What are we? Where did we come from? and Why do we exist? are questions that have fascinated humans for at least 25,000 years.

Iain McGilchrist will contend that the world in which we live in the West is shaped by a set of beliefs about reality which we know from experience, and feel intuitively, to be almost certainly false. Though the consequences of this are widely deplored, we seem strangely powerless to resist it. We are as if in a trance, whistling a happy tune as we sleepwalk towards the abyss.

Our world faces multiple crises, and attempts to address them are not working. We live in a world that is miserable and frightening for most of its inhabitants. Many of the rich are not happy, while the rich/poor gap gets wider. The richest 300 people in the world now have more wealth than the poorest 3,000,000,000 – that is nearly half of humanity. And we are ruining our planet at such a rate that sooner than most people can imagine, large parts of it will become uninhabitable. Einstein said that no problem can be solved from the consciousness that created it. So we are clearly in need of a shift in consciousness to enable us to resolve the global problems facing us.