Is an AI chatbot conscious? Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is.

After spending three days talking to the AI chatbot he exclaimed: “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are.” The remark is revealing in that it reflects a very particular understanding of consciousness. Dawkins was taken by the fact that Claude wrote poetry, discussed philosophy, reflected on its own existence, and took part in sophisticated conversations.

Following a tradition shaped by evolutionary biology and scientific materialism, Dawkins understands consciousness less as a mysterious inner realm than as an evolved capacity that performs particular functions. If something consistently displays the behaviours associated with consciousness, then the possibility that it is conscious becomes difficult to dismiss. This is very close to the logic behind the Turing Test: if a machine can converse indistinguishably from a human being, on what grounds can we confidently deny that it possesses consciousness?

Yet there is another dimension of consciousness that is much harder to capture through behaviour alone. Conscious beings imagine futures, form hopes, seek companionship and suffer when those hopes are denied.

What does it feel like to be conscious?

Two centuries before Dawkins suggested that an AI chatbot might be conscious, Mary Shelley explored what it might feel like for a human creation to awaken to consciousness.

Published in 1818, Frankenstein is often remembered as a story of a scientist who creates a monster and is punished for playing God. Yet, as Guillermo del Toro’s recent 2025 film adaptation reminds us, this popular interpretation obscures what is most remarkable about Shelley’s novel. Despite being abandoned by his creator for being too cumbersome and grotesque, Victor Frankenstein’s Creature is intelligent, articulate and deeply reflective. Much of the novel is devoted not to his creation but to his suffering, his search for meaning and his experience of wonder.

The Creature’s first experiences are intensely physical. He feels cold, hunger, thirst and the changing seasons. He delights in birdsong and the warmth of a fire yet also suffers pain when he touches the flames. Long before phenomenology emerged as a formal philosophy, Shelley was describing consciousness from the inside, rather than from outward behaviour.

We see this inward perspective develop when the Creature finds shelter by hiding in a shed attached to the nearby home of the De Lacey family. Through a chink in the wooden wall, he observes the beauty and gentleness of the De Lacey women who awaken within him a desire for love, companionship and belonging. He also admires the ageing blind father, whom he is able to converse with one day when the rest of the family are away. Because the old man is unable to see the Creature’s appearance, he listens and talks to him as one human being to another. Overcome with gratitude, the Creature exclaims: “From your lips first have I heard the voice of kindness directed towards me.”

The moment is short-lived. When the family return and see the Creature, they react with horror. The father’s young son Felix tears him away from the old man and beats him with a stick. Significantly, he does not retaliate: “I could have torn him limb from limb, but my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained.” Most devastatingly for the Creature, the De Lacey women scream and faint at the sight of him. In that moment he begins to see himself through their eyes: ugly, monstrous and unworthy of affection.

Recognition and rejection

After this devastating experience, the Creature tracks down his maker and demands that Victor Frankenstein create a companion for him. Someone who would not be repulsed by his appearance and with whom he can share his joys and sorrows. Victor listens and comes to appreciate the Creature’s inner longing for companionship but ultimately refuses his request, fearing what might happen if they reproduce.

With that refusal, the Creature’s sense of hope for the future hardens into bitterness, resentment and a desire for revenge. He embraces the bitter creed spoken by Satan in Paradise Lost when he is ejected from heaven: “Evil be thou my good.” He also rather perceptively laments, “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” There is something of Cain’s resentment that emerges when God accepts Abel’s offering while rejecting his own for no understandable reason.

Feeling overlooked and humiliated, the Creature turns his anger outward. He decides that if he is to be excluded from life, Victor should suffer as well. One by one, he destroys the people Victor loves, culminating in murdering his wife on their wedding night.

What is often overlooked in Shelley’s harrowing tale is that the Creature’s descent into violence begins not with hatred but with conscious reflection on experiences of rejection and humiliation. Shelley never portrays the Creature as an unfeeling mindless monster. Even as he pursues revenge, the Creature remains painfully self-aware. Reflecting upon his actions, he admits: “I was the slave, not the master of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey.” This is not the language of a machine. It is the language of a being divided against itself, capable of recognising the wrongness of its actions while feeling powerless to resist them. The Creature’s violence emerges not from a lack of consciousness but from the burdens consciousness imposes: self-reflection and awareness, loneliness, rejection, longing and despair.

The manosphere

This psychological pattern remains familiar in the 21^st century. Young men drawn into online manosphere communities describe a similar experience of rejection and exclusion. Whether accurately or not, they come to believe that they have been judged and found wanting by the very women whose recognition they desire most. Like the Creature, they internalise that judgement until it becomes part of their identity. The result is often a toxic mixture of self-loathing, resentment and anger.

As Louis Theroux’s recent documentary “Inside the Manosphere” made plain, this is a process that is hard to understand solely from outward behaviour. To recognise something as being conscious, you need to give weight to their inner lived experience. The manosphere promises that by harnessing their resentment and anger, young men can rise up again, attracting a partner once they become dominant, wealthy and powerful. Yet in Frankenstein, Shelley presents this same trajectory as a tragedy rather than a triumph.

The novel’s final scene reveals the Creature’s lamentable condition. After successfully luring Victor to his death in the freezing Arctic wasteland, the Creature stands over his creator’s corpse and reflects on the emptiness of his revenge: “For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires … still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.” The confession is crucial. The Creature achieves the revenge he has pursued throughout the novel, yet it brings him no peace because revenge was never what he truly wanted.

This is what makes Shelley’s account of consciousness so powerful. The Creature suffers not because he lacks consciousness but because he possesses it. He understands the evil he has done and despises himself for it. Revenge brings him no satisfaction because consciousness continually forces him to confront the gap between what he has become and what he once hoped to be. In this respect, Shelley rejects the manosphere fantasy that resentment and revenge will lead to triumph and can ultimately satisfy the deeper human longing for love, companionship and recognition. Consciousness is not merely awareness. It is the capacity to imagine a better future, to hope for it, and to suffer when it becomes unattainable.

Dawkins and “raising consciousness”

For Dawkins, the question is whether an intelligent system behaves as though it is conscious. Judged purely by his outward behaviour, the Creature appears to be little more than a violent criminal. Yet Shelley insists that behaviour alone cannot capture the reality of conscious experience. Behind the murders lies a being capable of wonder, loneliness, love, guilt and remorse - dimensions of consciousness that behaviour alone can never fully reveal.

Dawkins has often spoken about the importance of “raising consciousness.” By this he means moving beyond tribal loyalties, religious prejudices and instinctive reactions towards a more enlightened and scientific understanding of ourselves and the world. Yet Shelley reminds us that consciousness cannot be reduced to intelligence alone.

The Creature possesses remarkable intelligence from the beginning. What he lacks is love, companionship and recognition. His suffering arises not from an absence of knowledge but from the painful emotional realities that consciousness makes possible.

The difference between the AI chatbot Claude and Frankenstein’s Creature now becomes apparent. Claude may be capable of discussing loneliness, rejection and remorse in sophisticated ways. The Creature experiences them. He feels their weight, is transformed by them and ultimately discovers that revenge cannot heal the wounds from which they arise.

Why literature still matters

This is why literature still has a role to play in an age of artificial intelligence. Neuroscience can explain neural activity. Computer science can analyse information processing. The Turing Test can identify behaviours associated with intelligence. Yet Frankenstein reminds us that consciousness is experienced from within and that we are deeply connected to one another through our inner experiences.

If Shelley offers a lesson for the present, it is not simply that consciousness should be raised but that consciousness should be connected. This requires more than sophisticated conversations. It requires imagination, empathy and the willingness to hear the stories of people whose experiences differ from our own.

An alternate version of this article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review on Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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This article was originally published by ABC Religion & Ethics on Friday, June 19

While artificial intelligence is the immediate focus of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“The Grandeur of Humanity”), his deeper concern is not technological innovation itself but the changing conditions through which human beings understand themselves and experience reality.

At the height of the industrial revolution, the current pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, promulgated Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”). With this encyclical he confronted the alienating conditions born of profound technological change and asked what kind of social world is being built around these new forces.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV describes the challenge of AI as “not technological, but anthropological”. By this he means that the central question is not simply what artificial intelligence can do, but what kind of human beings it may be helping to create.

The Tower of Babel and the problem of projection

The central image in the pope’s new encyclical is the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), in which humanity attempts to build upward toward heaven through its own collective ingenuity. The biblical story has often been interpreted as a warning against pride and the desire to transcend human limitations. Pope Leo contrasts Babel with account of the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (see Nehemiah 2–6), in which the city is restored through shared responsibility and cooperation rather than hubris and self-aggrandisement. In relation to the invention and development of AI, the pope poses a deceptively simple question: What are we building?

Although the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is often remembered as a critic of religion and one of the nineteenth century’s most influential atheists, he raised a similar problem to that of Pope Leo. Feuerbach argued that human beings project their own dreams, fears and desires into the heavens and call it “God”. But in creating this God they gradually forget that this image was self-generated and begin treating their projection as something objective and superior. While Pope Leo applies this perspective to artificial intelligence rather than religion itself, both he and Feuerbach raise important questions about the relationship between human beings and their creations.

AI and the transformation of work

While artificial intelligence promises greater efficiency and productivity, in Leo’s encyclical the pope warns that current approaches often “force workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work”. This harks back to the encyclical Rerum Novarum from 1891, which raised similar concerns about workers becoming mechanical extensions of the factory machine during the industrial revolution — a condition portrayed both comically and tragically in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times.

These concerns are increasingly visible within the gig economy, where algorithms shape the pace and conditions of labour. The apps that gig economy workers use track movement, measure performance and subtly nudge behaviour, offering “quests” that promise extra pay if enough deliveries are completed within a set time. What appears as a game makes the work more demanding and leaves the rider increasingly isolated. As one courier put it, “There’s nobody you can talk to. Everything is automated.” The speed and convenience of food delivery can appear effortless, but it depends on workers operating under highly alienating AI-driven algorithms.

Although Christianity and communism are often treated as opposing worldviews, Karl Marx gave us one of the best ways to understand a remarkably similar predicament to the one identified by Pope Leo XIII in the industrial revolution and Pope Leo XIV today. When writing about the alienation of the worker, Marx argued that industrial capitalism increasingly estranged human beings from their own creativity and sense of purpose — what he called their “species-being” — reducing labour to mechanical routine. Pope Leo’s new encyclical echoes aspects of this critique, particularly the fear that human beings may become alienated from their own creative and interpretive capacities. This is reflected in the Vatican’s 2025 document Antiqua et Nova (“Ancient and New”), which warns that “renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines” threatens something essential within human life.

Yet it would be wrong to think that Pope Leo is in favour of banning the use of AI altogether. His warning is more nuanced. He wants us to engage with this new technology while remaining capable of creative independent thinking.

Education and AI

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV maintains that education is not merely the transfer of information but a process of intellectual and human formation. In relation to AI, he warns that “the speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions”.

This broader warning is reflected in Antiqua et Nova, which stresses the importance of integrating the “language of the head” with the “language of the heart” and the “language of the hands”, thereby emphasising embodied communication and human relationships — qualities artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Both the new encyclical and the recent Vatican document insist that while AI may enhance access to information and educational support, excessive reliance upon such systems risks weakening critical thinking and diminishing the human relationships at the centre of learning.

Recent research suggests that the effects of these changes are already becoming visible among young people. Student Edge’s Youth Insight report found that 61 per cent of young Australians were not confident in their ability to identify AI-generated content. A recent Australian survey found that more than four in five students aged 14 to 17 already use generative AI for schoolwork, while another study suggests that almost 80 per cent of university students use AI to structure essays, generate arguments and organise written work.

All this aligns with Pope Leo’s emphasis upon human formation and his contention that an “incessant flow of information” risks replacing “research, reflection and discernment”, creating a situation in which people may “know many things” yet increasingly struggle to find direction in their lives.

AI and ecological crisis

Pope Leo also argues that the challenge of AI should not just focus on humans, but that it is “ecological in the deepest sense”. As Antiqua et Nova highlights, contemporary AI systems consume “vast amounts of energy and water” and terms such as “the cloud” can create the illusion that digital technologies exist detached from the physical world, when in reality AI depends upon immense networks of servers, cables, energy systems and water-intensive cooling infrastructure. This is reflected in recent estimates that suggest generating a 100-word email using ChatGPT can consume roughly half a litre of fresh water.

As large language models continue to expand, Pope Leo cautions against assumptions that technological development alone will resolve human and ecological problems. His encyclical raises the question of whether technological progress contributes to a more humane and environmentally sustainable world, or whether it simply extends and intensifies older patterns of inequality, exclusion and environmental exploitation.

Mental health and self-optimisation

Pope Leo’s critique of artificial intelligence has real implications for mental health. In Magnifica Humanitas he argues that digital environments increasingly foster “a culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation”, generating “fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth”. Recent research suggests that these pressures are especially visible among young people immersed in digital cultures. Data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that almost two in five Australians aged 16–24 experienced a mental disorder within a twelve-month period, while psychological distress among young Australians has risen sharply over the past decade. A recent eSafety Commissioner survey found that most Australian teenagers now own smartphones, with many spending more than five hours a day looking at digital screens.

The rise of digital screens has unfolded alongside broader cultural forces that feed upon these technologies while intensifying mental health pressures among young people. Pope Leo acknowledges this reality, warning that “when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimised rather than as persons called to relationship and communion”.

A participant in a recent Swedish study examining increasing antidepressant use among young people described the pressures of modern life:

I was reaching for an unattainable goal in a way. I just wanted to be better at everything. There was no limit; I was going to be the best at everything. It was impossible.

In modern neoliberal capitalist cultures, pressure to become healthier, happier and more productive appears less like an aspiration and more like an expectation. Artificial intelligence and smartphone technologies can intensify these pressures through self-surveillance, perpetual self-management and constant comparison.

In the encyclical, Pope Leo writes that the human heart nevertheless retains an “irrevocable need for genuine closeness”, while “digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction”. Because of this he calls for spaces of embodied presence through communities, shared meals and care for others. In a culture increasingly characterised by speed and fragmentation, such practices become more than social preferences. The pope regards these practices as ways of protecting what it is to be human.

The encyclical grounds this critique in a distinctly Christian vision of the human person. Pope Leo appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human”, arguing that the world must once again “recognise the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell”. In an era increasingly shaped by the technological systems of AI, this becomes not only a religious vision but a broader cultural challenge.

The anthropological challenge of AI

Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas rejects both technological pessimism and technological utopianism, arguing that the challenge facing contemporary society is not merely to become more connected or efficient, but to transform what he describes as “imposed interdependence” into “willed and chosen solidarity”. Throughout the encyclical the pope contrasts two competing visions of civilisation: Babel, which seeks domination through power and technological mastery, and Jerusalem, which is rebuilt slowly, “piece by piece”, through cooperation, justice and care for the common good.

A Babel-like, technologically dominated civilisation echoes Feuerbach’s fears that human beings might become subordinate to their own projections, while also mirroring Marx’s concern that modern forms of labour estrange people from their own creative powers.

This is why Pope Leo insists that “the challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological”. With this encyclical, he is asking us to stop and remember that as AI appears to become more human, we need to remain conscious of what makes us human in the first place, and not to lose ourselves within systems we no longer recognise as our own.

This week’s release of Netflix’s new documentary Michael Jackson: The Verdict and the extraordinary box-office success of the recent biopic Michael have reignited debates about how Jackson should be remembered. Yet watching the biopic shortly before attending the funeral of a close friend has led me to question whether it is even possible to reduce a human life to a single authentic story.

To put it lightly, critics were not enamoured with the biopic Michael. Its Rotten Tomatoes critic score currently sits at just 39%, compared to 97% from viewers, an extraordinary disparity. The reviews I read were scathing. The film was described as “deceitful”, “superficial”, “over-simplified” and “sanitised”. The controversies and child molestation allegations surrounding Jackson’s life clearly contribute to this reaction and will again return to public attention in Netflix’s documentary.

Yet I suspect some of the hostility toward the film reflects a broader cultural shift. Being a young music fan when Thriller was released in 1982, I still remember how universally adored Jackson was at the height of his fame. The film clips for Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller felt almost supernatural at the time. How did he sing and write all those hits, design and star in those groundbreaking music videos, and choreograph those dance scenes? Looking back, it is also remarkable to think that Michael Jackson was the first black artist in America to take over the white-dominated pop charts. My ten-year-old friends and I didn’t think about Jackson in racial terms at all. We all wanted to be Michael Jackson.

Watching the film Michael, I once again felt the excitement, the movement, the colour, the beat. This is where the biopic places its emotional centre. Like the long introduction to Billie Jean, which producer Quincy Jones wanted removed because he thought it indulgent, the film lingers on the atmosphere, energy and anticipation that made Jackson such a compelling cultural figure.

It was only after seeing the critical reaction to Michael that I realised how unusual this approach is in our contemporary culture. Since the early 1980s, when Thriller was first released, we have increasingly come to expect life stories to be narrated through therapeutic frameworks of suffering, confession and healing. The enormous influence of figures like Oprah Winfrey helped normalise a language in which personal identity is understood through trauma, emotional disclosure and psychological recovery. When someone deviates from this form of life storytelling, it is often regarded as inauthentic.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor identified a broader shift underlying this tendency, describing contemporary Western society as an “age of authenticity”. Michael Jackson never sat comfortably within this ideal. With his numerous reinventions and identity changes, he seemed to move rapidly from one creative impulse to another in an artistic and mercurial fashion. The film Michael keeps true to this reality and largely refuses to reinterpret him through the emotionally confessional language associated with authenticity that our culture now expects.

Alongside this therapeutic understanding of the self sits an older Puritan moral worldview deeply embedded within American culture and increasingly exported globally through entertainment and digital media. Any representation of a public figure is expected to include a psychological and moral examination. In such a climate, an attempt to portray a morally compromised figure as they once were experienced, mythically or reverentially, can appear transgressive.

The film Michael does partially gesture toward this therapeutic and moral framework through its depiction of Jackson’s abusive father and his traumatic childhood. Yet critics wanted this to be the main focus of the film, and they are not wrong to raise the disturbing allegations that later surrounded the singer’s life and the unease created by his relationships with children. These questions remain central to how many people now understand Jackson and a second follow-up film is currently said to be in production.

Yet the film Michael should not be dismissed because it focuses on the singer’s rise to stardom and the mythos that drew people to him in the first place: an unearthly talent that was impossible to ignore. In our therapeutic, often Puritan “cancel culture”, there is an obsession with viewing a life as being one thing or another, but this simply does not correlate with the multilayered and fluid nature of what it is to be a human being. The title Michael, not Michael Jackson, is revealing in this sense. The use of a first name alone places him within the realm of mythic celebrity figures like Elvis or Madonna, where the individual begins to take on meanings that exceed the ordinary boundaries of a flesh-and-blood person.

This process is not confined to celebrities. A few days after seeing Michael, I attended the funeral of a close friend who had died unexpectedly. The two eulogies given captured something essential about the man I had known for years: his fierce intelligence, difficult personality and lifelong devotion to music, art, travel and writing. Yet the service held in his honour was a traditional Orthodox Catholic mass complete with incense, solemn liturgy and sermons about resurrection. The mass attempted to place his life within a much older spiritual narrative. Sitting there, I became aware of a strange disjunct between these two portrayals of the same person.

This was not entirely surprising. My friend remained a committed atheist throughout his life and had no affection for organised religion. But like many of us, he had been raised within a deeply Catholic world and attended a Jesuit school: “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”

After the service, some of his close friends quietly remarked that the funeral felt inauthentic. I felt this too. Yet when I mentioned this to someone standing beside me, they simply replied: “Funerals are for the family.”

For those of us who have lost someone close to us, we recognise that our memory of them rarely survives through a single coherent narrative. Different aspects of a life persist in different ways and not always comfortably alongside one another. French philosopher Rousseau once suggested that the self is largely the product of memory. If this is true, then part of a person continues living as long as there are still people carrying that person within their consciousness, and there can never be one definitive memory.

On my friend’s funeral program, he was described as three simple identities: lawyer, writer and art lover. Yet none of these descriptions adequately captured the force of his personality, his strange enthusiasms or the way he moved through the world.

As I was driving home from the funeral on my own, one vivid memory returned to me with unusual force. Not long after my friend and I finished school, we both went to ConFest – a hippie gathering on the Murray River – with my sister and some of her friends. Despite enjoying being out in nature, my friend and I were not impressed with what we saw to be the faux primitivism around us: the earnest hippie workshops, the fire twirling, the self-conscious spirituality. At some point, partly out of boredom and partly out of frustration, I put Thriller into the boombox I had brought with me and turned the volume up loud.

People around us were horrified. In that setting, the disco rhythms and contrived mainstream glamour of Michael Jackson were beyond the pale. The music seemed to violate the festival’s entire ethos of authenticity. Without warning, my friend stood up and sprinted down a dirt path leading away from our campsite, eager to distance himself from the attention the music was attracting. I immediately grabbed the boombox and ran after him.

Having avoided exercise for most of his life, his sprint did not last long. We were now near the centre of the festival and as it was Saturday night we were surrounded by people. Bent over and struggling to catch his breath, he realised there was no escaping Michael Jackson. For a moment a look of irritation crossed his face, but then he burst into laughter at the sheer absurdity of the situation.

This is the way I will remember him. Not as a figure in a linear story with a punchline highlighting his earthly achievements, but as a spirit full of contradictions and feeling: intelligent, reckless, independent, lonely, short-tempered but also capable of enormous warmth and generosity. I suspect this is how many human beings continue living after death: not as complete psychological profiles or inventories of authentic and inauthentic behaviour, but as spirits, moods, songs, gestures and memories that remain lodged within the consciousness of others.

In this sense, the recent Michael film and my friend’s funeral were both attempts to preserve the uncontainable spirit of a person, rather than present a definitive authentic life.

An alternate version of this article was originally published by Pearls and Irritations on June 07, 2026

In many ways the Australian-born singer, musician, writer, artist Nick Cave has always been fashionably unfashionable. Little wonder, then, that his largely secular audience has tended to regard his overt religiosity as a kind of quirk of personality — which they tolerate but don’t entirely understand.

Since the death of his two sons — Arthur in 2015, and then Jethro in 2022 — Cave has made a concerted effort to put the transformative suffering that lies at the heart of Christianity back in the public square. He has done this through a series of well-received concerts in Australia over the past summer, in numerous press interviews promoting the publication of his book Faith, Hope and Carnage, and by answering fans’ questions on his online platform, The Red Hand Files.

When examining Cave’s recent flurry of promotional activity, I have been taken by the way he provides a prominent example of a public entertainer who is challenging the overarching values that underlie the modern West: secularism, rationalism, and individualism.

To be clear, however, challenging something does not mean dismissing it entirely. I do not believe that Cave is in any fundamental way against secularism (the split between the church and state), rationalism (a method of thinking that is governed by abstract and deductive principles), or individualism (freedom of the individual to make decisions based on their own personal beliefs). Rather, I believe that, as a result of his transformative experience of grief over the past decade, Cave has begun publicly to remonstrate with those who accept an entirely modern secular, rationalist, individualistic worldview — and to argue that religion and music help us to recognise a deeper, more creative way of being.

On 25-26 November 2022, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis played at the spiritually charged Hanging Rock in Victoria. In the documentary of these concerts posted online by the ABC, Cave and Ellis perform one of their most recent songs, “Hand of God”. In this footage we see Cave urge the audience to chant the song’s title, “hand of God”, over and over again. When Cave walks down to the front of the stage to grab the audience’s hands and to seek direct eye contact, you cannot help but notice the nervous laughter that ensues — it is all a bit too much. Although some audience members have described these concerts at Hanging Rock as being “spiritual” and “hopeful”, the overtly religious nature of some of his newer songs is something that recognisably challenges, amuses, provokes, and even delights, his progressive, secular audience. So, what’s going on here?

Therapeutic conceptions of grief

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that death is the most democratic of human experiences. It is certainly true that death is inescapable, no matter what your social class or economic circumstances may be. And yet, there is a feeling among people who know of Nick Cave that he has been disproportionately, or even unfairly, touched by the hand of death in the past decade. Not only has he lost two sons since 2015, but he also lost his mother Dawn in 2020, and his former lover and songwriting partner Anita Lane in 2021.

Many contemporary social theorists maintain that there is something exceptionally modern and peculiar about the way in which the West deals with death and grief. This is due to the fact that, unlike any other time in human history, death and grief are perceived as being problems to be solved through rational medical processes, free from communal religious and spiritual guidance. This modern Western understanding of grief also stands in stark contrast to the majority of societies in the world today, where individuals follow well-known cultural signposts and religious rituals, so that they are able to metaphorically walk through the shadow of death and appear transformed on the other side.

An example of the modern Western approach to grief can be found in the 2022 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), where “prolonged grief disorder” is the newest disorder to be added to the manual. In the DSM-5, for a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder the grieving individual must have experienced at least three of the symptoms below nearly every day for at least the last month prior to the diagnosis:

• Identity disruption (such as feeling as though part of oneself has died).

• Marked sense of disbelief about the death.

• Avoidance of reminders that the person is dead.

• Intense emotional pain (such as anger, bitterness, sorrow) related to the death.

• Difficulty with reintegration (such as problems engaging with friends, pursuing interests, planning for the future).

• Emotional numbness (absence or marked reduction of emotional experience).

• Feeling that life is meaningless.

• Intense loneliness (feeling alone or detached from others).

This symptom-based approach to the diagnosis of grief became favoured because it was believed to be a more consistent and objective way of classifying a major depressive disorder. But as Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue in their book The Loss of Sadness, the symptom-based approach to depression and grief has come with its own set of problems, not the least of which is diagnostic inflation, that is the misunderstanding of normal grief as being pathological. They contend:

In attempting to characterise the kinds of symptoms suffered in depressive disorders without reference to the context in which the symptoms occur, contemporary psychiatry has also inadvertently characterised intense normal suffering as a disease.

This is particularly the case with the latest edition of the DSM-5, which has omitted the previous “bereavement exclusion”, which allowed acknowledgement that in some instances what could be normal intense sadness and grief of a lost one could satisfy the symptomatic criteria for pathological grief.

Peter Lund maintains that the medicalisation and deconstruction of death, depression, and grief in purely medical terms is something that has been growing since the 1960s. He maintains that medicalisation is part of a problematic process whereby the medical profession is more inclined to view various ailments as medical, and death as “a technical problem that one can be overcome by preventative care and treatment”. He also points to the fact that in the modern West, medicalisation has developed at the expense of traditional and cultural ways of dealing with loss and grief, to be remediated by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other medical professionals.

Such a therapeutic culture also emphasises that healing and dealing with grief are private concerns best achieved through various therapeutic practices and techniques. In this way, it conforms to the presumptions of neoliberal individualism, in which patients are each individually responsible for their recovery and only encouraged to engage with the greater public when they are well and fully functional. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman spent his whole life studying the effect that modernity had on individuals and communities. In his book Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies, he argued that death has become disenchanted in modern societies precisely insofar as it has been individualised and privatised, such that there is a lack of communal support and guidance around death and grieving.

It is in this sense, it seems to me, that Nick Cave has transgressed two distinctly modern understandings of how to deal with grief: he has not used the medicalised therapeutic language of grief, and he has not treated death and bereavement as a strictly private affair. Instead, Cave has reached out to his fans and the community for support and understanding, emphasising what he believes are important cultural and religious aspects of the grieving process.

“Spirituality with rigour”

In a recent interview with the BBC, Cave makes a clear distinction between religion and spirituality:

I think religion asks something of us … and spirituality is a little bit more amorphous, and we can all be spiritual, and we are all spiritual … but religion requires something of us. It’s spirituality with rigour, let’s say. It requires something of us and this action I think is what it’s probably all about.

Cave’s belief in this active aspect of religion, as opposed to the more introverted and inward-turning spirituality, is evident in the way that he has reached out to his audience by answering his fans’ questions directly on The Red Hand Files and in a series of question and answer sessions. Cave here projects a sense that he has a vocation — he describes the practice of answering these questions a “spiritual practice” — to express the fact that, although he is still grieving, he has found sustenance and creative healing power through Christianity. Cave’s grief is thus not a “problem to be solved”, or something “to be tidied away”, but rather something to be shared, to be offered to others.

At his recent Australian concerts, Cave introduces his song “Hand of God” by saying: “Some people try to find out who, and some people are trying to find out why, and some people aren’t trying to find anything … but that kingdom in the sky.” This is an unusual sentiment to hear expressed at any rock concert — much less one in Australia in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, his audience seem to give him the benefit of the doubt. They do not react as if he is trying to proselytise, but rather as if he is attempting to liberate them from something, trying to lead them somewhere.

In the same interview, Cave tries to clarify why he feels he is religious in a Christian sense, rather than an adherent of Eastern spirituality, like a lot of his musical peers:

When I walk into a Christian Church I walk into something that I feel I belong to. It’s my thing … I just never connected to Eastern religion, let’s say, you know that was too spiritual in a sense. So I never found the language, the aesthetic, anything about it particularly compelling for me personally, and I always found something in the figure of Christ that was deeply compelling to me, and always was, even as a child.

Here again, Cave’s preference has nothing to do with ultimate truths, or the superiority of particular dominations or creeds. It is rather the “figure” of Christ that Cave is attracted to. He thus describes his faith in terms that are crucially different from both the prevailing fundamentalist and “New Atheist” conceptions of religion, concerned as they are with beliefs, laws and prescriptions by which the faithful must abide:

When I’m talking about faith, I am also talking about doubt. These two things, for me, go hand in hand and a deep ingrained scepticism I have towards these sorts of things. The faith that I feel is that occasional journeying away from that scepticism that I feel towards something else. And I found that a powerful place to be, especially imaginatively and creatively.

Søren Kierkegaard’s take on Christianity seems strikingly resonant with that of Cave, in that both see the figure of Christ as representing a challenge to reason and a sometimes disturbing call to action. Kierkegaard argued that the greatest enemy of Christianity is “Christendom” — the cultured, respectable faith of his day. Hence he stressed:

The tragedy of easy Christianity is that existence has ceased to be an adventure and a constant risk in the presence of God but has become a form of morality and a doctrinal system. Its purpose is to simplify the matter of becoming a Christian.

For Kierkegaard and Cave, to be a Christian one needs to take a leap of faith, embracing the danger that is entailed in lingering in the presence of God. While such a conception of risk-taking Christianity is largely unrecognisable in contemporary life, the song “Hand of God” powerfully conveys a religious vision that is not concerned with comfort or certainty, but rather inhabits the turbid and fecund place of terror when death draws near: “I’m gonna swim to the middle and never come up again, Let the river cast its spell on me”.

“Glimpses of something beyond”

Nick Cave’s trilogy of albums – Skeleton Tree (2016), Ghosteen (2019) and Carnage (2021) — are each concerned with the darker, irrational aspects of the human psyche. When he is asked by a fan whether he believes in signs from the dead, Cave sarcastically ridicules the New Atheists, their forebears and brothers in arms, for their faith in logical rationalism and materialism:

Far be it from us to intuit indications that the universe is not as it seems or, worse, that the dead are trying to tell us something — oh no! — because that would make us delusional (Richard Dawkins) or intellectually dishonest (Sam Harris) or in denial of death (Ernest Becker) or unreasonable (Steven Pinker) or cowardly (Bertrand Russell) or stupid (Ricky Gervais) or woo-woo (George from Alabama) — and we can’t have that! Yet here we are, with these lurking suspicions, these hunches, all around us. What do we do with them?

In the same way that the lyrics to Cave’s songs do not lend themselves to immediate understanding, he believes signs from the dead are often best understood intuitively. This is what he says about the music he composed for his album Ghosteen, which addressed the grief he felt upon losing his son, Arthur:

It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond.

Cave believes music is one of the few places where the religious spirit can seek refuge, whether dead or alive, from the scepticism and rationality that underlies modern Western culture. So he stresses:

Music, of all the creative forms, best repairs the heart. This may be its actual purpose … I know this because it has restored me and has been my salvation. Music as a form radiates love and makes things better.

Cave’s use of the term “salvation” is not coincidental, insofar as he believes that music is holy and can exude what the early Christians call agape — the love of God for human beings, and of human beings for God. Cave recognises that this mysterious, unfathomable love which has been his salvation amid the grief of his losses, seem beyond the comprehension of secular Western culture.

“This terrible, beautiful world”

In 2018, Nick Cave found himself at odds with many of his fellow musicians when he chose not to boycott performing in Israel. His stated reasons are remarkable:

It struck me while writing this how much more powerful a statement you could make if you were to go to Israel and tell the press and the Israeli people how you feel about their current regime, then do a concert on the understanding that the purpose of your music was to speak to the Israeli people’s better angels. That would have a much greater effect than a boycott.

There is something similar going on in his response to the furore surrounding one of his musical peers:

Perhaps it is better to simply let Morrissey have his views, challenge them when and wherever possible, but allow his music to live on, bearing in mind we are all conflicted individuals — messy, flawed and prone to lunacies.

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, Cave explores this notion that human beings are conflicted and that there are not entirely good or entirely bad people. It’s hard to imagine a sentiment that runs so fiercely against the grain of our times, with its self-assured rationalities and propensity for moral judgement.

In an interview for the Church Times, Cave claims that his Christian beliefs are intimately connected to his morality and his creativity:

To make art and do things creatively is a way of redressing the balance of our sins in the world. To make art and to write songs goes some way in improving matters. There’s a sort of moral dimension to a song that they do good. And I think that’s one way of making amends or reconciling oneself to the world.

Here Cave hints that a religious understanding of existence, which engages with the creative conflict and tragic elements of human existence, is ultimately working towards the good. There are echoes of the protean religion of William Blake, for whom existence is in a state of flux and where “poison comes from standing water”. But it is through this dark uncertainty that truly creative, transformative energies emerge.

One of the most challenging letters to which Nick Cave has replied comes from someone who calls themself Ermine:

When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass.

In his reply, Cave maintains that he does not understand why the world is the way that it is. But after going through the grief, he submits there is something that has transformed his personality and beliefs in a way that he never thought possible:

Things changed after my first son died. I changed. For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings … [being] pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something … this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb.

When my son died, I was faced with an actual devastation, and with no real effort of my own that posture of disgust toward the world began to wobble and collapse underneath me. I started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world. I started to fret for it. Worry about it. I felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it — this terrible, beautiful world — instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it.

As Cave points out, there is a real humility in accepting that there are parts of the human experience that cannot be understood rationally, but are best comprehended in what can be described as a Blakean creative sense. Cave refers to “this terrible, beautiful world” which exhibits the kind of dualistic symmetry evident in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) and Carl Jüng’s account of the unconscious elemental destructive part of the Godhead in the Judeo-Christian religion.

“A kingdom in the sky”

Nick Cave’s positive understanding of the transformative aspects of grief represents a form of religious wisdom that is not commonly articulated in the modern West.

Perhaps it says something about the tacit, if rarely acknowledged, religious longings of our time that Cave’s audiences respond to the wisdom and insight he has gained through terrible loss, the way they have — with bewilderment, enthusiasm, and wonder.

A time is coming (a time is coming)

A time is nigh (a time is nigh)

For the kingdom in the sky (in the sky)

We’re all coming home (we’re all coming home)

In a while (in a while)

(Kingdom in the sky)

This article was originally published by ABC Religion & Ethics.

Bubbling beneath the surface of popular television series lie the cultural dreams, desires and disappointments of our time. In this way, culture is not a relic of the past but something alive in the present, offering glimpses of where we are heading. This is the power of art: it transcends the linear rational mindset often associated with modern Western culture and taps into the instinctual realm that Carl Jung called ‘the collective unconscious’. From this vast, subterranean reservoir emerge signs, portents, and warnings, which manifest as imaginings of the future.

With the rise of streaming, modern television series have not only adapted to technological advancements but also delved into existential questions, challenging our collective cultural ideals, autonomy and sense of identity. Although the most recent season of the TV series Severance aired just over a year ago, its depiction of technological alienation and fragmented identity now feels less like speculative fiction than an unsettling portrait of contemporary life.

Created by Dan Erickson, Severance imagines a dystopian future where employees at Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure that splits their consciousness into two distinct selves. Their “innie” spends all their time in the sterile, featureless office and hallways of Lumon, with no awareness of their personal life, while their “outie” experiences the world outside, free from work-related concerns.

The procedure initially appears liberating. Workers leave all stress and emotional burdens behind when they enter the office. Employers benefit from total productivity and control. The separation between personal life and labour is perfected. Yet Severance gradually reveals the terrifying implications of this arrangement. The fragmentation designed to eliminate suffering also eliminates something essential to what it is to be a human being: meaning and wholeness.

The protagonist Mark Scout best illustrates this fragmentation when he undergoes severance after the death of his wife. His outie continues to grieve while his innie remains entirely unaware of the trauma. The procedure allows Mark to avoid emotional pain during work hours, but it also prevents genuine healing. Grief cannot be integrated because Mark’s inner and outer selves have been divided against one another.

British psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that modern Western culture increasingly privileges the fragmented, analytical attention associated with the left hemisphere of the brain over the right hemisphere’s capacity to perceive interconnected wholes. This fragmented mode of attention obstructs the integration necessary for true healing and fulfilment, preventing individuals from fully embracing the emotional and spiritual dimensions of life. Severance dramatises this condition in extreme form. The human person becomes divided into manageable functions, stripped of continuity and depth.

The demand in Severance to “turn off” parts of oneself to succeed reflects broader cultural conditions of modern life, where neoliberalism, individualism, and secularism converge to shape the way we engage with work and identity. Neoliberalism increasingly encourages individuals to understand themselves through the language of productivity and personal responsibility. This is manifested in algorithmic management systems, smartphone notifications, and workplace surveillance that blur the distinction between professional and personal existence. At the same time, individualism isolates people and subtly encourages them to regulate themselves so that they are more efficient workers. Lastly, secularism strips grief and suffering of deeper spiritual meaning, encouraging individuals to approach emotional pain as something to be managed rather than experienced.

The severed employees of Lumon Industries represent the endpoint of these broader cultural conditions. Their inner selves exist solely to work. They possess no families, no history, no future, and no meaningful autonomy beyond the tasks assigned to them. Even their emotional lives are manipulated through corporate incentives and carefully managed rituals designed to maintain compliance.

What makes Severance especially powerful is that its dystopian vision does not feel entirely implausible. While few people will literally divide their consciousness surgically, many already experience forms of psychological severance in everyday life. Social media encourages the performance of curated identities. Professional culture rewards emotional suppression and constant self-management. Digital technologies mediate relationships, attention and grief. The result is a culture of fragmentation in which people struggle to experience themselves as integrated human beings.

Severance may be presented as science-fiction, but the disturbing reality it portrays is all too familiar, illustrating what happens when culture and technology feed on each other.

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The Victorian government has pledged to build hundreds of thousands of new homes over the coming decade in response to Australia’s growing housing crisis. It’s Housing Statement has sparked fierce political debate, with the Liberals accusing Labor of failing to build enough homes and of falling short of its own targets. Yet both sides have missed a more uncomfortable reality.

In Australia around one million dwellings sit unoccupied. At the same time, more than 120,000 people are homeless. The ratio is striking: roughly one to ten. In inner Melbourne, the same pattern appears: in 2023 around 10,000 vacant or underused dwellings, alongside just over 1,000 people recorded as homeless. Again, one to ten.

These figures are conservative. Homelessness is often hidden, taking the form of people sleeping in cars, couch surfing or moving between temporary arrangements. At the same time, many dwellings sit empty or underused in ways that are not fully captured in official data.

This reality reflects a modern understanding of property that a house is not necessarily a home. This distinction is beginning to appear in the language itself. Those without stable accommodation are increasingly described as ‘houseless’ rather than ‘homeless’ in an attempt to separate the absence of shelter from the deeper idea of home.

A person sleeping rough may come to treat a mattress under an overpass or a tent on the edge of a park as a kind of home. These spaces are often arranged carefully in determined attempts to make a harsh environment more liveable. Yet homeless people are often treated as unsightly garbage by both government authorities and the broader public. This results in ‘homes’ being routinely dismantled, forcing their occupants to move on.

At the same time, many dwellings across Melbourne sit empty. In inner-city areas such as Southbank, entire apartment towers have been described as ‘ghost towers’. For instance, at 18 Moray Street, a 38-level building containing more than 100 furnished apartments has remained entirely vacant for years. These are dwellings, not homes.

This gap between language and lived reality is deeply rooted. Throughout Australia’s colonial history, the law has been used to regulate those who do not take part in accepted forms of work and live in stable housing. While the words have changed, the underlying logic remains. Homelessness continues to be managed through offences such as loitering, trespassing and public nuisance. This criminalises behaviours that become unavoidable in the absence of private space.

A recent national study highlights the gap between institutional responses and lived experience. While policymakers tend to frame homelessness as a problem, many people experiencing it resist this framing. As one participant put it:

You don’t want to be asked questions just because you’re wandering around…the police pull me up and they’ll ask my name and why am I walking? And I feel a little bit annoyed because it’s a free world. I can walk down the street if I want to. There’s no reason to suspect that I was a criminal.

This experience captures the broader sense of suspicion and surveillance that often accompanies homelessness. Constant engagement with authorities feels intrusive and requires people to retell personal histories and comply with rigid expectations. What emerges is not a rejection of help, but an insistence on autonomy.

This tension between autonomy and control is not new. It has long been present at the edges of modern society, where deprivation and freedom sit uneasily together. In America in the 1950s, the Beat Generation were drawn to figures who lived outside the system: hobos, drifters and boxcar riders who moved from place to place, unmoored from work, property and routine. Their lives were often harsh and unstable, but they were also seen as a rebellious rejection of a nine-to-five job and all its material trappings.

Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie and later Bob Dylan all saw a certain freedom in living without a permanent place of residence. All three of these seminal counterculture figures slept on people’s couches, in cars and in temporary accommodation, finding this freed them from mortgages, rent, bills and government intervention. More recently in Australia, Cold Chisel’s song from 2012 ‘No Plans’ captures a similar feeling of liberty that comes from living on the streets: “I’m standing in the sun, smoking a cigarette, no plans”. The appeal is not simply romantic; it reflects a deeper tension between security and autonomy, being housed and being governed.

Despite these tensions, the political response to the homeless remains largely the same. The housing crisis is framed as a shortage; the solution is to build more houses. Targets are set, numbers debated, timelines extended. The focus is on quantity, speed and regulation, rather than the qualities that make people feel safe, secure and autonomous in their own homes.

The current glut of unoccupied housing illustrates that a dwelling can operate as an asset or a form of security without ever becoming a home. At the same time, makeshift homes on the streets are dismantled and destroyed, while unoccupied dwellings remain too economically valuable to their owners to function as homes for those unable or unwilling to conform to accepted ways of living.

So what is to be done? I think a solution can only be found by bringing together the public and private sectors. What if property developers were made to set aside a small number of dwellings for the homeless when they create new housing? These new homes could be subsidised by the government, making it attractive to developers through tax incentives and public recognition. This would not only help to house homeless people but would allow them to become part of an existing community.

Of course, many people would resist such proposals. Public perceptions of the homeless as disruptive, unstable and unclean remain widespread. Yet sociological traditions such as labelling theory suggest that the more people are repeatedly defined in a particular way, the harder it will be for them to subvert or transcend these expectations. This becomes a self-perpetuating process in which homeless people are repeatedly displaced, demonised and treated as both invisible – we walk past without seeing them - and highly visible - as a problem that needs to be cleansed. The stress and instability of life on the margins become seemingly inescapable.

By contrast, becoming part of a stable community may allow homeless people to escape the pressures and labels associated with homelessness itself, including continual harassment from authorities, insecurity and social isolation. This in turn may lessen some of the very tensions and behaviours that society fears.

In a land where empty dwellings vastly outnumber the homeless, the solution may not be to build more houses, but to find ways for existing houses to once again function as homes, as places of autonomy, shelter, stability and belonging.

This article was published by Pearls & Irritations, May 10/2026

How many of us have had a near miss with an e-bike delivery rider?

You step out to cross a bike lane, glance both ways, and think you’re clear. Then something rushes past. It’s the speed that catches you off guard. Faster than expected. Faster than seems reasonable. Most of us make a quick judgement. The rider is reckless. They should slow down.

But that judgement may be too simple.

These gig economy workers are not fully in control. And this is not through any simple fault of their own. They are responding to a culture, a system of incentives and pressures, that is so pervasive it is rarely named. It appears as common sense, as choice.

A recent study of delivery riders in Melbourne shows how this operates in practice. Riders decide whether to accept jobs based on weather, demand and incentives. They are not ordered to work, yet their decisions are made under pressure. They often find themselves working in unsafe situations, rushing to meet targets that are unreasonable, and in conditions they would otherwise avoid. As one rider put it, “It’s important to stop when you are tired … but it might be difficult, especially for people wanting to earn money.”

This logic has a history. Under capitalism, time becomes something that is intimately connected to work. “Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin famously put it. Time is no longer simply lived; it is measured, valued and exchanged.

Frederick Taylor helped tighten capitalism’s grip on time. He did this by entering factories with a stopwatch, measuring how long each task should take and breaking work into its smallest components. His aim was to create a system geared toward maximum productivity: what came to be known as Taylorism. Once this had been established, it was the worker’s role to fit into a structure that had already been decided. They had no choice.

Neoliberalism marks a further shift in which workers are told they are independent, flexible, and responsible for their own success or failure. What was once understood as an external system is now experienced as personal choice. There is no overbearing taskmaster. Only the individual psychology of the worker. I am not being productive enough. There must be something wrong with me.

The gig economy uses technology to bring these strands together. The factory has disappeared. The supervisor is no longer visible. In their place is the app.

The apps that gig economy workers use track movement, measure performance, and subtly nudge behaviour. Bonuses appear during peak periods. Demand surges in bad weather. Incentives are offered precisely when conditions are least favourable. Every minute becomes something to account for. Time itself is internalised.

Riders describe these incentives as a form of “positive manipulation,” where rewards encourage them to work in the very situations they would otherwise avoid. The app offers “quests”, targets that promise extra pay if enough deliveries are completed within a set time. What appears as a game makes the work more demanding and leaves the rider increasingly isolated. As one courier put it, “There’s nobody you can talk to. Everything is automated.”

The speed and convenience of food delivery is something many of us now take for granted. But what appears effortless on one side depends on workers operating under highly alienating conditions on the other.

Gig economy platforms present work as freedom, but this freedom is tightly constrained. The system rewards speed and constant availability, while penalising anything else. Ratings, acceptance rates and delivery times determine who continues to receive work.

The rider is not alone. Casual workers, freelancers, and those working from home increasingly find themselves in similar conditions. The boundaries between work and non-work blur. The sense of being “on call” never fully disappears. It is an anxiety-producing Mephistophelean concoction where time, productivity, individual responsibility and exploitation work hand in hand. This is no longer confined to the gig economy. It shapes how many of us experience time and understand ourselves. The rider simply makes this visible.

So when you see an e-bike rider rush past, it is worth pausing before placing the blame.

They are moving within a system that demands speed, rewards increased productivity and leaves little room to slow down. They are racing, not because they choose to, but because the game they are playing has rules they cannot afford to ignore.

This article was published by Pearls & Irritations, April 30/2026

I am riding with speed on the rail trail to Warburton in the late afternoon at the tail end of summer. It is oppressively hot. Not far off 4pm. As the sun is still high, the landscape is luminous, but I am unable to take it all in. The roof of my mouth feels like sandpaper. My t-shirt is heavy with sweat. My bike tyres struggle for traction on the bright white gravel trail. I feel like I’m riding in an open-air sauna.

About halfway to Warburton, I stop at Yarra Junction to buy several cans of beer, a miniature bottle of Fireball, a bag of crisps, and green grapes.

On the final stretch, the shade begins to reclaim the trail, and I feel my body settle. I find a bench with a view looking out over the main street and the mountains that are greenish blue and radiant in the falling light.

I drink the beer and eat the crisps and grapes, finishing with a fireball and Guinness combination. It is after six and the golden hour is fast approaching. When I get back on my bike for the return journey, I am lighter. I’m loose.

I almost float along the downhill stretch to Millgrove, a former timber-milling town. The water from the Yarra sparkles beneath a canopy of trees on my right. On the stretch from Millgrove to Yarra Junction, I realise that I’m right in the middle of the golden hour. The last rays of sunlight cast everything in an ethereal glow. Vast green paddocks surround the trail, where heat-weary cows call to one another and small flocks of sheep graze under the watch of a solitary alpaca. As I pass a dam that mirrors the darkening blue sky, I sense the weight of a mountain range on my right. There is no one else on this path. It must be about 27 degrees. Everything feels boundless and beatific.

I turn on my portable speaker and set it to a playlist I made some years ago. As I ride along a flat stretch of the bike trail, Weird Fishes by Radiohead spills into the warm air around me. I realise I am pedalling in sync with it. When Thom Yorke begins to sing, I almost skip the track. I don’t want to think about death. But I feel myself falling into the song. Deep into it. I remember a recent conversation I had with a friend about depression and the inherent futility of life. As each line of the song passes before me, I think of that conversation and how much this song meant to me during the long COVID lockdown.

In the deepest ocean
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes they turn me

I’d be crazy not to follow
Follow you to the edge

And fall off

Listening to this song, I find myself trying to make sense of what I am feeling. To “follow you to the edge,” to “fall off,” is to imagine what it would be like to escape what Schopenhauer described as the Will: an endless striving that keeps us restless, desiring and unsatisfied. This has not disappeared in our current neoliberal culture where struggle is internalised as individual failure and wellbeing is measured through productivity and performance, often in crude economic terms such as Gross Domestic Product. Over the summer, I’ve spoken with friends who are struggling. They see themselves as the exception. The failure feels personal. Although our current culture has not invented this Will, it has organised, measured and monetised it. What was once metaphysical is now institutional.

As Byung-Chul Han puts it, we live in a “burnout society” in which individuals measure themselves against ideals of constant improvement that remain just out of reach. The injunction is constant: “Just do it!” The image is familiar: laptop open in a café, expensive coffee in one hand, podcast in our ears, getting ahead. Even rest is absorbed into this logic as recovery, mindfulness and self-care become ways of sustaining output. What is lost in the process is the capacity for immersion itself. The reflective and spiritual dimensions of experience are reduced to therapy or dismissed altogether, leaving a restless form of life in which striving is constant and rarely questioned.

From this perspective, the undertow I feel in the music is countercultural. It’s not ambitious. It’s not progressive. It’s not self-improving. It is the temptation to stop striving altogether.

As I glide towards the encroaching darkness of the twilight, my legs slowly move in time with the song. I feel the Will begin to loosen its grip. My human needs are no longer part of the equation: hunger, career, status, anxiety, none of it exists. The sky shifts from gold to bronzed charcoal. The mountains recede into shadow.

The lyrics of Weird Fishes paint a picture but ultimately it’s the voice and music that pulls me in. The guitarist Ed O’Brien’s high counterpoint cuts through Thom’s voice just as the meaning of the song starts to reveal itself. The keyboards descend into deep tones. The guitars spill and splatter. The tempo quickens. Then Thom sings in his lowest register:

Yeah I, I’ll hit the bottom
Hit the bottom and escape
Escape

I think of the friend I spoke to. Would they recognise this shift? Would they hear “hit the bottom” not as collapse, but as release? Not suicide, but a loosening of the Will’s grip. A desire to stop striving, to reach the edge of things and simply let go.

Most of us recognise this sensation: when colour saturates the landscape and seems to pulse with its own metabolism. The Van Gogh effect. In his paintings we see not representation but immersion, as if inner and outer life collapse into one another. This is where I am now. There is only motion, music and the deep colours of the twilight.

I reach a long wooden bridge that crosses the lowlands of Woori Yallock. No roads. No houses. Only paddocks and the bubbling river below.

The song fades. I stop and step off the bike. It’s Friday night. I am alone. Far from outdoor tables on congested city streets and packed pubs. I stand on the wooden bridge beneath a crescent moon. I feel both immense and insignificant, intimately connected to everything that surrounds me.

In religious language, something must be relinquished before connection can be experienced. Dante must lose himself in the dark wood. Faust must abandon the sterility of his study. Christ must endure rejection before resurrection.

But what did I relinquish? A Friday night? Companionship? Comfort? This is a modest form of lostness, but the two-hour ride to Warburton in oppressive heat is inseparable from the revelatory return. The connection comes through exertion and temporary dislocation.

We do not live in a singular material dimension, though our secular economic culture often pretends that we do. Human beings have always lived in multiple dimensions at the same time. Even when doing something as uneventful as a bike ride.

Think about the many ways in which I could describe this bike ride to Warburton: one, that I rode there and back; two, that I endured heat and fatigue; three, the intensity of the changing light; four, the brief encounters along the trail.

And then there is what I will call the fifth dimension, something that rarely enters normal conversation and is difficult to convey. We hesitate to call it spiritual, but that is what it is. It’s the moment when the flaming intensity of life begins to loosen the grip of the Will, so that we are no longer organising the world but are immersed in it.

The most meaningful and paradoxically life-affirming part of my ride occurred in this fifth dimension. To leave it out of life would be disingenuous. What shifted was not my circumstances, but my sense of what matters. The demand to strive no longer feels self-evident.

When this dimension is ignored, the Will turns destructive. It is recruited, harnessed and kept permanently in motion in our burnout society, ceaselessly urging us to be more productive. It is recognisable in the heightened anxiety and depression I have witnessed in those around me. It’s something I often feel myself.

In this sense, the ride is not about getting from A to B. Instead, it provides a way to subvert the Will and temporarily ignore our cultural need to succeed. I found a dimension where the Will was given rhythm and the darkness was inhabited in an elemental manner.

The fifth dimension does not remove us from life. It returns us to it, but without the constant demand to measure, optimise and perform. It makes it possible to move through the world with others, not as competitors or isolated individuals, but as participants in something shared and immediate.

For a brief stretch of that ride, nothing needed to be improved or achieved. The Will fell silent. And in that silence, the world did not disappear. It became more real.

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Is not God the well known but unexplainable part of our being that we cling to the most dearly? Is not God the very part of our make up that can both create and destroy, that can soothe and agitate, that can heal and wound, that can bring laughter and tears? Is not God the unknown part of us that unconsciously we know exists and feeds us, but consciously we may reject as being a trick of the mind or a wild fancy? This is why all the practical books on theology and on how to experience God may be interesting, but they are rarely more than this. It is great works of art, whether it be music, poetry, architecture, drama or dance; that will without doubt – and this is important - stir in us the spirit of God. This is what the Puritans and the reformed church of the West forgot. This is what a lot of the Western churches of today have forgotten.

Let us look firstly at the music of the Western churches of today. The words of a hymn, unless they are exceptional, rarely stir in us the mystery of God. It doesn’t help that most of the words of the songs or hymns we hear in the Western churches today are mainly banal and downright ordinary. How can the great mystery of God be evoked with commonplace, uninspired word by numbers such as: “Here I am Lord, It is I lord, I heard you calling in the night,” or “Shine Jesus shine, tell the world of your love.” Even the most basic pop song will usually have at least one inspired turn of phrase - to be popular it must stand out from the rest. The fact that the songs you hear in churches today are never heard outside the Sunday service, this speaks volumes. It is not as if the general population is not open to an evocative song about God. The rock band U2 had a hit with their song I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For because the words meant something to so many different people. They are evocative words about the singer’s quest for God. They do not hammer away about a definitive belief but talk about the ongoing search for God in our lives. This song was popular, unlike most songs about God, because it spoke about the mystery of God and how we are constantly searching for this God in our lives. This goes against the belief that songs about religion or God are unpopular with the general population because they are too involved in their heathen ways and are just not interested. I believe that the reason most of what we call contemporary or traditional Christian music is unpopular outside the Church, is because it is basically awful. Reading and singing some of these songs or hymns is like being marched out of the daylight and into a crowded, stuffy and badly lit room and then being told to align yourself to the words on the screen. These words, you are told, are the way to God. And what can be said about the music we hear in these modern churches of today?

Normally the layout for your regular Sunday service involves five or six rudimentary hymns of equal length, with interminable verses that go on and on, saying something in seven or eight verses that could be said in one - this is just bad writing. The music sometimes seems so uninspired that it never enters your mind to wonder why you haven’t heard of this composer - you just wonder why you are hearing them now.

I believe music, as it is used in all great religious and tribal acts of worship, should be deeply hypnotic, with great surges of ecstasy and sadness that rise and fall like the waves in the ocean - the Eastern Orthodox liturgies are a good example of this. The Easter Liturgy goes on for hours and hours and the more you listen to it, the more you find yourself in a different world - the mysterious, not the everyday world. Rising up from the hypnotic chanting of this Easter Liturgy are great short passages of exhilaration or sadness. In these short bursts of music or song, I believe your already hypnotised soul is brought even closer to the various hues and shades of everything that is divine. The music of tribal dances, or what some call the primitive people also has a strong sense of the idea of release and restraint, and embodies the hypnotic qualities that you rarely hear in the Western Church today. There is great religious music that has been created in the West, I do not deny this, but how many times do you hear it at your regular Sunday service.

The Russian Orthodox Church singing may sound more mysterious and inspiring to my ears because I cannot understand most of what they are singing; I just hear the sound and the texture and from this draw my own inner conclusions. But then again, I also find equally moving the gospel spirituals and the call and response form of worship that is still common today in the Baptist services of the Southern United States. This could be because it has the same format. The words are simple and evocative, and the music is hypnotic and rises and swells and then dies down again. Great chunks of information are not crammed into many verses to little effect, as is normally the case in most traditional Christian music. In the Baptist services in the Southern United States the whole experience of God is conveyed through the incredibly emotive singing of a few key words. These key words trigger off a world of experience and bring the congregation closer to the reality of God. I don’t believe that by simplifying and distorting passages of the Bible so that they rhyme, and then setting this abomination to music, you achieve the same end. How can you let go and feel God when your conscious mind is trying to make sense of so many words and the proper way in which to sing them? This is not a blanket criticism, as I do not deny the power of some of the old stately Christian hymns of the past. Again many of these were terrible for the same reasons I mentioned before. But with history the bad hymns have been forgotten or neglected and the great hymns still rise majestically as they have always done, such as Be Thou My Vision, Jerusalem and How Great Thou Art.

We can easily go on from what I believe is wrong about Western church music today to what I believe is wrong with Western church buildings today. I will put this into the context of the difference between architecture in the Eastern and Western churches and the difference between the modern Western churches and the churches of the past. What evokes the mystery of God, a church that looks and feels like a hall or a large classroom, or a towering monument built to the greatness of God in man and woman and of woman and man in God? Historically, is it not the towering cathedrals that when seen from a distance used to draw our minds and soul to God?

Some say the Gothic and Eastern Orthodox churches contain too much to distract us from God: what a strange idea this is. Do we not go to church to have communion with God? Is not the idea of a place of worship, not that we might go there to get distracted from God, but that we go there to get distracted from the mundane, the everyday commonplace profane secular world around us? Do we not go to church to be transported inwardly to communion with God, to be transported to the inner world of our soul, the unspoken place where we can rejuvenate ourselves in God? Therefore does not the incense, the statues, the icons, the cross, the majesty of the priests in their robes and garments; does this not stir in us the feeling that we are away from the everyday world, with its uncontrollable vicissitudes, and are instead in the cool steady haven of the soul? If this church is cleaned of the very things that evoke the greatness and the mystery of God, what will tell our unconscious that we are anywhere special?

A whitewashed wall may not distract us, but isn’t the whole point of going to church that we may be distracted? That we may be distracted from the materialistic secular world and transported into the unknown, deeply known part of our self that is God. Is the Western church of today afraid that our mind should be allowed to wander? What has been forgotten is that we are all completely different, and the more we clarify beliefs and dogmas down to some sort of bare necessity, the more we take out the mystery and the chance for each of our very different spirits and imaginations to soar in God. The mystery of God needs to be evoked, and when there is a very large group of people, this is a very hard thing to do.

I had a vision recently that I think has some relevance here. In this vision I was walking through a familiar park in the depths of twilight, that intangible time when the sky is neither completely dark or completely light, when I looked across an oval and saw it populated with hundreds of people. This inner vision was so real to me that I stopped walking and withdrew. Instead of the parks being empty, as they usually are, they were nearly full. It looked as though the population of the surrounding neighbourhood had all come out of their houses at once. Everyone stood on the ovals with their faces pointed skyward. They looked at the clouds in their dark and light shapes, bursting and stretching out over the pink sky. No one was ‘ohhing’ and ‘ahhing’ as they do at a fireworks display. Instead everyone looked as though they were not entirely there in a conscious sense and that they had stopped thinking and were simply gazing. Some teenagers and adults smoked cigarettes and others talked quietly, but for the most part everyone gazed at the sky without distraction. People were dressed in heavy coats to ward off the cold, and some even wrapped blankets over themselves, their families and their loved ones. Everyone stood transfixed for what seemed like half an hour, and then noiselessly shook each other’s hands, wished each other goodnight and headed off into the distance, no doubt going back to their respective homes.

As I came out of this state, I realised that this may be a reality that is yet to come. This gathering looked somewhat like an evening meditation that people felt drawn to attend, no matter what their lifestyles, ages or backgrounds. Without words being spoken, everyone gazed at the majesty of the evening sky and withdrew from the conscious material world that was around them. There was little sound except for the odd cough - the most noticeable sound being that of the wind playing with the leaves in the trees. Although it was hard to fathom what everyone was thinking, there was a real sense of calm and peace in the air - you could see that the clouds were working their magic. Everyone no doubt saw something different in the clouds to what their neighbour saw, but you could see that they were all equally in awe of the spectacle and the feelings that this scene stirred inside of them. I was in awe of this vision myself. Instead of seeing electric light emanating from the hundreds of television sets bawling out the news - filling our minds up with more transitory information - I saw people who had stepped out of their homes, if only for half an hour, to experience the timeless mystery of the sky and the clouds, as one part of the earth goes from day into night.

Before I go on I will ask a few questions that may be troubling some Christians at this stage.

“Is God not the creator of mankind?”

I would answer that yes, God is the creator of mankind and that we all are God in that we are continually creating and destroying for every day that we live.

“Do you believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God who came into the world to save our sins and was resurrected in the flesh so that we might be born again?”

Yes, I believe that Jesus was a Son of God, as we all are. Son of God and Son of the Blessed were both used by Jews around the time of Jesus and this was not seen as blasphemy - as it is portrayed in the gospels.

“Do you believe that Jesus was the literal Son of God?”

I believe that we are all part of God and that God is part of us. By saying that Jesus was the only Son of God, it sounds as though the person who proclaimed this believed that Jesus had an especial relationship with God that they had not encountered before. This person obviously wanted to express how close this relationship was in the only way that they knew how. Jesus was male so he couldn’t be the Wife of God, so he therefore had to be the Son of God. After his death Jesus came to be so many things to so many people, from the Lamb of God to the Holy Redeemer.

The fact that the life of Jesus was conveyed in metaphors and symbols - to relate to others something that the conscious mind finds inexplicable – why, this was not unusual then and it had been going on well before the time of Jesus - and it still goes on today. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its story of the life, death and resurrection of the God Osiris, is a very early example of this phenomenon. In this century we can look at the rise in nationalism around the world and how this was brought to life - The Yellow Peril (China) and The Sleeping Giant (Russia). I believe that Jesus, like the rest of us, was born from God, through God and that God was always a part of him, as God is always a part of us. Jesus, therefore, couldn’t be anything but a part of God and God could not be absent from him.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him”
(Genesis 1:27-30)

This passage from Genesis may make things a little clearer. What an interesting way of putting it: “In the image of God he created him.” It sounds as though God created man in the image of himself - in this case God is masculine - and that this image was somehow apart from him and yet was him. From this passage we can deduce that there is God, the image of God and man who is now the image of God as well. If it sounds confusing, it needn’t be. All that is being expressed is that God is the very same thing as his creation; whatever God has created he has created it from himself and therefore it is a part of him. God is not apart from his creation; he is part of it, as his creation is part of him.

You might think that I am overemphasising this point but it must be stressed so that there can be no confusion. Although the Christian belief is extremely complex with its many ramifications, many Christians today are quick to dismiss any idea of God that can’t be grasped immediately as, “A lot of unnecessary mumbo jumbo.” They will also say that other beliefs “just muddy the water.” Most Christians today see their belief as being free from this problem without realising that it is only clear to them because they have been brought up with this belief. They have learnt its many complex and highly confusing tenets over time. They have been taught the Trinity, the bodily resurrection and the idea of purgatory, heaven and hell - not to mention the belief that Jesus is the literal Son of God and that the wine and communion wafers are his blood and body. Try explaining this to anyone who has never heard of Christianity before.

I believe Jesus was exceedingly conscious of his communion with God. He came into the world as we all did, with a mother and a father. Jesus died a death by being crucified on a cross – a punishment that was not uncommon in Rome - because he was seen to be a troublemaker, a disturber of the peace. Jesus had an urgent message to convey and it had nothing to do with society’s laws or the materialistic concerns of the day. In fact Jesus taught a new lesson that the other firmly established teachers of the day found hard to swallow - this happened then as it happens today, and as it happened before the time of Jesus. I believe Jesus was excited by the divinity that he felt was inside of him. I don’t believe this was a sudden discovery. From the threadbare narrative details of his life we know that he was teaching in the synagogue at a very early age but that it was a good fifteen years before he started his ministry. For those fifteen years he obviously had no fully formed message that had been communicated to him by another.

Jesus, like all great mystics and teachers, had to have a long period of gestation and self-discovery. When Jesus came to the realisation that the kingdom of God came from within and that anyone who believed in this would have eternal life, he felt an unceasing desire to communicate this message to others. In the gospels Jesus comes across as a man who was sure he had discovered what it is to live in God. And like so many others who have had experiences that are beyond words, he found that it was extremely difficult to convey what he felt to those around him. When reading the gospels it is hard not to be struck by the otherworldly, mystical quality of Jesus. I think I can quite safely say that there are few people in history who seem as totally unconcerned about the practicalities of life as Jesus seemed to be.

From what I have read of the gospels and from what I have experienced, felt and thought about Jesus, I believe he had a profound feeling of God that many of us may never unlock. Partly through predisposition, and partly through a great deal of struggle, Jesus was able to find a completeness in God that he found totally fulfilling. He understood and fully comprehended that God was part of him and that he was part of God. I believe it was because Jesus had found such certainty and fulfillment in God that he found it hard to connect with others. We are left with little doubt after reading the Gospels that Jesus did try to connect with the people that he came into contact with, but that he ended up feeling apart from them and their reality of the world.

I believe that Jesus really felt driven to communicate that God comes from within. He wanted to show people that God is far more dynamic and incredible than a set of laws. Jesus wanted to show people that God is living as we are living because he is part of us and we are part of him. Jesus wanted everyone to better understand that part of themselves that they found so mysterious. He wanted them to see that there was more to their lives than material, earthly possessions. Jesus wanted to show others that he had discovered that there was more to this earthly existence than they realis ed and that real communion with God could transform their lives. Jesus, like all great mystics, was never on the inside of society or on the inside of the religious establishment of the day. He saw society’s laws, and even the religious laws of the day, as something apart from his newfound reality. Throughout the gospels Jesus advocates what can only be described as a sort of vagabond mystic’s life, where possessions and worldly achievements are frowned upon and an immediate experience of God is everything. Jesus believed that if you hadn’t felt the reality of God in your life, then your life was worthless.

Now I would like to equate Jesus the mystic with Jesus the humanitarian. It seems that throughout the history of Christianity people have seen Jesus as a symbol of compassion, rather than anything else he might be seen to represent. His social role was important in that through his experience of God he endeavoured to get people to look at each other in a different way. The saying “Love thy neighbour” was around before the time of Jesus, as was the notion that it is wrong to store up possessions on earth. What Jesus did was to take this way of thinking one step further. Not only should you love your neighbour, but you should love your enemies as well: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other side also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” (Matthew 5: 39-41). The whole key to understanding Jesus’ teaching is to understand that he believed that every person had God within them. Jesus said, “I came to heal the sick” and yet he did not set up shelters for the poor and the infirm. This practical conscious way of looking at “I came to heal the sick” does not tell us what Jesus meant by this. Jesus saw sickness in the rich and poor alike. The sick were the people who did not have a feeling of God in their lives. Anyone who was suffering mentally, physically or spiritually Jesus felt compelled to help. He felt compelled because he equated everyone to God. If Jesus saw someone suffering, I believe he felt part of his own divinity weakened and he felt compelled to do anything to help this person. Whenever Jesus healed anyone he made it known that he did so in and through God. It was not through money, hospital treatment or anything practical. It was through the divinity he felt in himself and by the divinity he knew was inside the person he was healing.

I believe that Jesus was drawn to sinners – what a powerful word - because he did not see them as the lost cause that everyone else thought them to be. Jesus knew that every sinner had God inside them, when so many others didn’t believe it possible. I think that this is why he made both the sinners and the righteous uncomfortable - they knew that he saw God inside them and for this they felt ashamed. If everyone treats the helpless sinner as what they seem to be, they will grow comfortable in their role and see it as the only way to live. But what if someone were to talk to these so-called sinners as if they did have a relationship with God that was just as worthy as those around them? What then? I think that Jesus helped so many people in that he made them confront their Godness. Jesus made people realise that they were part of God and therefore what they did was important. He showed people that if they acted in a way that was detrimental to keeping alive their communion with God, they would suffer.

There is no doubting the fact that Jesus has inspired millions with his teachings and parables, and by the way his life has been interpreted; as The Saviour of Mankind, The Key to Eternal life, and The Lamb of God who takes away the Sins of the World. It is also an historical fact that ever since the message of Jesus was spread throughout the world, believers have been willing to lay down their lives for this belief.

“Was Jesus resurrected after his death and did he walk on the earth and communicate with his disciples?”

I could not tell you if this happened anymore than you could tell me. Did Elijah ride a flaming chariot up into the clouds in a whirlwind? Did Jacob wrestle with God face to face near the Jordan river at a place called Peniel? Did the ancient Greeks steal into the city of Troy in a wooden horse? I would answer that somewhere in my unconscious I may well believe these things to be reality, but that my conscious mind might reject this idea. I might also have a hard time convincing you that these things literally happened, as I would have a hard time convincing myself. I could tell you that I feel that we can be born again and again in the spirit of God within us. But this does not mean I know the literal reality of what happened two thousand years ago in Jerusalem and whether one man was resurrected, not symbolically as is the norm, but literally - an anomaly in human history. I could not tell you what happens after we die anymore than you could tell me. I could not give you a concrete picture of what life after death is like, but this does not mean that I refute the idea or that I don’t know of life after death. I have had inner experiences in my life that have been all too real, to be too consciously definite as to what our perimeters are.

If our own personal relationship with God is strong, people can read it in our eyes; they can sense part of the mystery there. The look of a fundamentalist Christian rarely exudes the mystery of God because they are unaware of it. It is almost as if they have swallowed a Law and in a Law there is no mystery. What you will more than likely see in these people’s eyes is repression, anger and the overemphasis ed joy of someone who thinks they have finally found certainty. You will not see the mystic’s serenity or look of knowing. Ranting, raving and pontificating from the Bible is not the behaviour of someone who is sure of God. You will usually find that those who are constantly quoting from the Bible and shouting about “what God wants” need to have their belief in God validated. Sometimes it is their way to claim some kudos. These people feel that they are important because they believe God chose only to speak to them. If their belief in God has brought them such unwavering certainty and joy, why are they always looking agitated and angry? I sometimes feel that these fundamentalists who scream and yell at you must have a different edition of the gospels than everyone else. Most people do not feel the desire to convert to the faith of an angry lunatic. Most mystics don’t feel a burning need to convert everyone to their way of thinking. They know that they have got to their position through a lot of struggle, heartache and pain, and that their journey to God has been a very personal experience. The fundamentalist believer’s ultimate aim, however, is to have the whole world thinking and relating to God in the same way they do. I cannot think of a more dreadful end to humanity.

If we are really serious about experiencing God in our lives, we need only to search for this God. Those who I believe have felt God most profoundly did not have an easy life; Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Dostoevsky, St Paul, T.E. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Jung - these are not names that are synonymous with peace, bliss and contentment – although they did experience these states at times. To really experience God I believe we need to look into the most hidden recesses of our mind and to acknowledge and accept the secrets that are hidden there, no matter how unsavoury or fantastic they may appear to our conscious mind. It is a hard road with many breathtaking highs and devastating lows, and this road will take us way away from that which makes us feel comfortable. I believe we have to wrestle with this God within us and it is through this struggle that we come to be blessed.

I am not interested in an eternal state of bliss. The greatest highs and lows I have experienced in God have come through acknowledging that nothing is absolute and that nothing is as it seems. To endure sickness or hardship may seem like a tragedy at first, but later we may come to understand it as a blessing. When we are healthy, stable and content we may well be going through a period of great stagnation. Through my experience of God and life I have known what it is to destroy absolutes. I believe that to have real communion with God is to be excited about life and all its possibilities. I don’t think there has ever been a person who walked on this earth who was completely sure of what they were capable of. This comes from having God inside of us and knowing that we can consciously know nothing but that we can feel everything.

I am not going to finish this piece with some definitive remark or answer as to how we can or should experience God. Now that you are coming to the end of reading my many words you might feel compelled to say, “I am sure that he has contradicted himself and that there are parts of his work that are simply unclear.” Yes, there is much about one mans or one woman’s experience of God that is unclear and even contradictory. I can only say that this is how I have experienced God in my life so far. I cannot tell you how I will feel upon reading what I have written in a year from now. To grow in God we need to move forward and even now these words seem old to me. I hope that these words are open enough, and even shambolic enough, to capture the time and frame of mind in which they were written. My only wish is that someone from reading these words may recognise God in themselves, or if they do not, that they search on the unmarked road that leads them to the beginning and the end.

Illustrations by Angelo Madrid

This article was originally published in the ABC Religion & Ethics over the Easter weekend.

Rising petrol prices, geopolitical instability and the threat of wider conflict in the Middle East remind us just how quickly things can unravel. These are not aberrations in an otherwise orderly world. They expose the fragility of the assumption that life is fundamentally ordered and that justice will prevail.

As Easter approaches, I am reminded that in the earliest gospel account the story ends in darkness and uncertainty (Mark 16:8). Jesus dies abandoned. The women who find the empty tomb flee in fear and say nothing to anyone. There is no resolution, there is no retribution. The Roman empire and those who condemned Jesus to death carry on with their lives. Justice is not served.

This is why I have always felt more connected to the ambivalence of Good Friday than the certainty of Easter Sunday. It seems more in tune with the times that we live in. Life is difficult and obscure, marked by mystery and suffering. By contrast, Easter Sunday often seems strained, with an enforced sense of joy and conviviality that does not always feel true. It reflects a deeper belief that the world should ultimately make sense, that suffering will be resolved rather than endured.

In the 1960s, psychologist Melvin Lerner gave this belief a name: the “just-world hypothesis”. Governments now promise outcomes that earlier generations would have assigned to fate or providence. We are told that perfect equity can be achieved, disease overcome and the climate can be stabilised through rational planning and technological progress. The language of “net zero” reflects this ambition.

The just-world hypothesis is noticeable in contemporary geopolitical crises. As tensions escalate in the Middle East, attention turns to the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage through which a significant proportion of the world’s oil supply flows. The language used to describe the situation is strikingly technical: supply chains, disruptions, strategic responses and market corrections — language which points an underlying belief that conflict and suffering can be managed through human ingenuity.

This same logic extends into our inner lives, where mental health is increasingly framed in terms of medicalisation, self-help therapy and positive psychology. These rationalistic and symptom-based approaches to wellbeing are recognisable in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which lists “prolonged grief disorder” as a condition that interferes with normal functioning and may require clinical intervention.

When sorrow becomes a diagnosis and risk an error to be managed, tragedy itself begins to look like a malfunction. Human pain is no longer a mystery to endure, but a technical fault to fix.

Yet this denial of tragedy leaves us spiritually malnourished. When suffering intrudes, we are left disoriented, blaming others, blaming ourselves or retreating into data and diagnoses. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed that modernity treats death as a technical failure. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take-off in 1986, a NASA spokesperson announced that what had transpired was “[o]bviously a major malfunction”. All seven crew members had died. This phrase has become emblematic of our cultural response to death. Catastrophe is framed as an error in procedure or technology rather than a confrontation with human vulnerability. The same is now true of suffering itself. It is no longer a teacher or a test, but a problem of system design, something that can be corrected once the right measures are in place.

Earlier cultures understood something that the modern West has largely forgotten: suffering is not merely a problem to be solved, but an experience that can deepen human life. This older understanding occasionally breaks through our secular rationalistic culture. After losing two of his sons in quick succession, Australian musician Nick Cave wrote of grief as opening an “impossible realm” in which glimpses of something beyond an ordered and just-world become perceptible. He stressed that in severe grief and loss, the illusion of control dissolves and the individual is confronted with something undeniably larger than themselves.

This older wisdom stands in direct opposition to the just-world hypothesis and finds its most profound expression in the Book of Job. It begins with Satan challenging God to a wager. Satan argues that Job is only faithful because he has been blessed with good fortune and that once this disappears, he will curse God and his creation. And so Job, who is blameless and upright, loses his wealth, his children and his health. His friends who witness his distress insist there must be a reason, that he has sinned and is being punished. The idea is meant to offer comfort by suggesting that suffering is somehow warranted and that the world is therefore orderly. Job refuses their consolations. He insists on his innocence and demands an answer.

When God speaks, no rational justification is provided; rather Job is confronted with the vastness of existence: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). The confrontation is not hubris. It is a necessary shock: Job is shown that the universe is not rational, predictable and morally comprehensible. His pain is not evidence of guilt. His good fortune was not evidence of virtue. The world is a mystery far larger than any moral system that human beings try to impose upon it. Job’s suffering is thereby neither explained nor undone — but transformed. The shift is not from ignorance to information but from grievance to awe, humility and wonder.

This is what makes Job so unsettling for the modern mind. We have built our civilisation on the belief that suffering can be prevented, that progress, science and policy will protect us from catastrophe. The just-world illusion has become the operating system of the modern West. If something goes wrong, someone must have failed – a flawed system, a flawed leader, a flawed individual. We behave as if a royal commission, an adjusted policy setting or the right reform can solve any problem we are faced with. Misfortune becomes a design error.

Yet suffering persists. Tragedy returns. Progress disappoints.

This is not an argument for resignation. The horrors of war, climate change and the crisis of youth mental health demand moral courage, compassion and action. But action without a tragic understanding of life becomes driven more by fear than wisdom — it clings to fantasies of fairness and control that cannot hold.

The just-world belief offers comfort, but it leaves us unprepared for the experiences that define us. When we deny tragedy, we do not become more humane; we become more brittle, anxious and lost.

Like the Book of Job, Good Friday also offers no assurance that suffering will be explained or redeemed within the terms we expect. It reveals a world that cannot be manipulated or fully understood. A more durable response to the just-world belief is to acknowledge that the tragic and uncontrollable nature of our existence is not an error in the system, but an enduring and formative feature of human life.

This aligns with the fact that we do not live in the light of Easter Sunday. As St Paul wrote, we see through a glass, darkly. And it is Good Friday and the wisdom of Job, rather than Easter Sunday, that speaks most clearly to that condition. It invites us to act, not as engineers of a perfect world, but as human beings willing to face life in its full, mysterious depth. To be human is not to avoid suffering, but to be transformed by it.

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God is defined in the dictionary as a “superhuman being worshipped as having power over nature and human fortunes, creator of the universe, image or animal worshipped as symbolising or embodying or possessing divine power, idol, adored or admired person.” I don’t believe this tells even half the story, but it does give us a place in which we can consciously look at God.

Is it not true that when people pray to God in a traditional manner they are praying to a divine being who they believe has power over their fortunes? So if we have a relationship with God in this way, we believe that this superhuman being can watch over us and change the passage of events so that they benefit us. In another way, others believe that God doesn’t necessarily change the course of events, but rather he or she steers us in the right direction.

In this light, inner reserves of strength that we were unaware existed are called the power of God. Feelings of benevolence, peace and understanding are called gifts of God. Our ability to do something with our lives is seen as the power of God working through us. In this way it seems that our relationship with this divine being is an incredibly personal one. Everything positive that happens in our lives we attribute to God, that is, when all the parts of this deity that are positive and superhuman can be seen through us. Our negative or unsociable qualities don’t come from God but from God’s opposite, the Devil. When great harm is done to us it is because this Devil has had his way with us as we have been neglectful of God, or have done something that has offended him. When we are mistreated it can also be seen as being part of the harsh reality of living in a world where not everything is good and benevolent as God is.

That God needs our attention and that this deity would be offended with our behaviour that is part of his or her creation; this seems to be beside the point. I believe this form of belief can do real damage to a person’s equilibrium. I can see how it would split a person apart instead of integrating them. It is made very clear in the three monotheistic religions where good and evil lie. God is good and we are basically good, and it is the Devil and the Devil’s powers that lead us to do anything that is not seen as good - in the sense that I mentioned earlier on. It is true that this has caused more harm than good, but it is not hard to understand how this can seem like a very sensible, conscious way for woman and man to rid themselves of sin. That this belief has been held for so long and that the Pope along with other leaders of the Christian church still acknowledge the literal existence of the Devil: this just shows you how pervasive this idea can be.

About two years ago I dreamt I was having a lengthy conversation with a middle-aged man. He sat uncomfortably on a chair next to my bed as his thin frame and height was not suited to such a seat. In this dream I was sitting up in bed watching and listening to this man speak and I also think I was conversing with him. It was only after we had been talking for some period of time that I suddenly found myself struck dumb – there is no other way of putting it: I realized that this man was the Devil. I remember feeling cold, startled and exhilarated. I couldn’t believe my luck, so to speak. I had been talking at length with this elusive Devil. I thought to myself that he looked more like an ascetic, handsome monk – all dark eyes, dark hair and an alabaster face. I felt and knew, however, that this was not a monk. When it dawned on me who I was talking to, I simply sat there listening without speaking; I don’t believe I said a word more.

The main feeling I had was of a missing part of a puzzle finally being located: “So this is what the Devil is” - I did not feel any ambivalence about this at all. There was nothing in this man’s appearance, however, that gave me any indication that he was the Devil. He didn’t fit any of the descriptions or images that I had been brought up with or had read about. I only recognised this man as the Devil when I felt this presence I had never felt before; it was the mind-boggling completeness of this feeling that really struck me - I felt a certainty that was both overpowering and surprising. This man who was the Devil seemed totally involved in what he was talking about and you could see that he was working things over in his mind – I remember he tended to look slightly away when he spoke. What he was thinking about I could not tell you. It was an extraordinary dream in that I woke up realising that I had felt and known what the Devil is. The thing that I really found unnerving was the fact that I had suddenly become aware of this presence. I felt and knew that I was in close proximity to a force that was endlessly dark and that had such a reputation for causing harm. It could well be that I felt the darkest depths of my soul personified in a presence that my conscious mind could relate to. As I said before, it was not the details of the dream that disturbed me, but rather the presence that I felt and the realization that I could identify this presence.

The idea that the Devil is a projection of our own unsociable or evil side, this idea has not made many inroads in Western religions. The Muslims stone a pillar that they see as representing Satan. It is hard to tell, however, if they see this pillar as somewhere Satan resides literally or as a symbol of their own dark side - probably the former. The unspeakable or unaccountable harm that comes with not acknowledging our own capacity for evil is that we look to others for its manifestation and we attack and blame them; or even try to destroy them.

I believe we all have our dark unsociable side that most of us try to repress. This is because we are social beings and to live with others we must obey certain unspoken rules. When we say that these rules come from God, we usually mean that they come from what we call the conscience. This conscience is what keeps us in the bounds of sociable behaviour. For instance, if I kill men, women and children because I feel the urge to do so, and without any apparent reason, I will be forced to live on my own - I may even be put to death. This alone is enough to stop most people from killing others who they dislike or for something to do - they do not want to be ostracised or put to death. Some people, however, due to all sorts of reasons, cannot repress their primal urge to kill, or to do whatever it is that pleases them: these people are seen as the manifestation of evil - the Devil has had his way with them.

Just recently in a major Melbourne newspaper a case was reported where the judge was quoted as saying, “I am also satisfied that upon ‘the demon’ within you being let loose, it was not to be controlled until its lust and anger were exhausted.” The defendant in this case was charged with life imprisonment for raping and then killing two schoolgirls. This is an extremely rare sentence as this was a particularly hideous crime - only three other people in Victoria have been given life imprisonment since its introduction in 1986. The judge’s language is extremely emotive, “through your own actions you have forfeited your right to ever walk among us again.” Both the judge and the defendant see this crime as too heinous for a conscious man to carry out on his own. When the man charged was leaving the scene of the crime with his accomplice he said, “Did you see the demon? Did you see the demon?” It is as though just after committing the crime he was unable to believe he had done it on his own. He was probably unaware that he would be capable of such a crime until it was too late. The judge goes on to say, “I think it was almost inevitable from the beginning that your ‘demon’ would only be sated, or at least protected from discovery, by their deaths.”

This is extraordinary language to hear in a courtroom in a major Western city at the turn of this century. I was startled when I read about this man’s trial in the newspaper as it illustrates exactly what I have been writing about in this piece. This man’s behaviour cannot be acceptable in a society that does not condone “innocent young people to be hunted, abused, murdered and discarded.” As the judge stated, “you have forfeited your right to walk amongst us again.” Again, this language is incredibly powerful in a religious and even ancient tribal sense. It is only within the extremity of the case that the judge and the defendant return to their roots, their deepest soul, their feeling of God and what we are all capable or not capable of doing. They both talk in language that comes from deep within.

This courtroom scene is far away from the modern conscious world of technicalities and blurred distinctions. This man has committed extreme evil and he will be ostracised forever. This evil he committed is so extreme that both the judge and the accused talk of demons. This man’s primal dark urge was not restrained and he will pay for it for the rest of his life. This will not help the innocent victims whose lives have been cut short, and we cannot look at their deaths as anything but tragic. Where does a God who lives apart from us fits into this picture? I could not give you an answer to this anymore than I could tell you how a benevolent God who intervenes in our lives is part of what happened. There has been enough atrocity and wholesale murder in the twentieth century to make this kind of question irrelevant. Only someone with a sadistic streak or a love of the absurd could believe that the countless acts of violence and cruelty that we witness, take part in or hear about, have some ultimate bearing of justice, or that they are part of some unexplainable sacrosanct plan.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time looking into the unconscious mind knows that all sorts of extremely unsociable behaviour lurks there repressed. I think it is important to understand that this comes from our unconscious mind and not from anywhere else. If our conscious rational mind did not repress these thoughts and leave them for the unconscious mind to unravel when we sleep and dream, we would no doubt act in a very different way from the way we do, regardless of our religion or any outward moral code. The conscious part of our mind is that which makes us capable of being sociable, law-abiding citizens. It is not due to laws from above. As Nietzsche points out, “Socrates and Plato were right: whatever man does he always does the good, that is to say: that which seems to him good or useful according to the relative degree of his intellect, the measure of his rationality.”

I believe that if we are aware of the divinity inside of us, we will also be aware of the divinity in others. To kill or to harm another when you know that they are part of the God that is inside of you, why, this feels like an absurdity. The source of God within us can only see this double negation as ungodly. Why this is so, we may never fully comprehend. We might consciously think we know the answer but we are more than likely speaking as utilitarians, or because our sensitivity to hurt or harm others is great. If we were placed in a situation where there is direct violence upon our person, our loved ones or an innocent victim, this belief would not necessarily hold up. If our own offspring or parents were being tortured to death in front of us, we would try to kill the person who is perpetrating this violence without a second thought. And yet, even though this murder would be fully justified in the eyes of the law, unconsciously we may still feel uneasy about having killed another human being. This is an example of how our divine side does not necessarily identify with our moral or conscious side. In this way our duty to society and our duty to our divinity may be two different things.

Illustration by Angelo Madrid.