Losing Control (and other things)

I just love the cover of this book. It's so vibrant! And although I had only ordered this lately (when I discovered there was a Jules Evan book on sale at BookXcess) I allowed it to skip the queue of the piles and piles and piles of unread books all over the house in disgraceful heaps (I planned to buy another bookshelf but then the pandemic got worse and Ikea closed off its services and the MCO happened. Again).

Anyway I so enjoyed Philosophy for Life And Other Dangerous Situations (you can see my review elsewhere in these pages) that I knew I would enjoy this one as well. Because, well, Jules Evans is witty. He's laugh out loud funny. There's no other word for it.

And typically, after a book about stoicism and keeping everything under control, reasoning things out, he would write a book about, well, losing control. The opposite of stoicism. Dissolving the ego and allowing the flow.

Because Evans, as he even tells you in the earlier book, had a near death encounter which changed him profoundly. It healed him of long-standing PTSD (that came about because of a bad LSD trip while he was a teenager) and so, after going through CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy, not criminal breach of trust!) and questioning his crazy thoughts and reasoning himself back to sanity, he was ripe for something different.

Here's the thing about Stoics; they don't believe in dancing. I remember reading what Socrates had to say about poets and it filled me with rage. What a colourless world, you inhabit, I thought, where everyone would behave quietly, logically, without any drama.

Anyway, in this book, Evans started to seek out all the different things he could do to dissolve his ego. Being an academic (he is a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London), he naturally went about it in a structured way.

He joins a charismatic church. He looks at art. He talks to people who are experimenting with psychedelics (being much too afraid to do it himself after that memorable bad trip). He reads some Thomas Traherne (and introduces me to him -- will have to get a copy of Centuries of Meditation). He goes for a Zen retreat. He delves into war and violence and how that can bring about feelings of ecstasy. He looks at how the technologists have turned themselves into Gods (and actually believe it).

It is a rollicking ride. If I had one bone to pick about the book it would be that Evans never goes into any of these things very deeply. He holds it all at arm's length and observes with some cynicism and distrusts the value of his own experience.

Here's the thing about dissolving your ego.

You have to actually let go.