116 _
days in a Vipassana center and went on
a retreat, I was a member of a Christian
church for a year, went on a pilgrimage
to Memphis and Nashville, in the US,
where rock and roll began, sang in the
church of Al Green, attended a dream
workshop, and danced myself into
ecstasy. I asked people about their
favorite form of losing control and I had
discussions with experts such as the
Hungarian-American psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first
described the concept of ‘flow’.What does ecstasy do to you?
Ecstatic experiences are often good
for you and can be healing. According
to Stoic philosophy and cognitive
behavioral therapy, you can heal
negative emotions by rationally
adjusting your thoughts and beliefs, but
that turns out to work for only 40-50
percent of people. Emotions arise not
only through thoughts, but also through
physical reactions in the autonomic
nervous system. As a result, you can
not only change them top-down,
through your thoughts, but also
bottom-up, through your body—by
focusing your attention on your
breathing, exercising, singing,
dancing, listening to music, taking a
walk in nature, having sex and so on.
Non-rational states of consciousness
such as flow, meditation and trance
are said to also heal your mind that
way. In addition, ecstatic experiencesyour own thoughts. You’re always free
to think whatever you want, and to
have your own opinions. On the other
hand, you’ll have to accept that you
don’t have complete control over
events outside of yourself. And that
therefore your influence on what’s
happening in the world is limited. If
you don’t accept that, Epictetus said,
you’ll spend most of your life feeling
angry, scared and miserable.In your second book, The Art
of Losing Control, you explore
a very different path.
When I finished my first book, I
realized that Stoicism is very rational,
and heavily focused on self-control
and control. When I was 24, however,
I had a strange, almost ecstatic
experience after a serious skiing
accident. While lying on the ground in
the Norwegian mountains with a
complicated leg fracture and two
broken vertebrae, I had a near-death
experience in which I felt absorbed
into a white light. In that moment, I
felt only love and everything was
good. It sounds very airy-fairy, but
that experience, along with Stoicism
and cognitive therapy, helped me to
get rid of my depression and anxiety.
So when I’d finished my first book, I
wanted to study the other side of the
story. And that’s the side which looks
at the moments when you forget all
your worries and drudgery andbecome absorbed in the things
around you. The moments when you
forget yourself and experience flow.What kinds of experiences are
those exactly?
For one person, it may be losing
yourself in a book; for another, it can
be gardening. For me, playing tennis
is a very good way to forget myself.
When I play, I am so completely
focused that the world doesn’t seem
to exist beyond the tennis court. But
the feeling of being detached from
yourself can also go deeper, like
during meditation, when you use
mind-expanding substances or
dance. In such moments, you feel
connected to something greater than
yourself: nature, the cosmos or
humanity. It can go so far that you
lose all sense of ‘me’ or ‘you’. In
mystical literature, this is defined as
ecstasy. I wanted to know how
people experience that and when
those kinds of experiences are good
or bad for you.In your book, you describe how
you yourself participated in all
kinds of ecstatic experiences.
As when I wrote my first book, I spoke
to all kinds of people about how they
experienced it, but I also wanted to
know what it feels like, that kind of
ecstasy. And so I ventured far beyond
my comfort zone: I meditated for ten