In this lecture Graham will explore the multiple ways in which we live simultaneously with the visible, or what we can perceive through our senses, and the invisible. The invisible pertains to any number of ordinary realms – the sensory, the operations of the mind, the phenomenal world, and the cosmological.

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.

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.