Mystics and Scientists 2016

According to our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only […]

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.

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.