‘You went into psychiatry to try and cast light on the mystery of suffering. Did it? ‘Not really. It’s a theological question, you can’t expect medicine to answer it.’ RD Laing, interviewed near the end of his life In this article I’m going to look at definitions of ‘psychedelic integration’…

I’ve spent the last five days at Esalen, the famous spiritual workshop centre on the coast of Big Sur in northern California. I was invited to take part in a seminar on the ‘superhumanities’ at Esalen’s centre for research. I’ve been wanting to visit Esalen for years, and it hasn’t…

This week I got into an argument on Twitter. That’s quite rare for me, these days, but still happens occasionally. I tweeted something about the damage Trump has done to democracy, globally, and an account called ‘Behold Retreats’ tweeted back that democracy is a sham. Behold Retreats was set up…

‘Do you really want to be perfectly well?’ So begins a tantalizing advert in Good Health magazine in 1905. It invited the reader to the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, where countless specialists are ‘studying this one thing alone — how to get well and how to stay well.’ For…

The 20th century was an extraordinary moment in Hinduism’s encounter with the West. For centuries, Hinduism had not expanded beyond India’s borders. Instead, India was colonized by Muslim rulers in the 16th century and invaded by Christian missionaries in the 19th century. But this one-way traffic changed on September 11…

People sometimes ask me for writing and publishing advice. My main advice would be to find something else to do. This is a terrible way to make a living. The average book sells less than 500 copies, and authors typically make 10% of the price of each book sold, so…

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish…in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess’. HG Wells, Anticipations (1901) NB: the following contains very distressing information. The flipside of the ego-inflation dream of the ubermensch is…

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. In 1879, in Breslau, a group of idealistic young Germans gathered round an oak tree at midnight to swear an oath. They swore to do everything they could to return…

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project. It feels taboo to read Mein Kampf. It is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’, in Karl Ove Knausgard’s phrase. You download it and think, ‘I must be on some FBI list now’. Nazism still inspires hate-crimes and murders, like the Buffalo…