the immortality of the soul, but it’s certainly the case that people emerged from Greek or Christian ecstatic cults able to ‘die with a better hope’, in Cicero’s words. Likewise, people emerge from near-death experiences less afraid of death. Several recent trials found that psychedelics dramatically reduce depression and anxiety in the terminally ill by triggering mystical experiences. A more ecstatic society may transform our attitude to death.
The dark side of ecstasy
But it ain’t all roses. There are risks to ecstasy too. When you dissolve the ego, you can be flooded with repressed aspects of the psyche – what Jung called ‘the shadow’. We’ll examine the difficult experiences people can have through meditation, and also through psychedelics. Spontaneous spiritual experiences also have their risks: people can become grandiose, suffer ego-inflation or convince themselves that they’re the Messiah.
When we’re in states of deep absorption, our critical rationality is suspended and we become highly suggestible. That can be healing if you’re in a safe and nurturing environment, less so if you’re in a cult. As I mentioned, the spiritual supernova of the 1960s led to a proliferation of cults, from Jonestown to the Manson Family. Daesh, or ISIS, has many of the features of a charismatic death-cult. The flipside of the ecstatic sense of togetherness is a paranoid demonisation of outsiders - the world becomes neatly divided into Us versus Them. At the extreme, the sense of a cosmic battle can lead to the dark catharsis of blood-sacrifice: the demonic outsiders become the scapegoat, whose blood will purge the body politic.
But the most common risk in our culture is that we become unhealthily obsessed with the ecstatic. Modern spirituality can become all about the peaks, the rapture, the ‘God-like hours’. Spirituality can become commodified into an ecstatic experience economy - this moment of transcendence was brought to you by Red Bull. The obsession with heightened experiences can lead to an unattractive spiritual entitlement: you don’t get it unless you’ve spoken in tongues/been to Burning Man/taken magic mushrooms. And we might never put in the hard work to turn the epiphany into durable habits. Abraham Maslow warned: ‘Peak emotions may come without any growth or benefit of any kind beyond the effects of pleasure. The rapture may be very profound but contentless.’28
The festival of ecstasy
I’ve imagined the book as a festival, with each chapter as a different tent or zone. Each tent explores a different way that people find ecstasy in modern Western culture. As at a festival, in some tents you’ll feel at home; others might seem a bit weird, but just go with it and see what happens. Not everyone you meet will be trustworthy but I’ll try to point out the dodgy geezers. I hope the book provides a map to help people find the good stuff at the festival, while avoiding the risks.
One of the most useful ideas to keep in mind, as we navigate through the festival, is sixties psychedelic guru Timothy Leary’s emphasis on ‘set and setting’. ‘Set’ means the mindset or intention one brings to an ecstatic experience. When we journey beyond the ego, we can have euphoric or terrifying experiences, and it’s important to maintain equanimity and not give way to mania or panic. At the moment, Western culture is inclined to what the religious scholar Karen Armstrong calls ‘unbalanced ekstasis’ – either we’re terrified of it, as a consequence of the Enlightenment, or we’re manically attached to it, as charismatic Christianity and New Age spirituality can be. We need to try to greet whatever comes our way with equanimity. The other important intention to cultivate is humility and compassion. There’s a real risk, when you go beyond the normal bounds of the ego, that you succumb to pride and ego-inflation. Humility, from the Latin humus meaning earth, helps us to ‘earth’ ecstasy, in Armstrong’s words, to prevent it ‘from becoming selfish and self-indulgent, and give it moral direction’.29
The second part of Leary’s ‘set and setting’ concerns the context in which an ecstatic experience takes place. Context has a decisive effect on the outcome of ecstatic experiences, and on whether they’re healthy or toxic. We’ll explore many different cultural contexts for modern ecstasy, from New Age rituals to rock festivals to charismatic churches to extremist gangs. Some communities I really immersed myself in, others I skirted at the edges of. You might say this approach is typically post-modern – a sort of spiritual bungee-jumping where one dips into traditions without ever swimming in the deep end. Maybe so. But it’s not my intention to convert you to any particular religion. It’s up to you to choose which tent you want to stay in.
The festival begins with spontaneous spiritual experiences. Then we look at how we can actively seek these experiences and integrate them into our life. We explore the world of ecstatic Christianity, then explore how the arts and rock and roll have become alternative ‘churches for the unchurched’. Next we find ecstasy through drugs, sex and contemplation, before considering the ecstasy of war and extreme sports. In the penultimate chapter we consider how ecstatic experiences connect us to nature; and finally we explore transhumanism, and the idea that technology enables us to transcend our humanity and become gods.
Remember, I’m not suggesting Western civilisation should become a permanent festival of ecstasy. That would be dangerous escapism, not to say impractical. The ecstasy of Dionysus (the Greek god of intoxication) needs to be balanced with the rational scepticism of Socrates. Without Dionysus, Socratic rationality is arid and soulless, but without Socratic reflection and practice, Dionysiac ecstasy is just a rush. It’s only through repeated practice that epiphanies become habits – the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield wrote: ‘After the ecstasy, the laundry.’30
In Aldous Huxley’s Island, one character ponders: ‘Which did more for morality and rational behaviour – the Bacchic orgies or The Republic? The Nicomachean Ethics or the maenads?’ To which the reply is given, ‘The Greeks were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads . . . All we’ve done is take a leaf out of the old Greek book.’
Now it’s time to enter the festival. Let’s head to the Entrance Gate, to explore spontaneous spiritual experiences.
1: The Entrance Gate
In the winter of 1958, a 17-year old American named Barbara Alexander wandered into the tiny town of Lone Pine, California. She’d spent the night in a car with two friends, hadn’t slept, and had barely eaten in days. As the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada, she left her two friends sleeping in the car by the highway, and wandered through the desert and into town. She walked through the empty streets, and then suddenly:
the world flamed into life . . . There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All’, as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once . . . Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, ‘inside’ and out, the only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.1
The experience – or ‘encounter’ as she thought of it back then – didn’t burst out of nowhere. For some years, Barbara had experienced moments of dissociative absorption, when something ‘peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words’ and she felt plunged into ‘the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed upon world arises’. She was also a depressed, introspective and solitary teenager, with an alcoholic father, a suicidal mother, and few friends or boyfriends. She was gripped by a search for life’s meaning, torn between a reductive materialism and the Romantic mysticism
