Shamanism, the Dao, new spirituality, new technology and cultural revolution
Apes, Angels and
Outlaws

New Science, New Philosophy, New Directions
Search for a Method The Main Ingredients The Personal Perspective The Dao of Beginning Again








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What you will find on this site

This is a unique fusion of philosophy, ecology and systems theory. It is in effect a soft technology for spiritual renewal and cultural revolution. Combining deep sensibilities both to the sciences and humanities, this is where Martin Buber meets R.D.Laing meets Jane Austen, with cross-currents of shamanic journey, the Chinese Dao and a revitalised Darwinian evolutionary theory.


Who am I?
I am Michael Roth, the author of all the material on this site. While training as a medical doctor, I was also an alumnus at the famed AntiUniversity of London (1968-1969), and became involved with the alternative psychiatry movement in that era and later.

I worked and studied with the existential psycho-analyst R.D.Laing, and was a founder-member of the Arbours Association (London), which provides alternative care for persons diagnosed with severe mental illness.

My research path has taken me into spheres of philosophy, social politics, linguistics and anthropology - whilst I have continued to seek out a genuine way of relating to other human beings in the troubled milieux of psychiatry, communal living, and twentieth and twenty-first century social and cultural instability.

I have been consistently inter-disciplinary in all of my reading and exploration, and the personal and philosophical insights to which this has given rise are almost always outside the prevailing classifications - or accepted lists of subjects.

The following authors are they whose work I have been most deeply occupied with, at different times in my life. This has often entailed exploring what the actual world feels like, within the patterns and definitions of life offered by these people. I have also written extensively, and often critically, about many of them.

Philosophy
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Martin Buber
  • Lao Ze
  • St Matthew
  • St Mark
  • St Luke
  • St John
  • Rudolf Bultmann
  • Paul Ricoeur
  • Richard Rorty
  • Robert Pirsig
  • Donald Davidson
  • Jacques Derrida
  • Benedetto Croce
  • Charles Peirce
  • John Dewey
  • A.N.Whitehead
  • J.H.Randall
  • Justus Buchler
  • Martha Nussbaum
Biology, Physiology, Ethology and Cybernetics

Anthropology
  • Mary Douglas
  • Gregory Bateson
  • Milton Ericson
  • R.D.Laing
  • David Cooper
  • Clifford Geertz
  • Victor Turner
Virtual Reality
Psychology
  • Eugene Gendlin
  • Arnold Mindell
  • M. Scott Peck

I am the foremost exponent of Charlotte M. Bach's ground-breaking theories of emergent evolution, described in my A Bolt From the Bleeding Sky (Dielectric Publications, London, 1984). I continue to work as a psychiatrist and as a researcher into holistic methods of facilitating social change. This used to include facilitation and training sponsored by the organization, Community Building in Britain which developed and disseminated the work of the holistic psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, through the 90s and noughties.

I am also involved in an exploratory research group seeking to fuse poetic, practical and fantastical modes of action to create significant cultural/political interventions in the here and now.

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   Which direction will you choose?
This site offers you multiple pathways, and a wide range of choice of what you will explore - because the various links really do lead in very different directions. Everything depends on which links you follow.

It can be as personal, or as poetic as you want it to be. It incorporates the latest and the best science and philosophy (if that is what you want to explore). It is the missing link between the wisdom of the past and the technology of the future (- if you happen to be looking to find the best of both these worlds).

Would you like to tune in better, to the rich detail of your own life - or to discover your own world reflected in the vivid, intricate worlds of fiction and drama? Then you can explore the personal, the emotional intelligence or the lived reality links that you will find here.

If you want to understand better how one person's life is a real and important facet, within the kaleidoscopic sweep of biology, of culture, and of the evolution of humankind - then there are links here which will start to unfold this for you.

If you want to discover how practical commitments can also make sense within a spiritual or cosmic trajectory, there are pages you can explore here, too.

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If you want to find reconciliations - beyond the sects, fundamentalisms, atheisms and other complacent creeds that seek to divide us from one another - there is a key to this in the ordinal, multiple perspectives that spin out from the everywhere centre. There are affinities and complementarities that defy the conventional frontiers, and have the power to draw empathic hearts into a subtle, intelligent accord.

If you wonder what Apes, Angels and Outlaws are all doing together here on the same web-site: there is a link which will point you towards the real "missing link" - a key to a new evolutionary theory which simultaneously uncovers the pattern of your own evolution, as well as making sense of the evolution of species, more clearly than the neo-Darwinist fundamentalists have ever managed to do.

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So. Which direction will you choose?
Search for a Method The Main Ingredients The Personal Perspective The Dao of Beginning Again




© all content: copyright reserved, Michael Roth, March 2009