Above is an interview I did with Stephen Dinan, the CEO of the Shift Network, which is the biggest platform of online wisdom courses, with around three million customers.
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Nathan Filer’s excellent new book, The Heartland, humbly points out the flaws in psychiatry’s definition and treatment of schizophrenia. But it still shares psychiatry’s habitual contempt for spirituality.
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Can education help us to become more well-rounded, integrated, wise and whole people? This was the project explored both by Aldous Huxley, and by his ancestors - Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold - in their famous dispute over the role of sciences and the humanities in education.
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In response to my last post, ‘Is there a trans bubble?’, a trans queer person called Kate, who is a regular reader, got in touch to say that she disagreed with some of my points. Here’s Kate’s response, followed by some questions from me and answers from her.
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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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Last week I came across a small book called The Making of a Counter Culture, written in 1969 by an American historian called Theodore Roszak. I loved it. Roszak was the first to coin the phrase ‘the counterculture’.
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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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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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While I was in San Francisco, I got the chance to meet Michael Murphy, one of the founders of the Esalen Institute. It's a cross between a spiritual retreat centre and an adult education college, perched on the cliffs of Big Sur next to some hot springs. It's been very influential on transpersonal psychology and American spirituality.
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On Monday, I’m teaching undergraduates for the first time at my university, Queen Mary University of London. It’s launching a ten-lecture course on health and well-being, and I’m doing two of them – one on the philosophies of well-being, another on ego-transcendence.
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Last week I visited Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat centre outside Philadelphia, nestled between the gorgeous Quaker liberal arts colleges of Haverford and Swarthmore. I made a sort of mini-pilgrimage there as part of my research into the ‘mystical expats’ – Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Alan Watts, four English writers who moved to California in the 1930s and helped invent the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ demographic (which is now 25% of the US population).
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These days everyone is a goddam shaman. But what if you wanted to really train as an Amazon maestro or maestra? What is that process like? Is it terrifying, magical, bonkers? Never mind Carlos Castaneda and his fictional 'Don Juan'.
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Last week, if you remember, I was at a Buddhist seminar in the Colorado mountains, taught by a Tibetan Buddhist lama called Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. This was quite different to other Buddhist retreats I’ve been on. There wasn’t much meditation, instead there was four hours of teaching every day, over nine days.
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Pema Chodron's book, The Places that Scary You, has been extremely helpful to me over the past six months. I came across the book in the Amazon jungle, when I was on an ayahuasca retreat last October.
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Spiritual emergencies are moments of awakening and ego-dissolution which can be both ecstatic and deeply disturbing, even quasi-psychotic. With the right tools and support, we can navigate them to a richer and more meaningful life.
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The only thinker whose popularity on YouTube comes close to prophet-of-rage Jordan Peterson is Alan Watts, the British popularizer of Eastern wisdom. Watts’ talks from the 50s, 60s and early 70s have millions of views on YouTube, and are often edited to the accompaniment of orchestral or ‘chillstep’ soundtracks and jazzy collages of modern life.
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Last week I wrote about a book I picked up on Amazon – Pema Chodron’s The Places That Scare You. This week I’ll talk about the other book I picked up in the jungle, a little novel called A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood.
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The other day I came across one of those ubiquitous articles about the Problem with Men. And it had this line: 'life is not a race, it's not a game, and it's not a fight'. The problem, the author suggested, was men were attached to the wrong metaphor for life. He preferred 'life is a dance' - that frames life in a non-competitive and open way.
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It's a confusing world, but there are some things we know for sure. We know for sure that it's good to be vulnerable, don't we? That humans - particularly men - need to learn to open up more, because that's the way to better connection and higher self-worth. That much we know. Right?
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Here is part 2 of my interview with pioneering researcher Milan Scheidegger, who works in the psychedelics lab at University of Zurich. You can read part 1 here. In this half of the interview, we discuss how to translate aspects of indigenous ayahuasca rituals - such as the shaman or sacred plant songs - into the context of western healthcare. We also discuss Milan's plans to establish a psychedelic healing clinic in Switzerland.
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A friend emailed me asking about retreats, whether they're useful, and how one goes about picking one.
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Hello. Well, this is awkward. I stopped writing this newsletter two months ago, just before travelling to the Amazon jungle for an ayahuasca ceremony. The good news, back then, was that I'd been handed a philosophy column for the New Statesman magazine - the culmination of a dream I'd had for over a decade.
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As regular readers will know, I've begun a new research focus, looking at well-being in higher education. British universities have started to focus on this issue a lot more, spurred by worrying headlines about an 'epidemic of mental illness on campus'. But, judging by the events I've attended so far, universities don't yet get the complexity of this issue, and see it simply in terms of increasing funding for counselling.
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Should a university provide a moral or spiritual education to its students? The idea seems ridiculous in the age of the mega-university. Universities today are enormous corporations, employing tens of thousands of academics and staff, with anything from 5000 to 30000 undergraduates studying there at any one time. The university is a microcosm of our multi-cultural society - there can be no one over-riding ethos in the 'multi-university'.
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On Wednesday afternoon I was walking up the Holloway Road in the pouring rain when I saw a body lying in a heap beneath the bus shelter. Two Japanese tourists were staring at it. I crouched down next to the body. It was a girl, maybe 18. Her jumper was covered in mud and she was sobbing.
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It's been a tough week for the UK - mental illness went up 164%. Previously, mental health charities assured us that one in four people have been diagnosed with a mental illness in their life. But this week, abruptly, one mental health charity suggested as many as two in three adults will suffer from some mental health problem at some point in their life, whether that's a panic attack or a period of depression.
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Dr James Mallinson is unique among British academics. Not only is he a widely-respected Sansrkit scholar at the School of Oriental and Africa Studies in London, he’s also the only Westerner ever to become a mahant – a senior sadhu [ascetic holy man] in a sect of yogis, which he has spent time with since he was 18.
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Last Sunday I finished a 10-day Vipassana retreat, at a monastery in Sweden. This was my third attempt to do a monastic retreat - I’d done a runner from both previous efforts, from a Rusian monastery in Lent 2006 (the head monk kept trying to convert me to Orthodox Christianity) and from a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight in January 2013 (I was bored). This time, I vowed not to do a runner.
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One evening in the winter of 1969, the author Philip Pullman had a transcendent experience on the Charing Cross Road.
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On Monday, a new free online course is starting, exploring the mental health benefits of literature (you can sign up here). It's made by the author Paula Byrne and her husband, literary academic Jonathan Bate, and features interviews with Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Melveyn Bragg and others, about how poetry has helped them through difficult times.
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The modern Stoic movement, which brings together atheists and theists, is one example of a new friendship and alliance between people for whom metaphysical disagreements are less important than friendship and spiritual practice. The New Atheism wars are over, and a new messy spirituality has emerged.
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Sir Anthony Seldon is the former headmaster of Wellington College, one of the first schools to introduce well-being classes into its curriculum. He's also a co-founder of Action for Happiness. In his new book, Beyond Happiness, he suggests we need to look beyond 'workaday happiness' to find something more non-rational and spiritual, which he calls joy or bliss. I interviewed him about this, as well as his thoughts on the 'politics of well-being' and his plans to create the first 'positive university'.
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I gave up booze for Lent. This is long overdue - I have had a drink, usually more than one, pretty much every day for the last 20 years. Stoicism and booze helped me through PTSD and social anxiety. My stiff upper lip was soaked in beer. Twas ever thus - why do you think Edwardians called cocktails ‘stiffeners’?
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This week, I’ve been researching an ancient mnemonic technique called ‘the mind palace’, where people imprint a real or imagined building onto their memory - a palace, a mansion, a church, even a whole street - and then fill it with striking images, to which they attach bits of information they want to remember.
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I’ve been working on a book provisionally entitled Modern Ecstasy for the last two years. I’m half-way through, and having a mid-season wobble. Turns out it’s difficult to write about transcendence. Who knew!
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It’s that time of year again, when people all over Britain go off for the traditional New Year's Vipassana retreat. But not me - this year, I decided to keep it old school. I went on a Benedictine retreat.
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Earlier this week, my girlfriend and I toured around Yorkshire and Northumberland, once the stronghold of English medieval monasticism. We visited the beautiful ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, which once boasted the biggest church in England. As we wandered around the ruins, I wondered what we lost, when Henry VIII dissolved more than 1000 monasteries in five years.
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Peter Vardy is a theologian and perhaps the leading Religious Studies teacher in the country. After teaching theology at Heythrop College and writing several best-selling books on ethics and religious philosophy, he and his wife Charlotte - also a theologian - set up Candle Conferences, which runs huge events for RS students around the country.
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This weekend, I was at a conference in Boston called the International Symposium on Contemplative Studies. I know - sounds pretty niche, maybe two monks, a chakra healer and a shaman with maracas? Well, it was enormous - 1600 people, 300 presentations, including ones by some of the leading psychologists in the world, and the Dalai Lama.
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There are lots of reasons to be anxious at the moment: the recession, ISIS, ebola, the rise of far right parties across Europe. But there's one big reason to be cheerful, and to be proud of UK public policy: mental health.
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Sam Harris, the second-most-famous atheist in the world, is an unusual sort of atheist. On the one hand, he’s a neuroscientist who reveres the scientific method and despises the superstitious dogma of religion - so far, so normal.
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I sent out a tweet last week asking to interview someone who'd found mindfulness useful for coping with depression. Mary got in touch and told me her story, which was fascinating. I thought I'd share it for this week's newsletter.
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I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from 1995 until 2001. Seven years of fear, anxiety, depression and paranoia, which I feared would last forever. But I got better, thanks to a near-death experience.
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This year I’ve developed and trialled an eight-part course in practical philosophy, called Philosophies for Life. The pilot was financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via Queen Mary, University of London. I trialled the course with three partner organizations: Saracens rugby club; New College Lanarkshire and HMP Low Moss prison; and Manor Gardens mental health charity.
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It's been a busy couple of weeks, hence no newsletter last week. I feel like I am spinning plates at the moment. Luckily I'm off to Cornwall tomorrow to take it easy with some good friends. In the meantime, here are three insights I have taken from this weekend's wild adventure.
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Jane Davis says that literature saved her life. She grew up in a broken home, with a single mum who died of alcoholism. She left home and lived in squats, with a husband who also eventually died of substance abuse.
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I write this from York, where yesterday I went to the ‘Story of Chocolate’ museum, and was shown around by a delightful and learned historian, Alex Hutchinson, who is the world expert on the Rowntree family and thus able to tell me some fascinating family gossip.
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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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Yesterday I finished a pilot course in practical philosophy at Low Moss prison. It’s an eight-session course that introduces people to the ideas and life-philosophies of various ancient philosophers, including Socrates, the Stoics, Plato, Rumi, the Buddha, Jesus and Lao Tzu. I've been running it in partnership with New College Lanarkshire, which runs the learning courses in west Scottish prisons.
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I've been reading a very unusual book about sport, a classic really, called The Inner Game of Tennis, written by Tim Gallwey and published in 1974. I picked it up at a free bookstore in Holland. Two tennis players had recommended it to me as one of the few good books on tennis out there. What I didn't expect was it would be such a wise book about spirituality.
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Apologies for the lack of newsletters recently - I’ve been in the depths of a project to design and teach a course based on Philosophy for Life. This month, I started teaching it in three organizations - a mental health charity in London called Manor Gardens; Saracens rugby club; and Low Moss prison in Glasgow (via New College Lanarkshire, which runs learning courses there).
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Welcome to another PoW newsletter. At the moment I am deep in research for a project I am running at Queen Mary, University of London, looking at the history and contemporary rise of philosophy groups. The hope is it will build links between academic philosophy and 'street philosophy', and also encourage people to get involved with grassroots philosophy, by joining clubs or setting up their own.
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