E165 - Dr. Iain McGilchrist: Rediscovering Wisdom, Awe, and Balance in a Left-Brain World

World-renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist explores the profound truth about the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and why understanding their relationship can change the way you see yourself, others, and the world. We go far beyond the popular myths of “creative right brain” vs “logical left brain.” Dr. McGilchrist reveals how the two hemispheres actually work together to shape perception, meaning, and even our experience of the sacred. This is a conversation about imagination, intuition, and truth... and about what we lose when the left hemisphere dominates our culture. From education and consciousness to the future of humanity, Dr. McGilchrist shows how rebalancing our relationship to the brain can awaken a deeper, more fulfilling way of living. Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 0:00 Intro 2:02 The Brain is Split in Two... Here's Why it Matters 15:57 Right Hemisphere: Wisdom & Intuition 24:00 The Problem with Reductionism 31:02 How Truth is Found in Paradox 38:24 The World the Left vs Right Hemisphere Creates 48:22 By Grasping for Life, You're Missing Your Life 53:23 Your Relationship to Life Shapes Your Life 1:03:51 Attention is Your Most Valuable Resource 1:13:23 Defining & Experiencing the Sacred 1:24:01 How Our Education System Should be Structured 1:35:20 The Power of Imagination & Intuition 1:53:36 Accessing Higher Information Through Consciousness 2:03:53 Difference of Information, Knowledge, & Understanding 2:16:19 What it Means to Know Thyself 2:22:45 Expanding the Self, Love & Oneness 2:33:19 Suffering & Meaning of Life 2:39:09 His Message for Humanity 2:44:29 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The rational mind is a precious servant and the intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in a world which acknowledges the servant but has forgotten the gift. There are profound philosophical consequences to the fact that the brain is divided in two, but they can become very unbalanced towards the direction of the left hemisphere, the one that is less intelligent, less attentive, less perceptive. About all the things the left hemisphere would want not to do, the number one thing is to slow down. Everything in our life now tells us to speed up, to try and do things faster and faster and faster. And in doing so, you can't really appreciate anything. I think once you recapture the awe-inspiring nature of existence,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  then you're getting close to living again. 99.9% of the time, your intuition is doing a very good job. Most important steps forward in science were not made by endless scribbling, but by a moment of insight. Intuition is a great gift that we have and we need to pay attention to it.

• 1:11André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, literary scholar. His landmark works, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, have been fundamental in reshaping our worldview on life and the brain, our place in it. And his work has evoked so much in my own personal path, getting to study it more recently, re-evoking a sense of awe, beauty, wonder, and sacred in the everyday life. Dr. Ian McGilchrist, thank you for being here.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  No, thank you, Andrew, for inviting me to your rather lovely place here in the Pika Canyon.

• 1:52André Duqum?

  Yeah, the Pika Canyon. The pleasure is mine.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56André Duqum?

  I thought we could dive right in and

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:58André Duqum?

  set some of the framework for this conversation by asking, why should anyone care that the brain is split in two?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I think that's a very important question, not often enough asked, but why should it matter?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  People might well say, well, as far as I'm concerned, as long as my brain's doing the things I want it to do, I don't care where it's doing it or what shape it has. But there are, I believe, profound philosophical consequences to the fact that the brain is divided in two. And there are three questions that led me into this area when I was training in medicine. I started off in the world of ideas and literature and realised that I needed to become trained in medicine to deal with people who had a physical condition often affecting

• 2:58Speaker 00

  the brain that changed their mind and their personality and their way of looking at the world profoundly. How did that happen? And equally, people who were thinking in certain ways that could actually produce physical effects on their body. So it was in that area of overlap between mind and body that I wanted to work. And in medical school, there were a couple of things that were hardly mentioned, they were glossed over, and they're obviously true. One is that the brain is divided in two down the middle. And for people who haven't seen the human brain, it's slightly like a large walnut

• 3:42Speaker 00

  with the wrinkly masses but a bit in the middle that divides it. And this is not something peculiar to humans, it's true of animals, it's true of birds, it's true of virtually all the creatures that we've looked at that have a kind of proto-brain or a brain. Why are they all divided in this way? Because the computational power, if you think in terms of a computer, which we've been taught to do, the computational power of a mass of neurons must be proportionate to the number of connections it can make, and therefore to willfully reduce the number by cleaving it down the middle seems odd.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  The second thing that was odd and was mentioned but just glossed over in medical school was that the brain is asymmetrical. And that too is interesting because there's no real reason for the brain again to be asymmetrical. The skull is broadly speaking is symmetrical. And if you wanted to just get a bit more stuff into the skull, you could expand the brain symmetrically. But indeed, it has expanded asymmetrically, suggesting that there's a difference between what's going on in one part and what's going on in another. And in school, medical school, they mentioned that that was largely due to the thing that

• 5:06Speaker 00

  was said to set humanity apart, which was the acquisition of language, and that there were language areas in the posterior left hemisphere. And because language was a big thing, it needed a lot of space. And so that part of the brain became bigger. But this can't be true for a couple of important reasons. Animals that don't have language, the monkeys and even the great apes, already have this enlarged area without any big vocabulary to take up that space. And the other thing is that, and it wasn't ever mentioned because it was rather embarrassing,

• 5:48Speaker 00

  was that the largest asymmetry in the brain was actually in favor of the right hemisphere at the front. So the frontal part of the right hemisphere is bigger than the, if you like, the same area on the left. Why was that? The third thing was actually mentioned, and it really went home to me, which is that a lot of the communication across the corpus callosum is negative in the sense that it's saying, keep out of it, I'm dealing with it. So one hemisphere will take hold of a task, as you would, and it will send messages to the other hemisphere, which are largely inhibitory.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Some of them, of course, are excitatory, but their overall function, more often than not, is to exclude the other hemisphere from getting involved at the moment with this task. Now, that seemed extraordinary.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  I later discovered that there was no such band of fibres, we call it the corpus callosum in humans, there was no corpus callosum until mammals, so other creatures, reptiles, amphibians, birds, whatever, however sophisticated, didn't have a corpus callosum. And so their two halves of the brain were much more independent. And then when we started to develop one in mammals, very quickly, the growth in the size of the brain was not replicated in the size of the corpus callosum. So as the brain got bigger, the corpus callosum got effectively smaller. So it's smaller again in humans. What is all this about?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  And it seemed to me that, at the least, what one can say, it was about both uniting two things and dividing two things, keeping them together but keeping them separate because they were distinct. Why and what was that about? And the old story was, and I would ask everybody who doesn't know my work just to put out of their mind everything they think they know about the differences between the hemispheres, because largely it was all nonsense. And it used to be said, for example, that the left hemisphere was rational and dependable, a little bit boring, but there it was, it was, you know, sensible and mature, whereas the right hemisphere was sort of airy-fairy and given to painting pictures.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  But this is a very bad, very bad picture of what's going on. In fact, both hemispheres are involved in doing everything. And that led some people to say, well, there's no question here to answer. But it led me to think, no, there is, there just needs to be a better question than what are they doing? And that question was, in what way are they doing it? And I don't mean by which mechanism, I mean, in what manner, as you would say, of a person, but, you know, how does he approach this? What is he like when he's doing whatever he's doing? So the answers there are really fascinating.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Because, perhaps I should just mention that the left hemisphere is not reliable and dependable. It is actually given to delusions, far more delusional than the right hemisphere. Indeed, I'm by far not the only neurologist who said the left hemisphere is delusional when left to its own devices. Secondly, it is not devoid of emotion. It has rather strong emotions, most of them self-regarding ones. It gets very angry very quickly. Anger lateralizes to the left hemisphere more than to the right. And it gets quickly, expresses disgust and contempt.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  In fact, it's a rather disagreeable creature that is not by any means free from its own emotions. The right hemisphere is far more a good guide to reality. We'll come on to that. So just to say, all of that stuff is, that used to be said, is wrong. Why there are two hemispheres is because, at least this is the best explanation I can find, and nobody's produced a better one, and nobody's said that I must be wrong, is that all creatures have to solve a fundamental problem of survival,

• 10:16Speaker 00

  which is how to get stuff in order to eat, or to make a shelter, or whatever, and utilise it. So to manipulate the environment, to get stuff to eat, to gather stuff to make tools, to use the world. But if that's all it's doing, it will miss everything else that's going on at the same time. So, well, it's getting its lunch, it's somebody else's. It's not looking out for its kin, it's not looking out for its mate, it's not looking out for everything else that it should be looking out for. And so...

• 10:51Speaker 00

  The solution, the only solution, has to be, must be, and has been historically, to have two loci or loci of consciousness, one in one of the cerebral hemispheres and one in the other, and addressed to the world in different ways. So their disposition towards the world is different, their attention to the world is different. This is the root of the distinction. So the left hemisphere's root of attention is to a tiny thing that is isolated, already known, desired, and is easily graspable as long as you focus on it alone and go for

• 11:36Speaker 00

  it. Whereas the right hemisphere's attention is exactly the opposite. It's not narrow but broad, it's not moving from here to place but sustained, it's vigilant, it's open for everything else without preconception of what it might be. Now, these two complement one another, they work well together, they have completely different modes of approach, but we need those two to be able to survive. And this was imaged in the title I chose for my first book on this topic, The Master and His Emissary. And the idea there is that there is a wise spiritual master who looks after a community

• 12:16Speaker 00

  so well that it flourishes, and after a while he realizes that he can't look after all the needs of the community. But what's more, he realizes something even more important, that he mustn't get involved with certain, particular, detailed matters, because they will draw him away from his broad, intelligent, wise oversight. So he appoints his, you know, brightest and best second in command, a sort of aspiring bureaucrat, to go about on his behalf and do the number crunching and the administration and all that, while he is able to maintain the oversight.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  And there's a well-known principle in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and the less you know, the more you think you know it all. The left hemisphere is an example of the one that knows rather little but thinks it knows it all, whereas the right hemisphere knows so much that it's more aware of what it can't know. So the idea of the story is that the emissary is vain, resents the master, thinks, what does he know? He sits back there at home, meditating peacefully, while I go about doing all the hard work. I'm the one that really knows, I'm the master, and adopted the master's cloak. And because he didn't know what it was, he didn't know, the community

• 13:42Speaker 00

  fell into ruins, and along with it, the master and the emissary. So that story is, if you like, my way of expressing what I think is happening at the present moment in the 21st century, where the hemisphere, the left hemisphere, that knows and sees much less, thinks it knows everything, and is telling us what the answers to things are. Well, we're not listening to the right hemisphere, who knows a great deal more about how things are. And to come very belatedly to your question, why should this matter?

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Well, obviously, it does matter if our brains are, in some sense, the scene of a battle between two entities, one of which is headstrong and taking control while it knows very little. That is important in itself. But the real crux of this is that we can now, with the help of the research I've done, we can be fairly clear when we see the stamp of left hemisphere thinking on something. And we can be pretty clear when we see the hallmark of right hemisphere thinking. And because we know that left hemisphere thinking leads

• 15:07Speaker 00

  us astray far more often than right hemisphere thinking, we should have now the capacity to go, well, I think a right hemisphere point of view would be like this. And so we ought to give that more credence than the other. Historically, you know, in philosophy, people have said about various questions, oh, well, look, at one point in history, people thought like this, there was this school that thought like this, and then later there came this school that thought like that, you know. Shrug yourself, just take your choice. But I believe no. Now, I mean, I don't want to sound as though I'm overestimating what it is I've achieved.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  But I think I have given an indication of how we can resolve these dilemmas in favor of the path towards what is true.

• 15:57André Duqum?

  This, this quote I want to pull from.

• 16:04André Duqum?

  As you're describing the way the left hemisphere has colonized the contemporary world, this quote from your book, The Matter With Things. At the core of the contemporary world is a reductionist view that we are, nature is, and earth is nothing but a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material and whose only value is utility. And so you examine this reductionistic notion as a disease, essentially. And so I would love for you just to unpack a bit more about the clear differences, both on the left and the right way of attending to the world.

• 16:48André Duqum?

  And then we can go deeper into how the contemporary world is very much so overly operating within the left hemisphere.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Okay, yes, good.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Well, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, to search for any kind of understanding of the world, we have to begin from the question, which of these hemispheres is better able to take in information about the world at the lowest level? And the first part of my book, The Matter With Things, shows that it is, in every case but one, it is the right hemisphere. So the right hemisphere attends better to the world, attends to more. It perceives better than the left hemisphere in all modalities and perceives more. It makes better judgments on the basis of what it has attended to and perceived.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  And it also has a greater intelligence to bring on bear on understanding that information. So it's.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Emotional and social intelligence, that of the right hemisphere is greater than that of the left, and the cognitive intelligence of the right hemisphere, IQ, is far more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left. And indeed, in terms of creativity, the right hemisphere is better at being able to see how something would fit with something else. So we can make sense of the world better than the left hemisphere can do. And so we've got at outset those, what I call the, the sort of windows on the world

• 18:37Speaker 00

  or the modes whereby we can get hold of information. Then we work on that to try and build up a picture, and it is the second part of the matter of things, in which I say there are probably four main paths towards truth that we would all agree on to some degree. Some would emphasise one or two more than others, but generally, everyone would probably agree that we do need science, that we do need reason, that we do also need intuition, and that we do also need imagination. Now, those last two have had a bit of a bad rap in the last forty, fifty years from cognitive

• 19:22Speaker 00

  psychologists who are sort of trained to think that only rationalistic observations can work. But in fact, we know a great deal, thanks to their efforts apart from anything else, about the great importance of intuition in coming to deeper understandings of things. Following a rational course can only go along one linear track at a time, but intuition is able to draw perhaps up to fifteen different things that it's aware of, that it knows, unconsciously, and bring them to bear on making a final decision. And imagination is, I would argue, essential to getting to understand thoroughly anything

• 20:07Speaker 00

  else. It's not like fantasy, a way of covering it up and... Making it untruthful and more fun. Imagination is the the deep faculty within us, which is true to what is true and wishes to see into it. And for those who know the work of particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge in English, but also of philosophers like Hegel and Schelling around the same time in Germany, and Goethe, will know what I mean about imagination. So those are the parts. And when we come to finally say, OK, so what is the cosmos like?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  What can we say about the cosmos that that is truer than the opposite? And that is the very last part. It's the second volume, but the third part of The Matter with Things. And in it, I look at the structure of the cosmos, that it is that is not afraid of paradox, that paradox and the so-called coincidence of opposites are essential to its understanding. And the one and the many, as in other cultures, particularly Chinese and Indian culture, the one and the many are both real and both parts of the creative cosmos.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  I look at flow and change, much as in the spirit of Taoism, but I believe I can see that also from a Western point of view is important, that things are not fixed but flowing. The nature of time, the nature of space and matter, of matter and consciousness, and then of value and purpose and the sense of the sacred. Now, there is, I knew I was always going to be writing about the first of those, like time and space and matter and consciousness. But I didn't realize when I started writing The Matter with Things, which was about 10 years before I finished it, that I would absolutely crucially be needing to go to

• 22:16Speaker 00

  chapters on value and purpose and the sense of the sacred.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  And for me, these are non-negotiable elements of the cosmos that didn't arise, certainly are not painted onto it by us, but didn't arise secondarily from anything else, that they cannot in fact be secondarily derived from anything else, in the same way that I believe that consciousness cannot be got out of matter if matter has nothing of consciousness in it. Whatever you do, you simply will never end up doing anything to lumps of completely unconscious matter and going, "Heck, consciousness came out of it."

• 23:02Speaker 00

  So I hold a view that is now quite remarkably mainstream in even Western philosophy now, which is that psyche is fundamental to the cosmos. I'm a pan-psychist in the sense that I believe that psyche is there at the origin. And we can come on to talk about where matter fits in later, if you like. But I would point out that it's only through psyche that we can even know anything about matter at all, that matter is something that we know through our consciousness.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  But consciousness is not something that derives from or is based on matter. Complicatedly, they may actually be facets of the same thing, but that's what I would eventually wish to argue. So when people imagine that the world is, they've reduced it to parts by analyzing it, and then found that there's very little in the parts, and said, "Oh, well, that's all there is." And I am helplessly reminded here of Monty Python, not Monty Python, of Forty Towers. And I guess Forty Towers is crossed. To America, pretty much.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  And I don't know if you remember, there was an episode in which the chef gets drunk and they're having a gala night and they and faulty thinks, what can I do? And he goes to his friend Andre, who runs it, runs a restaurant in town and brings back with him what he believes is the duck, which is to be the centerpiece of the evening. And in fact, unfortunately, unknown to him, it was swapped in the restaurant with a blancmange. So he comes into the dining room with his trolley with a duck and he's chopping his knife and fork and making that inimitable, uh, John Cleese thought of it. Ah, and he takes off the lid and does a double take because there's not a duck there.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  There's a blancmange and then he goes like this and he goes ducks off because whatever it was, there's nothing in it. Now, sometimes apply this to the decoding of the human genome because the great shock was that there was nowhere near the amount of information by billions and billions and trillion folds that we would have needed for the genome to explain all the things that we'd laid upon it to explain. So reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it's going to make. And, you know, a simple down to earth example of may give one is a piece of music.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  So if you ask somebody who is analytically bent, you know, to, to work out what a piece of music is doing. Well, they say, well, first of all, what is a piece of music made out of? It's made of notes. Well, um, well, let's, the first thing, question and answer is what is a note? A note is a sound like that. And what does it mean? Nothing. Okay, all right. And well, then the music has another of these notes. Uh, what does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I've got Mozart's G minor quintet. It's just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing. And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye,

• 26:36Speaker 00

  which was the web of connections.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  In which and only in which the thing had any meaning. Now, I believe that applies to the cosmos in general, that, in fact, I argue that everything arises from relations. So there aren't first things which are then related, but the things don't even come into being until they are in relations with other things. That's what makes them what they are. And so I sometimes use the image of, from the Vedanta, of Indra's net, and Indra is a god whose net was cast over the cosmos. And this was a very special net, and every crossing point in the net was suspended a

• 27:25Speaker 00

  jewel, and in each jewel was seen all the other jewels in the net. Now, that is a very good analogy of the way in which I see the coming into being of everything that we call the universe, the cosmos. It stems from relations, and the bits that stand forward to us in networks or in the apparent phosai of interest and crossing points, these are what we then call things, but they're secondary to the net. The net is primary. And you can see this, because, you know, what is a human person?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Well, in what context is that person a person at all? And what we've lost sight of is that people are only people in the context of a society out of which they come and which helped very much to create them. Even if they reject that society, that rejection is very much part of the idea of how things are that was built into what they learnt from that society. So we are social beings, we derive from sociality, and we give back to sociality. And we can only be said to be what we are because of the relations in which we stand.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  I don't know if I answered your question, but the point I think I'm trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning. And if you think of the universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you've got down to with your microscope, you can't see what it makes in aggregate. A simple analogy would be like, what is a motorbike? Oh, I'm going to find out. There's one in the garage, I'll take it apart. And several hours later, the other person comes back and says, okay, what is it? Well, it's got two of these and three of those and something else. Search me, I have no idea what it is.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  And it doesn't mean anything because it's completely destroyed by the act of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was, was to get on it and ride it. And life is like that, that you can't stand aside from it from outside and understand it. A religious belief is like that. You can't stand aside from it and inspect it and go, well, it doesn't add up according to where I am standing now. But it only doesn't stand up from where you're standing now because of where you're standing now. Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank with a river, with a book, saying, this is how you swim, and swearing you're not going to get into the river until you've learnt how to swim from the book.

• 30:07André Duqum?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's like the difference between having, reading a menu and having the meal, right? The experience.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  A good one, yes.

• 30:15André Duqum?

  I am very fascinated at this distinction you have in this example with the Vedantic lens of Indra's net, where it is like the blossoming of a flower, where there's an unfolding of something that is unfolded, which I've already speak to. And so it reframes our position in the universe when we go from this left hemispheric notion of mechanistic universe of atoms bouncing off of each other towards a relational universe, where there is meaning tied into how things are unfolding. And I'm just curious if you want to highlight any of your thoughts there, specifically on the unfolding of something that is unfolded?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yes, very much. Thank you for that.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  There's a marvelous saying of Goethe.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the whole work of nature. And he compares it to the systole and diastole, the two beats of the heart, and the drawing in of breath and the exhalation of it. That there are these two complementary processes that don't somehow negate one another, but each require the other and couldn't be without the other. You couldn't have just the systole and not the diastole. You couldn't just breathe in and never breathe out. And the same thing exists everywhere, that there is an enrichment in the unfolding, which is not lost when it is reintegrated. So if you take the image of a bud,

• 31:54Speaker 00

  and the bud eventually unfolds, and what you find, the bud is beautiful, but what you find is a flower in all its complexity, and it is beautiful in a new way, but it hasn't destroyed the bud. It's completed the potential of the bud. It has fulfilled the potential of the bud. And eventually, that flower will then go back again and become a fruit. And the fruit hasn't destroyed the flower. The fruit is the fulfillment of the flower, and it is the promise of new life. So these processes are constantly cycling

• 32:38Speaker 00

  and involve alternating unfoldings and infoldings. Hegel used this image also, and I'm a great believer in... I wouldn't call myself Hegelian exactly, but particularly in the Martian, his embassy, I do rely on Hegel quite a bit. But I think what he saw for the first time was that

• 33:05Speaker 00

  things in their apparent opposites have the same nature and require one another. I had a very interesting conversation just the other day with a Chinese scholar, and she was saying, "Well, of course, in the West you talk about paradoxes, but we don't see any paradoxes, because for us, there is nothing..."

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Unruly or to be explained away in the idea that a thing and its opposite come together. You know, I remember in my own intellectual unfolding that at the time that I was reading Plato in class, an older boy introduced me to the work of Heraklitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, in whose work a lot of apparent paradoxes are displayed or examined, or just left there for your curiosity. And I began to see something there that was so important that I'd intuited and thought at last, here's somebody who's expressing it.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  This essential paradoxical nature of things, which is not really paradoxical. For there to be wet, there needs to be dry. The way up needs to be also the way down, as Niels Bohr, said to be the father of quantum mechanics, said, although the everyday and the small do not coincide with their opposites, the more important something is, the more it will coincide with its opposite. And so I see that, in western terms, coincidence of opposites, or in eastern terms, the fulfillment

• 35:00Speaker 00

  of a non-dual dual nature, if you like. The magnet has a north pole and a south pole. These are not in opposition to one another. They do, in fact, oppose one another if you push them together, but they are, in fact, inseparable. The one cannot be had without the other. And together they make up what it is to be a magnet. And together, the things that we think of as the big opposites go to make up. Something important, for example, I am a strong believer that death, which people nowadays are terrified of and start running away from as soon as they can even bring themselves to look at the concept that one day they're going to die, buster, they just start running

• 35:45Speaker 00

  away from it and won't talk about it and do all kinds of self punitive things in order to they make their lives that little bit longer. Death is not in any way the enemy of life. Death is like the rose going through another phase. It is, again, as Gertrude said, death is life's way, nature's way of making room for more life. And I, for one, have not the slightest fear of death. I'm excited by the prospect of death because there are only two possible outcomes. Either there'll be something, in which case I'm fascinated to know what it is, or there'll

• 36:30Speaker 00

  be nothing at all, in which case I won't be there to be disappointed.

• 36:33André Duqum?

  That's a very, that's a very liberating thought, you know, that there is the excitement of the adventure and continue if it does, and if not, then you won't be there for the disappointment of it. That's great. I, I think of, because you mentioned Niels Bohr, another saying of his, I believe, which I love, is the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  Another profound truth. That was roughly speaking exactly what I was referring to.

• 37:04André Duqum?

  Yeah. And it makes me think of how we can embrace paradox more in our life and how much we've really come to see life in such a fractured and separated sense. And it can quickly fall into the camp of demonizing the left hemisphere and saying this way of, you know, viewing the world is wrong without seeing the necessary, you know, pole polarity and the purpose it serves. But I am fascinated to hear your thoughts on how this way of thinking has infiltrated society largely and how it will attract positions of leadership and authority that are incongruence

• 37:47André Duqum?

  with its perspective on life, the left hemisphere, and how that begets more of its own way of thinking.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Going back to a question that you asked me right at the beginning, why is any of this important? One way is to talk in terms of social and cultural history. And I believe that each hemisphere's experiential world has a different quality, simply because of the nature of the attention it pays to the world. And these go together to compose the way we think about the world. But they can become very unbalanced. And in particular, they can become unbalanced and tend always to become unbalanced

• 38:37Speaker 00

  towards the direction of the left hemisphere, the one that is less intelligent, less attentive, less perceptive, more liable to delusion. That is kind of important. So in the second half of The Master and His Emissary, as you know, I effectively look at the history of the West, from the ancient Greeks through to postmodernism, looking at the main shifts in the history of ideas. And it shows that there are oscillations, periods when the two hemispheres are working in a kind of harmony. That doesn't mean they're of equal value. It means that the left hemisphere is acting as the proper servant or emissary of the right hemisphere.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  And when it does, we have wonderful periods of flourishing, as we did in the sixth century B.C. in Athens, as we did again around the dot in Rome, and as we did at the beginning of the Renaissance in Western Europe. And in those periods, you can see everything taking a step forward. A highly imaginative, creative society that was evolving new systems of thought, making steps forward in science, in astronomy, in map making, but also in drama, in poetry, in music, in painting, in architecture. All these things were flourishing.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  And then inevitably, they become more crude, more gross, more vulgar, and eventually collapse. And they get, as they do so, they drift more and more into the left hemisphere's mode of being. And I believe we are in that stretch. We have been for arguably a few hundred years, but certainly since the Enlightenment, really, in a period when, though the Enlightenment was a marvelous movement, and if I'd been there at the time, I would have been a great supporter of it. I think it's also a hubristic movement that overestimated what it could do and what its importance was. And we are reaping the benefits now. They are that we believe we can find all the answers to everything by simply doing more experiments, roughly speaking.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  So what are the differences between these two worlds like? I think that would be worth saying. Well, firstly, the left hemisphere's world, because it's focused on one thing that it knows and it wants to get it quickly. The left hemisphere is the quick and dirty one, not the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is, as Ramachandran says, the devil's advocate. It's always going, "Yeah, but it might be something different." But the left hemisphere is in a great hurry. It wants to get it so that he can eat it, grab it and have it. So it's not particularly interested. It might get it wrong sometimes, but who cares? So that's the left hemisphere. It's made up of little things, that it knows what they are, that are separate, non-individual, I mean, it doesn't matter which rabbit it is

• 41:34Speaker 00

  or whether the rabbit has a family. It's a rabbit, I want to eat it. It doesn't understand anything that is not explicit. It understands the brute fact of the something there that it can grab, pick up and take. In doing so, it's taking the individual embodied being and making it an abstract representative of a category. It's a rabbit, it's a twig, it's a whatever it is. It is also distancing itself from whatever that is in the sense that it is the manipulator of it. It's not interested in a relationship with it, it's interested in just getting it.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  And this kind of world builds up a picture which is literally inanimate. So people who have right hemisphere damage often talk about living creatures, including other living people, as say automata or zombies. They begin to see themselves as possibly like that, or describe themselves as having the qualities of a piece of furniture. So the animacy has been lost, but so has everything else that makes things important. And these are the things the right hemisphere sees. It doesn't see anything as ultimately entirely isolated or entirely fixed. It sees things as always changing,

• 42:59Speaker 00

  interweaving themselves with other things, having meaning which goes beyond the explicit. In fact, sometimes what is not said is as important as what is said. It understands poetry and jokes, both of which depend on not explaining what's going on. When you explain a joke, you kill it. When you explain a poem and reduce it to a few banal sentences about how painful it is when somebody you love dies, you've destroyed the poem. The poem was also unique and it just becomes another example of something in the left hemisphere. The poem was embodied. It didn't just affect your intellect,

• 43:42Speaker 00

  but in reading it, it had effects on your embodied being, on your blood pressure, on your heart rate. It can have effects on your, on the, make your hair stand on end, or bring tears to your eyes, or make you sweat, or whatever. So all, the right hemisphere sees is embodied, physical, complex, interconnected, never exactly pinable down, and ever more evolving into being. Whereas the left hemisphere sees things where all that is finished and dead. It is cut up into bits, and the bits are recognized and added up, and the more of them there are, the better. Never mind about quality, we're interested in quantity. And you can imagine that what this results is two kinds of world.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  One is like the real, living, unpredictable world that you actually encounter from second to second. And the other is like a reproduction, like a map or a film or whatever, where everything is already in place and is just a representation of what was originally a living thing and present. Because after all, representation means being present again when you are no longer present. So the left hemisphere's world is this non-world, and the right hemisphere's world is this vivid, living world. And what I think has happened in our time is that we have come so much to believe in our helpful map, the schema, the diagram that enabled us to exploit, that we think

• 45:12Speaker 00

  that's all that there is. And it's like somebody who tries to live in the map instead of living in the world that is mapped. This has a lot of damaging consequences. It means that everything has to be, if you like, converted into a web of algorithms, procedures, and rules. So what used to be intuitive responses, commonsensical responses to two human situations between them, is now one in which, whatever you're doing, the other person is, "I'm sorry, the system won't let me do that." "No, the computer says no," and all this.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  So they are only stuck in what the system allows, which is almost never a reflection of what real life is, because real life doesn't fit into those categories. So I think that happens, and leaders think that, you see, the power... Let me talk a bit about values. The one single value of the left hemisphere is power.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  The power to control. And this is what, going back to the evolution of the two hemisphere system suggests is that the left hemisphere is the grabber. It's the one that gets stuff. And so it's really only interested in having control of things. If it hasn't got control of things, it's anxious. So if the left hemisphere begins to take over, we're anxious about everything that doesn't seem to be already under control. So the natural world is intrinsically a source of danger. It must be administrated, brought under departments,

• 47:02Speaker 00

  have people who go out in little uniforms and create powers and destroy the natural nature of it. There will be a hatred of the human body and attack on it because it has all kinds of unpredictable qualities. It can get ill, it can, it can fall in love. And then what on earth will happen then? And it might get ill and die. And so we, we resist this thing that is the only way which, way through which we can experience life. We see it as whatever is over and against our will. And so the left hemisphere's field is one of will.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  If I can just create enough departments and enough special interest groups who will investigate and evaluate, we'll get there. But of course, that process in itself uses colossal energy, distracts one from everything that really is important and becomes a tyranny in itself. There's a wonderful book, by the way, called The Tyranny of Metrics. And it's by Jerry, can't remember his surname now. But anyway, look up The Tyranny of Metrics, all those who are listening or whatever. But he explains in ways that just make it clear

• 48:26Speaker 00

  what we all sense about the ridiculous way in which our lives are overlaid with more and more and more rules. So much so that actually just trying to answer the questions and follow the rules and tick the boxes can take up half of one's life. And time is important. Time is life. When your time is taken away, your life is drained away from you. So that's part of the world we live in now. And I think that managers, instead of allowing as light a hand on the tiller as possible, so that people are free to use their initiative, their intuitions, their insight, want to micro control things.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  And when you do that, of course, the whole project becomes sclerotic and eventually dies.

• 49:17André Duqum?

  This is very much so what you're getting at when you say that we nowadays no longer live in the presence of the world, but through our representations of it. And there's something so devastating about that understanding because to not be in true intimacy with the gift of a human life is, uh, yeah, it's devastating. And so I'm just curious for you to share your thoughts on that because we have become societally, it's become so normalized to live life through our models of reality instead of intimate with reality itself.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  It's very true.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  And going back to what I was saying about the the pointless of constantly trying to extend your life. It seems like the less your life means, the more you want to extend it. And in other words, you're looking for quantity, which is the left hemisphere's idea, not the quality of life, which would be the right hemisphere's idea. So what are you getting out of this life? What are you experiencing in this life? What are you contributing to this life? And so it's about all the things the left hemisphere would

• 50:29Speaker 00

  want you not to do. The number one thing is to slow down.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Everything in our life now tells us to speed up, to try and do things faster and faster and faster. And in doing so, you can't really appreciate anything because it takes time. And you can't certainly appreciate the subtle, unspoken, the intuitional and the in-between-the-lines sort of elements in life, which need to be savored. And to take pleasure in the moment, which actually is something we need to practice. It doesn't come naturally to us anymore because we've been subjected to a culture which focuses us on surfaces, on the superficial, on the maps, on the diagrams, on the boxes we need to take.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Anything to get us not to be looking at the actual world, which is still amazingly unfolding in front of us. And to recapture the awe of that. I think once you recapture and feel again the awe-inspiring nature of existence, then you're getting close to living again. And I think there are a couple of other things I say are important. One is a kind of humility, which is unusual in the modern world.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  Because we are so hubristic, we're guided by these

• 52:01Speaker 00

  fantasies of total control, of being able to achieve so much, just wait in 10 years' time, we'll we've mucked everything up, but you wait, we'll have even more power to muck it up in 10 years' time. We don't need more power over the world because we're exerting that power in damaging ways. What we need is greater wisdom, and wisdom begins in humility, which is the awareness of just how little you do really understand. That doesn't mean to say you have to accept to be stupid. In fact, it's a sign of astuteness to be modest about what you know. The person who is

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Believes they've got the answers to everything is by definition a fool. I would say that ignorance comes before knowing, but there's unknowing that comes after knowing. And it's that unknowing that one is aiming for, much as, you know, Christ said, except you become as little lambs, you know, which is of course, how should we do that? This is what I was saying. But what he meant was, there is, there are two kinds of innocence. The innocence of a child before the child becomes experienced.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  But there is a much more robust innocence, if you like, of the saintly person who has achieved an innocence the hard way through having had experience. So these things, the spiritual gifts at the end, they sound curiously like what we thought we were leaving behind, but they're in a new light, a new coming into being.

• 53:53André Duqum?

  I loved all of that so much, man, that it just, I resonate so deeply in the way that you described and the notions of which we can attend to life. And it is inspiring to know that we can experience more of that way of life through the way that we choose to use our attention and attend to things. And I'm curious to hear you explain how the way that we attend to life and our relationships and the circumstances in life changes very much so what we find there.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, and I make a slightly stronger claim. But I do make that claim. So what I would say is that depending on how we attend to things, we find different things there in the world to attend to. And because of the way we have attended, and it's brought forth whatever it is it has, we think, oh, well, that worked, let's pay more of that attention. So if, for example, you're using, you're using a kind of...

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Detached, manipulative attention to people. You will see them as mechanisms that can be overcome and directed by you. But if you see other people as objects of compassion and of love and capable of all the same kinds of things to give in life as yourself, then you will get a different experience from being around people. And to make it simple, I talk about the mountain behind my house, you know. The mountain behind my house is it's got a sloping outline,

• 55:51Speaker 00

  which can be seen from the sea. And it gives the name Talisker to the place where I live, because Talisker, and apparently in Norse, meant the sloping rock. And so what that tells you is what it was that mountain to the Vikings who came down that coast of Scotland in the year 1000. It was a landmark which told them the difference between danger and safety, because it signified a bay that was famous for its rocks and its capacity for shipwreck. But it was also the home of the gods for the Celts, who, sorry, the Picts, in fact, who lived in the shadow of it a thousand years before that,

• 56:36Speaker 00

  as we know from what they have left behind of their dwellings and their artefacts. In the 18th century, people started to go there to paint it, and for them, it was a multicoloured form of different textures that was very beautiful to draw. In the 19th century, people got very interested in geology, and it happens to be an outstanding example of columnar basalt formation. So people went there for that, and they still go there with their bright yellow hats, wandering around with their hammers. And

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Because it's basalt to a, what shall I say, to an exploiter, it would be dollars. But to a physicist, it's ninety nine point nine nine empty space and the other zero point zero one percent. We don't really know what it is. Now, these are each descriptions of the mountain, but which is the mountain? And the answer is, in my view, none of them is the mountain. Because the mountain can be all kinds of things depending on how you attend to it. And if you tend with a certain goal, you see one thing. If you tend with another goal, you see something else. So, you know, the same thing is true of a human body. There are different ways that we attend with.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  The doctor, the pathologist on the slab when he's dissecting a corpse, your lover, an art, an artistic model, all these bodies are all human bodies, but they require a different attention.

• 58:20André Duqum?

  How does the quality of the attention you pay change? Not just what you find, but also you, the attender?

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Oh, it's also you, absolutely. Because you become, I mean, suppose you think, well, humans are just machines and you attend to the extraordinarily complex organismic nature of the human body in a mechanistic way. You will certainly find small areas where there appear to be quite clear linear mechanisms, where A affects B affects C. In fact, if you look a bit broader, using the right hemisphere, you see that actually these systems are not one to one analytic linear, but are in fact massively complex systems in which ten thousand things are happening in a cell per second

• 59:13Speaker 00

  and they're all interreacting with one another in ways that you simply can't map and are not just beyond our power to predict, but are intrinsically unpredictable. So on the one hand, you've got this vision, it's all predictable and mechanical. On the other, you've got, no, it's infinitely complex. It has recursive loops in it and it can't really be predicted. Now, if you are interested in having noticed a mechanism and you're able to intervene in it, you feel very clever. You know, "Oh, I've done something useful, I intervened in the mechanism, so on." So I think the whole thing is just a mechanism, and you just carry on paying that attention for the rest of your life, and you never see anything else. So I think it does affect you, but I'd also go further and say that the way that we attend

• 59:57Speaker 00

  to things affects the world at large, because none of us, again, is isolated. So if grows up a culture, you may be inclined to see the world in all kinds of interesting, virtuous, revealing, creative ways. But if your culture nonetheless, all around you, is saying, "This landscape is whatever it is, it's for extractive purposes, it can be covered in all kinds of roads and bits of metal and so on, and it'll still be what it is," then, as far as the culture is concerned, that is what it has become, and it becomes harder and harder for people to see it in

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  any other light, and to argue back against it. Two examples come to mind for me. One is a long report, 400-page report, on the impact of a certain development on an area of outstanding natural beauty, which would effectively destroy its outstanding natural beauty. And the report mentions, you know, how money could be raised for the project, how interest could be earned on the project, how jobs could be provided during the construction

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  of the project, the impact on the local community that might be beneficial or not, and so on. But nowhere do they mention the above all important thing, that one of the last really beautiful wild places in that part of Britain was going to be completely destroyed. And at the end, they say, "But we can't evaluate that, so we're not saying anything about it. We can't put any numbers on it, and so it doesn't exist." The tyranny of metrics. And an even more extraordinary one is the report...

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  Of UNESCO on the effectiveness of a campaign to wipe out onco psychosis in children in very poor parts of Africa. It being a protozone that is can cause blindness. And by washing in certain river water, you can become blind from this creature. And at the end, it said various things about the impact on the local economy, which could be measured. And it said, of course, a lot of people have been saved from blindness,

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  but we're not going to talk about that because there's no figures we can put on it. So it is almost as, I mean, one can smile, but it is beyond belief absurd. That is how we now think. So much in terms of the scheme of money and jobs and so on, and so little of beauty and goodness and truth, all of which seem to me to indicate that onco psychosis and the beauty of a landscape are important.

• 1:03:20André Duqum?

  Have you ever gone people watching? Have you just gone? Have you ever just sat somewhere and watched people go about their life?

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Quite a lot, yes, yes.

• 1:03:31André Duqum?

  I'm curious because in the deeper studying of the contemplative practices, you have the ability to train your faculty of attention and the kind of quality of attention you pay. Many different practices, one could be staring at a candle and being able to, which seems like an impossible task at first, maintain 20 seconds of concentration, let alone 10 seconds, without distracted thought. And it can be a cultivated practice to where the penetrative nature of your attention and awareness can glean you insights about that to which you're paying attention to. And that can be taken from a candle flame to all of life around us, especially other people. And it's fascinating

• 1:04:15André Duqum?

  to the degree in which we pay attention, what comes to mind? What comes into our awareness when we pay attention in a certain way? Where you might just see people walking about. In their daily life, in their hustle bustle and struggles, to the deeper things that you can attend to and pay attention, become aware of within their experience, their emotional landscape, things that you become much more sensitive and receptive to,

• 1:04:41André Duqum?

  that you just weren't previously aware of. And I find that fascinating because in many ways, I've seen attention as our spiritual currency, if you will. Like, that's why we pay it. We pay attention. And it's what we do with our life in any given moment. And so I just find it so important to focus on this a bit more because attention is an area of life and an aspect of being human that is the faculty in which we engage with and derive meaning through life. And I'm just curious if anything comes to mind as, yeah, how you pay attention changes

• 1:05:25André Duqum?

  what you become aware of and therefore can also change how you interact with and steward life around you in a sense.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  It is a sense in which attention, well, I say it is a moral act because it has moral consequences in how much or what you see in a person. And it's been compared to love by two French philosophers, Simone Weil and Louis Lavelle, that attention is the pure attention that you pay to another, is a kind of love that you give that person. And in it, that other person can become more revealed. They can become more themselves. And I think there are people also

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  who have practiced very much what you describe, which, alas, I haven't over a long period, and who are therefore able to see things in people.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Very clearly, and rather alarmingly. But they can detect what is going on for a certain person very well. It's a kind of psychic phenomenon, I suppose, and I don't claim to have it. But I do know people who can exercise it and see their way into the nature of things. This was, in a way, what the poet Wordsworth did and often describes, that he was much mocked for paying attention to, you know,

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  very simple, ordinary things, to a small tree, not the big ones, or a lump of rock in the middle of mountains. But of focusing on these things for a while, as well as, of course, all the rest of it, and seeing into them. So, you see, one of the things I think is that we may feel that it's important to get to know a realm that is conceived of as beyond the one we inhabit. And that may well be real, I believe it is real. But I think the mistake is to think that we would get to find it

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  by turning our backs on the realm that we find ourselves in. Instead, I think one sees deeply through the realm that one is in. So we don't find the infinite by turning our backs on the finite, but by looking more deeply into the finite. And we, in other words, treat the world as having what I call translucency. And it's not quite the same as transparency, at least not in the way I use it. So transparency would just be that I was able to see through a landscape or see through... You and see something else beyond.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  But very importantly, I also see you and the landscape as well as what is beyond. And it's rather like looking at a painting. And your eye can stop on the surface of the painting. Or it can go through the painting, not in such a way that you don't see the painting. In fact, you see the painting more rarely than ever, but you are thereby granted access to something that in one sense lies through and beyond that painting. Does that make any sense? Yeah.

• 1:09:15André Duqum?

  Yeah, it makes me think of how. Why is there a felt experience that music and poetry seem to get us at what something truly is in its essence, other than prose or typical language?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Right? Yes.

• 1:09:33André Duqum?

  And it also just, yeah, it makes me think of the ability to pay attention and become aware of the context in which something arises. What makes this room useful is really the empty space in between all of the things.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:09:50André Duqum?

  And so it's like the awareness of the nuances, the space for the silence in between the notes of a song that make it what it is.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, I. I wrote a book back in my twenties called Against Criticism, which was my way of dealing with the problems I'd encounter in teaching literary criticism. Partly because of the way in which we took this unique artifact from the past that somebody had left for us, because they believed it communicated something. And it was unique, it was embodied, it was implicit.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  And we took it out of its embodiedness, made its implicit quality explicit, and destroyed its uniqueness. And so we worked in the exact opposite direction in which the work of art was supposedly taking us. And at the end of that book, I have a chapter called Speaking Silence, which is about the fact that often the words we use when faced with something.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  Spiritually profound, get between us and our understanding of it, and that it's the silence in encountering it, not a pure absence. Much as the whole idea of emptiness, as it's translated, is that Shunyata, I think, is translated from Sanskrit, is not emptiness as commonly understood in the West now as something entirely negative, but the fruitful space within that is like the womb, a place whose emptiness makes possible the forthcoming of an endless potential.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  So it is a richness that is in that silence. The silence is not saying nothing. The silence is where you can, if you are attentive, pick up important things. So you must have this attentive posture, which George Steiner talks about in one of his essays on Frangelico's paintings of the Annunciation, to where the angel comes to Mary and says, "You will bear a child," and so forth.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  And he describes this inclination of her head in which she is listening, and it's an open or active passivity. She's not actively going towards something or grasping something, but she is remaining receptive, but actively receptive. And it's that active receptivity that I think that we...

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Need to, and I try to when I can, to cultivate so that I am listening, but I'm not talking into that space, but I'm listening for things. And if one does listen, things come, not complete. I mean, they may do to some people. People say they hear a voice and that's wonderful and God speaks to them and so on. This doesn't happen to me. But I do know that creative things can have this quality. So that there is something there that has a shape to begin with, has certain qualities and you, and by rushing in, you will destroy it and saying you've got it before you really have.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  But a sort of subtle diplomatic being aware, being available, but not trying to grasp it too quickly allows it to come into being. It's a sort of dialogue between the left hemisphere saying, oh, I got it. And the right hemisphere saying, hang on a minute. I don't think you have got it. Stay, listen, and then allowing it to come.

• 1:14:16André Duqum?

  What would you say is then the sacred? And we've been alluding to throughout this conversation, the various barriers to a felt experience of the sacred in our day to day life. But I'm curious how you define, which I understand is inherently paradoxical in doing so, the sacred.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:38André Duqum?

  And then, yeah, and then I'll go from there.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Well, as you would imagine, it's very difficult to say. As a result, writing the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, which is the last substantive chapter of the matter with things, took me longer than any other piece of its length that I've ever written. It is 111 pages long, so it's kind of a short book. But the reason that it was so difficult and it took me time is because I had to both say and unsay because.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  I didn't want people to run away with clear ideas of what it was I'd said and substitute those for what I was trying to get them to to understand I was gesturing towards and trying to help come into being in however little a way. So it was much easier to say what it's not, because I think a lot of things are mistaken for the sacred. And indeed, in religions, I think there can be both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere playing their roles in ways that are quite typical. So there are religions, and most religions have branches in which

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  a great deal is set on a written text, which is infallible, because it's written by God and the truth is all 100% clear, because it's written down there, and that's it. Now, that is a left hemisphere fantasy, which makes you feel very, very safe and comfortable. And because it's constantly longing for certainty and safety, then that's a very prominent part. It also answers all the questions that are so difficult by saying, "I'm right, you're wrong. If you believe anything else, you're damned", and all that kind of thing. We get this growing in religions.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  It's a kind of anti-religion that takes over religions historically at various parts. But in those religions are also traditions that respect very much the, that which cannot be pinned down in language, that the important things about the divine are what cannot be said. So, for example, at the beginning of the Tao Te Ching, the great text of Taoism, it says, "The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao", and you might think, "Well, that's just Chinese",

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  but no. Saint Augustine, a pretty heavy, heavy-duty priest, saint of the Christian Church, said, "Si comprehendis non est Deus", "If you have understood, it's not God you understand".

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  In other words, he's saying from the outset, "You will never understand God." "God defies all understanding." But doesn't that mean by that, "That defies all approach"? If you try to grasp this, what he's saying, with the left hemisphere, "I grasped it." "The right hand, I've grasped it." "The left hemisphere controls grasping." Then you will never succeed. But if you are open to something that will come to you out of its own goodness, out of its own charity, then you may receive it. I begin the chapter in question with a quote

• 1:18:16Speaker 00

  from the anonymous writer of "The Cloud of Unknowing." And I can't now think what it is exactly, but it's by... "By love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never." And so, paradoxically, an awful lot of the history of religions do contain a great deal of thinking. And I'm not against that, actually. I think that as long as the thinking doesn't think it's finally pinning things down, it can be useful. It can help clear away areas where it's not important.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  But what that sacred is, is something... that I think, let's put it this way, that we all, unless we've deliberately tried to, you know, say, "Oh, it's rubbish, or it's nonsense, it doesn't mean anything." We've probably all got some sense of what is meant by the sacred. They may have experiences that seem to them sacred. They may or may not be related to a holy place or to a church, but they may nonetheless have that quality of sacredness. They may be of the natural world. They may be of an encounter with another person. They may be through art, through, particularly for me, music.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  I think there's music that is very beautiful, of course, and very intellectually satisfying. But there is also music that really asks to be called sacred. And...

• 1:19:59Speaker 00

  I wouldn't apply it to other music that I find equally beautiful. I would say it's wonderful. There are songs by Schubert and Schumann which are exceptionally beautiful and moving. I wouldn't call them sacred in the normal sense, but there is a lot of music, particularly welling out of the whole of the 16th century in Europe, that I would call, you know, just quintessentially sacred. When you, a lot of it was set for sacred purposes. But when you hear it, when you encounter it, it raises feelings in you which are not just feelings, nor not just thoughts, but are something that involves your emotional and intellectual being, but also your soul.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  You are called to by something that carries conviction. And indeed, I come from a family that had no religious convictions and I didn't get taken to church or anything like that. But in my teens, I was lucky enough to encounter

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  this, particularly this extraordinary stream of unbelievably moving and beautiful church music and music from other non-European traditions that were sacred.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  And the architecture and the art and the poetry of both poets and many books of the Bible. And I thought, there's something here. You know, I wasn't brought up to this. At the time, I was mainly studying science, but I thought, I know it's not good enough to pass this by. It's calling to me. And I decided I was going to become a monk, actually. I was going to go to Oxford and preferably do philosophy and theology and then probably go into an enclosed order or maybe get ordained and pad the streets of Manchester, I don't know.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  But in any case, this didn't happen. But all my life, these things have been with me, so vivid. And I can't say what it is. I've certainly experienced it in the astonishing beauty of lonely and beautiful landscapes and...

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  You find this in all cultures. There's a fifth-century monk who lived in a desert waste and who describes the beauty of it as speciosus, which means sort of having a charming beauty. So it's a strange thing. I'm not sure I can really do more than say, if people are interested, try reading my best shot at explaining what I'm talking about. You won't be encouraged by my ramblings now, but I have tried to explain what it is and what it isn't. And I thought it was the most important thing that I could give to people. And interestingly, since writing that,

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  I have had many, many, many, many, many, many communications from people. It has been a fantastic gift that they have, writing to me, saying how much my work has meant to them. But in particular, people who say, "I never understood what people meant by a religion or the talk of spirituality, but after reading this, I think I understand." People saying, "I lost my religious faith, but in reading this, I have come back to it."

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Monks and priests, Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, have written to me and said, "What you have said is so important to in our tradition and rings many bells for me." And the most touching thing for me was that the man who was the person who prepared me for confirmation classes, which meant that you were prepared to be confirmed into the church as an adult and receive communion and so forth. And I wasn't too sure about it all, but I was interested enough to go along with it, and I did.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  But anyway, he read, he must, he was being, he died last year and he was 95. And he wrote to me, so therefore in his early 90s. And he said such a moving thing. He said, "You know, what you've been able to say here is what I have struggled all my life to say." I mean, can you imagine what that made me feel? And he sent some wonderful poems, actually, Blakean poems, which, anyway, so I was able to write back and say, gosh, that is very touching and beautiful.

• 1:24:54André Duqum?

  I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what society would look like if

• 1:24:59André Duqum?

  education from young age culturally was more right-brain centric.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  Hmm, hmm.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  Well, in terms of what we can do to

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  help the chances of this civilization surviving,

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  education has got to be one of the key elements in it.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  I think education has

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  got worse during the last forty, fifty years. I haven't been involved in it, except at the level of teaching younger doctors and things like that. So my, my experience of certainly school teaching is from my young days when it was exceptionally good. And I'm going therefore mainly on what I hear reported. But I feel that it's like everything, it's become

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  over-administrated, over-evaluated at all levels, constant checking and ticking and so on.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  And what this tends to encourage is that the idea of an education is putting information into children. It couldn't be further from that. It's about not putting in things at all, certainly not putting in information. I mean, that may happen. I mean, that may be a byproduct of education and it's an important one. Somebody who left school with no information would obviously be in a rather poor way. I understand that, but it can't remotely.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  constitute in itself an education. An education is about drawing something out, not putting something in. It's about drawing out something that is already latent innate in the person that is being educated. And that is

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  done by, as always, a mixture between,

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  or should I say, steering a very important path between two opposite

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  problems. One is a problem of too much structure, too much emphasis on the quote right answer, and too much regulation and not enough independence for the child. But equally avoiding the opposite one in which they just please themselves, anything goes, let it all hang out. Neither of these is a sensible or indeed a decent or compassionate way to treat a living being. One is just abandoning them and the other is destroying them by overregulation. So what I believe should happen

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  is that there should be, first of all, I think that teachers should be more independent from government edicts. And when, when I was growing up, our own school system in England was contrasted, of course, favorably by us, with the system in France, where on the morning of the third of March,

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  nineteen sixty-two, every child in France would be on the same page of the same book. And this was said to be a reflection of the dirigiste character of French culture. Whereas there was much more freedom to what we did. But, so I think having that freedom is, is good and trusting teachers is good. And I would, I would say. Get the best teachers you can. There's no other criterion than how good they seem to be when you interview them and so on. That is why you employ them.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Give them a good deal of leeway and keep an eye on what their pupils are turning out like. And if there's a problem, you should be allowed to sack them without too much trouble. At the moment, once you get to be whatever it is, it's almost impossible to sack you, however bad you are. And I understand that's, you know, protective for the teacher. But it is also stultifying for everybody if you've saddled with somebody who's doing a very bad job and they can't be got rid of. So, I mean, really, that's only a passing note, but what I'm trying to say is, it's probably the necessary safeguard if you're going to give them a great deal of independence.

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  So I would gather a group of teachers who are different from one another, phenomenal, excited by what they were teaching and allow them to go ahead. And yes, you would test them and so on as children and see how they're getting on. And unless there's any particular problem, and that's a really well-running school. But what I understand is that it's all about, no, they must know this particular thing and they must, there are 12 things you must say about Jane Austen, or if Jane Austen's even allowed in the curriculum anymore nowadays. It's all very sad. People are being dragged away from the history of their own culture, without which they

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  can't really understand what they're looking at in the culture around them. There's Neil Postman, who, very late in the day, I'm reading his book, Technopoly, about what's happened to our culture. And really, he's saying things that I've been saying for a very long time, but he did say them before me. Unless we have a grounding in our own culture and its history, and unless we understand the works of literature like Shakespeare and poetry and drama, unless we understand and music becomes part of our education, acting is part of our education.

• 1:31:37Speaker 00

  It's not an education and another part of it should be free thinking. So at my school, I was taught, okay, come on. Tell us what something you really are very important, you think is very important and you're passionate about it. So I would, I would talk about it for five minutes. And then they say, yep, that's fine. Now imagine you're somebody who has exactly the opposite belief. Now argue their point of view for five minutes and we'll, we'll score you on how good you are at that. Now, if more children couldn't leave school without doing that, there'd be less of the simplistic.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  This view is right, that view is wrong, rather than saying that most views can be taken to extremes in which they become wrong. But there is common ground between many sensible, wise thinkers. So we need to get away from, you see, the left hemisphere is black and white in its thinking. It's either this or it's that. It has no time for subtlety, for nuance, for a bit of this and a bit of that, for the coming together of opposites. It thinks, no, it's this. And if so much of this was good, then more and more and more of it would be better. So a right hemisphere educational system would produce people who were, first of all,

• 1:32:59Speaker 00

  yes, capable of doing the so-called STEM subjects, that is important, but they're not in themselves in education. They do need the humanities because guess what? They're going to be human beings, we hope, and live their lives among human beings and the key is in the word. So do a bit of that as well, rather a lot of that. Yes, do creative work. Yes, learn to think flexibly and learn how to mediate between people and listen to them. So, and it wouldn't take very long. It needn't be a big part of education, but it could be a week, you know, in perhaps one of the later years of school, in which you, you will spend time learning how to

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  mediate between two groups of people with completely opposing ideas. If people were chained in that, gosh, that would create a happier society. And the other one that I think of, but isn't familiar to most people unless they've been through it themselves, is really a form of couples' therapy. And it's applicable across the board, not just the couples. So in couples' therapy, there are two people who want to either part on better terms or get their life together back on track. And to do that, they need to understand what the other person wants and sees and hopes for. So you have the two people and you ask one of them to talk about what they conceive as

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  being the main problem that they're facing. And then they'll say something and the other person will say, oh, but that's always when you... And they say, no, no, no, hang on, you'll have your chance in a minute. We want to hear more from this person. And so that person has their say. And then the first thing that happens is you turn to the other person and say, what did you just hear said? And it's incredibly revealing because they say what they thought they heard said. And the other person says, that's fantastic, because I never meant that at all. I meant this. And then the other person goes, oh, well, that's useful to know.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  You know, so much misunderstanding happens because people get into shouting matches in which they never hear anything that doesn't confirm what it is that's already going around in their heads. So that's what I'd say on that one.

• 1:35:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, it seems like if education was truly the way it was, the word was designed aducca, I believe, Greek or Latin origins, to evoke from within, not stuff things down, not just what to think, but...

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  It's Latin, meaning to draw something out or lead something forth, yeah.

• 1:35:46André Duqum?

  So not just what to think, but how to think, when to think, why to think. And it...

• 1:35:56André Duqum?

  It kind of broadens the conversation. So what you mentioned earlier around the four different ways of knowing, there's science and reason, of course, important empirical ways of examining reality, and yet the underutilized faculties of intuition and imagination. And I would just love for you to spend some time, if you will, sharing your thoughts on what these modalities of ways of knowing provide that the others don't, the importance of them. And yeah, the thoughts you have around the importance and power of intuition and imagination.

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  Well, about intuition, I think the first point I'd make is that people like Dan Kahneman, whose work I respect, can develop very clever scenarios, which are set in such a way that you may well make a mistake if you answer them intuitively. And so then people do, and they, and then Kahneman, I'm not using, but you know, people like them, clever cognitive scientists come along and say,

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  ah, but you're mistaken, you see, because, and then you feel a bit of a fool. But the way I look at that is that the reason that you can be caught out is that 99.9% of the time, your intuition is doing a very good job for you. And it is always possible to set up a special set of circumstances so designed to lead you into making the wrong choice. That doesn't show that it's a generally fallacious procedure. And the analogy I use is that of optical illusions. There is one optical illusion that is so staggering that it is impossible to believe when you look at it. The so-called checkerboard illusion, I don't know if you know it,

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  but I include it in my book because it is so amazing. And two squares that look obviously different shades are in fact exactly the same shade.

• 1:38:20Speaker 00

  But I've never known anyone who, after seeing this and having had it pointed out to them that they got it wrong, said, "Oh, well, that does it for me. I'm never going to use my eyes again." Because, of course, almost all the time, your eyes are doing a very, very good job. So I work through whole areas in which our intuitions are good. And they, of course, one thing that happens now, and is entirely understandable, is people worry about prejudice. And I make a distinction between prejudice, which is inevitable, and bias, which is swinging

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  your judgment in an unfair way. So prejudices, there's been a lot of work on prejudices, and you won't like this, but you can go back to the science. Prejudices are extraordinarily robust. Most prejudices are common across peoples around the world and are generally borne out by the data that we have that is objective.

• 1:39:40Speaker 00

  Bias is the use of that information in a way that is damaging and unfair to an individual.

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  And the really good news about that is that it is also one of the most robust findings in social psychology, that faced with, say, a person who belongs to a group against whom you have a prejudice, you are enormously skilled at setting that prejudice aside if the evidence is this person is not like that prejudice would suggest.

• 1:40:23Speaker 00

  So...

• 1:40:25Speaker 00

  That's the deal with a really thorny run, and no doubt people will argue all kinds of ways, but I have treated it as fairly as I can with the information. And it is really a case that while you can't do away with prejudices, people are extraordinarily good on the whole at doing away with them. And whether you're good at or not in disregarding a prejudice when making a decision has nothing to do with your educational level. So scientists and highly educated people

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  are just as biased as less educated people. Their biases just may be different, but they have them. And so the concept of prejudice and bias is an interesting area. For example, nobody who's intelligent can avoid having prejudices. If you were walking down a street at night and you see a gang of loud leather jacketed men swinging bicycle chains and shouting,

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  your prejudice that these people are quite likely to attack you is perfectly correct. And you see them as more dangerous than a group of ballerinas walking down the street. I mean, they might suddenly turn on you, but it's much less likely. So in general, our prejudices are the absolutely inevitable consequence of leading a life and not blindfolding yourself for what you know. It's what you do with that information and whether you use it in bias, in judgment, and so on. And this also is importantly not either a left or right thing. So there are people who are biased on both ends,

• 1:42:33Speaker 00

  who make judgments about people on the basis that they belong to a certain group and they didn't wait to see whether they're actually more reasonable than they would have anticipated or whatever else it is.

• 1:42:48Speaker 00

  So that's not the most important and likeable thing. I just need to deal with it because, of course, everyone will say, but intuitions are subject to prejudice. But one of the things about intuitions is that they are capable of gathering together as many as 12 to 15 strands of thought. And for this reason, there was a jurist, a legal expert, who is the head of one of the German Max Planck Institutes, whose advice to business leaders is to allow their people to use their intuitions as much as possible. And you may or may not know this, but most important steps forward in science and in

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  mathematics were not made by endless scribbling, but by a moment of insight. And I know of about 40 of these and quote many of them in the book. And George Gaylord Simpson, who was the leading light in the establishment of the mainstream way in which science now looks at evolutionary biology, himself said that most scientists don't produce their results as a result of the scientific method. You know, we're taught at school, you do this, you do that, and so on. And a certain amount of that obviously comes into it, and perhaps many years of slogging

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  goes into it. But you don't actually reach your answer that way. You reach your answer through intuition. And if you rule intuition out, you will never be an imaginative, creative, or interesting scientist. That's science and maths, never mind art and poetry and music and so on, where, again, whatever just seems to come to us, not through a conscious level of an effort indeed, stops one from it happening. So one has to stop the effort and allow the thing to speak to you. And again, I have descriptions from poets, from novelists, from composers and so forth.

• 1:44:58Speaker 00

  So intuition is a very fine and a very accurate thing. Accurate, can that possibly be right? Yes, because, take a couple of examples.

• 1:45:14Speaker 00

  Racehorses are all very fast. And when they're racing, they normally are able to win. The winner will win by sometimes a fraction of a second. And I have the accounts of a man who contacted me after reading The Master and His Enmistry and said, you know, I'm a fairly left hemisphere type of guy. I grew up in and was, I think he grew up in France, but he, he worked in America where he got a doctorate in horse equine physiology.

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  And he developed a hundred and twenty point score for how to estimate the, the potential speed of a particular horse. And then he, he went to, to, to France and bred horses and so on. And he now makes his living in England by being a tipster. He goes to the, the course before a great race. And he says, for the, at maximum five minutes, I see the horses being led around the ring or being slowly walked by their, by their jockeys around the ring. Then on the basis of that, I have to make a decision as to which horse is going to ring, win.

• 1:46:36Speaker 00

  And he found that to begin with, his left hemisphere kept getting in the way. So he'd make a judgment and then he'd go, but I've put high odds on that one winning. But why? No, it, it'll be the, the other one. And so he'd put the other one and send that in. And of course, the first horse that he, he shied off, he won. And this happened so often that the people that he was advising, the betting people in the betting office said, for heaven's sake, don't write it down and then change your mind, just put it straight into your phone and send it.

• 1:47:13Speaker 00

  And as long as he just did that, he won most of the time and became one of the most successful, you know, with, with a six figure income out of just this guessing. And he's, but how can I guess this? How can I guess this? That this particular horse can be perhaps a tenth of a second faster than the other one? And another thing he found was that when he went to the racecourse, if he took his son with him, and his son knew a lot about it and was interested in it and wanted to follow his dad, he would explain to his son why it was he made a decision and as soon as he'd done that, it was no good anymore. So eventually, they said to him, please

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  don't take your son. And the other thing he discovered was that if he had a short nap before meeting the horses, he would, he would go along and he'd stay in the car, he'd have a 10-minute nap, he'd then go and do this. As long as he followed this, his instinct, his intuitive sense gave him a huge advantage. And another thing from sports that I examined was, the man who is the physician to the TT races in the Isle of Man wrote to me. Now, the TT races in the Isle of Man is, has been described as the most dangerous sport

• 1:48:32Speaker 00

  in the world, in which the Isle of Man is a rocky island off Britain. And it runs an annual race around the island, not on a racecourse, but on the roads that go up over mountains and so forth. And while they're running these courses, there's no other traffic on the road, so that's it. But there are potholes, there are tight bends, there are all kinds of things you wouldn't encounter on a, on a, on a smooth racecourse. And he looked after these people and he was fascinated, because there's a big place where they would

• 1:49:13Speaker 00

  pass a stand and go down a steep hill, turn to the right, have to do a wiggle around a bend, go over a bridge and so on. And he would say to them, if you're not in exactly the right place as you stand, as you pass the stand at the top of this rise, you won't be able to negotiate the, the bend at the bottom, how do you envisage that? And this guy said, oh, when I'm at the stand at the top, I'm not bothering about the bend at the bottom, I'm thinking of what is half a mile away, which is this going over a bridge. And if I actually were thinking about the bend, I'd come off. So there's some, and he has many stories about them.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  How their attention is extraordinarily vivid to the whole field. So that he can, he can detect somebody in a field to the side lighting up a cigarette. He can smell it. He can take in the whole scene, but his eyes are completely unfocused. He said, when you watch these people, it's like they're just staring into the middle distance, but they're doing stuff at the, at the immediate level, which is life threatening. And indeed, they have to take a certain bend that has a stone wall in it so tight that their leathers brush the stone, otherwise they won't be able to carry on. All this is going on and it's all done entirely intuitively. And when you stop to think about it, you, you mess up and you can multiply this across as many sports as you like.

• 1:50:42Speaker 00

  But of course, to me, it's not just, I mean, that gives massive interest, but it's just that intuition is a great gift that we have and we need to pay attention to it. And I have this quote from Einstein, that the rational mind is a precious servant and the intuitive mind is a precious gift. We have, we live in a world which acknowledges the servant, but has forgotten the gift.

• 1:51:12Speaker 00

  So that's about a few thoughts on, on, on intuition. Imagination is a wholly different matter. Imagination is the capacity to see connections, to see forms and shapes that are not obvious. And as I say, to see into, what Wordsworth used to call seeing into the light of things, by which he meant this ability I described earlier of being able to see something through and beyond, whatever he was, not neglecting what he was seeing, but actually seeing it more real than it ever was. And by doing that, seeing what it really intimated to him of a realm beyond.

• 1:51:54Speaker 00

  As a child, he was constantly aware of this, if you like, transcendental.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  Sense of the world. He describes himself as a seven year old or a ten year old as as completely enraptured, bewitched by the waterfalls, by clambering on the rocks, by the woods and forests and the sound of the cataract and all these things. As an adult, he sort of recognizes them. He knows they're there. He sort of can see they're beautiful in the left hemisphere, example of, but he can no longer get back to feeling that, whatever it was that he sensed as a child. And what's really amusing to me about that one is that, you know, obviously who I mean

• 1:52:44Speaker 00

  by Richard Dawkins, and he has this view that children have no sense of the transcendental or of the spiritual or of the divine, and that they wouldn't have any time with this absolute nonsense if it wasn't indoctrinated into them by their families and their early schooling. And this has been researched, and what actually it seems is that preschool children naturally think in such terms. They hear things and see things that other people don't hear and see, and their parents tell them, "Don't tell lies. You can't really hear things. You

• 1:53:28Speaker 00

  can't really see things." And they're discouraged when they get to school for talking in spiritualized terms because they learn that it's not smart to do so, that really by the time you're in seven or eight, you really ought to be talking in mechanistic terms about everything. So what Dawkins believes is happening is the precise opposite of what actually happens. And this is important too, when you come to think of people, some peoples of indigenous origins and indigenous tribes that I have met, who are capable of hearing things, knowing

• 1:54:09Speaker 00

  things, seeing things at a distance, and even being able to see things in the future. And, you know, who are we to say that they can't? And when they say they can hear the voices of the elders advising them things, how do I know that they're not?

• 1:54:27André Duqum?

  What does that make you think of the nature of consciousness then? Because

• 1:54:31Speaker 00

  The limits of consciousness.

• 1:54:33André Duqum?

  The nature of consciousness.

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  Nature of consciousness.

• 1:54:35André Duqum?

  Because there are, yeah, like you said, innumerable examples across cultures all around the globe that have access to information that they in sort have no business in knowing or having access to. And you could look at the Dogon tribe that has maps of the Sirius stars and proper proportions to so many different examples. And I'm just curious your thoughts on a larger scale of the possibility of consciousness being more fundamental than emergent and information being communicated and not just the top down sense.

• 1:55:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:55:17Speaker 00

  Information's a word we should come back to, but anyway.

• 1:55:22Speaker 00

  Let's dive into the consciousness question instead, but I would like to come back to information.

• 1:55:29André Duqum?

  We can do it, I promise.

• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. So

• 1:55:38Speaker 00

  the relationship between the brain and consciousness can only be of one of three kinds logically. Either the brain can secrete consciousness or emit consciousness in the way that the kidney produces urine.

• 1:55:54Speaker 00

  Or it can transmit consciousness in the way that a radio receiver transmits a program from somewhere else. Doesn't generate it, but it passes it on. Or it can, and this is my favorite relation, it can permit it. By which I mean it's closer to transmit, but it's not really transmitting something. It by its

• 1:56:18Speaker 00

  By its permission or negation, it is allowing something to come into being. So it is like a sculpting element. It is like a valve that constricts, restrains, and alters the course of what passes through it. So we can either image, for which there is no evidence at all, there has never been the slightest explanation of how that could happen, unless consciousness is already in matter to some extent, in which case, that is not the question. I agree that there is matter and consciousness are also always together. So the only possibilities are those, and I suggest that what it is, is that it permits consciousness.

• 1:57:03Speaker 00

  And what I mean by that is that, and the best I can come up with is, the way in which water flows, and water lands on a landscape entirely at random, and it then drains across the landscape, and it flows down certain channels. And those channels reliably end up getting the water, and they flow reliably eventually into the sea. And

• 1:57:41Speaker 00

  the banks of the river that form the channels, the undulations in the landscape, certainly don't make the water. The water comes to them. They don't exactly make the river. They are part of the river for the time that they're constraining its banks. So the river couldn't exist without those banks, but the river couldn't exist without the water that came to it. Now, that's really my simple idea, simplified idea, about the relationship between the brain and consciousness, that consciousness as a whole...

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  Is pre-existent to my consciousness. It comes into being for me as my consciousness because of my particular brain constraining the consciousness that is everywhere in certain ways, and it becomes my consciousness. Now, if by an accident, or a disease, or something, the landscape of my brain changes, and these channels, as it were, become disrupted, then of course, my consciousness will become disrupted in ways that are relatively predictable. So, that is it. And I think that matter is the more difficult one than consciousness.

• 1:59:08Speaker 00

  Unbelievably, there are, I believe, professors still holding down chairs at respectable universities, who claim that there can be no consciousness, or consciousness doesn't exist, and that it is, quote, "an illusion." Dan Dennett was one of the people who said this before he himself became an illusion. But the problem is that, you know, if it's an illusion, it's got to be an illusion in consciousness and something. You can't have just an illusion without a consciousness. It's utterly incoherent, but never mind, let's pass over all that.

• 1:59:45André Duqum?

  Consciousness being the one thing that is self-evident.

• 1:59:48Speaker 00

  It is one thing that is absolutely undeniable and self-evident. And so, there it is. And what is matter? Well, nobody has ever seen matter. All we've ever seen is things manifesting themselves in our consciousness that we call "material." We fix the term "material" to them. And what do we mean by that? We mean that they have certain qualities, which I think can be pretty much summed up as persistence and resistance. So, you know, something that is immaterial, it can disappear from my mind, it can come back again a year later, but it has no persistence.

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  And an immaterial thing also brings no resistance to that. A thought, again, I can go with it, or leave it, or whatever. I can put my hand through it, but I can't put my hand through the table. So... And those two things, permanence and resistance, turn out to be incredibly important for creation. For something to create, it has to have a degree of continuity of existence, otherwise there is nothing being created, except random comings and goings of nothing. And resistance enables it to come into being. If there weren't resistance, there could be no permanence, and there could be no thing

• 2:01:15Speaker 00

  separate from the unity, globular nature of the all. For there to be the many as well as the all, and it seems to me that that is the one thing we can say fairly clearly about the story of the cosmos, is that it started from this relatively undifferentiated mass, and then has become differentiated in unimaginably rich ways, complexified, made beautiful, and that is the evolving of the many. And in doing so, it is not disrupting the wholeness of the whole. We had this earlier when we talked about a flower, that when the flower unfolds, it

• 2:01:57Speaker 00

  hasn't, as it were, disrupted the flower, it has fulfilled the potential of the flower, it still remains the flower, and can close in again and open again, and so forth. And this is what, this coming together and coming apart, is the intrinsic nature of the cosmos. So matter presents us with material that is persistent and resistant, and all matter partakes of consciousness in that particular way. Now, I believe that you shouldn't separate matter and consciousness, but instead talk

• 2:02:38Speaker 00

  about them as phases of the same underlying entity. So there is never a need to say, well, how can we bring these two things together? Unless, even if they both existed from time immemorial, how can we nonetheless reconcile them? I say they can be easily reconciled because matter is just another phase of consciousness. And I'm not using phase in the sense of a temporal phase, but in the phase of a physical sense that physicists and chemists talk about the different phases. And the obvious one to refer to here is water.

• 2:03:20Speaker 00

  If you think of water, you tend to think of something that is translucent and flows easily and can run over your hand and can support you and so on. That's fine. But water can also present as something that is opaque, rigid, immovable unless a great force pushes it. And it's so solid it can split your head open. In other words, ice. And it can also present, and is present, in this room as literally tons of water you cannot see in the form of water vapor. Now, which of these is water? Well, we're inclined to say the liquid stream.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  But in fact, they are all water. They're just different ways in which water manifests. My view is that matter is a phase of consciousness in that same sense.

• 2:04:17André Duqum?

  That very much so actually aligns with the eastern yogic sciences and what they say and how they delineate the different forms of density

• 2:04:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:04:29André Duqum?

  that consciousness would take shape in. As we as human beings have different layers of self that you could say have different, take different shapes and different forms of density.

• 2:04:44André Duqum?

  So, okay, then, do you want to come to, it's the information now?

• 2:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, the reason we have to come to information is because, well, first of all, you used it there. And secondly, you talked about knowledge.

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  And especially when we're talking about education, it seems to me rather crucial to talk about information, knowledge and understanding as different things.

• 2:05:18André Duqum?

  Would you say understanding is consilient with wisdom? Now, information, knowledge, wisdom?

• 2:05:25Speaker 00

  I say wisdom is something yet again, but I'd be happy to include it as another.

• 2:05:31André Duqum?

  A fourth?

• 2:05:32Speaker 00

  A fourth. I think one should. And I think wisdom is a more spiritually rich state. And I think it's a gift that comes only out of a great deal of understanding and a great deal of knowledge of the experiential kind. So what is it, information? Well, it is effectively data. I mean, originally, there is the idea of a form, which is fascinating, because in physics a long time ago, certainly at least 115 years ago,

• 2:06:16Speaker 00

  and in biology in the last perhaps 15 years only, people are beginning to see that you cannot talk about, well, in biology, you cannot talk about processes without invoking fields that enable certain forms to be followed. Because there isn't enough information in the genome, now that we've decoded it, that could possibly direct four-dimensional formal processes. In fact, there's so little information in the genome that it's been described as one of the most inert, rather than being this Dawkins-like tyrant

• 2:06:58Speaker 00

  that directs us, the lumbering robots, almost nothing is directed by the genome. It's kind of like a larder to which the cell can go when it needs certain ingredients. But often the ingredients aren't there and therefore have to be found another way. So.

• 2:07:17Speaker 00

  Form fields are very interesting, but information has come to mean lists of facts and, in other words, points of data. And these are things that, on their own, mean nothing. And this, again, in Technopoly, Neil Postman's book, it's now 25 years old or more even, perhaps 35, he was saying, "The problem nowadays is that people have lost all the things that gave meaning to life, which were the connections, historical, social,

• 2:08:01Speaker 00

  and so on, which enabled them to read what certain things meant." But if you take people away from their history, and by the way, one of the ways of really destroying a culture, if you are an oppressor, a tyrant, who takes over and wants to destroy a culture, is to destroy their history, take them away from their history. This is happening now in Western Europe, at any rate, I can't speak for America, but it is. And another way is to fragment their values and say there are no sources of value, which used to be partly the knowledge that was passed down in families and by churches and by other bodies.

• 2:08:45Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not saying that anybody here is infallible, but without certain guides that are pretty reliable as to how people got to know something, we are at a loss. And information makes things not only no better, but worse. So his theory is, and I think it's pretty much a revelation, is that we started from a position where we thought more information obviously was good, because it helped us understand more and to banish superstitions. And then with the printing press, there became more and more information that was disseminated much faster, and that seemed to be good for a while. And then along came much faster transmissions of information using...

• 2:09:29Speaker 00

  Photography, telegraphy, and so on. And that now we have a situation in which there is so much information that it is disinformation for almost everybody. Nobody knows, well, he doesn't say this, but by now we can clearly see nobody knows what to trust in the way of information. Because information itself can't answer the question whether it is, has a meaning, even if it's trustworthy, even if it is true that whatever information comes to me, that a certain thing is, you know, for the most intents and purposes, that is a true fact. Information itself, no amount of it, not more of it, can help me understand the meaning of that information. So where does the meaning come from?

• 2:10:14Speaker 00

  The meaning comes from the network in which that information is embedded. And I don't just mean a lot of other facts. I mean, other things that come to us intuitively, imaginatively, and through a lifetime of being able to think reasonably and carefully. And I say reasonably rather than just rationally, because there are certain things that are totally irrational, the conclusions that you can reach that are totally irrational through mere rationality. I make a distinction between rationality, which can often lead you astray, and reason, which doesn't lead you astray. Reason is what a wise judge would have after a lifetime

• 2:10:57Speaker 00

  of dealing with people, thinking about things, and absorbing information from experience. So reason and these other things will nurture one into, along with a culture and along with the connections between different areas of knowledge, will help one.

• 2:11:21Speaker 00

  Realize the information as meaning. Now, the next thing is knowing, and knowing has two very importantly different meanings, which, again, I say again, because other languages have differences between rationalizing and reason, but we know, I use those. But knowing, as you know, in most languages, there are two words for this. So in French, for example, there's savoir and know a fact. I know that France is the capital, Paris is the capital of France. But there is also connaître, meaning I know Paris, because I spent a couple of years living there.

• 2:12:04Speaker 00

  And that's a much more diffuse, rich, round. And so if I say, I know Paris. Oh, you know it, then, well, what is it? No, I can't tell you that in a few sentences, but I can certainly tell you it's the capital of France. That's just savoir. And there's the same difference in German, kennen and wissen. So kennen is the knowledge by experience, wissen is knowing the facts. And I don't speak Spanish, but there probably is a Spanish and so forth.

• 2:12:31André Duqum?

  Sanskrit, vidya, and yan are two ways in describing knowledge that is, could be transmissible through a book versus the gnosis of the experience of the knowing.

• 2:12:42Speaker 00

  That's very important. And that probably is an even deeper one, actually, because there are kinds of knowing that can be known through a book, but would be more of the connaître kind after you've read the book. So I think that's an even subtler distinction. And I gave a talk once where I was told that Swedish has three words for knowing. I can't remember what the third one entailed. But anyway, the point I'm making is that there are different ways in which you can know, and one of them is relatively superficial, and a computer could easily take it on board, because it's more dependent on facts. And the other is dependent only on experience, the experience of an embodied being who is capable of emotion,

• 2:13:27Speaker 00

  capable of suffering, capable of love, capable of acknowledging the briefness of life and so on, which helps you understand what being in Paris for a while means in its business-free nature. And neither of those is the same as understanding.

• 2:13:48Speaker 00

  First of all, why is it called "understanding"? And there's a kind of meaning of "under", that's gone out of English, but it's preserved in German. So, German has the word "unter", and it can of course mean "below", but it can also mean "among", "unter Freunden", when one is among friends, one can say. So, "unterstanding", is being able to stand amidst and among a whole array of things. And it's not a simple business of knowing in any sense. It's something about, "Ah, I see this gestalt",

• 2:14:32Speaker 00

  this whole thing that makes sense. And that understanding gets richer from more experience, from more knowledge, from more everything. And is in a way the goal of a life well-lived, if it is to understand the really important things, which I would say are the true, the good and the beautiful. And wisdom is to see the way of negotiating one's ability to bring those things into being in a life, to do them with love, to do them with compassion, to do them with humility, but to respond to those ultimate values of goodness, truth and beauty,

• 2:15:17Speaker 00

  all of which I've seen in my lifetime trashed and degraded, you know?

• 2:15:23André Duqum?

  So wisdom being the integration and synthesis perhaps of those other modes of knowing?

• 2:15:31Speaker 00

  Yes. And whereas I think understanding might be more...

• 2:15:40Speaker 00

  Something you might expect in somebody and what is your understanding? And they could explain and then there may be bits of it that you might think, oh, unusual. But I think wisdom can be completely bouleversant, as the French say, can be completely turn things topsy-turvy. So I think Zen is an example of this, where part of his wisdom might be, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. And you think, really? Is that wise?

• 2:16:19Speaker 00

  So I think in order to get to wisdom, you sometimes have to take a position which shocks or inverts in order to release another level of understanding in which true wisdom can. Because I think wisdom will often be the case, like Neuss' bores, where, you know, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. Yes.

• 2:16:51André Duqum?

  I'm curious what your thoughts are on the words know thyself, to know thyself, and what the extent of the self is. I know we've been exploring around a lot of different aspects of consciousness, value, meaning, attention, what it means to be human. What is the self in your eyes?

• 2:17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:22Speaker 00

  I'll just mention before I forget it that I read an article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies called Selving and Union. And the word selving, becoming a self, I take from Gerard Manley Hopkins, from one of his poems.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  And in it, I was really being asked to consider, so what is the self that, for example, in many religious traditions, you are advised to rid yourself or free yourself of?

• 2:17:57Speaker 00

  And I think there are, again, different ways of understanding the self. Not surprisingly, for everything, there will be differences, at least, between the way the left and the right hemisphere think of the self. And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the left hemisphere's self is something like Jung's idea of the ego.

• 2:18:25Speaker 00

  And his idea of the ego was something that was very valuable in the early stages of the development of any human being, because it enabled that being to have a coherent self. When a child is newly born, it is not aware that it is, in any sense, separate from the mother. And for several months, it may not have any understanding of itself as a separate being. The mother and one of few, and the children, the child is... The mother and the child are fused. Then, as things progress, the child suddenly realizes

• 2:19:08Speaker 00

  that there are differences between the mother and the child, and include differences in desires, difference in expressed wishes. And they have to learn how to know that they are themselves and not just, as it were, swallowed up in the mother, but also that by being separate from the mother, they're not abandoned by the mother, that in fact, there can now be a still richer union that comes from the fact that there are two.

• 2:19:37Speaker 00

  And those phases, you know, are the starts of the idea that one consolidates in toddlerhood and in childhood, to an extent, that you are separate from other people. But he also emphasizes that there is a self that grows,

• 2:20:01Speaker 00

  not so much when one's very young, but begins to grow as one attains some sort of maturity, as a self that is constituted by the presence of others.

• 2:20:18Speaker 00

  Much as indeed that very first ego was constituted by the presence of the mother, that oneselfhood is also constituted by the net of people to whom you belong, who are your family, your people, your kin, and that you owe something to them, and that indeed you put yourself eventually second to the flourishing of those that you love. And that is the development of a pure or more mature self.

• 2:20:55Speaker 00

  When the Buddha was hungry, it wasn't somebody else that was hungry, it was the Buddha that was hungry, and he knew he was hungry. And when the Buddha died, it was the Buddha that died. It wasn't somebody else that died. There was a self, there was a Buddha, but the Buddha's selfhood had become so extended, if you like, that it was something like Indra's net. It was ramified across all that exists, is perhaps one way of putting at it. Most of us won't achieve that, but if we achieve a kind of self that is other-centered,

• 2:21:37Speaker 00

  then I think that is not a bad aim, because from a psychiatrist's point of view, people who have no sound self of themselves are very damaged and unhappy people who cause a great deal of grief to themselves and to others. Two principal examples of people who don't have a secure sense of self are people with schizophrenia and people with

• 2:22:08Speaker 00

  multiple personality disorder, borderline personality disorder.

• 2:22:15Speaker 00

  And who who tend to act impulsively, extremely damagingly because they don't really have a secure sense of who they are. So a lot of psychiatric work for such people is enabling them to get a secure sense of who they are. And in the case of schizophrenia, obviously, there's much else that has to be dealt with in the cognitive and emotional realm. But but so that's my thought on the self. But what were you saying before that?

• 2:22:55Speaker 00

  What was the other part of your question?

• 2:22:58André Duqum?

  I mean, the sense of self, what the self is, the extent of self. I'm also happy to share just I'm taken back to the beginning of this conversation when you said that we start in ignorance, we come to knowing and then make our way to unknowing again. And when it comes to the sense of self, the necessary individuation process that one must go through to have a secure sense of self, otherwise the many different derails and schizos from that from that point are made are made possible. Going from the healthy integration and individuation

• 2:23:41André Duqum?

  process of an ego and a sense of a separate self, to then putting that that experience of that small self, if you will, and the content of our experience in a larger context of awareness, where our sense of self extends beyond the temporal meat suit of our of our body, is a journey that I'm obviously very interested in, and since you are as well. And so, yeah, I'm just curious about your your thought process on the extension of the self.

• 2:24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, well.

• 2:24:16Speaker 00

  I mean, there's some sense in which, parallel to the idea of knowing, uh, sorry, of ignorance, knowing and unknowing, there is a sort of the ego, the self, and then a sort of dissipation of that sense of the self, at least as the ground of everything that one does. I, I, I don't know of it, because I haven't attained to that. Um, but one reads the accounts of people who, who, who perhaps do experience that. It's very difficult to say, because you see, the thing is, we come now to the nature of love.

• 2:25:02Speaker 00

  And to love somebody, there have to be two selves. Those selves, heaven forbid, should be isolated egos. But they also need to be reaching out to one another. And to reach out to another is to have a base from which to do so, to build a bridge. A bridge cannot have only one stand, it needs to have two. And, and a relationship, a good relationship, and love seems to me the archetype of a relationship.

• 2:25:40Speaker 00

  And in most spiritual traditions, as I know of, the ground of being, however conceived, is a fount of, of love.

• 2:25:54Speaker 00

  Twoness, as well as oneness, comes into it. And even perhaps threeness, of course, because the love that's created is something that is not purely dependent on the two that are there. So you get a movement that Hegel would have been familiar with, that a thing and its opposite form a relationship in which neither are nulls the opposite element in the other. They hold the two in tension, and out of that tension comes for something new. Here again, I would think of Heraclitus's image of the bow that has to be pulled in

• 2:26:36Speaker 00

  two directions, not just one. It has to be pulled apart, which sounds like a waste of effort, but actually, that is what allows the bow to have the power to send forth an arrow. It's that which allows the strings of the lyre the power to produce a note. Without that tension between the two, there wouldn't be the third thing, the music. Now, in a way, two people can be thought of as the two opposites that are tied together, and they're pulling apart, but they're also holding together in order that the music can come. Perhaps also the arrow can come. And arrows can be the arrows of Cupid, and

• 2:27:19Speaker 00

  they can be the arrows of other things too. But such is the nature of human relation. And so I would see it like that. And I've really been interested very much in thinking about the Trinity, which is odd, because when I started off being interested in religion, I thought, well, there's a lot of wonderful ideas in Christianity. Some of the things you're asked to believe are frankly highly improbable, if not impossible. And I'm hoping to get by not having to sign up to them. As I've gone on in my very simple way pursuing

• 2:28:04Speaker 00

  these things, I think I can understand the meaning of some things that seem to me improbable or paradoxical or whatever. And one of them is the Trinity.

• 2:28:19Speaker 00

  There was some light shone on it for me by a Franciscan monk, who I met while I was at school. I was not in a religious foundation at school. And he said, "Well, think of it like this: it's like a book. What is the book? Is the book whatever it was in the mind of the one who wrote the book? Or is it the result of that which is this object here on the table in front of me that I can open and read? Or is it what happens when I read it and it goes into me and becomes part of me?"

• 2:29:02Speaker 00

  I thought that was quite good as a way of dealing with the idea of something which exists in different realms of matter and consciousness. But in a way, all three of them partake of one another. And in looking further at the trinity, I discovered that the trinity is, and probably you know this very well, an ancient idea. It is pre-Christian. And the Christian faith took it up in this special way of thinking about the relationship between different parts of something that is never divided into parts.

• 2:29:47Speaker 00

  It is one whole, and yet it is also tripartite. And when you get to this level, you are dealing with that kind of paradox. But that paradox doesn't destroy anything for me. I think both parts of it need to be there.

• 2:30:09Speaker 00

  I love a story, perhaps we need to end fairly soon, but I love a story which I must tell you, of a Russian bishop.

• 2:30:22Speaker 00

  Who went, he had a number of monasteries and hermitages and so on in his, I don't know, diocese or whatever, under his oversight. And he heard that there was a small group of three very holy men who lived on a rock somewhere. And that they hadn't been visited for 30 years or something. They thought, well, I must go and visit them and see whether they're all right and see what it is they're doing and thinking and so on. So he arrived there and they were duly impressed to be met by the bishop.

• 2:31:02Speaker 00

  And the bishop said to them, so what do you do? And they said, well, we work and we pray. What do you pray? And they said, three of us, three of us, have mercy on us. Which means, there are three of you, there are three of us, have mercy on us. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you must pray like this. And he taught them the Lord's Prayer and no doubt the creed and various other things.

• 2:31:41Speaker 00

  And then, feeling that he'd set things right, the bishop felt it was time to leave. And so he said his farewells and pushed off the boat and were sailing away. And then, in the boat, the crew were amazed to see the monks running towards them across the water. And they ran towards the boat and they were calling out and they were calling out. And the bishop said, what happened? And they said, we forgot the prayers.

• 2:32:21Speaker 00

  I think he's beautiful.

• 2:32:25André Duqum?

  I, both that story and what you were mentioning to beforehand about this within the realm of duality and the Trinity.

• 2:32:39André Duqum?

  It makes me, one, personally grateful for the contrast of experience that is always available to us. So not just seeking out the joyful, beautiful moments, but embracing the

• 2:32:54Speaker 00

  Very much.

• 2:32:55André Duqum?

  The antithesis to that, and very much so what you mentioned with Hegel's dialectic, with the synthesis of two seeming opposites or opponents. It makes me think, and again, through the Vedic lens, like the one becomes two for the joy of becoming one again.

• 2:33:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:33:14André Duqum?

  Like the illusion of separation allows the experience of one another.

• 2:33:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:33:19André Duqum?

  And through that, there is the joyful rejoicing and the experience and the contrast. And so it, to me, brings in gratitude and grace into the picture of what seems like just opposition and suffering. And I think that's really important.

• 2:33:39Speaker 00

  It so much is, and thank you for mentioning that because I think there's a sense in which

• 2:33:49Speaker 00

  a life in which there was no suffering would be one without meaning. And William Blake thought that even in heaven, there must be suffering. Because if so, if there were no suffering, there could not be joy.

• 2:34:07Speaker 00

  The two, as it were, need one another like the two poles of a magnet. And I thought, well, that's an interesting idea. And of course, he was very sound on the coming together of opposites of innocence and experience and so on.

• 2:34:23Speaker 00

  Good and evil and all the rest, but.

• 2:34:28Speaker 00

  I came back to an insight of Viktor Frankl's. And for those of you, your listeners, who may not know, Viktor Frankl was a very important psychotherapist, who himself was a psychotherapist and philosopher, who was, as well as his family, interned by the Nazis. And his family were killed. He himself survived. And goodness knows what he experienced and suffered is beyond imagination.

• 2:35:08Speaker 00

  And when he was asked what gave meaning to life, he said three things. One is the feeling of being together with others, sharing life with others, sharing one's meals with others, sharing one's love with others, sharing one's worship with others. The second was feeling that you had managed to do something in your life that made you feel had been worthy, that you had done something worthy and fulfilling. And the third was to have suffered.

• 2:35:52Speaker 00

  I thought that was extraordinary, coming from him especially. And he said that without suffering, there is really no meaning, no understanding. I think one of the things that's happened in my lifetime is that we have lived in a very, very peaceful period. I was born in the 1950s. And, you know...

• 2:36:21Speaker 00

  Touching wood. I have so far, anyway, lived in a world in which my life has not been narrowly touched by war.

• 2:36:34Speaker 00

  I do not know what is coming. It may be something terrible. But we've had a very peaceful time. And on the whole, we've become somewhat lazy. So we thought, oh, bad things don't happen very much. We don't need to guard ourselves against them and we can just enjoy ourselves. And to begin with, this was rather nice, but it's ended in a sense of a kind of pointless hedonism. Well, you know, you can get pleasure from doing that, but so what's the point in that? The so-called hedonic treadmill, that you need to do something more enjoyable, but you don't get even the enjoyment. And it's such a demeaning idea that we're here just to have fun. And Wittgenstein himself said, "I've no idea why we're here,

• 2:37:17Speaker 00

  but I'm pretty certain it's not to just to have fun."

• 2:37:24Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I think that is, you know,

• 2:37:30Speaker 00

  suffering can just make people very bitter. It's very, it's true, and I've seen that. But most people that I like and I value have, have really suffered. They've been through some pretty devastating things that may have brought them near to death.

• 2:37:50Speaker 00

  And I, I think that is right, and I'm sure it helped him be a better psychiatrist.

• 2:38:01Speaker 00

  In my own smaller way, I, I have experienced such things that pretty much have killed me. And I hope they've made me a better psychiatrist and better able actually to enjoy life and feel the meaning of it, having not been completely destroyed by it, you know, which is the, the other thing. But that's right, you see, that you can't have the one in a way without the other. You can't have just the North Pole without the South Pole. And seeing that, living with it, acknowledging it, brings you to a position where you can say in the title of one of Viktor Frankl's books, which I very much recommend, by the way, "Saying yes to life in spite of everything."

• 2:38:46Speaker 00

  And I like that, both for saying yes to life, but also in spite of everything. Not because it's so marvelous, but because actually a lot of it is not marvelous. Yeah.

• 2:39:00André Duqum?

  Yeah, that's great. And it, it just makes me feel so, so much gratitude and resonant for your work, which is of course much larger than the exploring of the two hemispheres, but larger like cosmologically on the human developmental journey, this experience of life, the union of two opposing forces at large.

• 2:39:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:39:24André Duqum?

  Both on the emotional scale, on the psychological scale, on, on all scales.

• 2:39:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:39:30André Duqum?

  And, and that's what I see so much of your work is doing is bringing into unicity seemingly separate areas.

• 2:39:38Speaker 00

  Thank you for that, and I'm glad you feel that. I think I recognize that also as part of, part of the aim of what I've done with my life, actually, is to draw things together that are not often brought together in order to illuminate one another.

• 2:39:55André Duqum?

  If you had a last message,

• 2:39:59André Duqum?

  which I know is a big ask,

• 2:40:02André Duqum?

  for humanity,

• 2:40:05André Duqum?

  what would that message be?

• 2:40:08Speaker 00

  Ooh. Well, apart from saying yes to life in spite of everything, I think I was trumped there already by Frankel.

• 2:40:22Speaker 00

  I think it would be

• 2:40:26Speaker 00

  never to despair. I call myself a hopeful pessimist. In other words, I see things going wrong all around me, but I remain hopeful. And that's partly because I believe we don't know a tenth of what's actually happening, partly because I think human beings are a wonderful, um, a wonderful species. We've focused all the time on the things we've done wrong, and there have been many of them. But we should be more grateful for and aware of, not in a vain way,

• 2:41:07Speaker 00

  but in a humble way for what we can achieve at our best, which is extraordinary and is attested to by so many historical examples. And that gives one, gives one hope. So don't despair. And don't say, "It's all so much bigger than anything I can do." I often hear, you know, "Everything seems to be going wrong, but what can I do? The world is such a huge place and I'm so small. And this world is so tiny in respect of the cosmos, yet why does it even matter?" I think that is the left hemisphere speaking.

• 2:41:50Speaker 00

  Because what the left hemisphere is saying is, things are important because of their size, measurement, what we want is more, more, quantity, not quality. And so stop thinking in terms of quantity. Quality can be important in a very small quantity. How big, for example, are the things that are completely immeasurable? How big is my love for the person in my life I love more than anything? I may say, "My love is bigger than the heavens, it's deeper than the seas," or whatever. The left hemisphere says, "Okay, how, how deep is that?" And so, "No, that's not what I mean." It's like, "Oh, what does this person mean to you?"

• 2:42:35Speaker 00

  "No, I can't explain what you mean." This is the left hemisphere doing its kind of, "Let's get it all charted and measured, and then I'll say whether it's worth doing." No, there are things you can do on a big level. You can join Greenpeace and you can join, um, organizations that hope to help people in indigenous tribes carry on their way of life and so forth. And that's fine and good. They may or may not be successful. At an intermediary level, you can start modeling things like

• 2:43:10Speaker 00

  small groups of people who do aim to live together, preferably without being embroiled in technology, living their lives close to the ground, making and eating their food together. No doubt, one hopes having some kind of spiritual life that they can share together, and modeling something that may help us if things collapse, and I do think they may well collapse. And if they do, the most helpful thing will be to have small centers of people, rather like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, that kept going despite everything. But the third and last is, there is an area which sounds so small that it can't be worth anything,

• 2:43:52Speaker 00

  but it is worth everything, which is in you. What is in you is so big that the left hemisphere can't even measure it. And what is the only bit that you're asked to take responsibility for? You're not asked to solve all the problems of the world. Nobody is. That's completely ridiculous. So let that one go. Instead, make sure you've at least dealt with your own self. And that can start tonight. It can start now. It doesn't have to be something that's labored on for years. And it really is the most important thing you'll ever do, because you've been given you to look after,

• 2:44:35Speaker 00

  you to grow, as John Keats said. Amazing man, died at 26. In the letter to his brother, "This world is a veil of soul making." Your soul is not something that's sort of given to you. "Oh, okay, that's nice. I've got one of those. That's my eternal life, is it?" But no, the soul is something you encounter in you and you grow in you, or you fail to grow in you. And that matters enormously to you and for you, and you matter enormously. But it is also part of the saving of the world.

• 2:45:12André Duqum?

  Thank you so much. I will take home so much of what you said, which isn't hard because we're in my home. And it happened to your first live. I'm honored to share a space and conversation with you today. So much of what we talked about is what makes me come most alive in life. And I just appreciate the awareness of complexity, attention to nuance, and the depth of understanding you bring to all these different, seemingly disparate topics that come together to inform and unite a greater understanding of the whole. And so I just really appreciate you. Thank you for your time.

• 2:45:53Speaker 00

  You're a very kind man, Andre. And thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk. I really enjoyed it.

• 2:46:00André Duqum?

  Thank you so much. We'll leave links down in the description where people can find you, your work, your writings. Is there any other last words you have where people can find you or anything?

• 2:46:10Speaker 00

  I mean, the best place to go is probably channelmcgilchrist.com, which is fairly straightforward as long as you spell McGilchrist right. But even if you don't, Google will probably find me.

• 2:46:22André Duqum?

  You'll find it. You'll find him.

• 2:46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:46:25André Duqum?

  Amazing. Thank you so much.

• 2:46:26Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 2:46:27André Duqum?

  Okay.