Jules Evans's Reading List

"The founders of CBT were directly inspired by ancient Greek philosophy. Unfortunately, not many people are aware of that connection at all. Even a lot of cognitive therapists are unaware of it. That is partly because Aaron Beck was keen to present CBT as an evidence-based scientific therapy, so the philosophical roots of CBT were somewhat swept under the carpet. Donald’s was really the first book to properly explore the relationship between ancient philosophy and CBT. Donald runs one of the main CBT schools in the UK, and he wonderfully brings together a scientific thoroughness and a scholarly appreciation for the intelligence and beauty of some of the original philosophical material. CBT takes a lot of great things from ancient philosophy. But there is a value in also going back to the original material, because there are other techniques and exercises that the ancients used which CBT doesn’t yet use, like certain visualisation techniques for example. Another value of going back to the original material – as Donald does – is that it is so beautifully written. It is much better written than a lot of modern CBT books. So you can either read something quite recent and not that well written, or you can go back and read Plato, Marcus Aurelius or Lucretius, some of the greatest writers ever. I don’t think they are resistant to it at all. It’s just that a lot of them aren’t aware of it. I think more and more psychologists are really interested in the links of their work to philosophy. They are aware that sometimes CBT can be instrumental and technocratic, and that there are more interesting, broader questions about what it means to live a good life that are worth exploring. The same is true on the philosophy side. More and more philosophers are interested in how modern psychologists are trying to test out some of the ancient philosophical techniques for wellbeing."

"Pierre Hadot is not that well known, but the people who are aware of him really love and value his work. He was a French academic, a specialist in Neo-Platonist mysticism. One day he went into his local bakery, looked around at the people queuing for bread and thought: Neo-Platonist mysticism means nothing to these people and is not much use to them. So he started to become interested in the more practical philosophy of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and this idea of ancient philosophy not as abstract theory but as a way of life, something that ordinary people can practise every day to live better and happier lives. That idea of philosophy as a way of life and a set of daily practices is one way to get more people into philosophy. One of the reasons why people today are so into Buddhism or yoga is because it gives them something they can practise every day. One thing Hadot wrote about was the idea of keeping a journal. At the end of each day some ancient philosophers would keep track of what happened during the day – what they did well and what they did badly. The idea is that if you want to change yourself and get rid of bad habits, first you have to track yourself. Humans are such forgetful and unconscious creatures, we don’t always realise who we are or how we’re behaving. So we need to keep track of ourselves. Epictetus, for example, said if you have a bad temper count the days on which you don’t lose your temper, and if you manage to do it for 30 days then you can consider yourself to be making progress. Using a thought journal is a technique that CBT has brought back. If you have depression or anxiety and go and see a cognitive therapist, they will suggest that you keep a journal and keep track of your thoughts and habits, to bring more self-awareness into it and also so you can see the progress that you are making. You might have a day that you feel really down but you can look back and see that actually you have made a lot of progress from, say, three months ago. So that is one practical exercise which the ancients used that is really useful today. In fact, we are actively developing this technique today. Now there is a lot of new technology such as phone apps which we can use to track ourselves. There is a movement called the Quantified Self, where people develop different devices to keep track of themselves, their diet, their exercise regimes, their moods, their daily activities. Their motto is “self-knowledge through numbers”, which is a very Socratic idea. One of things I write about is the technique in ancient philosophy of choosing your role models, known as the exemplum technique. This is the idea that if you really want to take on board an ethical idea it helps if, rather than just considering it abstractly, you think about someone who really embodies that idea or that value. Then you can see that person as a role model and try to emulate them. This is very much the approach of Plutarch, a Greek philosopher and historian. He was aware to what extent we imitate the people around us. We are always consciously and unconsciously copying the behaviour of people around us, so he suggests we try to do this more consciously. We should soak our imaginations in good role models – and he tried to provide such ethical role models in his book Parallel Lives . I thought of this when I interviewed someone called Louis Ferrante. Louis grew up in a bad neighbourhood in New York and the roles models in his environment were all gangsters. They were all the people who had the power, success and money. So he became a gangster. He joined John Gotti’s mafia gang and by the age of 20 he was quite a successful hijacker, making lots of money, getting the best tables at restaurants and so on. Then he got busted and sent to a high-security prison when he was 22. At one stage the prison guard told him he was nothing but an animal. He was in solitary confinement, getting his food through a slot in the door. And he thought, I really am an animal. He looked at some of the people he had thought were role models, like John Gotti, and he said it was like seeing Caesar without his cloak. So he taught himself to read and came across the book Plutarch’s Lives in the prison library, which had stories of great figures from history like Caesar. He was so taken by this book that he stole it from the library. Then he felt bad about stealing it and brought it back. He was inspired by all the stories of people from history who had done incredible things, and had often gone through situations that were worse than his. He started reading biographies of people like Nelson Mandela, and he says that experience of finding better role models saved him. He got out of prison and became a campaigner for literacy in prison. That is just one story I really like which shows ancient philosophy in action in today’s world."

"I think of the revival of ancient philosophy as happening in three waves. The first wave was in the 1950s through people like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, how they rescued ancient philosophy and bought it back into psychotherapy. Then there was the second wave of people in academic philosophy, led by people like Pierre Hadot, who returned to the idea of philosophy as a way of life. The third wave, which has been around since 2000, was led by Alain de Botton, and it was about making ancient philosophy popular and accessible to ordinary people. The Consolations of Philosophy , his third book, introduced to the mass market the ideas of philosophers such as Seneca, Montaigne and Nietzsche . And it was a best seller. But academic philosophers were horrified. They accused him of dumbing down philosophy and turning it into self-help . If you look back at some of the reviews of that book, they were really vicious. But I think he was absolutely right. If you read the Stoics or Epicureans or even Plato, they say that the aim of philosophy is to make people happier and more fulfilled. And I think Alain de Botton won that argument. If you now look at where philosophy is 10 years on, it is much more concerned with things like flourishing, happiness and the good life. That is also true for academic philosophy, which has shifted in the direction that he went. For example, Yale university now does a course in the philosophy and psychology of the good life . Stanford does a course in the art of living. American academic philosophy has moved much more in that direction too, with the work of philosophers like Michael Sandel or Martha Nussbaum. The idea that philosophy should enable us to live happier and better lives is much more common today. But academic philosophy in Britain is in real trouble in comparison. Far fewer people are studying it both at A level and university level. Many philosophy departments are being closed in British universities, and if there is going to be a revival in British academic philosophy then it needs to connect with people’s aspirations and get back to that original mission of helping people lead better lives. There is a lot to be learnt from de Botton, if academics can just get the sneers off their faces. We all have values and a model of the good life that we follow throughout life, but often our model of the good life is unconscious. We picked it up unconsciously from our childhood, our friends, what we happen to watch on TV or the music we listen to. And often our unconscious life philosophy won’t work for us. If you have a bad life philosophy, it can really mess you up. But the amazing thing about being a human is that we have the capacity to reflect on our unconscious values, and consider if they are working for us. If they are not, we can choose different values and a different course in life. Philosophy at is simplest is that fundamental human process of thinking about the coordinates in our automatic GPS, and whether it is working for us. Why is it that we keep on crashing? Maybe we can choose a better path in life. That is something which we all do naturally, and it is fundamental to being human. The benefit of actually studying philosophy or reading it is that it helps us to do this natural activity a bit more consciously and articulately. And it introduces us to the ideas of people who thought really clearly about what is worth seeking in life."

"We have talked about how there has been a revival of ancient philosophy in modern psychology. One of the things that really fascinates me is how that is feeding into public policy and politics. Ancient philosophy offered a form of self-help, but it wasn’t just for individuals, it was also communal and political. Some ancient philosophers thought about what governments can do to help their citizens find fulfilment. You find that idea in Aristotle. His Nicomachean Ethics are all about how individuals can seek fulfilment, and it feeds directly into his Politics , which asks what the best form of society is to help people achieve that fulfilment. The idea that governments have a role in helping us find happiness was very unfashionable for several decades, because it was seen as a recipe for tyranny. Just think about how the communist governments in Russia or China insisted that they knew best how to help their people find fulfilment and positive liberty, and the sort of tyranny that led to. Liberal philosophers like Sir Karl Popper, Sir Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill insisted that we should be free to pursue our own version of the good life in our own way. Everyone has a different idea of happiness so the government should just stay out of it, they thought. But in the last few years, governments – encouraged by the psychology and philosophy of wellbeing – have decided that they should get back into the business of trying to help their citizens become happier. Exactly. But how can a government know if they are actually enhancing the wellbeing of their citizens? One answer governments have tried to come up with is to start measuring our national wellbeing – as the British government started to do in 2011. I agree, and this is partly what Jeffery Sachs’s book is about. He says that we need to look back to the wisdom of philosophers of the past to re-find our collective moral compass – particularly to thinkers like the Buddha and Aristotle. He thinks that national wellbeing measurements are a way for governments to re-find their moral purpose. So rather than just pursuing GDP we can try and enhance wellbeing. Other economists have argued the same thing, but it is interesting that Sachs should come out and say this because he was a key philosopher in neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, which was very free market and focused on the bottom line of GDP. So it is a real sign of the times that such an influential economist should have said we need to go back to Aristotle and start measuring national wellbeing. It is a very much a phenomena in British politics as well. The coalition government is full of Aristotelians. Oliver Letwin, David Willetts and I think David Cameron himself are all Aristotelians. On the one hand, it’s quite exciting that suddenly these philosophical ideas of the good life should be at the heart of public policy. But it’s also quite weird that we now have the Office of National Statistics going around trying to measure our eudaimonia , which is the word the Greeks used for fulfilment or meaningful happiness. The problem as I see it is that there are different ways to define happiness and wellbeing. The Office of National Statistics has said: “We know there is more than one way to define it, so we will measure both the utilitarian definition of wellbeing, by asking people how happy they are, and also the Aristotelian definition, by asking people how worthwhile they feel their life is.” But of course there are many more than just two ways to define wellbeing. I think people should be empowered to explore the different definitions of wellbeing, rather than forced down one path. We have to be careful to find the right balance between the [ancient] Greeks’ idea of the good life and our liberal right to choose our own path."

"Clay Shirky’s book isn’t really about ancient philosophy, but explores one of the reasons why there is a revival of community philosophy today. As discussed, there is the rediscovery of the ancients’ idea of philosophy as a therapeutic way of life, and this naturally leads to questions of community. Ancient philosophy wasn’t just individual self help. It was very social and communal. The Stoics would gather together under the Colonnade in their Athenian marketplace to talk about philosophy, the Epicureans lived together in a commune called “the Garden” outside Athens, the Aristotelians had their own community called the Lyceum, and so on. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As we return to this idea today, we’re starting to ask what is the best way to bring people together to practise philosophy communally? Alain de Botton came up with one answer, which was to set up The School of Life in London. Another part of the answer is the Internet, which is bringing people together online and offline to share ideas, and to discuss, debate and practise philosophy. You have Facebook groups, Yahoo groups and meet-up groups like the London Philosophy Club, a philosophy group that I am involved with. Yes, it is. Practical philosophy is booming outside of schools and universities. There is a huge demand for it. To go back to Clay Shirky’s book, it talks about how our culture has been transformed by the shift from TV to the Internet as the main media source. In his view – and I think it is correct – we have gone from the passive consumption of culture to a much more active, involved and engaged consumption and co-production of culture. He suggests, for example, that the TV sitcom was the opiate of our culture for several decades. We didn’t have genuine communities, which is why we got into things like Friends or Cheers – because it gave us a virtual community we could watch. But the Internet creates more engaged and co-productive communities. It has led to the re-creation of what [German sociologist] Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere, like the Athenian marketplace or 18th century coffee houses. That is one of the reasons why there is this revival of community philosophy today, because through the Internet it is much easier to get together with other people, and to get involved in philosophy rather than just watching an academic pontificate on television. People wonder why philosophy isn’t on TV. The main reason is because everyone is out doing it. I think there are some types of philosophy that probably fit with the Internet age better than others. The more practical it is, the better. Also, the more it is embodied in real life stories the better. People respond better to that, which is why the ancients would often tell the lives of philosophers. Look at the success of Michael Sandel, who is the leading public philosopher today. His lectures on justice are a huge Internet hit. Part of that is because he is so good at engaging his audience. He doesn’t just talk for half an hour. Instead he gets his audience to debate certain types of ethical problems. Some philosophies are theistic, so it doesn’t have to be either/or. In Catholic universities in America, philosophy is compulsory. Several of the leading philosophers today are Catholics, like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. But for many it is an alternative to organised religions. For example, the Skeptics is a grassroots movement with several million members. I visited their annual conference in Las Vegas called The Amaz!ng Meeting, where they hang out and listen to speakers like Richard Dawkins, then go back home to spread the word. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If philosophy is going to be a genuine alternative to something like Christianity, it is really about creating forms of community that bind people together. There is a very interesting study by an anthropologist called Richard Sosis about which communities lasted longest in 19th century America. He found that those communes which demanded more from their members lasted a lot longer – and religious communes, probably for that reason, lasted longer than secular communes. If philosophy wants to be an alternative to religion, then the question is how much can philosophical communities demand of their members without turning people off or being accused of being cults. Again, it’s the question of trying to find a balance between the ancient idea of the good life, and our modern liberal insistence on being free to follow our own path. Liberals are always loitering at the door of communities, afraid to commit. We crave for community, but we’re commitment-phobes. May 1, 2012. Updated: June 4, 2024 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"

"This is quite an obvious choice. but it’s still the best book on the subject, a century after it was published. James was a genius—one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers ever. His prose is so humane, so articulate, so poetic—he’s really in the 19th-century Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. Most modern psychologists are so narrow, so unsubtle, so clumsy, so unambitious in comparison. Reading them after him is like going into a telephone box after being in a cathedral. James used his considerable eloquence to argue that any full view of human experience needs to take account of ecstasy. And he gave researchers a way to approach this area—by collecting and analysing people’s reports. We can ask ‘what’s it like?’—and compare accounts from different people and different eras. We can see that mystical experiences often have some things in common—people report feeling one with all things, for example, or surrendering to a higher power when they’re desperate. “William James was a genius—one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers ever” Many researchers of altered states of consciousness have followed James’ footsteps and analysed ecstasy by asking people: ‘what’s it like?’ You can use surveys and questionnaires: Gallup has asked people if they’ve ever had a mystical experience—they’re actually becoming more common, from 20% in 1961 to around 50% today. In a survey I did in 2016, 84% of respondents said they’d had one or more ecstatic experiences. You can analyse how people describe their experiences—the word people most commonly use to describe moments of ecstasy is ‘connection’—they report shifting beyond their usual self-absorbed ego and feeling deeply connected to all things, to nature, to the universe, or to other people, or to God. James defined these experiences as ‘religious’, and only looked at solitary encounters with the divine. But in fact, they often happen to people when they’re in groups, and they are not always interpreted as an encounter with the divine—they could involve an ecstatic connection to nature, or other humans, or your nation, for example. The point James makes in Varieties , and it’s the main point of my book, too, is that these experiences are not only quite common, they’re often good for us. They’re healing, they’re socially-connecting, they’re inspiring. James suggests that ecstatic experiences involve an opening to the subliminal mind. Our ordinary conscious reality is just a small part of us—a great deal of our psychic activity is subliminal and embodied. In moments of ecstasy, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, and contents from the subliminal mind come into consciousness, as in a lucid dream. That can be frightening and disorientating, but it can also be profoundly healing and inspiring, at a mental and physical level. We can confront subconscious attitudes of guilt, trauma or self-loathing, and give ourselves permission to let go of these attitudes and love ourselves. James was inspired by his friend Frederic Myers, a British psychologist who developed the theory of the subliminal mind. Myers insisted the subconscious is both a rubbish-dump and a treasure house. Ecstatic influxes from the subconscious can be pathological, but they can also be inspiring and empowering. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But is ecstasy not just an influx from the subconscious, but also a connection to some genuinely transpersonal spiritual dimension? James remains agnostic, but in the Varieties he does seem to think that ecstasy sometimes really is a connection to a higher dimension, or Mind-at-Large. Myers thought the same, so did Aldous Huxley. James said, if there is a spiritual dimension to life, then we appear to access it through the subliminal mind. We have to learn to focus and expand our consciousness beyond its normal limits."

"Towards the end of his career, the novelist Aldous Huxley started writing a lot about ecstatic experiences and how we need to find more of a place for them in western society. Moksha is a collection of some of those writings. Huxley was one of the very few thinkers to consider how ecstasy relates to society, politics and education. He understood that transcendence could be healthy or toxic (what he called ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ transcendence). We need good cultural places, maps and guides for transcendence, so we can find it in healthy ways, rather than in unhealthy ways like addiction or violence. His final novel, Island , is a kind of blueprint for a society wherein the ecstatic is balanced with the Socratic. The young people on the island have an education which includes the rational but also the ‘non-verbal’ and ecstatic—contemplation, ecstatic dance, psychedelic rituals, tantric sex education. “Esalen helped to create the modern ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ landscape that we’re in today” His blueprint was hugely influential on Californian spirituality of the 1960s, on places like Esalen, and on the Human Potential Movement. Esalen is a sort of alternative college on the coast near Monterey, where students could study everything from Zen meditation to ecstatic dance to psychedelics to neo-Tantra and massage. The Human Potential Movement thought that transpersonal experiences—moments when we go beyond our ordinary ego and connect to something greater than us—have a very important role both in personal development and in human evolution. Places like Esalen helped to create the modern ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ landscape that we’re in today, where so many people follow practices like yoga, mindfulness, ecstatic dance, psychedelic healing, and so on. Huxley—this stiff, posh, English intellectual—helped to create that world."

"Yes, Kripal is on the board of Esalen and wrote the best history of it. He’s a religious studies scholar at Rice University, and is one of a group of American religion scholars whose work has been really useful to me—others include Ann Taves, Hugh Urban, Erik Davis and Tanya Luhrmann, my next choice. I’d include the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich in this group—she’s not an academic, but she’s one of the most important contemporary researchers of ecstatic experience. All of these researchers have explored the cultural history of ecstasy. They’ve studied the different cultural forms that ecstatic experiences can take at different times and different places. You can examine the deep paleo-anthropology of altered states in the culture of early homo sapiens (check out David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave ), or ecstasy in classical culture (as in E R Dodds’ classic, The Greeks and the Irrational ), or ecstasy in Christian medieval culture (as in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium ), or the pathologisation of ecstasy in the early modern era (have a look at Michael Heyd’s undeservedly-obscure Be Sober and Reasonable ). Ann Taves’ Fits, Trances and Visions does a splendid job of exploring the reconfiguration of ecstasy in the 18th and 19th centuries, via Methodism, Mesmerism and early psychology. And then you have researchers like Hugh Urban, Erik Davis and Jeffrey Kripal, who study the strange new forms that ecstatic experiences took in the 20th century, from neo-Tantra to UFO abductions to Silicon Valley transhumanism. “Kripal’s not afraid to discuss his own ecstatic experiences, such as making out with the goddess Kali back in the 1980s” I’ve read most of Kripal’s books and I think Authors of the Impossible is my favourite, partly because it turned me on to the British psychologist Frederic Myers. I love Kripal’s books for four reasons. Firstly, their audacity. Kripal’s not afraid to discuss his own ecstatic experiences, such as making out with the goddess Kali in Calcutta back in the 1980s, and to insist on the connection between ecstasy and eroticism. His dissertation was on the taboo connection between mystics’ sacred experiences and their sexuality—it caused a huge furore in India when he suggested Ramakrishna’s mysticism was connected to his supposed homosexuality. Secondly, his openness. He insists that to appreciate the weirdness of anomalous experiences, we need to steer between the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of materialist reductionism. “He has this idea of reading as an ecstatic experience, a way of opening up to other worlds” Thirdly, he is not afraid to track the ecstatic into the swamplands of pop culture. For example, his book Mutants and Mystics looks at how science fiction and superhero comics helped to reformulate paranormal and ecstatic experiences for modern culture; while Authors of the Impossible and his recent book The Supernatural both compare UFO abduction experiences to more traditional forms of ecstasy. Finally, his books are just a great read. He has this idea of reading as an ecstatic experience, a way of opening up to other worlds. There’s something of the hammy showman about him, not unlike the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart—both enjoy astounding the reader or listener."

"Luhrmann’s book is an anthropological study of a charismatic Christian community called the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which started in California as part of the hippy scene. It was the church Bob Dylan joined. It pioneered a sort of neo-Pentecostal Christianity that believes in the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and perform miracles today. It inspired churches like Holy Trinity Brompton [HTB], in London, where I spent a year. Luhrmann’s main point is that we learn how to lose control. We learn how to access, interpret and integrate ecstatic experiences through our culture—or, in this case, through the subculture of charismatic Christianity. This is why it’s crucially important to live in a culture which has a place, or places, for ecstatic experiences. Otherwise these experiences happen, and people are just like ‘what the f*** was that?’ Or they happen to people in unsafe contexts, in abusive or exploitative cults or gangs. “These experiences happen, and people are just like ‘what the f*** was that?’” Luhrmann studies how charismatic Christians learn to encounter and experience God in their lives. And she realises they’re taught how to hear the voice of God. They’re taught to go into a contemplative state—a state of trance or absorption—in which they’re more open to the subliminal mind, and they’re taught to identify certain thoughts as messages from God. They’re also taught to imagine and sometimes visualise God, or Christ, as a figure of love, and then to engage in a deep personal relationship with Him. It’s an emotional and imaginative practice—God becomes more real with practice. One thing I noticed at HTB is it’s also very much a communal practice. How do you believe in a God-filled world when you’re in a disenchanted culture which hardly mentions God? You surround yourself with people who also believe in a God-filled world, and you constantly talk about God and all the amazing things He’s doing in people’s lives. You make it real in your words, your relationships, your acts. It’s a form of collective improvisation, a ‘let’s pretend’ game which then becomes ‘really real’ in people’s lives. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When I was researching medieval mysticism, it reminded me of modern fan fiction. The mystic Margery Kempe, for example, reads up on the Bible and the tradition of female mystics, she becomes a huge fan and soaks her memory in the imaginative world of the Bible, and then she spontaneously starts imagining Jesus appearing to her and saying: ‘Margery, you are my favourite of all the mystics.’ And she writes her own book, tells her own story and adds it to that fan fiction universe. That’s the first autobiography in English, by the way. People have pretended that Jediism is a religion—kind of as a joke, but they kind of mean it as well. They’ll get Star Wars tattoos, memorise the films, buy the toys, go to conventions and dress up as their favourite characters. They may emulate the moral qualities of their heroes, ask themselves: ‘What would Yoda do?’ They may really believe in The Force as a theological concept. They will make the fictional world real in their lives. I think we all do this. We all shape our reality through our imagination and our expectations. Reality is a consensual hallucination. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari insists, we all exist in shared fictional worlds—capitalism is a fiction in which we become deeply absorbed, for example. “We all exist in shared fictional worlds—capitalism is a fiction in which we become deeply absorbed” The question is, are the imaginative universes we’re constructing and immersing ourselves in healthy and good for us, or not? Do they lead to flourishing? Do they lead to a better world? Do they predict or shape the future in useful ways? Of course, this raises the question of how do we morally evaluate different experiences of ecstasy. Kempe, for example, was widely considered an irritating oddball in her own time, because of her habit of howling with tears every time she thought of the crucifixion, which was often. I think we can follow William James and ask whether an ecstatic experience leads to increased well-being or flourishing for a person and their community. And also whether an ecstatic world-view is interesting, useful, beautiful. That’s quite hard to assess objectively! But there are some obvious cases where one could say, no, probably not—such as the Jonestown Massacre, or the Heaven’s Gate cult, in both of which the cult members killed themselves. They would say that their deaths did lead to flourishing, just in another dimension. Well, that’s where we get to the limit of the scientific method. But I’m fairly confident they’re wrong, that they were unfortunately taken for a ride by psychopath gurus. We need to balance our capacity for absorption with a capacity to say, wait a minute, are we giving our lives to a power-hungry, abusive lunatic?"

"The other four choices are all somewhat analytical, and I wanted to have at least one book that was more actively conducive to ecstasy. This book isn’t widely known but it’s a classic. Traherne was a pastor in 17th-century England, barely known in his lifetime, who wrote poetry and prose, including a contemplative guide called Centuries of Meditations —it’s 400 brief passages for meditation, written for a friend of his. The manuscript was lost for 150 years, and then discovered in a bin outside a second-hand bookstore in the Charing Cross Road, in 1896. It was finally published in 1908, and since then, a handful of readers have recognised its genius: C S Lewis called it “almost the most beautiful book in the English language,” Aldous Huxley quoted from it in his Perennial Philosophy, while the theologian David Bentley Hart recently described Centuries as “one of the most compelling and beautiful descriptions of reality as it truly is.” One of the things I was trying to do in my book was engage with my Christian heritage, as a life-long non-Christian. I was interested in whether non-Christians could engage with Christian contemplation, as well as Eastern practices, and whether we could create a new contemplative infrastructure for a multicultural society. So I read a fair amount of Christian contemplative texts, to see what could be accessible to non-Christians. And most of it isn’t really accessible, to be honest, unless you believe Jesus was the only son of God. But there are some books which are more open to non-Christian, and one of these is Traherne’s Centuries. “One of the things I was trying to do was engage with my Christian heritage, as a life-long non-Christian” It’s quite Stoic or Romantic—he says early on that what causes us suffering is not original sin, but our own opinions, particularly our need to win others’ approval. We need to stop trying to impress strangers, and instead look within, and realise how incredibly rich and blessed we are— the kingdom of heaven is within, in our souls or consciousness. And it’s also without, in the richness of the physical world, our bodies, nature. He writes these beautiful descriptions of his childhood in Hereford, how the trees and the fields filled him with ecstasy, how we need to re-find that sense of delight. They’re extremely Wordsworthian, 150 years before The Prelude. And he constantly insists on the wonder of consciousness. He was writing during the rise of materialism, a philosophy which is very useful for descriptions of physical reality, but which can’t really explain or find a place for consciousness. So it tends to downplay the importance of consciousness. But Traherne refuses to do this. He is amazed by consciousness—”Souls are God’s jewels, every one of which is worth many worlds.” “We need to stop trying to impress strangers, and instead look within, and realise how incredibly rich and blessed we are” He is astounded by how this immaterial thing—consciousness—can contemplate all of nature, even the universe, and thereby expand to take them into itself. Consciousness is ecstatic, he realises—it reaches out beyond the self, connects to things, attends to them. We can learn to attend to nature, to ‘enjoy it aright’, and appreciate how blessed we are to be in this world. Traherne sees a connection between consciousness and love—when we love someone or something, and when we feel loved, we move beyond narrow ego-consciousness into a more expanded, interconnected or ecstatic consciousness. He has a vision of a universe of souls connected in love: ‘All are happy in each other. All are like Deities. Every one the end of all things, everyone supreme, every one a treasure, and the joy of all, and every one most infinitely delighted in being so.’ One of the side-missions of my book was to encourage people to read Traherne—that’s why I dedicated the book to him, along with Frederic Myers. They’re two extraordinary English ecstatics, both of them practically out-of-print, both of whom deserve tremendous respect."