Ecstatic Integration
‘Improving Western culture’s ecstatic literacy’.
We work to try and make psychedelics and other forms of ecstatic experience safer by providing reliable and evidence based information on typical psychedelic and ecstatic challenges, and what helps people cope with them. Our work has influenced regulatory bodies, helped to shape the public conversation on psychedelics, provided information and support to those dealing with psychedelic difficulties, and even helped persuade a grand jury to drop attempted murder charges against the ‘magic mushroom pilot’.
Jules Evans, the editor, is a philosopher, researcher and author of several books including Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, The Art of Losing Control, and Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency. He has spent his working life thinking and writing about ecstatic experiences, how people find them and make sense of them, when they can be good or bad for us and for our societies, and how western culture can improve its ecstatic literacy and develop better maps, guides and containers for journeys beyond the self. Over the last two decades he’s written for organisations including The Times, The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman, Aeon, BBC Radio 4, BBC 2, Audible and the Financial Times. Benzinga listed him as one of 30 ‘movers and shakers’ in psychedelic culture in 2024.
‘Jules shows us philosophy is not just for the classroom. It’s also for life’. Matthew Syed, picking Philosophy for Life as a Times book of the year.
‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' Steve Taylor, author of The Leap
‘Breaking Open is the best book on spiritual emergencies out there’. Daniel Ingram, Emergent Phenomena Research Consortium
‘Yours is an important voice in the field.’ Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins
Ecstatic Integration also features other critical expert voices on ecstatic experiences, ethics, risk and harm reduction, such as Ed Prideaux and Joseph Holcomb Adams, and its essays draw on interviews with many of the leading thinkers on and practitioners with ecstatic and psychedelic experiences.
The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project launched in September 2022, and is the leading research and public communication project on psychedelic and ecstatic ethics, integration and harm reduction. We produce academic research on adverse psychedelic experiences, enduring post-trip difficulties, and what helps people deal with them.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter, podcast, online events, community chat and archive. All profits support the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences research project, which researches difficult trips and how people cope with them.
