchanted to a materialist world-view.
In an enchanted world-view, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit-world. The animist cosmos teems with nature spirits, the spirits of the dead, deities and spiritual energy. The Christian cosmos is created by God and filled with benevolent and malevolent spiritual forces. The human psyche in an enchanted cosmos is ‘porous’, to use the philosopher Charles Taylor’s phrase – our ego is a rickety old shed in a haunted forest.9 In an ecstatic experience, the shed is filled with spirits. We may be possessed by evil spirits, but we may also be inspired by good spirits and blessed with charismatic powers of healing, creativity or prophecy. The shaman, prophet and artist are ecstatic mediators between the tribe and the spirit-world, keeping relations cordial. Otherwise the spirit-world may destroy us with madness or environmental destruction – as the god Dionysus destroys King Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. We’re not really masters of ourselves in the enchanted cosmos. We’re meeting-houses for spiritual forces, and we must learn to let the right ones in.
In a materialist world-view, there are no spirits or gods out there. Ecstasy is a mental delusion. The universe is a giant lava-lamp of matter, beautiful but inanimate, ruled by mechanical laws. The human body is likewise a machine, which somehow produces consciousness in the brain. Spiritual explanations of physical or psychic phenomena are ignorant and childish. In this disenchanted world-view, ourselves are ‘buffered’, to use Taylor’s phrase: we are walled off from other people and from nature by our self-conscious rationality. We must learn to govern ourselves and control our impulses, not to placate any supernatural beings, but rather to win the approval of the Public, the new god of the humanist universe. The Public is always observing us, and we must remain polite and self-controlled at all times, lest people think we’re unreliable or crazy, and we get ridiculed or ostracised or locked up. We are – or must struggle to be – masters of ourselves. Rational control is the basis of morality, and losing control is shameful.
The demonisation of ecstasy
As Western civilisation shifted to a materialist world-view, it increasingly denigrated ecstatic experiences, and privileged rationality as the only sane and reliable form of consciousness. Dreams had been a gateway for divine messages. Now they were just side-effects of physical processes. Visions had been sacred revelations. Now they were ‘idols of the brain’, in the words of materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes. From the sixteenth century on, ecstasy was increasingly labelled ‘enthusiasm’, which came to signify a mental illness, the product of an overheated brain or an over-active imagination.10 Enthusiasm was the ‘anti-self of the Enlightenment’.11 It was a threat to the Enlightenment ideal of the rational, autonomous, polite and industrious self. The religious enthusiast became an object of ridicule in the works of Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and William Hogarth. Enthusiasm was also a threat to public order. The seventeenth-century Wars of Religion showed, supposedly, how much damage religious enthusiasm could do. The Encyclopédie warned that ‘Fanatical superstition, born of troubled imagination, overturns empires.’ To protect public order, the state should be secular and rational, and religion should be banished from the public sphere, privatised, rationalised, and drained of all ecstatic fervour. The better-educated the populace, the less likely
