At the third level, we can explain ecstatic experiences as socio-cultural phenomena. This was the approach taken by the sociologist Émile Durkheim, by anthropologists like Victor Turner and I. M. Lewis, and by social psychologists including Jonathan Haidt.23 We can look at how rituals trigger ecstatic experiences in groups, and bond those groups together in what Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’. We learn how to lose control from our culture – for example, the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann studied how people in charismatic churches learn to speak in tongues.24 Cultural history helps us examine the rituals, forms and structures through which people have dissolved their egos over time, from acid house to jihadism, from flagellants to football hooligans. Humans are constantly improvising new scripts, new ways to lose control, and these new scripts spread virally through groups like a medieval dancing plague.
There are long and bitter academic disputes between these three ways of explaining ecstasy but the three levels interact in fascinating ways. In a Pentecostal church, for example, the ritual of worship absorbs and alters people’s consciousness, which triggers deep reactions in their brains and autonomic nervous systems.
And then there is the fourth level, the spiritual level of explanation. People sometimes describe their ecstatic experiences as an encounter with some Other beyond the human. This is the level at which academic science gets embarrassed and fidgety. It’s easy to dismiss this level as woo-woo, because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to falsify people’s accounts. But before we reject people’s beliefs as nonsense, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what we don’t know: we don’t know what consciousness is, we don’t know how our consciousness is connected to other beings and to matter, we don’t know if there are intelligences higher than humans, we don’t know if consciousness survives death. Nor am I going to try to answer any of these questions definitively.
At the spiritual level of explanation, we can follow the lead of William James: he thought there may be a spiritual dimension (or dimensions) to reality, which humans are not usually aware of, but which we sometimes connect to in moments of ecstasy. But he remained agnostic, as I will throughout this book. What we can do is honestly describe our own experience, and the experience of others: did it feel to you as if you were connecting to some spiritual entity or power? And we can look at the fruits of such experiences in our lives. Did it lead to healing, inspiration and flourishing, or was it bad for you?
Ecstasy is healing, inspiring and socially connecting
Ecstasy is very often good for us. First, ecstatic experiences can be profoundly healing. Stoic philosophy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) teach that the way to heal negative emotions is to use rationality to examine and change our thoughts and beliefs. However, CBT heals only 40 to 50 per cent of cases of anxiety and depression; many find it too rational and cerebral. There’s an alternative model of the emotions and how to change them, put forward by William James,25 and refined by neurophysiologists such as Antonio Damasio and Stephen Porges. In James’ model, emotions arise not only through thoughts, but also through gut reactions in our autonomic nervous system. In James’ model, you can change your emotions not just from the top-down, using rationality, but also from the bottom-up, through the body – by altering your breath, exercising, singing or dancing, listening to music, going for a walk in nature, having sex, eating, taking intoxicants, and so on. James also taught that we can heal the psyche through non-rational states of consciousness – flow states, spiritual experiences, trances, dreams, psychedelic trips – which dissolve the rigid walls of the ordinary ego and tap into the healing power of the subliminal mind. This can liberate people from ingrained psychophysical habits, like depression, fatigue or addiction. Most cultures in the world have rituals in which people find healing through ecstatic surrender. Aristotle, despite being a rationalist, recognised that such rituals have ‘an orgiastic effect on the soul’ through which people ‘are restored as if they had undergone a curative and purifying treatment’.26
Second, ecstatic experiences can be inspiring – a word that has its roots in classical and Christian ideas of spirits breathing into us. Plato insisted that artistic inspiration comes from ‘divine madness’, and many artists and scientists say some of their greatest inventions and creations come to them through subliminal states of consciousness, and feel like a gift from ‘beyond’ (although they differ in their explanations of what that ‘beyond’ is).
Third, ecstatic experiences are connecting. Ecstasy is the experience of bursting beyond the walls of the ego and feeling a sense of love-connection to other beings. Ecstatic rituals create the feeling of communitas, agape, goodwill or tribal unity. Secular modernity shaped us into walled-off rational selves disconnected from our subliminal mind, our bodies, each other, the natural world and (perhaps) from God. It’s boring and lonely to be stuck in that rickety old shed. Émile Durkheim warned that modern Western society, lacking an outlet for ‘collective effervescence’, risked descending into anomie, loneliness and mental illness. His prediction proved prescient: in a 2010 survey, 35 per cent of Americans over 45 said they felt lonely much of the time; two-fifths of older people in the UK said the television was their main company; 10 per cent of British people said they don’t have a single close friend; one in five said they felt unloved.27 We need outlets for more ecstatic connection in our societies, or people turn to toxic communities, like cults, gangs, and networks of addiction.
Finally, moments of ecstasy can give people a sense of meaning and hope in the face of death. We feel connected to nature, to the cosmos, and perhaps to God in some form or other, and this can give us a sense of identity beyond the ‘I’, and the hope that perhaps something in us survives beyond death. I’m not going to try to prove the immortality of the soul, but it’s certainly the case that people emerged from Greek or Christian ecstatic cults able to ‘die with a better hope’, in Cicero’s words. Likewise, people emerge from near-death experiences less afraid of death. Several recent trials found that psychedelics dramatically reduce depression and anxiety in the terminally ill by triggering mystical experiences. A more ecstatic society may transform our attitude to death.
The dark side of ecstasy
But it ain’t all roses. There are risks to ecstasy too. When you dissolve the ego, you can be flooded with repressed aspects of the psyche – what Jung called ‘the shadow’. We’ll examine the difficult experiences people can have through meditation, and also through psychedelics. Spontaneous spiritual experiences also have their risks: people can become grandiose, suffer ego-inflation or convince themselves that they’re the Messiah.
When we’re in states of deep absorption, our critical rationality is suspended and we become highly suggestible. That can be healing if you’re in a safe and nurturing environment, less so if you’re in a cult. As I mentioned, the spiritual supernova of the 1960s led to a proliferation of cults, from Jonestown to the Manson Family. Daesh, or ISIS, has many of the features of a charismatic death-cult. The flipside of the ecstatic sense of togetherness is a paranoid demonisation of outsiders - the world becomes neatly divided into Us versus Them. At the extreme, the sense of a cosmic battle can lead to the dark catharsis of blood-sacrifice: the demonic outsiders become the scapegoat, whose blood will purge the body politic.
But the most common risk in our culture is that we become unhealthily obsessed with the ecstatic. Modern spirituality can become all about the peaks, the rapture, the ‘God-like hours’. Spirituality can become commodified into an ecstatic experience economy - this moment of transcendence was brought to you by Red Bull. The obsession with heightened experiences can lead to an unattractive spiritual entitlement: you don’t get it unless you’ve spoken in tongues/been to Burning Man/taken magic mushrooms. And we might never put in the hard work to turn the epiphany into durable habits. Abraham Maslow warned: ‘Peak emotions may come without any