About

These pages reflect a very personal view of my beliefs and how I came to have them, being someone who, many years ago, was formerly a committed rationalist atheist. I have written elsewhere about how I came to move from this position into someone with the beliefs I have now, in a long essay entitled In Defence of Faith and I will leave it to that to provide a context to my earlier life, before I engaged upon this latest stage of my spiritual journey.

I am an academic by training and have read widely in subjects such as comparative religion, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and spent many years studying the phenomenon of shamanism in particular, as well as pre European and Colonial period Andean religion, and the impact of evangelisation by Christianity upon traditional belief systems. I have also studied Eastern Yogic traditions and philosophies, so what I say here comes from a place of, if not authority, then of sufficient understanding. I have always been someone driven to understand things intellectually, whilst fully acknowledging that ‘God’, in whatever way that term is understood, is beyond intellectual apprehension. I also employ a fundamentally Jungian and post Jungian view of psychology and the structure of the human psyche and experience.

 

Featured image taken at the Shooltankeshwar Temple, Varanasi, during a Rudrabishek puja to Shiva, March 2020