<When Dr Robin Carhart-Harris finished his masters in psychoanalysis in 2005, he decided he wanted to do a brain- imaging study of LSD to see if he could locate the ego and the unconscious. That might have seemed an impossible … Continue reading
I’ll admit it, I was slightly nervous. I’d been invited to give a philosophy workshop in HMP Dumfries, a prison in west Scotland. Plummy-voiced and puny-framed Englishman that I am, I wasn’t sure what they’d make of me. Mincemeat, maybe. … Continue reading
This year, I’ve started researching ecstatic experience, from a personal and an academic perspective. One of the highlights of my research has been encountering the work of Ann Taves, a religious studies academic at the University of California, Santa Barbara, … Continue reading
Jeanette Winterson was walking through Amsterdam ‘one snowy Christmas, when the weather had turned the canals into oblongs of ice’. She says: ‘I was wandering happily, alone, playing the flaneur, when I passed a little gallery and in the moment … Continue reading
In the last week of November, Live Like A Stoic Week is happening for the second year. Everyone who is interested in Stoicism, or who practices it today, is encouraged to take part, get involved in an event or activity, … Continue reading
We all love a bit of ecstasy, don’t we? Not the drug (though that’s a form of ecstatic experience) but, more broadly, those moments of expansion, elation and awe we sometimes feel, when our heart-strings seem to vibrate in harmony … Continue reading
Around a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians now sign up to the Pentecostalist or neo-Pentecostalist belief that God talks to them. That includes some educated people like, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. How is this possible, in an … Continue reading
I’ve just re-read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, which he gave as a series of lectures in 1902. It is a marvelous book, in which James attempts to take a pragmatic and empirical approach to religious experiences, remaining open … Continue reading
Bernd Bösel is a philosopher and scholar with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who has explored the idea of enthusiasm in the history of ideas, in his book Philosophie und Enthusiasmus. I met Bernd for an enthusiastic caffeine-fueled conversation to … Continue reading
I’m sitting in the West London studio of Brian Eno, one of the all-time great pioneers of sound recording, and my dictaphone has broken. Right at the beginning of our interview. ‘It’s…er…saying it’s full’, I say. ‘How do I delete … Continue reading