Canongate, 2018.
This is a fascinating journey/adventure, escorted by somebody who has a very different outlook on life and who’s had very different life experiences. Jules is a philosopher – but not one of those pipe-smoking old men in shirt, tie and old cardigan, sitting in an armchair talking about abstract ideas. Jules is a raver, a `90s young man, familiar and comfortable with life in the early 21st century.
I like the overarching simile for the book’s organisation. Jules imagines the book as a series of different sections of a music festival. We get the sitemap to ‘The Festival of Ecstasy’ as we arrive and note that there’s a lot going on, lots to see and do. Beyond the entrance gate; revival tent and ecstatic cinema, there’s a main stage for live music, a psychedelic wonderland, a quiet contemplation zone, a tantric love temple and a mosh pit. After all that we can explore the forest of wonder before learning about futureland.
So, where do we begin? Jules draws us into the festival site, explaining, as we go, that humans have always sought out ways to transcend our humdrum lives. He nods to Aldous Huxley. Abraham Maslow, Wordsworth , Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as we pass them and explains how each of them dug into this need for transcendence. Iris Murdoch stops to explain that we need to ‘unself’, to get beyond our anxious, self-preoccupied worlds. To get there we must leave our selfness behind, as we do when we are caught up in a moment of natural or created sublimity that enables us to escape our egos.
Jules explains about himself, that he teaches Stoic philosophy but noticed that this didn’t fully explain our lives and failed to connect people together in community. So, he decided to learn to let go. He talks about Western culture’s problematic relationship with ecstasy and briefly explains the history that brought us to now. The Enlightenment was a pivotal period when philosophically and spiritually the culture embraced rationalism to the exclusion of all else. Yet, in the last generation, there has been a resurgence in interest in ecstasy, and the small streams that kept it alive as an idea over the last four centuries have been sought out and brought back to our cultural consciousness.
In the Revival Tent we join Jules on an Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. In the Ecstatic Cinema we learn about how the arts have been used to open people up to transcendent experience. The arts includes music and, at the Main Stage we hear about how Rock and Roll has been used, both the music and the dance to achieve ecstasy.
The Psychedelic Wonderland is a journey through history, mushrooms and the investigation of psychedelic chemicals. The massive block on the use of such compounds to benefit people seems to be dissolving and interest and research is pushing forward again.
In the Contemplation Tent we catch our breath and think about what we’ve learned. But there’s a lot here to digest, too. Christian contemplation, Buddhist meditation (Vapassana), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), all leading to the recent science of mindfulness. Jules warns us not to get attached to the rapture – both pathologising ecstatic experiences and becoming seduced by spiritual delights are dangerous.
The Tantric Love Temple is next. Jules attended a ‘conscious sexuality’ festival in Dorset. The famous Indian guru Osho (aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) brought this idea to the West in the 1970s. His experiment with forming a new community wasn’t an unalloyed success. The festival that Jules attended sounds like an opportunity for people to let go – of their emotions and hurts.
The Mosh Pit investigates the emotional draw of violence. It looks at this through four angles; combat flow – where we feel more alive when we are in danger of death, ecstatic togetherness – the brotherhood of warriors, participation in sacred myth – where violence transports us to where the world is a black-and-white experience and ‘Us and Them’ is all there is, and ‘blood-catharsis’ where killing and bloodletting is seen as spiritually cleansing.
The Forest of Wonder looks at ecology as a means to ecstatic enlightenment. Rational environmentalism needs to go deeper to rebuild our broken relationship with nature.
The last chapter, Futureland, looks at ‘transhumanism’, the philosophy that enables humans to transcend humanity and become godlike immortals. So, Jules has led us from looking back at our emerging humanity to facing a future where technology is employed to help us escape from our ego-centricness. He’s not a dogmatic pioneer, though. He knows his own journey is incomplete and he’s just wanted to show us some places we might meet on our own journeys. Thanks, Jules.