Art of Losing Control

Jules Evans

Description

Humans have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring. He sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control. Jules' exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey balancing personal experience, interviews and readings from ancient and modern philosophers that will change the way you think about how you feel. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and life-enhancing journey through under-explored terrain.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782118770
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Jules Evans
Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Jules Evans, 2017
Extract from ‘Four Quartets’ reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd (Faber & Faber, 2001) © T.S. Eliot (1944); © Valerie Eliot (1979).
Extract from ‘Anthem’, Stranger Music reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Canada Limited © Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music (1993).
Extract from ‘The Guest House’, Rumi: Selected Poems reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House © Rumi/Coleman Barks (2004).
The moral right of the author has been asserted
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 867 1 eISBN 978 1 78211 877 0
Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
To my brother, Alex,
and to Frederic Myers and Thomas Traherne, two English ecstatics who deserve still to be in print.
Contents
   List of Illustrations
   Introduction: Welcome to the Festival
 
   1: The Entrance Gate
   2: The Revival Tent
   3: The Ecstatic Cinema
   4: Rock and Roll Main Stage
   5: Psychedelic Wonderland
   6: The Contemplation Zone
   7: The Tantric Love Temple
   8: The Mosh-Pit
   9: The Forest of Wonder
10: Futureland
 
   Notes
   Acknowledgements
   Index
List of Illustrations
Paleo-anthropologists think cave paintings like these at Lascaux (from around 20,000 BC) were an early route for homo sapiens to reach altered states of consciousness. © Sisse Brimberg/National Geographic
Ecstasy also had a central role in classical culture – this vase painting ( right ) shows a maenad filled with the god Dionysus. © The Trustees of the British Museum
In Christian culture, ecstasy is interpreted as an invasion by God, though it could also be demonic possession or human imagination.
Two examples from Caravaggio – above , Saint Matthew and the ecstasy of creative inspiration. Below , Saint Paul and the ecstasy of sudden conversion.
Hogarth’s ‘Enthusiasm Delineated’ (c.1760) mocked the unbridled emotionalism of Methodist services. © The Trustees of the British Museum
A late-19th-century photo from the Salpêtriére clinic in Paris showing a hysteric patient in ecstatic attitude. Western psychiatrists often interpreted spiritual experiences as symptoms of mental pathology. © Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
A 19th-century Methodist camp meeting in the US. © Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Rock and roll secularized the ecstasy of charismatic Christianity and brought it to the masses. This is the audience at a Beatles concert in Plymouth in 1963. © Mirrorpix
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) imagined ecstatic encounters with extraterrestrial intelligences. Directors including Kubrick have used cinema to explore altered states and provoke them in the audience. © Warner Bros
Shakespeare’s theatre offered a playful, sceptical space for ecstasy (this is Vivien Leigh as Titania in a 1937 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ). © Photograph by JW Debenham. Courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol
Casper David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog ’ (c.1818). © bpk | Hamburger Kunsthalle | Elke Walford
Extreme sports have also been embraced as a means to ecstatic experiences in nature – the image below is from Werner Herzog’s 1974 documentary about a ski-jumper, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. © Deutsche Kinemathek – Werner Herzog Film
The Romantic counter-culture explored ecstatic experiences through poetry, free love and intoxicants. Above is a frontispiece by William Blake, a keen practitioner of sexual spirituality.
A photo from the 1969 Woodstock festival. Such experiments in ecstasy became a mass phenomenon during the 1960s.
Ecstatic nationalist movements like Nazism offer ecstasy through the worship of the state and its Leader, and through a narrative of sacred war against demonised outsiders. © Corbis Historical/Getty Images
An image of the myth of King Pentheus, torn apart by the demented followers of Dionysus. © 2017. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence
Introduction: Welcome to the Festival
I was walking along the beach beside Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. It was a clear, bright September afternoon on one of the most beautiful stretches of coast in England. Across the water was Holy Island, where St Cuthbert had worshipped standing in the sea, and his followers had created the Lindisfarne gospels, the oldest and perhaps most beautiful book in European culture.
But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was trying to get an internet connection. I was expecting an important email. I checked my phone again. Still nothing. I was in a tetchy mood. I’d come up there for a peaceful getaway from London, but was disturbed until the early hours by a wedding party in the hotel bar, then awakened at six by sea-gulls cackling at me from the street outside. Bloody sea-gulls. Bloody wedding party. Bloody internet. Bloody beach.
And then something changed. I started to enjoy the walk, the exertion, the feel of the wind on my face, the give of the damp sand under my boots. The rhythm of walking calmed my mind. The waves washed in, nibbled at my boots, and washed out again. A Labrador ran up and wagged hello. I looked up and noticed quite how huge the sky was. It was streaked with thin white wisps, like marble, lit up by the sun setting behind the castle, and the light was reflected in the water on the sand.
It was as if the world was exploding with fiery intelligence. It filled me with an almost painful sense of its beauty. Yet this was just one moment in one corner of Earth, more or less unnoticed, except by the handful of people walking along the beach. My heart lifted with gratitude for this planet of endless free gifts.
I set off for my hotel in a completely different mood. I felt lifted beyond the narrow anxiousness of my ordinary ego, switched into a more open, appreciative and peaceful mindset. I thought about taking a photo of the sunset and sharing it on Facebook. And then I thought, ‘No, there’s no need to go begging for others’ likes.’ Just enjoy the moment without trying to convert it into social capital. But, obviously, I did take a photo, and I did post it on Facebook. It got ninety-one likes!
Our basic need for transcendence
In some ways, that moment was quite ordinary. It was just one of those moments that come along now and then, when our consciousness expands beyond its usual self-obsessed anxiousness into a more peaceful, absorbed and transcendent state of mind. It can happen when we’re sitting on a bus, playing with our children, reading a book, walking in the park. Something catches our attention, we become rapt, our breath deepens, and life quietly shifts from a burden to a wonder. These are the little moments when we expand beyond the ego, and they’re deeply regenerative.
The writer Aldous Huxley argued that all humans have a ‘deep-seated urge to self-transcendence’. He wrote: ‘Always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in Wordsworthian phrase “far more deeply infused”.’ 1 The psychologist Abraham Maslow likewise thought humans have a fundamental need for ‘peak experiences’ in which they go beyond the self and feel connected to something bigger than them. 2 More recently, the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi wrote of how humans all seek ‘flow’, by which he meant moments in which we become so absorbed in something that we lose track of time and forget ourselves. 3
The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called it ‘unselfing’. She wrote: ‘We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals our world.’ But this anxious ego-consciousness can shift through focused attention, particularly when we’re absorbed by something beautiful, like a painting or a landscape. Murdoch continued: ‘I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.’ 4
All of us need to find ways to unself. Civilisation makes great demands of us: we must control our bodies, inhibit our impulses, manage our emotions, ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. We must play our role in the great complex web of globalised capitalism. Our egos have evolved to help us survive and compete, and they do a good job at this, by spending every second of the day scanning the horizon for opportunities and threats, like a watchman on Bamburgh Castle looking out for Vikings. But the self we construct is an exhausting place to be stuck all the time. It’s isolated, cut off by walls of fear and shame, besieged by worries and ambitions, and conscious of its own smallness and impending mortality. That’s why we need to let go, every now and then, or we get bored, exhausted and depressed.
From flow to ecstasy
We all have our own ways to unself, during the day and throughout the week. My former housemate had a bath-time ritual – he’d light candles, play music through a little speaker