Positive thinking and being cheerful are often regarded as unalloyed virtues and symbols of spiritual strength, but where do you usually score on the optimism/pessimism scale? When facing a new situation, do you tend to be hopeful or suspicious? If it is the latter,...

Anthropologists say that primitive tribes usually number between 50 and 100 people. It seems that 100 people is the most that anyone, then and now, can recognise individually as being part of 'our tribe' or 'us'. Beyond that number, people become strangers, the...

Twenty years ago, I taught a course of dream analysis at the Cancer Support Association in Cottesloe. In the class was an elderly refugee from Eastern Europe whom I will call Zelda. At first she claimed to have had only one dream in her life, but it had repeated for...

Anthropologists commonly regard the evidence of funeral rites around a dead body as the first signs of a distinctly human consciousness. Many animals clearly mourn their dead, but we human beings aren't content with that. We need the supernatural as well! What...

Does life have any meaning or purpose? Our gut-feeling tells us that it does. We certainly act as if each small thing we do is worth doing. We get up in the morning, set our eyes forward and walk towards the next task, and we do that all day long. We orient our...

We usually have little control over our thoughts. They come and go as they will, in their multitudes. Our sense of control only comes in the level of action. Jesus was being typically provocative and absurdly idealist when he said that a man who lusted after his...

When we look at life on Earth, scientists can't explain why everything works as well as it does. It's just too perfect for words. This sometimes called the Goldilocks principle - not too hot, not too cold but just right. More heat and water would evaporate. Less heat...

Are there absolute, eternal truths or is everything forever changing? Plato believed there were fixed, archetypal forms governing everything in nature. Heraclitus on the other hand believed that the only constant was change. "We never step into the same river twice",...

It is natural for us to think dualistically by using pairs of opposites such as good and bad, light and dark, body and mind, male and female, growth and decay. These have an appealing symmetry and tend to feel both profound and true. Some dualities are less than...

The oracle at Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. This astonished Socrates because he always felt that he knew so little. Upon reflection, he realised that he was wise because he recognised his ignorance. Unlike so many clever people, he knew...