Philosophical Gleanings- Insight from Schopenhauer

For the past four decades my research has frequently found me living in various parts of the world with minority religions who believe and do things that would seem, at least prima facie, to be both incredible and incomprehensible. I have also found myself drawn into taking an active, and often uncomfortable role in the so-called ‘cult scene’. Although it is impossible to generalise about the thousands of religious movements that currently exist, in this talk I shall discuss some of the characteristics that new new religions tend to display and how these are likely to change within a relatively short period. I shall also describe how, when stepping out of the ivory tower, one can find oneself in a Monty Python situation, discovering the familiar in the unfamiliar and the unfamiliar in the familiar.

Dialectical ‘both-and’ thinking is key to resolving paradox and integrating ideas in ways that avoid reduction of one idea to the other. In this talk, the history of such thinking in the West and East will be explored, including the Chinese yin-yang model, Hegel’s dialectical reasoning, Jung’s exploration of opposites within alchemy and the psyche, Erikson’s dialectics of psychological development, dialectical behaviour therapy, and both-and thinking in quantum physics. A dialectical model of the relationship between science and spirituality will be discussed.