In "The Art of Losing Control," Jules Evans—a philosopher, journalist, and researcher at the Centre for the History of the Emotions—undertakes a wide-ranging investigation into humanity's persistent need to get out of its own head. Evans wants to understand why human beings across every culture and historical period have sought experiences of ecstasy—literally, "standing outside" the ordinary self—through music, dance, drugs, meditation, extreme sports, religious ritual, sex, and dozens of other doorways. And he wants to understand what happens when this fundamental need goes unacknowledged or unmet in a culture that prizes rational control above all else.

The book is part philosophical inquiry, part cultural history, part personal experiment. Evans doesn't just read about ecstatic experience. He attends charismatic Christian services, participates in psychedelic ceremonies, goes to music festivals, visits Sufi mystics, and puts himself through experiences that test the boundaries of his own carefully maintained rationality. The result is a book that takes the human need for self-transcendence seriously without abandoning critical intelligence—a balance that's remarkably difficult to achieve and that makes this book uniquely useful for IMHU's community. Evans demonstrates that ecstatic experience isn't a luxury, an aberration, or a sign of psychological weakness. It's a fundamental human need whose suppression has consequences—consequences visible in the epidemic levels of anxiety, depression, and addiction that characterize societies organized around perpetual rational control.

Evans argues that modern Western culture suffers from what might be called an ecstasy deficit—a systematic failure to provide legitimate, supported pathways for the kind of self-transcendent experience that human beings appear to require for psychological health. Pre-modern cultures typically embedded ecstatic practices within their religious and social institutions: festivals, rituals, dances, and ceremonies that allowed people to temporarily dissolve the boundaries of the individual self and merge with something larger. The Enlightenment project of rational self-mastery gradually stripped these practices from public life, replacing them with an ideal of constant, sober, individual control.

The consequences of this suppression haven't been the triumph of reason that Enlightenment thinkers envisioned. Instead, the need for ecstasy has gone underground, finding expression through channels that are often destructive precisely because they're unsupported and uncontained. Binge drinking, drug addiction, fanatical sports fandom, online extremism, the ecstatic mob dynamics of political rallies—Evans reads all of these as symptoms of a culture that has failed to provide healthy outlets for a need it can't eliminate. The need to lose control, to dissolve the boundaries of the rational ego, to merge with something larger than the individual self is hardwired into human psychology. A culture that refuses to acknowledge this need doesn't eliminate it. It drives it into forms that are unstructured, unsupported, and often dangerous.

One of Evans' most valuable contributions is his mapping of the enormous range of experiences that fall under the umbrella of ecstasy. He moves from the relatively mild—the flow state of an athlete or musician, the collective effervescence of a crowd singing together—through increasingly intense forms: the emotional catharsis of communal grief or celebration, the trance states induced by rhythmic drumming or chanting, the overwhelming awe of mystical experience, the ego dissolution produced by psychedelics, the radical self-surrender described by contemplatives across traditions. All of these, Evans argues, share a common feature: the temporary loosening or dissolution of the ordinary sense of self and its replacement by a felt connection to something larger.

This spectrum approach is clinically useful because it normalizes the milder forms of ecstatic experience while contextualizing the more intense ones. Most people have experienced at least mild forms of self-transcendence—being so absorbed in music that they forget themselves, feeling merged with a crowd during a concert, experiencing a moment of awe in nature that dissolves their usual self-preoccupation. Evans shows that these experiences exist on a continuum with the more dramatic mystical states that clinical systems tend to pathologize. The person who reports a full-blown mystical experience isn't having a fundamentally different kind of experience from the person who loses themselves in a sunset. They're having an experience further along the same continuum—a continuum that reflects a natural capacity of human consciousness rather than a symptom of disorder.

Evans doesn't romanticize ecstatic experience. He devotes substantial attention to its genuine dangers—a honesty that makes his overall argument for taking these experiences seriously more credible. Ecstatic states involve the loosening of ego boundaries and rational control, and this loosening creates real vulnerabilities. People in ecstatic states can be manipulated by charismatic leaders, swept into mob behavior they'd never endorse in their ordinary state, pushed into psychological territory they're not equipped to navigate, or left with experiences they can't integrate into their daily lives. The history of ecstatic religion is filled with casualties alongside its saints.

Evans identifies several factors that distinguish beneficial from harmful ecstatic experience. Container matters enormously: an ecstatic experience within a well-structured ritual, with experienced guides and a supportive community, is far safer than the same experience erupting spontaneously or in an uncontrolled environment. Intention matters: seeking ecstasy for personal growth, healing, or spiritual development produces different outcomes than seeking it for escape or sensation. Integration matters: an ecstatic experience that's reflected on, discussed, and woven into one's understanding of life can be profoundly transformative, while the same experience left unprocessed can be destabilizing. And individual readiness matters: people with stable psychological foundations and good support systems are better equipped to navigate ecstatic territory than those who are already fragmented or isolated. These distinctions map directly onto IMHU's clinical concerns about spiritual emergency and the conditions that determine whether a non-ordinary experience becomes integrative or catastrophic.

Evans makes a case that deliberately engaging with ecstatic experience—in safe, supported, intentional ways—may be an important and largely untapped resource for mental health. The therapeutic potential of ecstatic practices is supported by growing evidence: the effectiveness of psychedelic-assisted therapy for depression and PTSD; the mental health benefits of group singing, dancing, and ritual; the documented effects of meditation and contemplative practice on wellbeing; the therapeutic value of awe experiences in nature. Each of these involves some degree of the ego-loosening that characterizes ecstasy, and each appears to produce benefits that conventional talk therapy and medication often cannot.

The implication is that mental health care may need to expand its repertoire to include facilitated experiences of self-transcendence alongside its current emphasis on strengthening ego functions and managing symptoms. This is a provocative suggestion for a field organized around the values of rational control, emotional regulation, and stable identity. But Evans argues that the evidence is compelling: sometimes what people need isn't a stronger ego but a temporary vacation from the ego—a glimpse of the wider consciousness within which the individual self is embedded. This glimpse can provide the kind of perspective, meaning, and felt connection that no amount of cognitive restructuring can produce. For IMHU, Evans' work supports the case that ecstatic and self-transcendent experiences aren't clinical liabilities to be managed but potential therapeutic resources to be wisely engaged.

What makes Evans' approach particularly valuable is his use of philosophy as a bridge between the scientific study of ecstatic experience and its lived, first-person reality. He draws on the Western philosophical tradition—from Plato's account of divine madness through William James's pragmatic approach to religious experience to contemporary philosophy of mind—to create a framework that's intellectually rigorous without being reductively materialist. Philosophy can ask questions that science alone cannot: What does ecstatic experience mean? What does it reveal about the nature of consciousness? What is the good life, and does it require experiences that transcend rational control? How should a society organize itself in relation to its members' need for self-transcendence?

These philosophical questions are ultimately the questions that IMHU's work raises. The organization isn't just making clinical claims about the importance of spiritual experience in mental health. It's making philosophical claims about the nature of consciousness, the conditions for human flourishing, and the limitations of a worldview that reduces all of human experience to neural computation. Evans demonstrates that these questions can be engaged with rigor, honesty, and intellectual humility—without either the dismissiveness of materialist skepticism or the credulity of uncritical spirituality. His approach models the kind of thinking IMHU's mission requires: serious about evidence, open to mystery, respectful of the full range of human experience, and unwilling to let any single framework—scientific, philosophical, or spiritual—claim a monopoly on truth.