We’re in an entirely new level of interconnection, and we’re freaking out. Breathe.
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The old religions said life inevitably involves suffering. The new religion of health and well-being says ‘you should be happy and healthy. If you’re not, that’s a disorder. Here’s some CBT or some pills. Now you should be happy and healthy.’
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People have been heralding the arrival of a new paradigm, in which consciousness is paramount, for over 140 years. So why hasn’t it arrived? I asked some leading thinkers in the world of transpersonal psychology.
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If you’re in one of those moments where it feels like gravity has increased and the universe is taking a dump on you, here are my three best techniques for getting yourself through difficult times.
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Do we have the right to bring children into what could be a pretty unpleasant historical situation?
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You could accuse XR of being a form of therapy for the middle-classes. Like a cancer support group in the middle of Oxford Circus. But the cancer is not terminal yet. This is an alarm bell, a scream.
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I met a futurist the other day. A traveller from a future land. We both gave keynotes at a conference on education. I sat next to him at dinner afterwards and asked him a bit about the futurism business, including what he charged for talks (I’m shameless). He shrugged. ’10, maybe 15’. ‘Pounds?’ ‘No…thousands’.
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A friend of mine told me recently that in a relative's class of 25 children, five of them are officially identified as trans. That means 20% of the children are on their way to hormone therapy and gender re-assignment.
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The closest I’ve come to enlightenment was the two minutes when I was lying in a bloody heap on Valsfjell Mountain in Norway. This was back in February 2001. While skiing down a steep slope, I crashed through a fence, flew off a cliff, and landed with a thump, breaking my leg and several vertebrae.
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As you may know, I’m researching a book about Aldous Huxley and his friends Alan Watts, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, and how these four posh Brits moved to California and helped to invent the modern culture of ‘spiritual but not religious’.
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I was walking to the Extinction Rebellion protest last weekend, and I suddenly started crying.
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Last week, I saw a good talk on somatic experiencing therapy. I’ve heard about it, and in some ways what I heard was quite obvious, but it was good to have it spelled out.
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Apologies for the delay in writing. I’ve been in California for the last three weeks, immersed in preparing for Burning Man, then going to Burning Man, then recovering from Burning Man.
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This is the best time ever to be alive and human. Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century, from 31 to 71. A century ago, 20% of babies died in childbirth, now it's less than 7%. You're far, far less likely to die violently than in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or even in the 1960s.
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After the bombing in Manchester, prime minister Theresa May said, on the steps of Downing Street: 'We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but as an opportunity for carnage.'
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Cult is sacred, secret and always the same. Culture is public, irreverent, and strives for originality and innovation. Yet the two are intimately connected. Culture feeds on cult, and cult feeds off culture. Our society today lacks a cult, and as a result our culture wearies itself in empty innovation.
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Dear Jules, I have been going through a really rough time lately and it is quite similar to your experience. I was quite a happy go lucky person through life until I had a bad terrifying trip on weed (my first time trying) I took way too much and freaked out and that traumatised me - having very anxious scary thoughts like what if I harm my self, what if I harm others - what is the meaning of life and whats the point of it all.
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I went to the book-launch of a new book on well-being policy yesterday, which brought together some leading figures in this nascent movement - including David Halpern of the government’s ‘nudge unit’, Canadian economist John Helliwell, psychologist Maurren O'Hara, and Juliet Michaelson of the new economics foundation.
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A few months back I was giving a philosophy workshop in a mental health charity. It was one of my less popular events - only one person turned up, a Romanian man who had recently moved to the UK and was finding it tough. We talked about Socratic philosophy, about the idea of engaging your inner voice in a rational dialogue, and the man (let’s call him Anghel) quietly told me that he heard voices.
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I was up in east Scotland on New Year's Day, and found myself walking along a path called the John Muir Way. A few days later, a book I was reading mentioned a famous naturalist called John Muir, so I looked him up. It turns out John Muir was a father of modern conservationism, and the founder of many of California’s national parks. He is also a perfect specimen for my research into ecstatic experiences in nature.
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Well, that was a weird year. 2013 was the year I became a Christian, or rather 'committed my life to Christ' as Christians put it. What does that mean? How did I get here? Am I really a Christian or am I kidding myself? Let's re-wind and play the tape again.
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Imagine, if you will, the scene. The Enlightenment has defeated Religion, and its various champions meet to carve up the vanquished enemy’s territories. Philosophy takes the chair: ‘Right then, settle down everyone. Thank you. Now, let’s see...Religion used to offer ethics and laws.
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Simon Critchley, an English philosopher at the New School in New York, has suggested that all philosophy is an attempt to deal with two disappointments: religious disappointment, or the loss of faith; and political disappointment, or the search for justice. In his most recent book, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, he attempts to put these disappointments behind him, and work out a relationship between religion and politics.
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To talk about David Bowie, first we need to talk about Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher who, near the beginning of the 19th century, recognised that rationalism was undermining the mythical foundation of society - Christianity - without putting any new myths in its place.
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Angie Hobbs came and spoke at the London Philosophy Club earlier this month. She's an expert on Plato, and in her talk she used Platonism as a way of making sense of last year’s riots. She noted that many media commentators called the rioters ‘shameless’. This wasn’t true at all, she said. The rioters had a sense of shame and honour, it was just warped, or misdirected.
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There's a cognitive bias which supposedly causes emotional disorders, whereby you minimize your own achievements while maximizing those of other people. I feel the authors of Britannia Unchained, a new book about how to save the UK from national decline, suffer from this bias.
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