Western culture urgently needs to improve its cultural resources to help people make sense of ecstatic experiences. Evidence suggests that more and more people in western culture are having and seeking ecstatic experiences, because of the growing popularity of psychedelics and contemplative practices like meditation and yoga. However, we have scant cultural resources for making sense of such experiences.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreAs we’ve explored in previous newsletters, New Age culture has had something of a shocker during the pandemic. It has, in the words of Jamie Wheal, turned into a ‘rat’s nest shitshow’.
Read MoreRick Archer emerged from a troubled youth to become a leading teacher of Transcendental Meditation. 12 years ago, he left TM and started Buddha At The Gas Pump, a podcast where he interviews spiritual teachers. It now has millions of views and downloads. I talked to Rick about how spirituality has changed since he first started meditating in 1968, and how he thinks New Age culture has fared during the COVID pandemic.
Read MoreThe most common criticism of spirituality is that its narcissistic, consumerist, selfish, apolitical and full of woo-woo magical thinking. That can be true, but not always. There’s one area where spirituality is much less individualistic, more politically active and more prone to evidence-based thinking than other faiths — and that’s regarding the environment.
Read MoreMichael Murphy co-founded Esalen, a cross between an adult education college, a research institute, and an ashram, in 1962. It’s had a huge influence on contemporary spirituality, and was the incubator for everything from ecstatic dance to Authentic Relating to holotropic breathwork. Here, Murphy tells me how he was inspired by his friends, Alan Watts, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, and how Esalen managed to keep going for 53 years, when so many spiritual experiments went very wrong very quickly.
Read MoreIn The Art of Losing Control, I wrote about spirituality as being like jazz improvisation. You inherit a set of standards from your culture, and from other cultures. And it helps if you really familiarize yourself with one particular tradition. But from there, you can improvise, you can bring different elements into contact with each other, you can find your song, your unique expression of Universal Consciousness.
Read MoreHis simple, hopeful message - humanity is waking up and you are a part of this great evolution - made more sense in 1999. What does he have to say to 2019? I went to see him speak in London, to find out.
Read MorePeople 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.
Read MoreWe’re in the vale of ambiguity. Things are not clear in this dimension. That’s part of the agony and excitement. It’s like the early stage of a romance, when it’s not clear if it’s a serious relationship or not, or is it perhaps the relationship…or is it just a rush?
Read MoreRowan Williams on the role that mysticism and spirituality can play in helping us confront the systematic unreality of our economic and cultural system.
Read MoreWe’re constantly getting hooked by our thoughts, beliefs and feelings, getting lost in the drama. But luckily, there’s a host of defusion techniques we can use to defuse, from ACT, CBT, Stoicism, Buddhism and many other therapeutic traditions. Here are 10 of my favourite.
Read MoreAs 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’.
Read MoreWhile 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.
Read MoreLast 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).
Read MoreOn a recent retreat I met Joe, an artist in his mid-20s. Joe reminded me of an Elizabethan artist – it might have been his goatee, or his air of punchy independence mixed with free-wheeling romance.
Read MoreMindfulness has become such an unobtrusive part of our cultural landscape that we can forget how radical and counter-cultural Buddhism really is. It’s become subsumed into the well-being movement: if we take five minutes to close our eyes, breathe slowly and relax, then we can live our normal lives on a slightly happier and more even keel. That’s the promise of mindfulness.
Read MoreI’m back from a 10-day meditation retreat, at Vajrasana in sunny Suffolk. That might seem a bit of a doss, but it’s also an investment – I really want to improve my meditation practice, for my benefit and others', and it’s ten times easier to learn on retreat than at home. It’s like trying to light a match indoors versus trying to light it on the top of a windy hill.
Read MoreSpiritual 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreI'm travelling in Mexico, researching the indigenous culture of magic mushrooms, or hongos as they are called here. Last weekend, I visited Huautla de Jimenez, a town eight hours drive from Mexico City, in the state of Oaxaca.
Read MoreHere 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.
Read MoreMilan Scheidegger is one of the most interesting young researchers in psychedelics, because he integrates several different perspectives. He's a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, who's spent a decade studying the effect of psychedelics on subjects in a laboratory, and on a meditation retreat.
Read MorePsychosis. Scary word isn't it? These days we think nothing less of a person if they publicly disclose they get depression, or anxiety. We applaud them for being brave, although they're not really risking anything.
Read MoreA friend emailed me asking about retreats, whether they're useful, and how one goes about picking one.
Read MoreLast month I attended a conference at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion called Religion, Society and the Science of Life. The premise was that there is something called the 'new biology' which is perhaps more sympathetic to religious or spiritual views of existence than the 'old biology'.
Read More26 years ago, when Twin Peaks first aired, I was a 13-year old boy, in my first year at an all-male boarding school. I was coming up on testosterone, discovering booze, porn and drugs, yearning for escapism. And I found it in Twin Peaks.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreIs there such a thing as 'individual genius' or is it a product of collective socio-cultural circumstances? This article explores two views, associated with David Bowie and Brian Eno.
Read MoreI was driving along a motorway at roughly 70 mph when I realised suddenly that I was not in control. I’d gone somewhere else, and spent the last five minutes or so thinking about my book in some virtual study in my mind. And yet, despite the car being unmanned as it hurtled down the A40, it did not crash.
Read MoreProfessor Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago is the leading historian of Christian mysticism. He's written five of a projected seven volumes of his history of mysticism, called The Presence of God, which have traced the evolution of Christian mysticism from Jesus to the 1550s.
Read MoreLast weekend I went to Wilderness festival and gave a couple of talks. It was a magical festival - the musical acts weren’t that stunning, but there was lots of marvelous, weird, dreamy stuff happening that I wandered into, like a Mardi Gras parade and a mock fertility ritual with a man dressed as a penis and a woman dressed as a vagina. It was all very Dionysian.
Read MoreI’ve been reading Pierre Hadot’s book on Plotinus. It’s marvellous - only 100 pages long, yet so much wisdom and poetry in it. My favourite passage in it is when Hadot talks about the ‘levels of the self’.
Read MoreSir 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'.
Read MoreOne of the things I want to argue in my next book is that ecstatic experiences have been pathologised in the secular west, to our detriment. People still experience ecstasy - by which I mean moments where we go beyond the self and feel connected to something bigger than us, usually a spirit but also sometimes another individual or group - but we lack the framework to make sense of such experiences.
Read MoreIt’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.
Read MoreEarlier 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.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreA lot of modern technology, particularly social media, is a technology for selfing. This is why we're so addicted to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc (well, I am anyway). They're technologies for Selfing. Every post and tweet, we're making another little carving in the epic construction of our Public Self, then we wait to see how many likes we get.
Read MoreIn my review of Sam Harris’ Waking Up two weeks ago, I wrote this sentence: "Spiritual experiences tell us something about the cosmos,...the experience of infinite loving-consciousness is a glimpse of the very ground of being, also sometimes called God, Brahman, Allah, the Logos, the Tao, the Buddha-realm."
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreLast week I got the chance to interview the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, for my research on spiritual ecstasy. It was an informal conversation, and it was very kind of the Bishop to give me the benefit of his time and wisdom. I thought he'd be a good interviewee because of his interest in contemplative practices and in Christian mystics like Thomas Traherne. And he was!
Read MoreI 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.
Read More100 years ago this year, James Joyce published Dubliners, his first book, in which he explored the lives of characters through what he called ‘epiphanies’. He’d been experimenting with epiphanies for some years, and even started to write a ‘book of epiphanies’, which he intended - with customary modesty - to send to every library in the world. You can read some of them here.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreApologies 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).
Read MoreWhen I was six, my best friend Joe and I could give ourselves head-rushes by contemplating the size of the universe. We let our imaginations rise from the Earth, to the Solar System, to the Milky Way, and then stretched our imaginations as far as they would go to comprehend the universe. Then we’d wonder what was beyond that, and for a second we’d feel a sort of dizziness at the mystery in which we found ourselves.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreIn my research into ecstatic experiences, I've become interested in the idea of poetry as a door to transcendence. Has our imagination withered as scientific materialism became the dominant world-view? Have we lost poetry's subtler way of knowing in our desire for quantifiable and testable facts? Can we get it back?
Read MoreWhen Dr Robin Carhart-Harris finished his masters in psychoanalysis in 2005, he decided he wanted to do a brain- imaging study of LSD to see if he could locate the ego and the unconscious. That might have seemed an impossible dream, considering he had no neuroscientific experience and there had been no scientific research into psychedelics in the UK for over three decades.
Read MoreAround a quarter of the world's two billion Christians now sign up to the Pentecostalist or neo-Pentecostalist belief that God talks to them. That includes some educated people like, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. How is this possible, in an era of rising education and living standards? Is the world going mental? One social scientist who has looked into the question deeply is Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who brought out an excellent book last year called When God Talks Back.
Read MoreI’ve just re-read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, which he gave as a series of lectures in 1902. It is a marvelous book, in which James attempts to take a pragmatic and empirical approach to religious experiences, remaining open to the question of where such experiences come from, and evaluating them by looking at their impact on people’s lives. In other words, he looks at the fruits, not the roots, of religious experience.
Read MoreSimon 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.
Read MoreHere are some quotes from my favourite living artist, David Lynch, about the creative process. They're from Chris Rodley's book, Lynch on Lynch:
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