I’ve imagined the book as a festival, with each chapter as a different tent or zone. Each tent explores a different way that people find ecstasy in modern Western culture. As at a festival, in some tents you’ll feel at home; others might seem a bit weird, but just go with it and see what happens. Not everyone you meet will be trustworthy but I’ll try to point out the dodgy geezers. I hope the book provides a map to help people find the good stuff at the festival, while avoiding the risks.
One of the most useful ideas to keep in mind, as we navigate through the festival, is sixties psychedelic guru Timothy Leary’s emphasis on ‘set and setting’. ‘Set’ means the mindset or intention one brings to an ecstatic experience. When we journey beyond the ego, we can have euphoric or terrifying experiences, and it’s important to maintain equanimity and not give way to mania or panic. At the moment, Western culture is inclined to what the religious scholar Karen Armstrong calls ‘unbalanced ekstasis’ – either we’re terrified of it, as a consequence of the Enlightenment, or we’re manically attached to it, as charismatic Christianity and New Age spirituality can be. We need to try to greet whatever comes our way with equanimity. The other important intention to cultivate is humility and compassion. There’s a real risk, when you go beyond the normal bounds of the ego, that you succumb to pride and ego-inflation. Humility, from the Latin humus meaning earth, helps us to ‘earth’ ecstasy, in Armstrong’s words, to prevent it ‘from becoming selfish and self-indulgent, and give it moral direction’.29
The second part of Leary’s ‘set and setting’ concerns the context in which an ecstatic experience takes place. Context has a decisive effect on the outcome of ecstatic experiences, and on whether they’re healthy or toxic. We’ll explore many different cultural contexts for modern ecstasy, from New Age rituals to rock festivals to charismatic churches to extremist gangs. Some communities I really immersed myself in, others I skirted at the edges of. You might say this approach is typically post-modern – a sort of spiritual bungee-jumping where one dips into traditions without ever swimming in the deep end. Maybe so. But it’s not my intention to convert you to any particular religion. It’s up to you to choose which tent you want to stay in.
The festival begins with spontaneous spiritual experiences. Then we look at how we can actively seek these experiences and integrate them into our life. We explore the world of ecstatic Christianity, then explore how the arts and rock and roll have become alternative ‘churches for the unchurched’. Next we find ecstasy through drugs, sex and contemplation, before considering the ecstasy of war and extreme sports. In the penultimate chapter we consider how ecstatic experiences connect us to nature; and finally we explore transhumanism, and the idea that technology enables us to transcend our humanity and become gods.
Remember, I’m not suggesting Western civilisation should become a permanent festival of ecstasy. That would be dangerous escapism, not to say impractical. The ecstasy of Dionysus (the Greek god of intoxication) needs to be balanced with the rational scepticism of Socrates. Without Dionysus, Socratic rationality is arid and soulless, but without Socratic reflection and practice, Dionysiac ecstasy is just a rush. It’s only through repeated practice that epiphanies become habits – the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield wrote: ‘After the ecstasy, the laundry.’30
In Aldous Huxley’s Island, one character ponders: ‘Which did more for morality and rational behaviour – the Bacchic orgies or The Republic? The Nicomachean Ethics or the maenads?’ To which the reply is given, ‘The Greeks were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads . . . All we’ve done is take a leaf out of the old Greek book.’
Now it’s time to enter the festival. Let’s head to the Entrance Gate, to explore spontaneous spiritual experiences.
1: The Entrance Gate
In the winter of 1958, a 17-year old American named Barbara Alexander wandered into the tiny town of Lone Pine, California. She’d spent the night in a car with two friends, hadn’t slept, and had barely eaten in days. As the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada, she left her two friends sleeping in the car by the highway, and wandered through the desert and into town. She walked through the empty streets, and then suddenly:
the world flamed into life . . . There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All’, as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once . . . Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, ‘inside’ and out, the only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.1
The experience – or ‘encounter’ as she thought of it back then – didn’t burst out of nowhere. For some years, Barbara had experienced moments of dissociative absorption, when something ‘peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words’ and she felt plunged into ‘the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed upon world arises’. She was also a depressed, introspective and solitary teenager, with an alcoholic father, a suicidal mother, and few friends or boyfriends. She was gripped by a search for life’s meaning, torn between a reductive materialism and the Romantic mysticism of Dostoevsky and Walt Whitman.
The encounter seemed a response to her searching. But who or what had she encountered? She had no religion to make sense of it – she had come back from a Baptist summer-camp contemptuous of the ‘mental degenerates’ she’d met there. Her confusion and sense of loss when the moment failed to reoccur led to a half-hearted suicide attempt. And then, gradually, she grew up and joined the human race: she went to college, took a PhD in cellular immunology, got married, had kids. When lab work seemed too dry for her, she became a freelance writer and campaigner for socialism and feminism. Like others in the progressive movement, she was a committed atheist, and wrote off her teenage experience as a mental disorder, possibly even an attack of schizophrenia. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling she’d betrayed her younger self.
In middle age, she experienced the ‘return of the repressed’. She started to write about the history of ecstasy, first about the ecstasy of war in her 1997 book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, and then the ecstasy of dancing in her 2006 book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, both of which were big inspirations for this book. Barbara Ehrenreich, as she was called by then, was engaging with her own past through the medium of third-person cultural history. And then in 2014 she took the plunge and wrote a first-person account of her own spiritual experiences, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. She has decided her teenage experiences really were ‘encounters’ with spiritual beings, but she still isn’t sure who They are, what Their purpose is, whether They even care about humans. She is worried her fellow scientific atheists will think she is insane (‘when good sceptics go bad’ is how leading atheist Jerry Coyne reacted) but she insists she remains committed to rational empiricism. ‘I want science to look at these odder phenomena,’ she told one perplexed fellow atheist in an interview, ‘and not rule out the possibility of mystical experiences. We need databases. It is unexamined, the data that might be there . . . This is going to sound totally crazy to you but this is a public health issue! When people have a shattering type of experience and never say anything about it, it is time to investigate.’2
The science of spontaneous spiritual experiences
In fact, such a database already exists. In an unassuming building in the Welsh town of Lampeter there is a room full of cardboard boxes, and in those boxes – like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark – there is a collection of 6,000 accounts of people’s spiritual experiences, filed and classified for scientific research. A crowd-sourced Bible stuffed with so many revelations