June 2018
Buddhism and Shakespeare - along with all the poets - held that life itself is a dream - of happiness and pleasure or a nightmare of pain and suffering. One day very soon we will have to face the new reality - the unthinkable prospect of human-caused climate change and a sixth mass extinction - and find a new way through, or perish. There is a middle way between pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, dream and reality, but we have to go beyond modern Western culture to find it. A new Axial Age promises a new balance - a nondual perspective on all our scientific, philosophical and political dualisms - which depends on the integration of everything, such as physics and meta-physics, or economics and ethics, but particularly the analytic sciences of the modern time-centred West with the universal Idealism of the timeless East.