Nine non-psychedelic paths to transcendence

From dreams to festivals, from violence to quiet domesticity...

The Art of Losing Control imagined a ‘festival of ecstasy’ with 10 different areas, each describing a different route to ecstatic experiences….

Next month we’re hosting an event about reporting on the psychedelic renaissance, featuring some of the top journalists in the space - free tickets here. One thing I’ve noticed while covering the field is there can be a tendency for people to fixate on psychedelics and see them as The Most Important Thing in the World. You get people for whom psychedelics are apparently their entire identity - they leave their career in marketing mid-life to become psychedelic coaches, they have little mushroom symbols after their name on LinkedIn, they sign their emails ‘Mush Love’.

Theodore Roszak noted the same tendency in his 1968 book The Making of a Counter-Culture. He wrote:

At the level of disaffiliated adolescence, the prospect held forth by psychedelic experience – that of consciousness expansion – is bound to prove abortive. The psychedelics, dropped into amorphous and alienated personalities, have precisely the reverse effect: they diminish consciousness by way of fixation…What is obvious….is that the psychedelics are a heavyweight obsession which too many of the young cannot get over or get around.

It’s good to remind ourselves that there are other routes beyond the ordinary ego. So here, for the end of the year, are nine non-psychedelic avenues beyond the self, with links to articles I wrote while working on The Art of Losing Control, my 2017 book about ecstatic experiences.

1. Spontaneous ecstatic experiences

Here’s an article I wrote about ecstatic experiences for Aeon magazine back in 2017. While researching TAOLC, I spent hours pouring through the files of the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Centre’s database. It contains over 6000 reports of ecstatic experiences, amassed since the founding of the centre in 1969 - everything from UFO encounters to ecstatic experiences at the dentist. They make for a strangely beautiful read, a sort of crowdsourced Bible. Here is entry number 208:

I was out walking one night in busy streets of Glasgow when, with slow majesty, at a corner where the pedestrians were hurrying by and the city traffic was hurtling on its way, the air was filled with heavenly music, and an all-encompassing light, that moved in waves of luminous colour, outshone the brightness of the lighted streets. I stood still, filled with a strange peace and joy … until I found myself in the everyday world again with a strange access of gladness and of love.

I love that sort of spontaneous ecstatic experience. Here’s NYT columnist David Brooks describing another:

One morning in April I was on the subway near Penn Station. Subway stations - possibly the ugliest place on the face of the Earth. But I looked around this subway car, and had the sense that everyone in it had souls - that every single person in the world has something in them that gives them infinite value and dignity…It felt enchanted. There’s not just materialist atoms, there’s some force in the universe.

2. Near-death experiences

I had a near-death experience in 2004 (or thereabouts), which transformed my life. I recently wrote this article about it, and about NDEs in general, for a project called Coming Home, which collects people’s accounts of NDEs.

In the Hall of the Mountain King

3. Dreams

In 2016 I carried out an online survey of over 500 people, to see whether they ever found dreams useful in their life, and to test out Jung’s theory of ‘big dreams’ — unusually vivid dreams which occur in times of transition and crisis and which offer helpful support or guidance. Almost 80% of people said they found dreams helpful sometimes — though, as Jung suggested, such dreams are relatively rare (27% said they had fewer than 10 such dreams in their life) and they tend to occur in times of transition and crisis. Talking of Jung, here’s a ten-minute radio programme I made for BBC Radio 4 on Jung’s idea of the Shadow.

After the paywall, an end-of-year feast of more links on ego-transcendence via the arts, nature, sex, violence, meditation and…domesticity!