‘My journey to understanding LSD and other holotropic states of consciousness resembled an exciting and challenging treasure hunt.’ ‘Psychedelics have shown us that the mechanistic materialistic worldview that we have inherited from the seventeenth century is seriously outdated and needs to be replaced by a post-materialistic philosophy and cosmology that…

Jesus Christ is revealed to be a second-century fiction by a remarkable new analysis of the source texts of the Bible which seeks to revolutionise our understanding of the origins of Christianity and Judaism The long-standing English idiom ‘the gospel truth’, taken to mean ‘the absolute truth’, and derived from…

‘There is no consciousness without philosophising, just as there is no philosophising without consciousness, and we are all philosophers at heart.’ Benjamin Davies By any account, The Shape of Knowledge: An introduction to paraphilosophy by Benjamin Davies (Iff Books, September, 2023), is a remarkable work, profound and far-reaching in its…

An interview with Nicholas Hagger, man of letters, cultural historian, philosopher and author of sixty books, whose new work ‘The Golden Phoenix: Russia, Ukraine and a coming New World Order’ (O-Books, October 2023) analyses how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacts on the West’s envisaged ‘Great Reset’ and progresses the rival…

What does the future hold? A democratic or an authoritarian world government, the nuclear devastation of a Third World War or a ‘golden age’ of global peace and cooperation? An important new book weighs the momentous options In a compelling new work, cultural historian and philosopher Nicholas Hagger analyses how…

‘The subtle, yet pervasive, entrapment of man through the illusion-generating processes of sense perception has been a central theme of mystics, prophets, seers and teachers for as long as mankind has been inquiring into the nature of consciousness.’ Ralph Metzner Psychotherapist Ralph Metzner, who died in 2019 at the age…

The significance of minority opinion in world affairs: how it can sway the masses The Belgian professor of psychology Prof Mattias Desmet, in his indispensable work The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), advances his theory of mass formation (read my Medium article about the book here). Prof Desmet…

Future apocalypse, prophesied down the centuries, has today moved out of the entertainment sphere, out of all those disaster movies and sci-fi novels, and into the political and scientific arenas. Twenty-first century apocalypticism, for overtly political ends, now abounds in mainstream climate change and pandemic rhetoric where even well-educated people…

Digitalisation obviously has its benefits but it also has a dark potential which needs more open discussion Could we be under sentence to a ‘digital prison’ where every aspect of our lives — and I mean every aspect — would be monitored and managed with Orwellian alacrity and rigour? It…