Sublime

Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues have argued that the Freudian primary process is characterised by high levels of entropy. The primal, infant brain state is disorganised; however, as the infant matures, organisation is the inevitable by-product of a system in which free energy is minimised. The ensuing (low entropy) 'structure' that emerges equa

they are both obsessed with questions of meaning. Sometimes I think this is just a way of winding up those atheists who betray a religious or evangelical intensity in promoting their atheism.

Bill Richards, a preternaturally cheerful man in his seventies, is a bridge between the two eras of psychedelic therapy.

But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are. Yet there remains, besides the promises of love and religion, one other – and more solid – resource with which to address our loneliness: culture.

At the heart of mental illness is a loss of control over our own better thoughts and feelings.

“Solitude and Leadership,” William Deresiewicz

Mill’s insight in this passage has a name: the paradox of egoism. And it has a history, dating back at least to sermons preached by Joseph Butler at the Rolls Chapel in London, which were published as a book in 1726.9

Dick posits the philosophy of Tao, which offers a means of examining the universe through the principles of interconnectedness – or Jungian synchronicity – at odds with Western ideas of a universe that functions on the mechanistic basis of cause and effect. In