Have long loved Augustine's thought, taken from Plato: human beings are 'between the beasts and the angels.'

Then, yesterday, I read Pascal's addition: 'Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.'

Pace, plot, effects. The psychological thriller Inception is a masterclass in them - the suspension of disbelief effortless. Plus, there's this intriguing deployment of dreams.

The film interprets them as a Freudian - focusing on Oedipal conflicts; dreams as residues from the every day; the role of wish fulfillment; the notion of the dream within a dream perhaps similar to Freud's distinction between manifest and latent content. (And I loved the doctrine that if you interfere with someone else's dreams, then their projections grow in antipathy towards you.) But I came away wondering about the big message, consciously or unconsciously embedded in the ideas-blockbuster of the summer.

I think it's to do with freedom, namely that we're far less free than we think we are. Our conscious life is, in large part, shaped by the unconscious. The question is how conscious you are of that. The film is quite clear that reality matters: to live in dreams is to lose your life, much as the addict loses their life to drugs. (In the film, dreaming is induced by mainlining opiates.) But freedom can be found by understanding the unconscious, for then you will not be split, like a fragmented dream, but know better how to live well.

The brain looks much more like the medium through which mental activity ripples, rather than the source of that mental activity itself. Natural selection can't really account for the differences between us and our evolutionary cousins, as for all the advantages that might be gained from having, say, a big brain, the disadvantages - such as that it kills mothers and infants during labour - should have prevented it. It's often celebrated that we share 98% of our genes with those said cousins, and a remarkably large percentage with sea urchins and mice to boot, only that's a problem for genetics, as there's not enough 'code' to account for the massive, manifest differences between them and us.

These are some of the mysteries that recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have deepened, and which James Le Fanu explores in Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Only, Le Fanu seeks to question that word 'advance'. Since, for all that a narrative of progress dominates the reporting of discoveries, the truth is that they have mostly served to highlight that we know less than we thought we did. Contemporary science is marked by an inverse relationship between knowledge and understanding - though perhaps only physicists acknowledge as much, with their talk of dark matter, energy and flow. Hence, expectations about what the complete human genome, or real-time scans of the brain, might deliver have fallen away.

It's clearly a book with an agenda, not just to celebrate the centrality of wonder in science - which many scientists would presumably retort never went away. But also to highlight the centrality of the non-material facts of human experience over which reductionist materialism stumbles. The vivid and liberating experience of consciousness also suggests, to Le Fanu, the need for the language of the soul, and of a natural sympathy not enmity between science and religion. Further, the apparently information rich operations of genes, and the syntactical nature of language, raises the possibility of a God-like intelligence, required as a kind of top-down, causative factor - he moots, sensibly towards the end.

As I've argued before, I don't think divine allusions serve scientific explanations well. And more generally, I did wonder whether Le Fanu overstates his case in his desire to score against his opponents. For example, the inexplicable nature of gravity, as it was to Newton - the force that bizarrely acts at a distance - is cited on a number of occasions as a paradigmatic case of the mystery of natural things. Only, General Relativity doesn't see gravity as such, but rather as an implicit feature of spacetime. You could say that just replaces one mystery with another, but I think it's important to say so. Alternatively, Le Fanu lambasts neo-Darwinism for the simplicity of its big idea - Dennett's 'universal acid' - because it is actually woefully inadequate when it comes to describing how, say, we shifted from walking on all fours to two: there are too many intermediary steps required with no obvious adaptive advantage. But then he also mocks the complexity of evolutionary mathematics as obscurantist. I felt you can't have it both ways.

What's exciting about the book, though, is the sense it leaves that we might be on the verge of a paradigm change in the biological sciences. To my mind, reductionist materialism has pretty clearly almost exhausted its explanatory powers in these fields, though it's had a great run. (That's something physicists have long had to contemplate.) We might live to see a new science emerge.

A new website, called Rent A Friend. Enough said. Well, not quite enough, as I suggest at the Guardian's Cif. A taster:

All friends like to be useful. You're only too happy to feed your friend's cat while they're on holiday, or to help them when they move into a new flat. You offer the help as a gift. It's elicited by the quality of the friendship. They, too, will offer you gifts in return.

But help with the cat or flat is very different from offering you a service. Services are not elicited, they are advertised, ordered and bought. If a friend treats you like that, you rapidly cease to feel useful, for you've already started to feel used. Feeling useful is a means by which friendships flourish. Feeling used is a means by which friendships end.

Great issue of the New Statesman, with thoughtful articles on secularism, one of those issues it is hard to do well in the media. Bryan Appleyard and Rowan Williams provide the meat, both, by different routes, coming to strikingly similar conclusion, that society needs a reference beyond itself to be itself - for Williams, it's the transcendent, that which is good whether we see it or not but can always call us to account; for Appleyard, what he calls, using network theory, a fixed node, to which all other parts of the network relate. Clearly, our problem is that there's no overt agreement on what that might be, though it's a step forward to recognise what's lost/at stake, and not to treat secularisation as merely the removal of religion, on the assumption that a 'natural', secular state will be revealed in its stead.

Alain de Botton writes provocatively on Comte's Religion of Humanity, though doesn't, to my mind, ask the crucial question which is why it failed. I think it's to do with the fact that religion can't be made, but must be discovered - a detail that I think did not strike the great social scientist, and inventor of sociology. There's a contribution from Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society too, arguing that its creed would be good for religion. Though it's a statement I find hard to square with their requirement of atheism for membership.

And there's a study of Indian secularism, which though not trouble free, roughly adds up to the state providing the environment, public and private, to let a thousand flowers bloom. It requires tolerance, though perhaps even moreso, a recognition that we need each other, or at least are in this together.

My PhD thesis was a reading of Plato's Lysis, the great philosopher's exploration of friendship. And so it was exciting, to me at least, to yesterday read Martha Beck's book, The Quest for Wisdom in Plato and Jung, and realise that the dialogue could be read in a parallel way to how I'd done, namely as a case study in analysis and individuation.

It's set outside a palaestra, on a festival day to do with love, which sets the whole discussion in what Jungians might call a 'libido field', a place resonant with psychic possibility. Socrates first 'analyses' Hippothales, who is infatuated with Lysis (he's identified with a projected complex, they might say), and promises to show Hippothales how to love Lysis properly. He does so by talking with Lysis as a separate individual - that is, he seeks to befriend rather than fall for him, which should show Hippothales the necessity of seeing his infatuation for what it is, at least in part. (Hippothales noticeably fails to do so.) The conversation with Lysis that follows is fascinating on a number of counts too. Socrates behaves as a midwife, of course - encouraging them to push, even when painful - which I understand is a good model for a Jungian analyst. But also for the results of their examination.

For example, there is the discussion about whether friendship is formed between individuals who are similar or dissimilar, and the suggestion that it is probably a mixture of both. This demonstrates a desire for a both/and rather than either/or conclusion - one that Aristotle, with his very unindividuated notion of the 'excluded middle', rejects in his discussion of friendship.

There's also a lot in the Lysis about our 'in between' status as human beings. For Socrates, what we're in between is our awareness of our ignorance of things and the unknown itself. This would mirror Jung's idea about the desirability of a new equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious being reached with individuation.

Then there's the aporia at the end, when Socrates confesses that though they think they're friends, they haven't been able to say what friendship is, which could, I guess, be interpreted as another moment of individuation - recognising the problem their encounter has thrown up, rather than simply being consumed by it. And also, more deeply, capturing something of the didactic role Socrates has played for Lysis. This, in Jungian terms, would be to act as a projection of his shadow, something Socrates did by questioning many of the assumptions Lysis has about how he belongs in the world.

Socrates leaves, remarking that he must take up the question of friendship again another time, probably with some folk of his own age, which might be thought of him moving out of midwife mode and seeking to tend to his own individuation too. Beck's broader suggestion is that, the Socrates Plato portrays is a literary representation of an individuated individual, with the brilliant twist that by reading the dialogues, and dialoguing with them, we too may search for soul via our interaction with this extraordinary man, as indeed Plato himself had done.

I notice that the Archbishop of York cited our Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis report during his presidential address to the General Synod, to launch an apparently blanket criticism of contemporary journalism as careless with truth, deploying spin and propaganda, and resorting 'to misleading opinions paraded as fact' - particularly in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He failed to mention that the report was actually published by a newspaper and edited by two journalists, myself and Madeleine Bunting. Surely he wasn't using it to deploy his own spin and propaganda?

I'm instinctively wary of the pic'n'mix approach to belief and spirituality, mostly because I'm quite a pic'n'mixer myself. It's the worry of never engaging the deeper riches of any single practice or way of life, which requires decades to do. And Jung suggests to me that might be right, via his concept of individuation.

By that account, the story of our lives is, first, the establishment of the ego, in the ways of the world; and second, the displacement of the ego by the Self - that wider participation in life, variously referred to as embracing the flow of life, fuller consciousness, the way, God. One needs the other: the Self needs an established ego fully to be in the world; the ego needs the Self to find not just instrumental purpose but ontological meaning.

Today, this rise and then eclipse of the ego is disrupted because the ego may never find the security it needs to first establish itself, what with the multiple choices on offer in the contemporary world: in a plural culture of many ways, and lots of pic'n'mix, it's hard to be committed to one way for long enough. The situation is exacerbated because consumerism celebrates the freedom of the ego - the freedom to experiment with this and then that. In a way, it's fascinating. Though the price is never sinking roots.

However, the Self seeks to make itself known no less. And the result is individuals in a perpetual state of meaning-seeking - we're all visionaries and mystics now - though we all also share a particular characteristic: unlike our forebears who sought meaning too, through their inherited tradition, contemporary seeking is marked by the constant fear that what we seek lies elsewhere. The risk is that instead of a steady process of individuation, we live lives of constant skirmishing between ego and Self. Or to put it another way, the commitment of the New Age is not to 'the way', for who can believe there is a 'the way' anymore; but instead to 'my way'.

I'm attending a conference on God and Physics, in honour of John Polkinghorne. I'll write a proper piece later, but for now, an observation - in the margins, as it were - stemming from attending a shorter paper this morning that tried to draw analogies between contemporary physics and Vedic spiritual ideas, via the prism of consciousness.

The link will be familiar to those who read New Age-type material - that at a very general level there appear to be parallels between, say, phenomena like quantum nonlocality and notions like collective consciousness. And this morning, I found myself asking: why do I feel embarrassed whilst listening to stuff like this? Does it say something about me, or is there something questionable about the links being drawn?

It may just be that the language of ancient Indian science is odd to me, and that learning about sat-cit-ananda in a temple, say - not a physics lab - would be straightforwardly interesting. Alternatively, it may be that I don't have the benefit of the esoteric experience that compels some people to seek to draw these links. Hence, I'm not feeling embarrassed so much as awkward, even annoyed, on account of feeling excluded. But, to be frank, I suspect not, and that rather there's something else going on.

I think the science is being appealed to in order to try and validate the spiritual insights, whilst paradoxically, at the same time, the science is patronised for only just beginning to grapple with the deep things that the spiritual have otherwise known for centuries.

Now, I should say that I don't need much convincing that the contemporary West is spiritually lite, and - more specifically - I have a growing sense that there is something going on in contemporary physics which is more than just an objective exploration of external reality. Perhaps not unlike Jung's reading of alchemy, and the exchanges he had with Wolfgang Pauli, the physical world can serve as an object on which to project essentially psychological searching - the imperative behind the search for a 'theory of everything' perhaps being appealing for not only metaphysical reasons, but because it mirrors the integrative goal of individuation too. Conversely, we are part of the natural world too, of course, and so our perception of it, as perceiving creatures, must have some bearing upon how we perceive and interpret it too.

But superficial, very general associations - such as between quantum nonlocality and collective consciousness - risk a confusion of languages, the scientific and spiritual. Without precise work on the associations and resonances between the two, if there are any, the result is naive, almost childish. Hence, I suspect, the embarrassment.