On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy

Chosen by Andrew Miller as a Book of the Year in the Daily Mail

'A significant and courageous invitation to think again about the kinds of thinking that matter; the kinds of thinking that keep us awake' Rowan Williams

Mysticism has been called 'experience at its most intense form', and here philosopher Simon Critchley asks: wouldn't you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself?

Mysticism is not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. It is a way of freeing yourself of your standard habits, fancies and imagining so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. It is the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.

This is a book about Julian of Norwich and medieval mystics that also ranges through the work of Anne Carson, Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. It looks at Nick Cave and German krautrock and shows how music can be secular worship. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life.