One autumn night, the old stone bridge over the Weir collapses. Nobody is hurt, but the town is cut in two. By morning, there are two accounts of what happened. The local paper, the Ashbourne Sentinel, reports that decades of council underinvestment in infrastructure finally caught up with a structure that engineers had flagged as failing eighteen months prior. A newer outlet, Weir Truth, reports that the bridge was brought down deliberately, as part of a redevelopment scheme

There is a version of you that is extremely competent. It wakes at a considered hour, follows a system, tracks its inputs and outputs, and moves through the world with a practised efficiency that others sometimes mistake for calm. It has opinions about sleep hygiene. It is never more than two days behind on email. It has learned, through considerable effort, to respond rather than react, to pause before speaking, to sit with discomfort before getting on with being a high-func

I grew up in a Christian household where we prayed for everybody. Friends, strangers, people who had wronged us, people who had never asked and would not have wanted our prayers if they had been asked. This was not considered an ethical problem. It was considered an expression of love. The logic was simple and, within its own framework, coherent: prayer is good, God is sovereign, and offering something good on someone's behalf requires no permission from the recipient. Intent

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who arrive at beliefs by weighing evidence. That is a comforting story. And like most comforting stories, it is largely false. In practice, human beings are far more tribal than rational. We do not simply ask, What is true? We ask, usually without admitting it, Who is saying this? Whose side is this on? Will agreeing with this strengthen or weaken my standing? Belief is often less a matter of reason than of belonging.

As someone who regularly experiences things that don't fit conventional frameworks, such as non-local knowing, spirit encounters, precognitive information, altered states where the normal rules of reality seem suspended, I rely heavily on direct experience as a source of knowledge. But as someone trained in rigorous thinking, I also know that "I experienced it" is not a get out of epistemology free card. Direct experience can be misleading, misinterpreted, or simply wrong.

In shamanic journey, you are fully present. Not chemically altered, not surrendered to a substance's trajectory, but consciously travelling into non-ordinary reality while remaining the author of the journey. This distinction is not merely procedural. It is the difference between being taken somewhere and choosing to go.

A few years ago, I caught the smell of a particular hand cream in a shop and was, for a moment, entirely somewhere else. Not remembering somewhere else. Somewhere else. My grandmother's kitchen, a specific afternoon, the quality of the light, a feeling in my body that I had not had in decades and that arrived whole, instantly, before I had time to think the word memory at all. I was not recalling the past. I was, in some sense I could not account for, back inside it.

As a child, I told my mother a plane would crash. The next day it was on every news channel. Last year, driving with my husband, I told him to slow down because I could sense a car crash ahead. About five miles down the road, one happened in front of us. These were not dramatic revelations. They arrived quietly, as information, the way you might suddenly remember you left the oven on. No ceremony. No altered state. Just knowing before there was any conventional way to know.

We tend to treat truth as the highest intellectual virtue, as the fixed star around which rational thought orbits. But there is a quieter, more unsettling possibility: that coherence is doing most of the real work, and truth has been taking the credit.

I want to begin with something I have noticed that I cannot fully explain, and that I have never heard anyone explain satisfactorily either. Over the course of my practice, I have spent time with a great many older women, women in their seventies, eighties, some in their nineties, women without university degrees, without professional credentials, without any of the markers our culture values. And I have sat across from them in a state of awe at their intelligence.

I'm going to say something that will annoy people on both sides of the religion debate: the New Atheists and religious fundamentalists have more in common than either would like to admit. Not in their conclusions, obviously. One side believes God exists and scripture is literal truth. The other believes God doesn't exist and religion is dangerous nonsense. But in their epistemology and in their assumptions about how knowledge works and what counts as truth, they're making the

Here is a fact that most people encounter in undergraduate physics and immediately file away under 'weird quantum stuff that doesn't affect real life': an electron does not have a definite position until it interacts with something else. Not unknown, but undefined. It exists as a superposition of possibilities, a smear of potential, until a relationship is formed. At that point a value crystallises. Not because we looked. Because something else in the universe entered into re

We confuse confidence with competence all the time. A person who speaks fluently, decisively, and without visible hesitation is often assumed to be more capable than someone who is more measured, more tentative, or more willing to admit ambiguity. Yet confidence is not knowledge. It is not expertise. And it is certainly not a guarantee of sound judgment.

I want to take Berkeley seriously, not because I think he was right in all the details of his system, but because I think the core philosophical impulse behind his idealism is both more defensible and more important than the standard dismissal allows. Contemporary philosophy of mind has, in my view, been circling back toward Berkeley for decades without quite admitting it, and reading him carefully reveals why some of the hardest problems in consciousness studies look the way

I come to this as someone with a deep investment in philosophy of mind and relational ontology, and as a shamanic practitioner who has sat with people navigating the territory between life and death. This is not an abstract question for me. It is one of the most urgent questions there is. And it deserves better than either the credulity of true believers or the reflexive dismissiveness of those who have decided the answer before examining the evidence.

We usually speak of death as if it were the end of a thing. A person lives, and then that person dies. It sounds straightforward, almost tidy. But that clarity may be borrowed from an older picture of what a person is. If you are a substance - a distinct, enduring entity that inhabits a body - then death is the destruction of that entity. But if you are not a substance at all, and instead a pattern, the question becomes much stranger. What exactly dies when a pattern ends?

Most people say they want the truth. They don’t. What they want is confirmation, dressed up as insight. They want their beliefs reflected back at them, their motives excused, their choices validated, and their self-image left intact. The moment truth threatens the ego, it stops being 'helpful' and starts being called rude, negative, or unrealistic. That is the real problem: people are not usually offended by truth itself. They are offended by what truth costs them.

Most people think of disagreement as a failure. A conversation that ends in consensus has succeeded; one that ends in unresolved dispute has not quite managed it. Philosophy, at least in its self-presentation, reverses this. It is the discipline that treats disagreement as the medium through which understanding develops, that regards the persistent challenge as more intellectually honest than the premature resolution. Socrates did not walk away from conversations once everyon

There is a passage in the Philosophical Investigations that philosophy of mind has not yet finished digesting. It concerns what Wittgenstein called the private language argument, and while the argument has attracted an enormous secondary literature, most of that literature debates its validity as an argument rather than attending to what it reveals. What it reveals, I want to suggest, is something that changes the terms of consciousness studies entirely.

Modern spirituality is, in its dominant form, a self-improvement project wearing borrowed robes. Mindfulness is sold as a cognitive enhancement tool. Yoga is sold as a fitness product. Silence is sold as a premium commodity: book a retreat, pay for the quiet, come back refreshed and ready to produce. We have taken the most subversive insight in human history - that the self is not the centre of the universe - and converted it into a personal development strategy.