Ecstatic Integration

‘Improving Western culture’s ecstatic literacy’.

Jules Evans, the editor of EI, is a philosopher, researcher and author of several books including Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (2012), The Art of Losing Control (2017), and Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency (2020). He has spent his working life thinking and writing about ecstatic experiences, how people find them and make sense of them, when they can be good or bad for us and for our societies, and how western culture can improve its ecstatic literacy and develop better maps, guides and containers for journeys beyond the self. Over the last two decades he’s written for organisations including The Times, The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman, Aeon, BBC Radio 4, BBC 2, Audible and the Financial Times. Benzinga listed him as one of 30 ‘movers and shakers’ in psychedelic culture in 2024.

‘Jules shows us philosophy is not just for the classroom. It’s also for life’. Matthew Syed, picking Philosophy for Life as a Times book of the year.

‘I have really been enjoying Jules Evans’ posts of late. Big props to his work on the dark side of psychedelics: not just critiquing the hypesters and chancers but getting into the murky ambiguities, like demons, entities, and brujos.’ Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness

‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' Steve Taylor, author of The Leap

‘Breaking Open is the best book on spiritual emergencies out there’. Daniel Ingram, Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium

‘Yours is an important voice in the field.’ Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins

Ecstatic Integration also features other critical expert voices on ecstatic experiences, ethics, risk and harm reduction, such as Ed Prideaux and Joseph Holcomb Adams, and its essays draw on interviews with many of the leading thinkers on and practitioners with ecstatic and psychedelic experiences.

EI is a sister project to The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which launched in September 2022, and is the leading research and public communication project on psychedelic and ecstatic ethics, integration and harm reduction. CPEP produces academic research on adverse psychedelic experiences, enduring post-trip difficulties, and what helps people deal with them. CPEP receives donations from philanthropists for its research on psychedelic safety, including Emergence Benefactors, the William G Nash Foundation and the Sarlo Family. One donor prefers to remain private - they’re a family foundation with no personal or commercial interests in psychedelic industry or culture. No CPEP donors have any say on what is written in this Substack.

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