Beauty, Value & Purpose | Iain McGilchrist with Maitreyabandhu

really really lovely to have you here at the london buddhist center really really lovely well thank you mate really lovely so i had this ex experience reading uh the matter with things and um the strange experience i don't know whether anyone's said this to you before but i had this weird sense that i wanted to memorize it all which given the length is difficult i i ended up underlining so many passages i felt like asking for a pre-underlined edition um you know and then then i had this system which you know i underlined and i squiggly underline for it yet more important than brackets at the side with a star with more important still i got up to a three star system it was becoming absurd you've got your own marginalian i've added my own marginalia so an impossible question but i thought we'd start if if you were to underline the crucial sections and you had your own three-star system what and you know absurd though it is after you know i know you've spent 10 years writing the matter with things what what would be some of the things that you would you would want to draw out straight away well one of the reasons i wrote the book is that i feel that we no longer understand who we as human beings are or what the world is and how we relate to one another and what i wanted to do is to not just say some new things that could be fitted into an old perspective but to shift perspective um and to to re-imagine uh what a human being is and how we know what we know so that's why it's rather long book i think the some of the main messages is hard to say really because as i say it's to do with the how rather than the what it's to do with adopting a different disposition towards the world in which certain things uh become more obvious and other things recede and that's really the the process that i hope for from the reader but i would certainly want to change a lot of the things that we we think such as that the only way we can understand something is by taking it apart um that we we are best to be completely detached a strange frame of mind which involves mental gymnastics of its own uh in one's relationship to the world whereas in fact as many philosophers have pointed out that's a very strange way to approach the world and that in fact one only understands what it is if one approaches it in a spirit of of openness really and welcome rather than the kind of um denial or distancing it's it's never about one pole or the other we don't want to collapse into subjectivity but we don't want to collapse into objectivity either one of the things that i think is so important very very important is that everything is in relation in fact relations i argue are primary to the things that are related which may be an odd concept for many people in the west now um but it's not uh it's not actually something that is contrary to the findings of modern physics and there are a number of physicists who have made the very same point that relations are prior to relative the things that are related but the point of that is that our understanding of everything and indeed what it is comes about through an encounter and the problem with either idealism in which as it were only what we make it to be or the opposite a sort of realism that is a naive realism which is alien from our minds is that each of these prevents and encounter and it's in that encounter of something real in here and something real with which it is continuous but which is not just contained in here that our experience comes about and i believe that attention is a moral act because the way in which we dispose our attention changes what the world is for us and it changes what we are as well we become more conditioned by that way of attending to a certain way of thinking of ourselves in the world and i think at the moment we desperately need some redress from the way in which we're constantly taught to think and in that i i found that i found that what was extraordinary to me was that approaching the question of what can we know and what can we trust about the universe as a whole i bring to bear neuroscience some knowledge of physics and philosophy and that each of these powers leads to a truth which would be very familiar to you that is not in any way in conflict with the ancient wisdom traditions all around the world who who anticipated and felt and saw and understood far more than we give them credit for um they didn't have clever machines for looking inside people's heads but they perhaps for that very reason saw more than we do so that's a that's a way of introducing what i'm saying you know what at one point you even say that there's i think you say no people that ever lived have understood so little yes i think that's right we know a lot or think we do um we know the kind of knowledge that we respect but we don't seem to understand and for me part of the the interest here is that i believe that i i can't give a complete account of the hemisphere hypothesis but but that the two hemispheres do different jobs in the sense of helping us to continue living and the left hemisphere helps us to manipulate the world to get stuff to catch things to pick them up to use them to eat them or whatever it might be but the right hemisphere is the one that sees the broad context has a kind of continuous vigilant awareness of the world and it's out of this that our understanding of the world emerges and one of the mistakes we make is that we think because we can make something happen we understand what we're dealing with but we don't and in that it's like the story of the masters the sources apprentice uh which you probably know uh it um for people as ancient as i am it was it was something i discovered through going to fantasia when i was about 10 years um a disney film of the old days but it's a it comes from a poem of gertis and probably represents a much more ancient perception that a sorcerer is able to produce certain things and make things happen and his apprentice watches this and thinks i think i can do this and he hears something his master says and the master goes out and says while i'm out i would like you to clean the workshop and he thinks i don't want to do all of that i can make the brooms and the buckets do their own work because i've seen him do it i know what he says so he says it the unfortunate thing is he hasn't a clue what is set in motion and he has no way of stopping it and it's only the re-arrival of the the sorcerer that enables um a cataclysmic disaster to be averted i think that in many ways that's a parallel with where we're at we have we have superficial knowledge of certain things that if we intervene in the world in certain ways certain things in the short run and in a very circumscribed area of the short run can be predicted up to a point but actually what we're dealing with is the deep thing and that i think we completely fail to understand yes indeed so i want to see if we can explore a little bit of the hemisphere hypothesis because that's going to underline both of our discussions because it seems you know the ma the master of chemistry and the matter with things for me they they seem like one great idea in in the best sense and and you can tell it is because it has such explanatory power so in the master and his emissary you explore the hemisphere hypothesis and you then you show how it works out in culture all the way up to post-modern culture and in the matter with things that you apply well you you then turn that to philosophy itself to to the great questions i wonder whether you can sort of help us sort of see that art from this hypothesis to because i think you you've added to philosophy in in a way that i think will be a major hopefully a major step forward in philosophy by giving us a sense of what is likely to be at least more right or at least less wrong yes perhaps there's a nice way of putting it you know well that's that's the very way i put this ambition because the idea that there is a big truth that we are going to arrive at is wrong but of course it doesn't dispense with the concept of things being truer than others if there weren't we couldn't say anything or do anything that had any meaning so it's an essential question and it's been much problematized in the modern era in such a way to suggest that there is no truth which i think is a thoroughly pernicious idea one thing that might help understand the hemisphere hypothesis is that it is although when i explain it it comes in a sort of serial form that the reason there may be continuity between these books is that there are continuities in the way i have looked at the world since i was a teenager so for the last 50 years and so there have been constant threads with me i mean from my teens i thought that the idea that there was only matter and that there weren't anything that couldn't be measured and wasn't material was not real i didn't think that was at all probable it didn't square with my experience in the least nor did i think that the sum of the parts was the same as the whole from which they'd been dissected and so on so there were many themes there which i explored in my earlier life and then i trained in medicine as you know 10 years later than other people in order to have a handle on what philosophers call the mind body problem and in doing that um eventually to cut a very long story short um i i came across the work of a colleague john cutting which had been about hemisphere differences and uh the the parallels between that and the philosophical position i'd put forward in my first book against criticism which i wrote in my 20s were extraordinary for me um and i thought there's something very important here and all my colleagues begged me not to explore this because because they said nobody will take you seriously because everybody says this is just pop psychology and it was all exploded 30 years ago and so on and my answer to that is yes what was popularly said in popular culture 30 years ago was mainly wrong but that doesn't mean that the problem goes away why why is the brain this organ which depends entirely on the connections it can make why is it divided right down the middle why are the two parts asymmetrical and why is the main track that joins the hemispheres inhibitory in much of its work it's saying you keep out of this i'm dealing with it and again to cut the long story short i believe that we need two kinds of attention to be paid to the world i've alluded to this we need a kind of focal attention to a decel in order to grasp it to apprehend it which really means to hold on to it and we need a quite different um open sustained vigilance to understand things to comprehend it which means to hold it together and that this produces two kinds of reality for us because attention as i say changes the world and to cut a very long story short again um what what one finds is that the left hemisphere and this is not just true in humans it's true in many animals that we've looked at and indeed in another side this asymmetry of the neural network goes back seven hundred million years it's not something very recent the most ancient creature we know nematocelovic tense is a kind of sea anemone which has the most primitive neural network it's already asymmetrical this arrangement results in two kinds of vision of the world or takes on the world one is one in which there are pieces bits that are precise but disconnected atomistic static because they've been frozen so they can be grasped filleted out of the flow of experience and inanimate disembodied taken entirely out of their context and inanimate lifeless the right hemisphere however seeing the whole sees that everything ultimately is connected to everything else certainly initially to the context in which it stands and to wider and wider context that it is never the same thing for a moment to moment but it's constantly changing but that doesn't mean to say that everything is just mutability uh going back to heraclitus the early greek philosopher who was in my view the greatest philosopher that ever lived and who said that everything flows uh he says by changing it remains the same i imagine there might be parallels there in buddhism so it sees this thing as a flowing animate hole which in which much is implicit and must remain implicit because if it's taken out and put into the glare of the spotlight of the left hemisphere suddenly lost all its meaning like explaining a joke it falls flat interpreting a poem into everyday prose ruins it and taking a religious ritual and re-paraphrasing it in newspaper language destroys it and all the deep things we know all the love that we have for people the love we have for music for art for poetry whatever it defies this desire to make it limited and explicit and simple and single so there we are that's now why is that important well first of all i think it's important to know that we we have within us these two ways of looking at the world and that in itself can help free us up to pay attention to another way of looking at things which might be the beginning of cultivating a better balance in this take but the key thing for me you see some people might say why waste a third of the book talking about the brain because frankly what i'm interested in is all the stuff you talk about later matter consciousness space time values the sacred why don't we just get to that um and i don't really care what it's going on in my brain and i'm deeply sympathetic to that because i'm not a reductionist i'm not trying to say it just is what the brain is doing but it's still very necessary to know what is speaking to you which bit of the whole picture you're getting and what in the first part of the book i do is to take all the what i call the portals to understanding not not the paths we follow but just the bits where we get any knowledge of the world through paying attention to it to perceiving it to making judgments about what it is to um using our emotional and social intelligence to understand it or a cognitive intelligence and our creativity to enter into it and understand what it is i look at all those and show that in every case the left hemisphere is deceptive the right hemisphere is more theoretical in other words a better guide to reality and we know that because when you follow what the left hemisphere says you run into serious problems you are in fact deluded and it's a very dangerous state to be in which is why it's very dangerous for our society to be in one in that state if we can see the imprint uh sorry i ought to balance that just by saying there is one thing that the right hemisphere is much better at sorry the left hand this is much better than the right hemisphere and that is as i say getting hold of stuff manipulating it and for that we honor it but we've forgotten to honour the rest that does the whole picture if we can see that certain ideas or certain conceptions have on them the imprint the characteristic style that would come from our left hemisphere dictating what we see then we know that we need to be wary of this vision and we're more likely to be guided towards truth by the right hemisphere congruent vision and that means that for example in philosophy there are paradoxes and then one of the chapters chapter 16 i think i i look at a lot of certain something like that logical paradoxes and we know that sometimes the paradox depends on one of the outcomes being true and one being false but we can't see why the false one is false so xenos paradoxes achilles and the tortoises the sort has challenged his achilles to a race and says you can never overtake me in fact you can't ever catch up with me and achilles says yes well all right but being a generous sort of character he gives the tortoise a very good start the tortoise knows he can never catch up because first of all he's got to get to where the tortoise starts but by the time he gets there the tortoise has moved on so now his job is to get to the next place the daughters is at but by the time he gets there the daughters have moved as you can see this is an infant series and so philosophers have puzzled about why this is clearly not right because we know in reality achilles will overtake the tortoise in two strides and the answer is that that vision of dividing things up into slices instead of understanding the way something flows as a whole leads you to misunderstand the world yeah and that that seems what you know there's so many crucial things as i said so many things are underlying but two things i want to draw out from that is how you see the world changes the world that seems to me to be a something that we all need to really understand much more deeply yes that the way you see the world creates the world or co-creates the world co-creates the world yes it's better and um that you know you from your experience as a psychiatrist you you can sort of almost diagnose in a way some up to a point which hemisphere is speaking like i was struck by your story of a patient you looked after with a right hemisphere stroke who wouldn't who wouldn't see that she had polarities on one side and but was worried about i didn't tell that story it might sort of eliminate that well yes i mean it's just one instance of many and anyone here who's medically trained will probably have seen this after a right hemisphere stroke it may be that the left arm or maybe the whole of the left side of the body is paralyzed and you can go and see this patient and the left hemisphere is always very optimistic i mean unrealistically so and you say is everything uh how are you doing they say well everything's fine and you say well can you move your your left arm for me and they say there and nothing moves and if you bring it round in front of them and say now it moves out they say oh that's not my arm that belongs to the man in the next bed or it belongs to my mother or whatever it might be um completely delusional stuff and and this is interesting to me because it obviously demonstrates that the left hemisphere left hemisphere on its own misconstrues reality but also that it's completely unrealistically optimistic has a very high opinion of itself compared with the right hemisphere and that's not just a form of words we can knock out one hemisphere at a time and ask the hemisphere about itself about the person as it were describing their qualities and doing a personality inventory and we can give the same thing to the person's friends and relatives and in the case of the left hemisphere it turns out that the left hemisphere gives a very very um uh pleasing account of itself has a very high opinion of itself compared with what other people think whereas the right hemisphere tends to be a little bit on the downside and tends to be over modest um but but there we are yes so one of the things that you're showing in this book is and that has a massive impact on philosophy on what we think we know because we can start to you know if history you've got all these different views and well there we go they're they're they're different and don't know which one to follow but your thinking starts to lead us into these thoughts are more likely to be more truthful um through that hemisphere hypothesis that's right but the hemisphere hypothesis only shapes things at the beginning it's not a sort of infallible answer to anything because i then move on to talk about the different powers we take to knowledge and i i take those to be science and reason intuition and imagination and what i basically show is that in each case including science and reason the greatest part of the work that produces the important results the great findings that change the paradigm comes from the right hemisphere not from the left so the everyday plodding work of following up following a formula the left hemisphere is very good at but actually understanding what's going on and suddenly seeing my god the world is not like this in a way that physicists had to do in the last century that comes from the use of the right hemisphere which is much better it's in a holistic intuitive understanding of a gestalt and that's just a word we don't have in english but it means something which is greater than what it becomes when decomposed into parts so that that's that's the the way the thing leads but this has enormous importance for all the things that i guess that we care about like the the meaning and the value and the purpose of our existence and whether or not these things have validity in themselves what they speak of and whether or not we should pay attention to the idea of there being something sacred or divine and i know that in the second half we will talk about i will so i want to there's there's so much i'd like to talk to you about but you know time and so on but i i i wonder whether we could just plunge into chapter 25 and you know you know you'll need to read the whole book to get the background um but i wonder whether we because what here's i wrote down this for the you that you said you say i see value as intrinsic to the universe and the possibility of appreciating and responding to value therefore fulfilling its potential as one of the reasons for the cosmos having evolved at all so i for me i that that sort of my hair stood on end you know that here you hear you saying that um values are in truth beauty goodness you also had purpose are foundational in some way i i thought that was such an important thought because i've even met buddhists who think of buddhism as something that gives meaning to life as if yes that there's such a deep assumption with so many of us not in a very conscious way and not in a very thought out in fact absolutely not a thought-out way that we live in a meaningless universe governed by random things it's really just material and that we've got this sort of brain that's working we don't know how but doesn't matter because it's going to turn out when we die um and some people come to buddhism thinking well wouldn't it be great because then buddhism can sort of add some meaning to that you know sort of buddhism being misread as a kind of yes the kind of answer to the problem of secular humanism just pop a little bit of buddhist thought into it and you sort of give a nice feel to it um so i wonder whether you can try and say something about yes this question of value being foundational to even cosmic consciousness not my consciousness even yes yes um i think there are two two elements to the quotation you made for me one is the one you've been referring to which is that i believe that um values meaning and purpose are not invented by us but discovered by us and to discover means literally to unveil uncover something that is there so we don't make it the left hemisphere only understands things that it has made it is the one that uses tools machines and then everything is a mechanism but in fact what we what we're experiencing is a world that's much bigger and greater than anything that comes into that particular under that particular rubric or in understandable in that paradigm and the second thing uh that i was hinting at there is that if one can talk about a drive in the cosmos and i think it's almost perverse not to one sees the cosmos as incredibly complicated and beautiful complex i should say rather than complicated and beautiful and lawful and constantly producing new things out of itself individuating out of its oneness out of its wholeness without in that in any way impairing its wholeness or its integrity the individual beings or individual aspects of being that come forth so that was the idea that was in there and don't forget that i'm suddenly it's actually 12 to 26 i think we no no no we've just skipped we just skipped it's a matter of no no we've just skipped a few thousand no a thousand pages [Laughter] so so i i do argue towards these positions they're not just um deposited on on the audience so to be um but i'm not alone in in thinking like this thomas nagle uh says uh who's i think a very great uh american philosopher now in his 80s he says that um he doesn't think that there is value because there is life but there is life because there is value and it takes life this is my belief and i didn't know naked had said this until i come to this conclusion myself that what life adds to the cosmos is principally responsiveness so i think the cosmos is i argue that the only terrible position is that consciousness is an ontological primitive it is in other words something at the origin of the universe and is somehow implicit in everything that exists the the the the idea of these values is also something which which belongs in that that realm and that in order to unpack or unveil or fulfill or nourish the further growth the co-creation of things that have these values of truth goodness and beauty there needs to be this unfolding process that allows something that is responsive to respond so i think the universe whatever it is is a conscious being which is can be thought of as a as a and white had thought of it as the god whatever that is and the world coming into being eternally together and in that process discovering what is in there like the idea of the emptiness described in in buddhism it's not just a blank in the way that we westerners think of it but is a fertility it is a like a womb that is ready to bring forth something it is a space in which something can happen and come into being and there's a heck of a lot i could say about that and i'd love to say about that but but essentially what i think that life brings is this increase in responsiveness because i think the inanimate universe responds but very very very slowly to what we call physical forces and so on but with life this process is speeded up and intensified billionfold and so yes that seems to me part of the importance of that's what i was trying to get at in that sentence i mean one of the things that excites me so much is is that you're willing to use words like life um you know not i don't know not things not because what how i understand your understanding of values is that values are ending themselves yes and that they then especially not to do with utility thank you for pointing out i need to say something about that because it you people may have heard me talk about purpose and be rather worried about that but one of the things i want to say is that there are two kinds of purpose there's the kind that the left hemisphere understands which is the purposing of a tool or a machine to fulfill your will and that once it's fulfilled your will that's its job done and there is another kind of purpose which belongs to all the things that we like it and love it it belongs to to games it belongs to our relationships to our experience of of spirituality and of art which is that they're not purpose less in the point in the point of view the left hemisphere has that you might as well not bother with them because they have no purpose but they are supremely purposeful because they contain within them something which calls to us and makes us move towards it and beyond so not in some designed way by an engineering god which is you know this is a terrible idea that the left hemisphere is dreamt up it sort of deifies itself as the organizer and mechanic of everything and it says god is like that but what i understand by god is nothing like that and therefore when i talk about purpose and talk about these values as being values in themselves ends in themselves i'm i'm suggesting that we need to re-imagine what we mean by those values and by that purpose i mean you use this wonderful metaphor of the the first kind of purpose is like a photocopier yes you know you you possibly on and you get something and that's that's it's sheet of paper really good yes and people think when you talk about purpose you mean it in that literal sense yes but then you talk about you know mozart string quintet does it have a per what does purpose mean in that way well it would be a huge mistake to say that it um made you you know relaxed classic fm i mean what a terrible thing to do to music i mean most of great music yes it can make you relax but i hope it does a hell of a lot more to you than that and sometimes it can deeply disturb yet in a very powerful important and beneficial way to help you move on and see something else so and it's like you know if you meditate because it makes you a better stockbroker or something then you've misunderstood what meditation is because strictly speaking it should not be for a purpose at all because it's purpose lies within itself can we get into more about what we mean by the purpose lies within it yes yes you know you use this lovely the the metaphor of the like the string quartet or the the symphony has its purpose been finished at the end you know there's something you're very very deep there i think what does purpose like that lies within it which is lying in the heart of the universal it's very difficult thing to talk about because our language is so vitiated by the preconceptions that we have about what purpose could mean and indeed what love means and above all what god means i'm wary of wordifying about it but what i think i i imagine we all intuit is that there are many activities that are in themselves supremely fulfilling just by doing them and that they don't have to achieve another end because if entered into fully they already give us what is in them to give and in great art and in great spiritual traditions that is literally endless it is bottomless so this a philosophical james cass distinguishes between what he calls finite games and infinite games finite games like a game of squash where one person wins and the game ends an infinite game is something that essentially can go on as long as one is able to continue it and is continually nourishing fulfilling and directing in in its process and one of the things i have to say is that i almost called this book there are no things that was its working title at one stage but i realized that that might align me with um what i believe is a very destructive aspect of post-modernism and some aspects of it have been liberating but some are destructive and i don't want to suggest that it's all made up in our minds but in any case the point is that i think things suggest separateness stasis and what we're trying to get at is processes and flow and continuity and this is the core of reality and it's interesting because to try to what one of the things i always mentioned to you we just had supper together and how beautifully the book is written it is very very beautifully written but but um because you need a certain kind of atmosphere to talk about these things and i wonder whether i i find that sometimes even talking to people about their meditation or about a work of art or their even their experience of a film you know that awful experience when you watch a film when someone just natters off yeah other times you wait don't you and then you find ways of talking it's got a particular atmosphere yes is that what we get partly a way of explaining not explaining but perhaps imagining what we mean by a left hand is there a right hemisphere take on it yes you do sometimes people have missed the point and if you said what is the point you'd have to say you're stumped aren't you yes you are and this points to the importance of negation the importance of undoing and unknowing which i'm sure i will talk about a bit more um which is a core element i think in buddhist thinking and what what that is is not mindlessness in the negative sense but trying to avoid the closing down of things all the time by what's called monkey mind which is effectively the left hemisphere saying i understand that it's one of those i've got it in a pigeon hole next please and i can talk about this yes it's like this and so no stop that and that's where mindfulness meditation comes in uh as an introduction [Music] for modern westerners to this otherwise paradoxical idea that the value comes not in what you're doing all the time or thinking or knowing but in actually reversing those processes so there's room for that to be something that you you're driving out by all your constant i know this i understand this you know one of the worst things about our culture is it's it's arrogance it's it's it's know it all you know we've got it all sus basically and yeah maybe 10 more years of experimentation and then we'll we'll know we'll we'll know it all we'll understand it all but really those who understand what it is that science unfolds see that it just unfolds further fantastic visions that themselves need to be accounted for and that the more you know the less you know that you know i mean i wanted to talk to you a lot about truth beauty and goodness but time moves on i just wanted to just let's talk about um just one of the things i i wanted to sort of mm-hmm let's focus on beauty i think um something is very very important to me and i think foundational really like you say i mean some of what you said reminded me of something that marilyn robinson said she's a great novelist but she's also a very wonderful theologian um a calvinist notion she said that beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality which i thought was very very suggestive and reminded me of your own explorations of beauty in this i don't know where that rings about with you the beauty is a conversation between humankind and reality well as you know i believe that everything is a conversation it's an encounter it's this co-creating process between whatever we are and whatever is not us although nothing is finally not us and you know it's this balance i need to constantly stressing between distinction which is not the same as division and union that we need both union and we need this individuation and that actually the business of the cosmos is holding these two processes together and our left hemisphere goes what do you mean you can't have them both they must be one or the other but it's not that um in terms of beauty i think it's something intrinsically extremely valuable for most of us and we imagine that it's superficial that it's a luxury that only people who have already got material well-being can care about beauty and that actually it's you can take it or leave it because the real business of life has nothing to do with it i strongly resist such an idea and [Music] i remember hearing an episode of the history of the world and 100 objects in which neil mcgregor was talking about a very early acts and he was ancient you know thousands of years ago and he was saying that it seems that from the word go people wanted not just utility but they wanted something to be beautiful and they wanted it to be complex which is really interesting because the two defining elements of the cosmos stimuli are its beauty and its complexity and they're confirmed by everything we know about it and so and incidentally another line on this is is that um a sociologist who was involved in setting up a school in a very poor area in mexico when when she asked the the parents you know what they wanted from this school the very near the top if not the top of the list was that it should be beautiful and these are very poor people it's not a luxury and in fact i think it's arguable that ugliness only started to come into the world into our creations of the world around 1850 and then up to that point just about everything had a kind of beauty because we understood harmony we understood proportion and we understood that it's in these relations everything is relational and the ratio of space the beauty of proportion and so on is intrinsic to the business of beauty so if anything um ugliness came with self-satisfaction and the fulfillment of our needs and beauty has been rejected and in the master in his chemistry i say beauty is a bit like a um a a power that used to be that has been airbrushed out of the photograph because it's no longer persona gratis we don't talk about beauty anymore the one word is power everything that we talk about listen to the news everything is calibrated by power there are no other values as i mentioned and yet there is a whole hierarchy of values and i here i think of shayla max shayla an early 20th century phenomenological philosopher who heidiger thought was the most interesting and powerful philosopher of his time and who uh brought into the philosophy of somebody like heidegger uh things that heidike himself didn't talk about to do with value to do with love to do his beauty to do with these things and in the pyramid of values that shayla describes at the base there is utility but above that they come what he called lebensvata which are the sort of things like generosity magnanimity courage and their opposites and then above that geistikovata which means either intellectual or spiritual values because in german geistic means both and these are truth beauty and goodness and things like that and at the top does heiliger which is the holy now it seems to me that the dialogue of our time has been from science and from pop philosophy to try and explain these to the left hemisphere inexplicable things like why would you be generous i mean why would you forego your own needs for somebody else why would you waste time on truth if something that's of total falsehood would serve better why would you bother being good why would you care about beauty so what happens is the account is that the concept of the holy was invented by a priesthood who just wanted power over the people that truth goodness and beauty are things that help hold the society together but the poor fools can't see through them to the fact that they're really just to do with control and conformity and so when you go down to the power and ultimately everything is to do with what shayla thought was at the rock bottom the least valuable which is pure and simple utility that's the story we've been told and it's so wrong it's also very wrong by the way wrong in not just in my opinion but in what we know about evolution that is all about competition competition is a very important part of the picture but it's only one part of the picture a very important other part of the picture and actually probably even more important part of the picture is cooperation the history of the evolution is very largely about evolving through cooperation and of course that involves competition as there are between friends or there are those in a family and so on there are both these qualities and together they produce collaboration which is the working together to produce something important so i have got on to that moment [Laughter] there's so much to say isn't it there's so much you're saying that i mean you do need to read the book but well not all but and let's just i really better start to close this down but you you in your epilogue you talk about three things you talk about and let's i thought it'd be lovely to have a bridge here and promised john of archer not to talk about the divine because he gets very cross um a lovely guy don't get me wrong he you know you you you're saying look the three main things are contract with the natural world uh that's why we started with words worthwhile is very very important to you you come back to wordsworth and hearing that again you hear words with absolute love of the natural world and this is feeling for it not just his thoughts about it but you know um then you talk about a cohesive community and how absolutely crucial that is to well-being and how much study there's been about that and then you say that there's a sense of the the sense of the divine can you just say a little bit about that before we jump to our team no absolutely well you're right to to uh to mention those three things um incidentally um wordsworth was also very important to a.n whitehead who's one of the philosophers who whom i most greatly admire and he used to read the prelude almost every day um [Music] and by the way that poem uh was very important in my life i had a kind of spiritual epiphany after hearing it read by my supervisor in oxford she said i'll read this to you in because something about the movement of it and i almost said to him look we've been talking for two hours we're supposed to have a one-hour supervision it's nearly dinner time please don't bother and i'm so glad i didn't because i she read it and although i had memorized this poem from my teens or at least the part of it i thought i'd never heard this poem before and it it spoke to me on so many levels anyway if you want you can find on the internet me reading um the tintern abbey owed nature what we now know is that the effects of being surrounded by nature or immersed in a natural setting are profound um they're not just spiritual or well not just but they are simply things like um reducing your blood pressure reducing your risk of cardiac mortality um changing your cognition so that it's more effective reducing anger violent feelings stress and opening the mind again from this cramp in which it gets pushed by modern life so that that we know is immeasurably important to spiritual well-being intellectual well-being emotional well-being and physical well-being i also mentioned at the end of the master in his emissary there was this research that showed that communities in america where immigrants had kept together and kept going the rights rituals and relations of the way of life they came from had despite um what we would think of as bad habits like smoking and sitting around eating rather good food for too long they had lower rates of mortality from the normal causes than than the native american population and this was to do with those effects of social cohesiveness and the third element which i didn't know about until about three years ago and i thought i'd better look into this but there is a vast body of information there and a lot of it's presented in the book that there are colossal differences i mean really vast differences in measurable well-being for people who have a spiritual orientation in life and particularly actually belong to a religious community that worships together but i think we don't need to get hung up on that but the idea is that partly that's the social cohesion that's but partly and partly also that sharing values with people in in in a sort of embodied way actually enriches them and makes us feel more connected but this spirituality has enormous effects on stress on um mental health on um and physical health it in fact these effects are stronger than going to the gym four times a week and giving up smoking so you know you think i'm making this stuff up but it's there chapter and verse and when i say things that are not commonly believed i have to give chapter and verse because i'm saying things that most people are not saying so there are 5 600 references in my book and and independence and i think they're a bit of a nuisance but i have to give them simply because if i was saying what everyone else is saying nobody would challenge me and they'll never be oh yeah yeah but people have a vested interest in challenging what i'm saying but believe me well i think there's an argument there and i think there's a journey there to use rather corny image which i would like to take you on in reading the book which is through you know how do we understand the world how does our brain affect that what is the balance of powers that we need to bring to bear on the world intuition and imagination as well as science and reason not in conflict with them by the way but reaching the same conclusions actually this is a fantastic thing and you know what can we make of the world of the universe of the cosmos what is it made of and i think it's made of stuff that inspires ore and inspires humility and instills in us a sense of compassion for what exists and if we could get there we might just save ourselves and the world from destruction it's a great place to finish thank you

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 7,028

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Id: e2BWdQsGXCs

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022