The greatest burden a child must bear, we remember from Jung, is the unlived lives of its parents.

Most of what happens in life is entirely out of your control, and while blind self-belief might disguise that fact for a while, it will eventually prove an anaemic opponent to brute reality.

So she borrowed the money and paid it across over the course of a year. When she hadn’t been healed – in fact, of course, her condition had worsened – she called up the pastor’s people to ask why. She was told it was because she had secret sin in her life. Her response, now at fourteen years old, was to douse herself in petrol and self-immolate.

Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life.

Confirmation bias occurs when we notice things in the world that support our beliefs and pay less attention to things that contradict them.

‘What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these

Again and again, many people play out the same story: that they surely cannot be easy to love; that love and admiration are dependent on career success; that others will always disappoint us. ‘The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents,’ wrote the legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Whatever we have taken from them, the

Perhaps death was not quite the annihilation she had thought. Perhaps it was not so essential that her person or even memories of her person survived. Perhaps the important thing was that her ripples persist, ripples of some act or idea that would help others attain joy and virtue in life, ripples that would fill her with pride and act to counter

If we are to talk of existing in any sense after we die, then the best we can do is to extend our sense of self – our space-time worm – to continue beyond the grave and incorporate how the atoms of our decomposing bodies feed into continuing life after we have breathed our last. Then we might say we have some sort of continuing existence. But this