Rosalind: They say you are a melancholy fellow. Jaques: I am so: I do love it better than laughing. Shakespeare, “As You Like It” Melancholy is ambivalent and problematic. Although it seems at once a very familiar term, it is extraordinarily elusive and enigmatic. Pierrot, Hamlet and even Batman are all melancholic characters with traits […]

Heng San, the philosopher, had been sent by the emperor of Chou Pai province to visit the court of his friend the emperor of Tsung Mu province. Heng San was well respected for his learning and his rationality. The emperor often sought his opinion on issues that were brought to court. The philosopher preached that […]

Science & Reality Science has spurred many of the advances that benefit us in the twenty-first century. It has improved our standard of living by contributing to our material wealth, our increasing longevity and better health outcomes, our exploitation of natural resources and has impacted on virtually every field of human endeavour. The advancement of […]

I am probably setting myself up for some criticism with this week’s blog, but it is a reaction to some media responses I have been reading to the Productivity Commission’s recent working paper titled Labour Force Participation of Mature Age Women (available on their website) which analyses the participation rate of women aged 45 – […]

Human beings always have contradictory aspirations: their will to assert their individuality conflicts with their desire to belong. And both tendencies bring inherent problems. Those who seek to emphasise their individuality and specialness develop conflated egos that hinder their ability to relate to others. The Vedantic sages understood this millennia ago. They differentiated between the […]

Not surprisingly, sitting here in Rockhampton for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking of floods. Most of the creation myths around the world seem to be accompanied by a flood myth. At some stage humanity falls out of favour with its god or gods, which results in a wide scale destruction which requires […]

The world is no doubt full of paradoxes. I recently read of a poll taken in the United States that indicated that 25% of adults reported feeling lonely and isolated. It is a strange phenomenon that somebody in a country with a population of over 310 million should feel isolated and lonely! I have no […]

I have often heard, over the years, when two parties are in disputation, one side saying that the issue would be easily resolved if only the other showed some “common sense”. Whilst I am sure that they did not consciously mean it, what was being implied was that what the aggrieved party believed is “common […]

One of the most fundamental questions that science or philosophy can pose is, “Why are things as they are.” The answer that science would give us is that there exist immutable laws that shape the universe. These laws are uniformly applied throughout the universe and are invariant over time. But that avoids the question that […]

There has always been a certain mystery surrounding the Gnostics. Modern novels such as Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” and films such as “The Matrix” have drawn on some of the mystical beliefs of Gnosticism. My essay this week will try to throw a little light on the little known and seemingly greatly misunderstood, Gnostics. […]