Beyond the Brain 2019

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.

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.

The rationalist-materialist paradigm is dominant, with spirituality understated. A world transforming spirituality has to be inclusive. Religion as spirituality fails to be […]