I’m making a u-turn. Where my go-to philosophy used to be Eastern: Theosophy, Buddhism, Upanishads, I’m now preparing to study Western philosophy at Leiden University.

I’m sure I won’t totally abandon my previous studies, but I do want to look at religion and spirituality from the perspective of the sceptic for a change. I’ve fed the mystic, now it’s time to feed the science geek again.

On this blog I will share books I love, thoughts I need to clarify for myself, summaries of the great philosophers of the past 3000 years too, I suspect.

This isn’t a totally new development. On Squidoo I’ve started a few discussions that were inspired by my study of philosophy as part of the ‘world religion’ studies program at Leiden University. We did general philosophy, ethics, religious philosophy and I personally also studied Indian philosophy.

Here’s some of what came out of that:

• The Ultimate Questions
• Humans have a soul!
• What are the important spiritual questions?
• Is God Omniscient ? If so, do we have free will?
• What is the cause of all Evil?
• What is God? IT is male and Female!
• There IS an afterlife
• Karma and Reincarnation: are we reborn?

Alright, not all of them were inspired by my world religion philosophy classes. Many were though. This time I expect to go deeper into such issues as: what is experience, what is knowledge, what can be talked about (and what can’t), is there a direction to human culture, etc.