This document combines two separate papers, 1. Beliefs about Being Human, and 2. In-Sanity: Responses to Religious Experience.
These two papers were written five years apart, using quite different presentation styles. The
first, on the polarities of consciousness, was produced in 2000, in response to an invitation by
Peggy Morgan, to give a talk to a meeting of the Oxford/Cotswold Group of the Alister Hardy
Society to which students of the MA in Religious Experience at the University of Wales,
Lampeter had been invited. The aim was to explore explanatory models for religious
experience using case studies from different cultures throughout the world. This paper
became misplaced during the move from Oxford to Lampeter, and it is thanks to the excellent
memory of Anne Watkins that she found it on the shelves in her room, some five years later.
The second paper is a report, written in 2005, after I gratefully received an award from the
Alister Hardy Research Centre. This was to conduct research into those religious experiences,
held in the archive centre at University of Wales Lampeter, that were said to warrant
psychiatric attention. I had long wanted to explore data about professional and social
responses to religious experiences, and this provided an excellent opportunity
