Ketamine clinics are booming across the US. According to psychedelic fund PsyMed, there were around 20 ketamine clinics in 2019. By the end of last year, there were reportedly over 600 independent ketamine clinics, as well as chains like Mindbloom, Field Trip and Delic with multiple clinics and home delivery services.
Read MoreWestern culture urgently needs to improve its cultural resources to help people make sense of ecstatic experiences. Evidence suggests that more and more people in western culture are having and seeking ecstatic experiences, because of the growing popularity of psychedelics and contemplative practices like meditation and yoga. However, we have scant cultural resources for making sense of such experiences.
Read MoreI’ve been reading Erik Davis’ magnum opus, High Weirdness. Davis is the pre-eminent chronicler of Californian spirituality, and this book masterfully explores a particular scene — the Californian counter-culture in the 1970s, when hippy optimism curdled into paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone suspected everyone else was a narc.
Read MoreThis week, psychedelic scientists and investors converged in Miami for the Wonderland conference. One of the panels was on the ‘shamanic approach to investing’. There, spiritual healer and financial advisor Sylvia Bentino said she’d had a vision on ayahuasca that cryptocurrency was going to change the world.
Read MoreIn 1967 Joan Didion went to San Francisco to cover the hippy scene in Haight Ashbury. After spending weeks hanging out with the hippies and flower people, she didn’t feel she ‘had’ the story, but she filed it anyway, and the essay became a classic of New Journalism and a famous takedown of vacuous spirituality, called ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’.
Read MoreHere’s an interview I did with Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture and co-author of Stealing Fire. We talked about his life and work, and then got stuck into western spirituality and what’s wrong with it.
Read MoreThe biggest company in the psychedelic market is Compass Pathways. It has a billion-dollar valuation on the stock market, and is set to be the 800-pound gorilla in the psychedelic jungle. It’s using its money to do a large-scale test of magic mushroom therapy for depression, and to train up a large cadre of psychedelic therapists.
Read MoreWhen it emerged that the ‘Qanon shaman’, Jake Angeli, was not only the poster-boy for the Trumpist insurrection but also a vocal promoter of psychedelic therapy, it provoked consternation among the psychedelic community. How could a psychonaut support Trump, and fall for an authoritarian and quasi-fascist conspiracy theory like Qanon?
Read MoreWe’re in a shroom boom. One company, Compass Pathways, which plans to offer magic mushroom therapy, listed on the Nasdaq in November with a $1 billion valuation. New funds like Atai are raising hundreds of millions to invest in psychedelics. New companies are listing, new training programmes for therapists are launching, new states are preparing to legalize or decriminalize psychedelics.
Read MoreI want to discuss the difficult question: to what extent can one cleanly distinguish a ‘spiritual emergency’ from other psychotic experiences.
‘Spiritual emergency’ is a term introduced by two transpersonal psychologists — Stanislav and Christina Grof — in 1989, to describe a disturbing spiritual experience which has some aspects of psychosis, but which should not be treated as ordinary mental illness. Instead, insist the Grofs, a ‘spiritual emergency’, if properly handled, can ‘have tremendous evolutionary and healing potential’.
Read MoreIt’s not every day you see the psychedelic mystery cults of ancient Greece discussed on CNN, but then, it’s 2020. The occasion was the publication of a new book, The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, which explores the ‘secret psychedelic religion’ that connects the ancient Greeks to the early Christians, and which Brian says is now being revived in the psychedelic renaissance.
Read MoreChristians could learn an openness to the messy mystery of spiritual experience and the surprising people who can be chosen by God, while psychonauts could learn how to ground ecstatic experience in community and charitable service.
Read MoreThe closest I’ve come to enlightenment was the two minutes when I was lying in a bloody heap on Valsfjell Mountain in Norway. This was back in February 2001. While skiing down a steep slope, I crashed through a fence, flew off a cliff, and landed with a thump, breaking my leg and several vertebrae.
Read MoreLast week I came across a small book called The Making of a Counter Culture, written in 1969 by an American historian called Theodore Roszak. I loved it. Roszak was the first to coin the phrase ‘the counterculture’.
Read MoreAldous Huxley thought western societies needed to become more open to ego-transcendence. We need to find ways to be less stuck in our egos, less stuck in consumerism and materialism, and more conscious, loving and open to other beings. We need to wake up to our potential and our power.
Read MoreHere's a conversation between me and David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom, about ecstatic experiences, spiritual pride and the trap of feeling special.
Read MoreAs you may know, I’m researching a book about Aldous Huxley and his friends Alan Watts, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, and how these four posh Brits moved to California and helped to invent the modern culture of ‘spiritual but not religious’.
Read MoreRecently, I’ve noticed several friends and acquaintances – mainly millennials - getting into magick. A 30-year-old successful professional woman who pays to consult a globe-trotting voodoo-priestess about her love life. A 33-year-old musician who's left a humanist community and joined a coven. Stephen Reid, formerly a leader of UK Uncut, who then set up The Psychedelic Society and now runs magick rituals.
Read MoreApologies for the delay in writing. I’ve been in California for the last three weeks, immersed in preparing for Burning Man, then going to Burning Man, then recovering from Burning Man.
Read MoreThese days everyone is a goddam shaman. But what if you wanted to really train as an Amazon maestro or maestra? What is that process like? Is it terrifying, magical, bonkers? Never mind Carlos Castaneda and his fictional 'Don Juan'.
Read MoreThe only thinker whose popularity on YouTube comes close to prophet-of-rage Jordan Peterson is Alan Watts, the British popularizer of Eastern wisdom. Watts’ talks from the 50s, 60s and early 70s have millions of views on YouTube, and are often edited to the accompaniment of orchestral or ‘chillstep’ soundtracks and jazzy collages of modern life.
Read MoreI'm travelling in Mexico, researching the indigenous culture of magic mushrooms, or hongos as they are called here. Last weekend, I visited Huautla de Jimenez, a town eight hours drive from Mexico City, in the state of Oaxaca.
Read MoreHere is part 2 of my interview with pioneering researcher Milan Scheidegger, who works in the psychedelics lab at University of Zurich. You can read part 1 here. In this half of the interview, we discuss how to translate aspects of indigenous ayahuasca rituals - such as the shaman or sacred plant songs - into the context of western healthcare. We also discuss Milan's plans to establish a psychedelic healing clinic in Switzerland.
Read MoreMilan Scheidegger is one of the most interesting young researchers in psychedelics, because he integrates several different perspectives. He's a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, who's spent a decade studying the effect of psychedelics on subjects in a laboratory, and on a meditation retreat.
Read MoreThis essay is a personal opinion and may contain misunderstandings of my own. I'd be interested to hear from others with more knowledge and experience of ayahuasca, including indigenous healers or those who work closely with them.
Read MoreThe Listening Society is a new book by a writer called Hanzi Freinacht. He outlines a philosophy called metamodernism, which he says can be defined as an aesthetic movement, a developmental stage, and a political ideology.
Read MoreBack in the 1960s, many people thought psychedelics would save the world. Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now called Ram Dass) of Harvard University had a graph on their office wall, showing how long they thought it would take the entire human race to take LSD and become enlightened.
Read MoreThis is the best time ever to be alive and human. Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century, from 31 to 71. A century ago, 20% of babies died in childbirth, now it's less than 7%. You're far, far less likely to die violently than in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or even in the 1960s.
Read MoreIn less than a month, I will be sitting in the Amazon jungle, tripping out on ayahuasca. I'm in the midst of my preparation for this nine-day retreat. I have to start the special diet - no pork, no alcohol, no drugs, and no masturbation. There goes my Friday night.
Read MoreLast month I attended a conference at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion called Religion, Society and the Science of Life. The premise was that there is something called the 'new biology' which is perhaps more sympathetic to religious or spiritual views of existence than the 'old biology'.
Read MoreI've spent the last two days at Breaking Convention, a conference on psychedelics at the University of Greenwich organized by some brave academics. It's my favourite academic conference, by a long stretch.
Read MoreThere's a new book out later this month on the psychology of ecstatic experiences, and why they're good for us. It's called Stealing Fire, by two performance coaches, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. It might be disconcerting to have another book on ecstasy published two months before my own, but actually I'm glad others are walking the same path and coming to similar conclusions.
Read MoreI spent the last few days at a weird and wonderful conference. It was called Breaking Convention 2015, the third conference on ‘psychedelic consciousness, culture and clinical research’ at the University of Greenwich.
Read MoreWisdom is a watering-hole at which animals of many different species can come and drink - as long as they don’t insist on trying to convert, denounce or attack each other, but instead meet in friendship and good humour.
Read MoreLast week, I went to an exhibition on Goya, in Boston. It was filled with his bizarre and fantastic dream-drawings, exploring the strange manias and nightmares that fill humans’ minds when their reason is switched off - as in the classic engraving, the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
Read MoreIn my review of Sam Harris’ Waking Up two weeks ago, I wrote this sentence: "Spiritual experiences tell us something about the cosmos,...the experience of infinite loving-consciousness is a glimpse of the very ground of being, also sometimes called God, Brahman, Allah, the Logos, the Tao, the Buddha-realm."
Read MoreProfessor Nancy Sherman has worked with the US military for over 20 years, and has written several books on military ethics, including Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind; and The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog-post analysing the video for Blondie’s Rapture, and pointing out the voodoo, occult and mystic symbolism in it. I wondered if Blondie were into that sort of thing, or perhaps I was seeing things. It turned out they were, and one of them - the bassist Gary Lachman - had even become a historian of the occult. He was kind enough to give me his time for an interview.
Read MoreYesterday I finished a pilot course in practical philosophy at Low Moss prison. It’s an eight-session course that introduces people to the ideas and life-philosophies of various ancient philosophers, including Socrates, the Stoics, Plato, Rumi, the Buddha, Jesus and Lao Tzu. I've been running it in partnership with New College Lanarkshire, which runs the learning courses in west Scottish prisons.
Read MoreApologies for the lack of newsletters recently - I’ve been in the depths of a project to design and teach a course based on Philosophy for Life. This month, I started teaching it in three organizations - a mental health charity in London called Manor Gardens; Saracens rugby club; and Low Moss prison in Glasgow (via New College Lanarkshire, which runs learning courses there).
Read MoreThis year I got some funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to teach a course in practical philosophy with three partner organizations - Manor Gardens, a mental health charity in North London; Low Moss prison in Glasgow; and Saracens rugby club.
Read MoreA few months back I was giving a philosophy workshop in a mental health charity. It was one of my less popular events - only one person turned up, a Romanian man who had recently moved to the UK and was finding it tough. We talked about Socratic philosophy, about the idea of engaging your inner voice in a rational dialogue, and the man (let’s call him Anghel) quietly told me that he heard voices.
Read MoreHow do you fit experiences of ecstasy, awe, wonder, the Sublime, or the Numinous into a materialist paradigm, without reducing or devaluing such experiences? With difficulty.
Read MoreWhen Dr Robin Carhart-Harris finished his masters in psychoanalysis in 2005, he decided he wanted to do a brain- imaging study of LSD to see if he could locate the ego and the unconscious. That might have seemed an impossible dream, considering he had no neuroscientific experience and there had been no scientific research into psychedelics in the UK for over three decades.
Read MoreI would love there to be more practical philosophy in schools. At the moment, the teaching of ethics and philosophy in schools and universities is almost entirely theoretical. Students learn that philosophy is a matter of understanding and disputing concepts and theories, something that only involves the intellect, not your emotions, actions or life outside of the classroom.
Read MoreI’ll admit it, I was slightly nervous. I’d been invited to give a philosophy workshop in HMP Dumfries, a prison in west Scotland. Plummy-voiced and puny-framed Englishman that I am, I wasn’t sure what they’d make of me. Mincemeat, maybe. Anyway, I figured it was a low-security prison, otherwise they wouldn’t be inviting philosophers to give workshops, right?
Read MoreLast weekend I had a glimpse of the future. I spoke at a New Age festival in Holland, a country where just 39% of people belong to a religion. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey released this week, that’s where we’re heading too. Thirty years ago, 68% of Brits said they belonged to a religion. Now it’s just 52%, of which less than half are Anglican. We are about to become a post-religious society. So what does that look like?
Read MoreI’ve just re-read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, which he gave as a series of lectures in 1902. It is a marvelous book, in which James attempts to take a pragmatic and empirical approach to religious experiences, remaining open to the question of where such experiences come from, and evaluating them by looking at their impact on people’s lives. In other words, he looks at the fruits, not the roots, of religious experience.
Read MoreI want to explore the idea of Greek philosophy as a meeting-point between various humanisms, including Christian humanism, atheist or agnostic humanism, Islamic humanism and Jewish humanism.
Read MoreI've a long article in Aeon magazine this week, looking at Improving Access for Psychological Therapy (IAPT), which is the first ever provision of talking therapy on a mass scale by a government. Before IAPT, the NHS spent just 3% of its mental health budget on talking therapy.
Read MoreWhile I was writing Philosophy for Life, I lived with three friends in a church in North London. We discovered that our land-lady, who we never met, was Sister Bliss, the DJ and one third of the dance supergroup Faithless.
Read MoreI’m in Holland again, this time in Utrecht, where yesterday I did a three-hour workshop at the University of Humanistic Studies. It was gratifying to have lots of bright students scrutinising my ideas, though also grueling in so far as the students very intelligently saw the limitations of Stoic philosophy.
Read MoreHere's my AHRC report on grassroots philosophy via fancy 'turn the page' technology. Thanks for the QMUL creative services team for putting it together. Check it out!
Big day today. I’ve finally finished my report on grassroots philosophy groups, which you can download here: Connected Communities- Philosophical Communities.
Read MoreRick Lewis was working in the laboratory of British Telecom when he decided, just over 20 years ago, to launch a philosophy magazine for non-academics, called Philosophy Now. He tells me about the early days, how grassroots philosophy has grown, how he met his wife Anja Steinbauer, who runs Philosophy For All, and where he sees the 'movement' going.
Read MoreThere was an article in Morgenbladet, the Norwegian newspaper, on philosophy clubs last month. It's not online yet but here are two beautiful photos from the story. Both are by Ellen Lande Gossner - thanks to Ellen for letting me use these photos in my report on philosophy groups!
Read MoreI'm writing this from a cafe in Antwerp, at the end of my first mini book tour abroad, having spent the last week doing talks and interviews in Amsterdam and Antwerp. My Dutch publisher, Regine, has been putting a lot into the promotion here - there’s even going to be a poster campaign around the country.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I organized a seminar (my first!) at Queen Mary, University of London, in its beautiful Octagon Room, about community philosophy, bringing together 20 or so practitioners in the field, who had a combined experience of over three centuries in grassroots philosophy. Here are some videos from the seminar:
Read MoreThere's a new spirit of self-help and mutual improvement blowing through public health policy. I first felt its breeze in Scotland's national mental health strategy, which was published in August, and which made much of its 'person-centred approach' to mental health in Scotland.
Read Moreaul Doran is one of the founders of Philosophy in Pubs (PIPs), which is the biggest network of community philosophy groups in the UK, with around 40 PIPs across the UK, including 14 in Merseyside, where PIPs began. Here he talks about how PIPs started, how to run a PIPs group, and how he sees community philosophy developing in the future.
Read MoreRoman Krznaric is the author of two popular books that came out this year - The Wonderbox: Curious histories of how to live and How to Find Fulfilling Work - and is also one of the founding faculty members of the School of Life, which teaches the art of living to its clientele.
Read MoreHip hop and Philosophical Inquiry
Read MoreThe eagle-eyed among you will have noticed there was no newsletter last weekend. Apologies. The reason for this is I have journeyed deep into the warm, pulsating heart of the happiness movement.
Read MoreAs regular readers know, I’m researching the rise of grassroots philosophy groups for a project called Philosophical Communities. This has got me thinking about the roles of groups and networks in the history of ideas, and I’d like to sketch out some initial thinking. I hope the following isn’t too pretentious...
Read MoreI was at a drinks party of a history conference this week, talking to a young academic who was writing a PhD. ‘And what are you working on?’ she asked me. I said I was researching philosophy groups, and was interested in the role of support groups and self-help networks in education and health.
Read MoreA few newsletters back, I talked about the idea of the ‘mass intelligentsia’, and posted an interview I did with Melvyn Bragg about the term (he used it in this programme on class and culture back in March). I’ve been digging into this idea a bit more since then, for an academic research project I’m doing on philosophy clubs. I’d like to unpack the idea some more, if that’s alright by you.
Read MoreHere is a great short vid by Leah Green, doing a broadcasting MA at Warwick, on the future of philosophy. It features Dr Angie Hobbs, and lots of members of the London Philosophy Club, including me looking a little bug-eyed. Must learn not to do that!
Read MoreThis week, I interviewed the philosopher and scientist Massimo Pigliucci as part of my research into philosophy clubs and the Skeptic movement. Massimo is a fascinating figure: he grew up in Italy, then moved to the University of Tennessee to become a professor in ecology and evolution, before moving to City University of New York to become a professor in philosophy.
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