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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On 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.
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This is an article by Joe, a young artist who I met at a London Buddhist Centre retreat last month, and whose story I drew on for my latest blog-post, Re-finding Your Joy. He told me his story on the retreat and I asked if I could interview him.
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Mindfulness 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.
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I’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.
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I went to see a publisher the other day, who said they had a project for me. The project turned out to be a series called ‘Great Philosophers’. Could I suggest any great living philosophers to write about, other than myself obviously? ‘How about a book about Kanye West?’ They laughed. Pause. ‘No, really. Make a series of little books about great cultural influencers. I’ll do one on Kanye West.’
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The fundamental mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the ‘psychosis’. The so-called ‘psychosis’ was an attempt towards spontaneous healing, it was a movement towards health, not a movement towards disease . . . it could be called mystical, a re-owning and discovery of parts of myself.
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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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This week I saw Tenzin Palmo speak at the Rigpa centre in London. She’s a remarkable woman, the daughter of a fishmonger from East London, who left Bethnal Green at the age of 20 to learn about the dharma in northern India. She became a Tibetan Buddhist nun – the second Western woman ever to do that – and then spent 12 years meditating in a Himalayan cave.
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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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I remember being publicly called 'spiritually immature' a few years back. It was in 2014. I was at a seminar for the RSA's Spirituality project. The seminar had gathered various wise folk all competing to display their wisdom, as was I.
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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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One of the topics I'm most passionate about is changing western culture's attitudes to spiritual experiences, so people not so afraid of them and keen to pathologize them, but are able to be open and friendly to unusual experiences when they arise, to see them as a gift.
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I'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.
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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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Milan 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.
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Psychosis. 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.
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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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I went to India for the first time last year. I'd always been drawn to ancient Indian philosophy, but had put off visiting the country until I had some time to dive in. It was, I guess you could say, 'spiritual tourism': travel for the purpose of spiritual growth.
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This essay is a personal opinion and may contain misunderstandings of my own. I'd be interested to hear from others with more knowledge and experience of ayahuasca, including indigenous healers or those who work closely with them.
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I've come back from India after an interesting three weeks. I went there with the vague intention to find a guru and take my spiritual practice to the next level. I say 'vague' because I wasn't quite sure how one went about finding a guru.
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One of the main insights of last year, for me, was that meditation and psychedelics are two useful spiritual practices that work well together. Meditation sharpens certain cognitive and emotional tools (concentration, acceptance, compassion) which help one ride the waves of psychedelic consciousness.
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The Listening Society is a new book by a writer called Hanzi Freinacht. He outlines a philosophy called metamodernism, which he says can be defined as an aesthetic movement, a developmental stage, and a political ideology.
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Back in the 1960s, many people thought psychedelics would save the world. Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now called Ram Dass) of Harvard University had a graph on their office wall, showing how long they thought it would take the entire human race to take LSD and become enlightened.
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The last few years I've been attempting to harmonize elements in my psyche - the rational and the ecstatic, or Socrates and Dionysus. I want to approach this idea today through the lens of Jungian psychology, and his idea of the two archetypes of the Puer Aeternus (or Divine Child) and the Senex (or Wise Old Man) - two aspects of the psyche which are superficially antagonistic but which actually need each other.
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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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This week I finished watching the new PBS documentary series, The Vietnam War, made by Ken Burns and Lynne Novick. It's a massive piece of work - 18 hours of footage from the last war when American journalists were allowed to roam pretty much wherever they wanted on the battlefield, and when presidents recorded their private conversations. You've never seen a war so close.
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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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I asked my Patreons what they'd like me to write about. Susanne wrote: 'I'm just learning about "emotional labour". I'd be interested to hear your take on it.' Sure, Susanne, here goes!
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In less than a month, I will be sitting in the Amazon jungle, tripping out on ayahuasca. I'm in the midst of my preparation for this nine-day retreat. I have to start the special diet - no pork, no alcohol, no drugs, and no masturbation. There goes my Friday night.
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This week, I read an interesting book that came out at the start of this year about the Black Lives Matter movement, called They Can't Kill Us All, by Wesley Lowery. It tells the story of one of the defining protest movements of this decade, which shone a light (or, rather, a phone camera) on American police's excessive use of force against black people.
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I've believed in reincarnation longer than I can remember. It must have started in a previous life. I've never really examined my core belief. It's just been there, part of the furniture. But a new book has stung me into examining that comfy old sofa. Do I really need it? Is it time to chuck it out?
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In October, I'm heading to the Amazon jungle in Peru to take part in an ayahuasca ritual at a place called the Temple of the Way of Light. I heard about it when I interviewed a novelist called Emma for The Art of Losing Control, who went there to try and help herself become pregnant after a series of miscarriages.
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With his unerring knack for the offensive, President Trump responded to last week's Nazi rally in Charlottesville, in which a young woman was murdered, with a condemnation of the 'violence on many sides'.
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It was when I took the escalator in Tottenham Court Road station that I realized quite how much Gay Pride has been embraced as a national festival. The entire tube station was festooned in rainbow colours, like a SuperMarioKart racetrack. Outside, a huge sign read Love is Love.
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Last 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'.
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This week I took the train out to Milton Keynes, then a taxi through the golden fields of Buckinghamshire to the University of Buckingham, where Sir Anthony Seldon recently became vice-chancellor. He was previously headmaster of Wellington School, where he became prominent for his advocacy of happiness classes. Now, he has brought that vision to higher education, outlining his plan to make Buckingham 'Europe's first positive university'.
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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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I've spent the last two days at Breaking Convention, a conference on psychedelics at the University of Greenwich organized by some brave academics. It's my favourite academic conference, by a long stretch.
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I covered a lot of different types of ecstatic experience in my book The Art of Losing Control - spontaneous ecstasy, ecstasy in nature, sexual ecstasy, psychedelic ecstasy, ecstasy through worship, war, sport, even the internet. I think it was one of the most comprehensive books on the subject - what few books there are on the topic tend to only cover positive experiences, and leave out stuff like, say, the ecstasy of mob violence.
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I think a lot of emotional problems arise from the fact we're both subjects and objects.
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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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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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100 years ago, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim was worried. He had just finished his epic study of the function of religion, which was published in 1912 as The Elementary Forms of Religion.
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26 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.
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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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There's a strange disjuncture in our culture. On the one hand, the majority of people hold spiritual or religious beliefs. In a ComRes poll in 2013, 59% of British people said they believe in spiritual forces (God, spirits, demons and so on), and 52% believed they affected life on Earth.
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I decided to learn scuba-diving while I was travelling in India. I took a flight from Chennai to the Andaman Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Burma. I stayed on Havelock Island, the most popular island for tourists. It has one incredible beach, soft white sand with barely anyone on it, and also some great diving sites off its coast with living coral - sadly, a rare thing these days.
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At the end of last year, an unusual article appeared in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. A single dose of a drug appeared to dramatically reduce anxiety and depression in those suffering from life-threatening cancer, far better than any other treatment. The drug was psilocybin, the psychedelic found in magic mushrooms.
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Depression is the leading cause of ill-health worldwide, but therapy is little known or practiced outside the West. If psychotherapy is going to become more popular in the non-western world, it needs to build bridges and find cultural parallels in local spiritual traditions. This is totally doable.
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Life can be stressful in Kolkata - the crowds, the poverty, the heat, the constant cacophony of car-horns. And that's just for me, a pampered western tourist. So how do the locals cope? More to the point, to what extent do locals seek therapy for mental health problems like depression, or for general life advice? To find out, I interviewed two Kolkata therapists, Mansi Poddar (left) and Charvi Jain (right), both of whom have successful local practices.
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There's a new book out later this month on the psychology of ecstatic experiences, and why they're good for us. It's called Stealing Fire, by two performance coaches, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. It might be disconcerting to have another book on ecstasy published two months before my own, but actually I'm glad others are walking the same path and coming to similar conclusions.
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Yesterday, I was at a panel on mental health in India, at a conference in Goa organized by UCL. One of the speakers – Ratnaboli Ray, who runs a mental health NGO called Anjali in West Bengal – asked for anyone in the audience who’d ever had mental illness or been on psychiatric drugs to raise their hands. For a few seconds, no one did. And then about 10 of us did, in a room of around 100.
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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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Arambol is a beach in the north of Goa, an old hippy hang out full of wizened old hippies and nubile young hipettes. Every night, there is a drumming circle as the sun sets. Last night, I danced in the circle, along with 30 or so other people, and worked up a sweat jacking my body to the syncopations, feeling my self dissolve to the beat. It was very pleasurable.
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Like a lot of people, I've been scrambling to make sense of the Trump victory and what it says about public attitudes in the US and western culture generally. I've spent this week researching the alt-right movement and reading some of its literature.
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I was planning to escape Brexit Britain by moving to America for a few years. Shit. So then, the day after the election, I tried to buy a Playstation Virtual Reality set. For real. That was my exit plan. Charlie Brooker seems to think it’s good, judging by his tweets.
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There is a growing consensus among secular psychologists that experiences of ecstasy and ego-transcendence are good for us, and tell us interesting things about the nature of the mind. But do they tell us anything interesting or reliable about the nature of the universe? I'm trying to figure this out. Here are my thoughts so far - please respond in the comments.
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I've been exploring the history of ecstasy in modern culture. One of the ways the Enlightenment tried to naturalize ecstasy was by developing the concept of hypnosis. In the 18th century, Franz Mesmer showed that he could achieve just as miraculous healings as a priest through his own rituals, the success of which he attributed to ‘magnetic fluids’.
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Can the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism help us in responding to acute political and personal problems? How does Stoicism reconcile the search for inner peace of mind with affection, love and social concerns?
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Here's the first episode of the new Living with Feeling podcast from the Centre for the History of Emotions - it's an interview by me with my favourite living writer, Geoff Dyer, about the theme of peak experiences in his writing.
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‘War’, wrote the French knight Jean de Bueil in 1465, ‘is a joyous thing’. War - and violence in general - is 'one of humankind’s great natural highs’, in the words of sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich. War absorbs our consciousness, heightens our senses, distorts times, bonds us to our fellow fighters, and can give us a sense of transcendent meaning and sacred value.
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I love the films of Jacques Audiard - Rust & Bone, A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and most recently Dheepan - though they also trouble me. Often in his films the hero has a moment of ecstasy or transcendence through violence. Violence is glamorized, aestheticized, even sacralized - moments of ultra-violence are moments of redemption for the hero, as in the bloody showdown at the end of Dheepan.
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Roger Scruton once wrote: ‘The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.’
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I'm researching ecstatic experiences for a book coming out next year. One chapter is on sex and ecstasy. There's not much research on this topic - hardly any in fact - so I need your help! Would you fill in this survey - it's very brief, completely anonymous, and would help me enormously. Thanks!
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I finally saw Get Out last night, and loved it. The film was laugh-out-loud funny, scary, and helped me somewhat imagine what it's like to be a black man walking through a white suburb, or a black man talking to a white police officer. How on your guard you need to be, the feeling of constantly being in enemy territory. Get out! But where can you escape to?
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