But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was trying to get an internet connection. I was expecting an important email. I checked my phone again. Still nothing. I was in a tetchy mood. I’d come up there for a peaceful getaway from London, but was disturbed until the early hours by a wedding party in the hotel bar, then awakened at six by sea-gulls cackling at me from the street outside. Bloody sea-gulls. Bloody wedding party. Bloody internet. Bloody beach.
And then something changed. I started to enjoy the walk, the exertion, the feel of the wind on my face, the give of the damp sand under my boots. The rhythm of walking calmed my mind. The waves washed in, nibbled at my boots, and washed out again. A Labrador ran up and wagged hello. I looked up and noticed quite how huge the sky was. It was streaked with thin white wisps, like marble, lit up by the sun setting behind the castle, and the light was reflected in the water on the sand.
It was as if the world was exploding with fiery intelligence. It filled me with an almost painful sense of its beauty. Yet this was just one moment in one corner of Earth, more or less unnoticed, except by the handful of people walking along the beach. My heart lifted with gratitude for this planet of endless free gifts.
I set off for my hotel in a completely different mood. I felt lifted beyond the narrow anxiousness of my ordinary ego, switched into a more open, appreciative and peaceful mindset. I thought about taking a photo of the sunset and sharing it on Facebook. And then I thought, ‘No, there’s no need to go begging for others’ likes.’ Just enjoy the moment without trying to convert it into social capital. But, obviously, I did take a photo, and I did post it on Facebook. It got ninety-one likes!
Our basic need for transcendence
In some ways, that moment was quite ordinary. It was just one of those moments that come along now and then, when our consciousness expands beyond its usual self-obsessed anxiousness into a more peaceful, absorbed and transcendent state of mind. It can happen when we’re sitting on a bus, playing with our children, reading a book, walking in the park. Something catches our attention, we become rapt, our breath deepens, and life quietly shifts from a burden to a wonder. These are the little moments when we expand beyond the ego, and they’re deeply regenerative.
The writer Aldous Huxley argued that all humans have a ‘deep-seated urge to self-transcendence’. He wrote: ‘Always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in Wordsworthian phrase “far more deeply infused”.’1 The psychologist Abraham Maslow likewise thought humans have a fundamental need for ‘peak experiences’ in which they go beyond the self and feel connected to something bigger than them.2 More recently, the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi wrote of how humans all seek ‘flow’, by which he meant moments in which we become so absorbed in something that we lose track of time and forget ourselves.3
The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called it ‘unselfing’. She wrote: ‘We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals our world.’ But this anxious ego-consciousness can shift through focused attention, particularly when we’re absorbed by something beautiful, like a painting or a landscape. Murdoch continued: ‘I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.’4
All of us need to find ways to unself. Civilisation makes great demands of us: we must control our bodies, inhibit our impulses, manage our emotions, ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. We must play our role in the great complex web of globalised capitalism. Our egos have evolved to help us survive and compete, and they do a good job at this, by spending every second of the day scanning the horizon for opportunities and threats, like a watchman on Bamburgh Castle looking out for Vikings. But the self we construct is an exhausting place to be stuck all the time. It’s isolated, cut off by walls of fear and shame, besieged by worries and ambitions, and conscious of its own smallness and impending mortality. That’s why we need to let go, every now and then, or we get bored, exhausted and depressed.
From flow to ecstasy
We all have our own ways to unself, during the day and throughout the week. My former housemate had a bath-time ritual – he’d light candles, play music through a little speaker, add various oils to the water, and get into the bath for up to an hour. Others might lose themselves in a book, or gardening, or going for a walk. Playing tennis is my favourite way to forget myself – I sometimes reach a moment when the normal ego-chatter dies down, my attention becomes absorbed, and life is blissfully reduced to the area of the tennis court.
And then there are the deeper forms of ego-loss that people find in deep contemplation, or psychedelics, or during incredible sex, or in close brushes with death, or through spontaneous transcendent experiences. In profound moments of ego-loss, people feel deeply connected to something greater than them – nature, the cosmos, humanity, God – to the extent they go beyond any sense of ‘I’ and ‘you’. In mystical literature, these deeper moments of ego-loss are known as ‘ecstasy’, from the ancient Greek ekstasis, which literally means ‘standing outside’ the self. Today, we think of ‘ecstatic’ as meaning ‘very, very happy’, but ego-loss can also be terrifying. As psychedelic researcher Gordon Wasson wrote: ‘In common parlance ecstasy is fun. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.’5 These deeper experiences are rare, but many of us have experienced them – in a survey I did in 2016, I asked respondents if they’d ever had an experience where they went beyond their ordinary self and felt connected to something bigger than them (this is my working definition of ecstasy). Eighty per cent of respondents said they had – this included Christians, atheists, agnostics, and ‘spiritual but not religious’ people.
As Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has shown, there is a continuum between the everyday moments of light ego-loss, which he called ‘flow’, and the much deeper moments of ego-loss which the mystics called ‘ecstasy’. He told me: ‘Flow is a kind of toned-down ecstasy, something that has some of the characteristics of ecstasy – the feeling that you’re losing yourself in something larger, the sense of time disappearing – but flow happens in conditions that are usually rather mundane. It can happen washing the dishes or reading a good book or having a conversation. It’s a kind of experience which culminates in ecstasy.’
Healthy and toxic transcendence
Everyone seeks ways to turn off the ego’s chatter and feel a sense of connection to other people and the world. However, there are better and worse ways of reaching this state. There is healthy transcendence, which improves our life and our society, and there is toxic transcendence, which damages us and our society. Any method of letting go, however innocuous, can become problematic. We could become addicted to switching off the mind with a bottle of wine every night, or junk TV, or a spliff, or Valium, or porn, or heroin, or violence. One in four people in the UK is obese, one in twelve suffers from alcohol dependency, millions of Americans are addicted to the $10 billion opiate-painkiller industry, and we’re all addicted to the internet.6 The actor Martin Sheen, a recovering alcoholic, has said that addiction is really a misdirected search for transcendence, connection and love. Aldous Huxley called it downward transcendence – we turn off the mind, but in an unhealthy way.
How we let go, then, is a question of fundamental importance for us and for our society. Do you let go in ways that are healthy or toxic? Does our society offer us good ways of losing control, or does it offer only shallow and toxic forms of transcendence? The critic Susan Sontag warned of the ‘traumatic failure of modern capitalist society . . . to satisfy