Beyond the Brain 2019

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.

Running alongside the acccepted history of western consciousness there is another current which should have pride of place but which has been relegated to a shadowy, inferior position, somewhere underground. In the seventeenth century this other current – known variously as the western esoteric tradition, the western inner tradition, and the Hermetic tradition – fell victim to a coup d’etat enacted by one side of our brain against the other.