of altered states has become more mainstream and accepted. There’s still much we don’t understand about this area of human experience, but we’re learning a lot, and it’s transforming our model of the psyche.
You can examine ecstasy from four levels: body, mind, culture and spirit. First, we can explain ecstasy as alterations in our neural chemistry, in our brain functioning and our autonomic nervous system. We know that giving people chemicals can trigger ecstatic experiences – a dose of the hormone oxytocin makes them feel spiritually connected to other beings, while a dose of LSD radically alters brain functioning and leads to mystical feelings of ego-loss. We know some ecstatic experiences are connected to brain disorders, like migraines and temporal lobe epilepsy. Neuroscientists have attempted to locate the precise part of the brain responsible for transcendence – the ‘God spot’ – but most now think ecstatic experiences are too complex and various to be attributed entirely to one neural location.22 Many of the ecstatic experiences we’ll encounter are deeply embodied – they are visceral reactions involving the brain and autonomic nervous system, which regulates breathing, circulation, digestion, the genitals, and other bodily functions. However, just because ecstatic experiences affect the brain and body, that doesn’t mean they are nothing but neurochemical processes.
At the next level up, we can explore ecstasy by examining how it affects people’s consciousness, and asking them to describe their experience. This is the phenomenological approach taken by William James in his 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, by other pioneers of psychology, like Carl Jung and James’s friend Frederic Myers, and by modern researchers in the field of ‘transpersonal psychology’. We can measure ecstasy using psychometric scales like the Hood Mysticism Scale or the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, which ask people to what extent they agree with statements like ‘I felt connected to all things’. The phenomenological approach explores how ecstasy alters people’s ordinary sense of self and takes them into altered states of consciousness. Rationality, James insisted, is just one mental state in a much wider spectrum of consciousness, including dreams, epiphanies and states of deep absorption. The everyday conscious self is a small shed in the dark forest of the subliminal mind, made up of subconscious and embodied patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour. Moments of ecstasy, according to James, Myers and Jung, are moments when the ordinary ego dissolves and the larger subliminal mind comes into consciousness.
At the third level, we can explain ecstatic experiences as socio-cultural phenomena. This was the approach taken by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, by anthropologists like Victor Turner and I. M. Lewis, and by social psychologists including Jonathan Haidt.23 We can look at how rituals trigger ecstatic experiences in groups, and bond those groups together in what Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’. We learn how to lose control from our culture – for example, the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann studied how people in charismatic churches learn to speak in tongues.24 Cultural history helps us examine the rituals, forms and structures through which people have dissolved their egos over time, from acid house to jihadism, from flagellants to football hooligans. Humans are constantly improvising new scripts, new ways to lose control, and these new scripts spread virally through groups like a medieval dancing plague.
There are long and bitter academic disputes between these three ways of explaining ecstasy but the three levels interact in fascinating ways. In a Pentecostal church, for example, the ritual of worship absorbs and alters people’s consciousness, which triggers deep reactions in their brains and autonomic nervous systems.
And then there is the fourth level, the spiritual level of explanation. People sometimes describe their ecstatic experiences as an encounter with some Other beyond the human. This is the level at which academic science gets embarrassed and fidgety. It’s easy to dismiss this level as woo-woo, because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to falsify people’s accounts. But before we reject people’s beliefs as nonsense, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what we don’t know: we don’t know what consciousness is, we don’t know how our consciousness is connected to other beings and to matter, we don’t know if there are intelligences higher than humans, we don’t know if consciousness survives death. Nor am I going to try to answer any of these questions definitively.
At the spiritual level of explanation, we can follow the lead of William James: he thought there may be a spiritual dimension (or dimensions) to reality, which humans are not usually aware of, but which we sometimes connect to in moments of ecstasy. But he remained agnostic, as I will throughout this book. What we can do is honestly describe our own experience, and the experience of others: did it feel to you as if you were connecting to some spiritual entity or power? And we can look at the fruits of such experiences in our lives. Did it lead to healing, inspiration and flourishing, or was it bad for you?
Ecstasy is healing, inspiring and socially connecting
Ecstasy is very often good for us. First, ecstatic experiences can be profoundly healing. Stoic philosophy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) teach that the way to heal negative emotions is to use rationality to examine and change our thoughts and beliefs. However, CBT heals only 40 to 50 per cent of cases of anxiety and depression; many find it too rational and cerebral. There’s an alternative model of the emotions and how to change them, put forward by William James,25 and refined by neurophysiologists such as Antonio Damasio and Stephen Porges. In James’ model, emotions arise not only through thoughts, but also through gut reactions in our autonomic nervous system. In James’ model, you can change your emotions not just from the top-down, using rationality, but also from the bottom-up, through the body – by altering your breath, exercising, singing or dancing, listening to music, going for a walk in nature, having sex, eating, taking intoxicants, and so on. James also taught that we can heal the psyche through non-rational states of consciousness – flow states, spiritual experiences, trances, dreams, psychedelic trips – which dissolve the rigid walls of the ordinary ego and tap into the healing power of the subliminal mind. This can liberate people from ingrained psychophysical habits, like depression, fatigue or addiction. Most cultures in the world have rituals in which people find healing through ecstatic surrender. Aristotle, despite being a rationalist, recognised that such rituals have ‘an orgiastic effect on the soul’ through which people ‘are restored as if they had undergone a curative and purifying treatment’.26
Second, ecstatic experiences can be inspiring – a word that has its roots in classical and Christian ideas of spirits breathing into us. Plato insisted that artistic inspiration comes from ‘divine madness’, and many artists and scientists say some of their greatest inventions and creations come to them through subliminal states of consciousness, and feel like a gift from ‘beyond’ (although they differ in their explanations of what that ‘beyond’ is).
Third, ecstatic experiences are connecting. Ecstasy is the experience of bursting beyond the walls of the ego and feeling a sense of love-connection to other beings. Ecstatic rituals create the feeling of communitas, agape, goodwill or tribal unity. Secular modernity shaped us into walled-off rational selves disconnected from our subliminal mind, our bodies, each other, the natural world and (perhaps) from God. It’s boring and lonely to be stuck in that rickety old shed. Émile Durkheim warned that modern Western society, lacking an outlet for ‘collective effervescence’, risked descending into anomie, loneliness and mental illness. His prediction proved prescient: in a 2010 survey, 35 per cent of Americans over 45 said they felt lonely much of the time; two-fifths of older people in the UK said the television was their main company; 10 per cent of British people said they don’t have a single close friend; one in five said they felt unloved.27 We need outlets for more ecstatic connection in our societies, or people turn to toxic communities, like cults, gangs, and networks of addiction.
Finally, moments of ecstasy can give people a sense of meaning and hope in the face of death. We feel connected to nature, to the cosmos, and perhaps to God in some
