Connecting to place and nature - Iain McGilchrist and Helena Norberg-Hodge

big welcome to you ian to join us for world localization day i'm so grateful that you've been able to take the time and i treasure our friendship and your wisdom in supporting this this movement towards localization and i would love you to talk about your you know your research that had you know that has made it pretty clear to you that we need to localize instead of continuing to globalize yeah phil thank you very much helena and i'm you know very grateful to be included in the work that you do because you've been laying the ground for so many things for decades and so it's a very great honor and pleasure to be able to join you on this i have all my life really since my teens been aware that was something quite wrong with the way in which we we looked at the world as a mechanism as something to be exploited as something that was essentially inanimate and there for us to use and use up and over time to cut a very long story short uh i started off in the humanities and um was interested really in in philosophy and it's overlapped with with um with the literature and then i trained in medicine and we got very interested in the brain and i began to understand that one of the reasons that we seem to be thinking wrongly about the world is that we've got locked into a certain model which is typical of a way of thinking of one hemisphere of our brain and we seem to be ignoring what the other hemisphere can tell us there's a misconception that i'm saying that somehow um either individuals can work only on one hemisphere or or the other of course we're using both all the time all people are using both nor is it the case that over time something has drastically happened to our brains so that somehow they they're no longer functioning properly the analogy i would make is is rather of somebody who um has a radio set and to begin with they explore and listen to a range of channels but after a while they find themselves tuned in to only one channel and that is really the way we are now we're tuned in if you like to one channel that our brain will offer us and tuning out what uh i can fairly confidently say is the far far more insightful wiser and far more complex parts of our understanding instead we've locked onto an enormously simplistic linear model which is based on manipulation because again to to abbreviate it very very drastically um one thing one could say about the difference between the hemispheres is the left hemisphere is the one that helps us manipulate and so it's really only interested in how to get hold of things and use them and seize the world as an array of of items of things that can be used whereas the right hemisphere sees a much more complex picture in which we see ourselves always as connected ultimately to everything else not somehow in here and it fall out there for us to get but we are part of nature we emerge from nature we return to nature i don't want to just talk endlessly about what what my work um implies for the sort of things that interest you and me but there are at least two things that are very important one as i say is the sense that we are a process and that nature is a process and that we and nature are one and we are all connected and all part of something which doesn't mean we're not differentiated there tends to be a um a binary way in which people think you know people say all is one you know it sounds terribly profound and i say yes and all is many you know and now what and we mustn't we mustn't um lose either aspect of this as i would say dipole between differentiation which is all about what is local what is personal what is individual but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that that is never over against it's not a war it's a kind of enriched community or communion that we have with other parts of of nature i just want to say it reminds me very much of this 4th century buddhist scholar nagajuna you know who talked about the fact that if you believe that everything is one is language-wise you're stupid as a cow and if you believe that everything is separate and individual you're stupid as a cow so that is the complex teaching of buddhism is the stance of interdependence and and that that both are true simultaneously and this yes so so i think uh however i think as you say many people who picked up some of that wisdom from the east about the oneness and interdependence of life or from indigenous cultures they often then tend to turn it into a rather simplistic approach and often what i think of a sort of spiritual materialism now everything is spirit and oneness and it also becomes you know an emphasis on creating our own reality through our thoughts only and forgetting about structures and action as also being fundamentally important one has to i find um try to get over the idea that either the world simply exists out there unconnected to us on the one hand or the idea that somehow we make it all up these are not the only alternatives of course and we are both partaking in the creation of what is and yet there is something very definitely far bigger than than we are with which we take part in that process so uh one of the themes of the book that i've just really finished writing is that we need the union of division and union we don't want division only or union only nor do we want either division or union we need both division and union and once you see that division is actually embraced by union union cannot be debris embraced by division they're not equal symmetrical partners and as incidentally neither are the hemispheres the right hemisphere understands the need of what the left does which is much more detail-focused but because the left hemisphere is narrower or more detail-focused in its view it can't see the importance of the big picture so they're not symmetrical and neither are division and union but we need both critically um so yes i mean one of my favorite sayings of nagarjuna is neither say that it is nor that it is not nor that it both is and is not nor that it neither is nor is not but but um what i was going to say is a long time ago really in my twenties um a colleague of mine who all souls in oxford brought me needham um saw that i was very interested in um other other cultures and their ways of thinking about the world and he was an anthropologist and he lent me a copy of a book by reichat called navajo religion and i found it absolutely fascinating to look at the cosmology of a different people very detailed interesting rich one which had many resonances for me and so since then i have i've discovered an enormous amount about um both native american and canadian cultures and of other non-western cultures not just the very great ones of china and then you believe in the smaller ones of um hunter-gatherer people so that these are very fascinating to me and it seems that there's a double whammy in the way the world is going at the moment which is is almost too painful to think about it is absolutely devastating that in destroying nature we are also destroying ancient wisdoms which are inherent in cultures that can never be reinvented once they've gone you can't artificially make them any more than once you've uprooted a plant you can sort of say okay well i wish i hadn't done that it's gone and these are people from whom we could have learned and who are being destroyed and driven out of their places even as we speak in fact one of the worrying things about this covid crisis is that it gives the perfect cover for people to do things to nature unobserved um that really would cause an outcry and i'm very concerned about that including trawling the sea bed to find minerals for electric cars and mobile phones and and so forth um and and of course the the terrible business and the amazon of destroying the rainforest and driving out and deliberately trying to exterminate um people who have lived in harmony with nature for well thousands of years uh and from whom we could have learned something i learned more about this of course when i did the film or took part in the film tawai with um bruce perry yes and of course as you know my experience in ladakh in this ancient culture completely you know supports everything you're saying and i do i still hope that people would be willing to learn from the records i mean for instance what i have to offer in ancient futures but also if we look back we find so much wealth of material and reports of people often who came in as christian missionaries convinced that they were going to bring a superior world view that they learned to speak the language fluently and they ended up great admirers of the culture and even albert howard who went to india to teach them how to farm came away saying well actually this traditional small scale adapted localized agriculture has far more to teach britain than britain can teach them so there are very valuable records that hopefully we can still learn from in this sort of last minute of trying to rescue life because of course as you were saying once these cultures are gone we're also losing with it biodiversity so the knowledge about specific plants and adapted animal species and so on is disappearing as we speak you know so we are we are talking now as i see it after this pandemic this the fundamental fork in the road is are we going to go along with a continuation of that newtonian mechanistic world view when the majority of people on this planet have demonstrated that they are waking up to the remarkable wealth of indigenous culture they're waking up to a great sensitivity for the animals that are suffering in this factory farming there's a very significant cultural turning that's been going on within the western world in particular but what we don't recognize is that the fundamentals of a globalizing economic system is not only following this newtonian mechanistic model but it's doing it clad in sheepskin you know it's a wolf in this sheepskin where the language is systems and emergence and uh you know beautiful language but the actual practice is a more stupid more simplistic more mechanistic more ruthless world view and tactics than ever before don't you agree yes i do indeed um what is worrying is that as you say um it's heartening that there are lots of people who see this but it's very disheartening that people with power who are the enormous corporations and the governments that are hand in glove with one another are busy destroying what you and i think is so important one thing is we don't know what's around the corner that's one thing and the other is we don't know what the effects of individual actions are we do need to act globally and systemically to counter these things because you and me and the next person on their own are not enough but that doesn't let us off the hook none of us can possibly lead our lives however much we have the money to buy everything pure and organic and eat only things that appear we're still implicit in a system that ratifies into everything in the world now we can't be squeaky clean so it's not about that it's about how do we minimize the bad and how do we maximize the good that is realistic and each of us is not let off the hook of trying to solve that problem and it's always going to be a more or less matter and i think i think yeah the point i'm going to make is that is that we we don't know enough to predict the future precisely and so it's premature to despair even though i believe that it it is almost impossible now to prevent some sort of a catastrophe it's a question of preparing for it both spiritually and as far as we can practically well there of course that's where localization comes in and where we feel that we need to move away from this focus on what can i do as an individual but as far as possible try to connect at the community level at the local level with some like-minded people start thinking what can we do now it's out of that we thinking at the local human scale level that we've been able to pioneer and help to launch a lot of local food initiatives and they are such a fundamental lifeboat they're such a fundamental safety net and lifeboat but also they are the fundaments of a shift in the right direction so they're the building stones of a better world so it's a it's something that's got to happen in the long run and when it happens right now and quite rapidly we see these remarkable effects of the restoration of biodiversity on the land this is this structural link between shorter distances and a market pressure towards diversification the farmer's market you know three hours from your farm doesn't want tons of straight carrots can't even use them and it doesn't ask for every carrot to fit the machinery and took the harvesting and for the supermarket shell on the contrary the buyers in that farmer's market actually welcome not only different sizes and shapes but even a little blemish to show that you haven't sprayed everything to smithereens so you have this remarkable and really fundamentally important benefit from these localized instructors and you know when we we encourage people to to start linking up to this community path that is being being born and implemented all around the world but also to speak out you know this is what i mean by big picture activism where please start articulating let your voice be heard for fundamentally a shift towards community towards the earth which is a voice for smaller scale slower pace deeper genuine interdependence with others and with everything that lives so with this combination of taking action at the community level and speaking out as loudly as you can that's what we're trying to do on world localization day have as loud a voice for this coming home to earth coming home to community and coming home to our uh a right to feel more joyous to feel more connected to feel happier um and i it's so wonderful that you in studying the brain have also concluded that part of what's happened is that we become less happy as we become less connected and less balanced yes we we no longer belong and belonging is a very very important idea and its root is the same as to long you know uh it's an old saxon root which suggests um a stretching towards a place or a person lanyard and we no longer belong anywhere socrates is said to have said i'm not an athenian but a citizen of the world and i have many many concerns about well certainly plato we don't know enough about socrates except what plato said he said and i think in this case it wasn't even plato but plutarch who said it but whatever it seems to me wrong nobody is a citizen of the world that is like that is a complete nonsense you can only be a citizen of a city or or of a community and there is good in it of course the idea that um we shouldn't um be fractional we shouldn't see ourselves as over against other groups but we do that not by turning our back on the local but through the local much as we find the general not by turning our back on the unique in the individual but seeing it through or in the unique and the individual so and indeed we find the spiritual not by turning our backs on the embodied and fleshly but by seeing it there in it so these things are not contraries and they're often expressed in terms that suggest that they are so on the one hand localism must be clearly seen as not an alternative to um in fact quite the opposite of feeling more connected to other peoples and the planets at large not not just a small thing but we can only do this by first of all finding ourselves in the place where we belong and what localism does is to promote both a spiritual growth into that community and an environmentally sound way of looking at our needs from the earth so i i love that in in all its respects yeah and that's you know what i have also seen both in traditional cultures and in the sort of new local is that as people start feeling that sense of belonging we are seeing anger and divisiveness decrease we we have many examples of juvenile delinquents prisoners torture victims addicts being healed by this combination of being helped to connect in a deep human way in a heartfelt way with other human beings we don't realize how much this techno-economic competitive system which you know started off with a belief that we are all separate from the earth and from one another and that believe that this i you know this sort of competition and survival struggle was completely natural that's in our economic system it goes back for hundreds of years and it's a system that started with slavery and and force but we don't realize the extent to which we still practice that way of being we're so afraid of being vulnerable we're so afraid of being in any way imperfect you know and so what i've seen is that as people become more closely interdependent and as they're helped to have the courage to to explain that they're not perfect they may have a fear they may have an addiction they may have had a difficult past as they're able to share and to communicate in a way that is deeper and more caring and especially as they are helped to feel interdependent with one another to rely on each other this new way of being and feeling connected as you say actually is the groundwork for people truly feeling a citizen at least of the world in terms of they feel more at home they feel more connected they feel more secure so they're not so afraid of difference they're not so afraid of you know a different skin color or a different language or they don't see diversity as a threat to who they are because they feel more secure you know they belonging and localism provides that sense of security and and like i said it also provides this sense that okay i'm not perfect but then you know my role models you know for a child growing up in a more localized community basing their identity on real living people never has the expectation to be perfect everyone has strengths and weaknesses yes i i found it helpful when talking to patients who often had unreasonable aspirations for themselves to be sort of perfect people um to to help them quickly to see that well there isn't such a thing and that we're all a mix of good and bad and there was um a popular book called um i'm all right you're all right which is a sort of self-help book and i used to say to people um well my view on that is i'm not all right you're not all right that's all right yeah i love that so i agree with that um and i think that one of the reasons that that um one of the many reasons that the technological expansion in the west are now all over the world over the last few centuries is so toxic is that it has been intimately linked with the destruction of community with uprooting people first of all in england to go and work in cities where they were basically treated like battery hens after having been part of a rural community and this is a breeding ground for all kinds of insecurities and although for a long time people are able to create small communities within that that world but but latterly it's been so eroded by um the feeling that we should all be um uprooted and go somewhere to help the the money-making machine leave our place and go somewhere else now some of that is good but not for everybody in all the time unless you lose the value of the community that was there but without sense of somewhere that you belong and somewhere that you can feel confident you're going to be anxious as you said and angry and one of the things that's been very clear in the last couple of decades is attitudes towards immigration when i when i was um young it never occurred to me when i met a black person or a brown person to think of them as somehow different i just accepted them that way and when i was talking to patients uh in london because i had a busy psychiatric practice in a in a fairly um as you know say disadvantaged area of london are you poor and and it had a large number of ethnic groups in it and i used to ask people as a person talking about their childhood did you experience um uh prejudice when you came here and i'm talking about people who came here in the 50s and 60s when i was you know a child and growing up and they almost invariably said no but when i talked to they're very much better off children who are giving a lot of advantages they say they are being the victims of prejudice apparently that is that they have been recast their thinking has been recursed but part of it is that i think when a culture feels confident it can absorb people and feel that's fine i'm not destroying my culture but when a culture feels what's happening to my values what's happening to my traditions they're all being trashed then of course quite understandably there is a reaction i'm not again defending any particular type of behavior any kind of thing that is unkind or intolerant is anathema to me but on the other hand you can understand where insecurities come from and they're not a good thing we need to rebuild strong local communities so that we can be generous so that we can be open tolerant and kind again and that means you know stopping fragmenting um our society by competition for goods unnecessary competition for goods that destroys and the beautiful places reconnecting us with the natural world which is you know a very important point we haven't really talked about but actually the healing quality of simply being in the presence of nature which used to be enormous almost universal human condition that is now you know half of humanity doesn't have that all these things have been sort of torn away from um from us from uh grounding in in the world and it's not surprising that we're behaving in very erratic angry aggressive destructive ways if you put animals in the laboratory uh the sort of stresses that we put our society through they start to fight and eat one another and of course there's so much research that shows that when you don't stress them they behave in a much more cooperative and balanced way and and this is absolutely true you know what you were saying about those immigrants when i was growing up in sweden same thing someone with a different skin color a different language we welcomed as honored guests curiously the the message about localization um is that we need to take a broad picture not a narrow one um and curiously the the way we've been living in our globalized world has had a very narrow focus which is likely to be me me me and one of the ways in which i can't help seeing what has recently happened is that from seeing the world like this selfie selfie selfie that the camera has moved back and we now see ourselves in a bigger panorama as connected to others as needing to help others who likewise can actually fulfill themselves through helping us i think that's been one of the good things that's come out of this emergency very few things are so bad that nothing good comes out of them and so i would stress what this is about is seeing a complex picture in which you don't lose sight of the overall but in which your care is rooted in what is next to you and near to you and flows out from there if it doesn't have that local rooting if you you're not rooted where you are and in your community and don't belong it's very hard to project something outwards that is not simply an abstraction not just the sort of thing committees come up with really one can argue all day about what is better and i happen to think that certain things are intrinsically better but you don't need to take that point of view one reasonable measure of whether a society is functioning fairly well or not is whether the people are happy in it and happiness in the west has declined over the period that we've got proper records of this rather than increased and the american psychologist called gene twenge has done an interesting piece of research in which she looked back from the 30s and 40s i think of the last century through to now and she looked a questionnaire that had been administered to children sequentially over the years and this had the advantages that she wasn't using the retrospector scope to assess how happy they were there were data at the time from the same questions being asked and the answers that were received so she could assess whether people were happier than or happier now what she found was the staggering a reality that there is now five to eight times as much depression and anxiety in our society amongst the young than the wars after the second world war in throughout the industrialized world you know the big push was lots of supposedly cheap fossil fuels we're going to make life easier people were pushed off the land into big cities and into you know cement high-rise buildings also based on all this supposedly cheap fossil fuel depression anxiety alcoholism the effect destroyed alcohol um destroying our agriculture and using the chemicals from the war to poison our land and to have you know great huge monocultures now i have never seen anywhere in the world a demonstration in favor of that monocultural fossil fuel based way of doing things i've never seen a single demonstration for a supermarket what i have seen throughout the western world have been demonstrations and movements trying to oppose this type of destruction the destruction of smaller towns and smaller businesses of healthy agriculture and this imposition of heavily subsidized ways of doing things so i don't i see it much more as the tragedy that almost no one has been looking at this system holistically not having no one has been briefed with the idea of stepping back and looking at this juggernaut economy that has continued to grow in such an unhealthy direction that now as i was saying you know we've got this sort of the sheep or you know the wolf in sheepskin with a type of green new deal that it can it's been promoted by many well-intentioned people and a lot of what's considered a green new deal may be a very good thing but there's a huge element of this in large businesses using language and assumptions that essentially deceive people who want to see a more balanced a more truly ecological way of life less commercial so i i really see it as the tragedy of individuals from the grassroots to the very top of power and decision making pushing blindly ahead so many of the movements that try to oppose the new supermarket or many of these very destructive trends are usually focused on a single issue they haven't looked at the global system so they're not really addressing the sort of systemic economic change we need at the top what i see is you know the higher up you go in business and government the more blind you become everything is based on those assumptions those maps and you numbers you don't have the the imposed reality that you might get if you're a bit closer to the ground and you experience some of the poverty you experience you know viscerally the pollution the toxic uh you know water and so on so you actually as many local governments are doing they're beginning to respond to those pressures from the real world and they're beginning to actually join the localization movement you know they are they're beginning to support the local food and the less toxic and wasteful way of doing things back in the 60s which was quite early um one of the people who taught me um english went off to be a subsistence farmer in wales he sold up in the south of england and he bought a small holding which was largely self-sufficient he had a small number of sheep and some ducks and geese grew his own corn and so forth and i went to visit him and i imagined um i wanted to be involved in the work on the farm and i imagined that the days would be grindingly long because they were roughly speaking self-sufficient and i was astonished to find that together we did three or four hours labor in the morning and then we would have a long lunch and go for a walk and i say but is it like are you just doing this because i'm here he said no no no this is how life is and what you don't understand is that we now have this idea which benefits capitalism that the life of a laborer is a terribly hard and and um impoverished one but langland uh in writing in the 14th century um funnily enough castigated the peasants for wanting very long lunch breaks with wine and only eating refined bread and he said that actually rural communities used to have two periods in the year at least the western ones which were very hard work they were landing time and harvest and during those periods everybody clubbed together and as a result of that they were hard days but there were also big celebrations when people got together and had a festival but that it was only when people realized in the 18th century they didn't need to grow food just for themselves but they could grow far more than they needed and then hoard it and sell it to other people that then people started um working grindingly long days so the 18th century laborer truly was impoverished in a way that the 16th 17th century labor had not now what's interesting about that is you get people like stephen pinker pointing to data that show that people have been taken out of poverty yeah what this often means is that people who lived in communities where they didn't have a tax return and where what ever it was that was their wealth was very hard to quantify were suddenly pushed out of this into cities where they were on benefits or doing menial jobs in dispiriting tower blocks in slum suburbs where that quality of life was hugely impoverished but according to stephen pinker they're now earning a proper little sum so it's just completely bonkers to think about the value of life in this way and also you know we must remember that exactly that description of what happened in england it was going on right now in china india and africa in so-called less developed countries exactly that process of moving into the big city and earning a dollar means that you are better off when actually you are in in every way if people were there to see what's happening they are poorer literally working harder struggling you know bad quality food water no community i mean it's it's yeah this is uh one of the big issues and i think just also i know both you and i agree that we're not trying to say that all of us need to move back to the land and become farmers because what we're seeing also in the localization movement is that from the big cities often there's now this localization movement is establishing a relationship with the farmers in the area and there's an attempt to start building more community within the city it's not either or about city and the land we can't all return to the land we can't even all reinvent a way of life that has been destroyed whether for good or ill so it's not about turning the clock back but it's about moving forward with the wisdom of things seeing the things we've lost and indeed all the great revolutions in the history of thought like the reformation in the renaissance came from people realizing what it is we've lost touch with that we'd somehow corrupted things and we needed to get back so a move forward is also one in which you learn from experience and from the wisdom of a culture it's not one in which you turn your back on it and try idiotically to invent a culture from scratch we can't do that but as i say it's not about either cities or or um living on the land but one of the things that really impresses me is that you know we can probably think of the origins of our civilization in the west as dating perhaps been arbitrarily from um athens in you know the sixth century bc roughly speaking but what one realizes is that although this was a city it was also one which had fields that came up to the walls and were around it and that every person who lived in athens also had a responsibility on the land around it and that people would sometimes work in the city and sometimes work on the land and they could at all times see their land from the city now that is to me a very potent image and how we could recreate that i don't know but it's worth bearing in mind that it doesn't have to be one or the other and if it becomes one or the other too far there may be problems so once again it's not either global or local it's not either town or country but it's finding a balance but as in those things some things are more valuable than others and at the moment we've lost track of the really valuable things we're running after fool's goal absolutely also you know when i was living in paris in the 1970s there were these wonderful markets throughout the city with the most fabulous food in the world and most of it came from the region and certainly 90 percent of it from france 30 years of globalization i find grapes from argentina with a label on them european patent i find garlic from china costing half the price of french garlic so it's really important that we we understand the longer trajectory of globalization that goes back hundreds of years that is particularly in the last 30 some years from about the mid to late 80s till now that there's been this quiet continuation of rolling out a red carpet for global banks and corporations and as i said while over-regulating and squeezing everybody else for taxes and that's what's been so massively destructive are we going to go down this high-tech energy-intensive path with more and more technology which always replaces people and human functions are we going to leap into 5g as a systemic leap towards using more and more energy and robots instead of making use of people who have the sensibility and have the potential to truly nurture life back to life and to be engaged in far more productive agriculture forestry fishery we need to go small we need to go people intensive instead of energy intensity there's also a terrible mismatch in that we now have a large number of unemployed people but this cavern where there should be hands-on skills which would be rewarding for people but we don't value that that's the problem we don't any longer value it and we don't reward it so that for example a good teacher if he or she carries on long enough will be promoted to a managerial post and all the wisdom that they learned about teaching will now no longer be uh put into practice if you're a good doctor you get promoted into being a medical director or a manager where half your job is virtual so you're taken away always from the thing that your life has given you skill for this is an inverted way of thinking and it's criminal as you say that there should be so much unemployment and yet we desperately need people to work and do things which they would enjoy doing we would benefit from but because of a mindset that says oh no it's far better to be in pr than it is actually to get my hands dirty that is the reality of the problem that is a big big problem and i keep saying it's a mindset it's certainly true we can do certain things but we've got to alter the basic mindset which is one that the abstract is more important than the contextualized that the virtual is more important than the embodied the real and therefore that this meta global um getting together in divorce and making billions out of large corporations is better than actually being part of your local community which is something that switzerland has embodied you know i mean there are many disadvantages to different forms of government but one thing that switzerland has managed to do actually is to keep a lot of control locally in cantons uh which makes a lot of sense and i'm i'm sort of beginning to believe uh we're not just beginning to believe but i do believe that we need citizens uh councils or you know people whose job it is to report to government from a non-specialist point of view about what really human beings want here because that voice is drowned out if i may say one more thing probably we ought to wrap up very soon but i i just like to pick up the idea of slowness yeah and indeed silence which goes with it um my view is that nothing important can be achieved um by trying to pack more in and doing things at breakneck speed what happens is that we become more superficial we become more shallow and the quality of what we produce is poorer you can actually see this in the pressure to publish in academe which results that actually very trashy stuff gets published i'm afraid um and there are fewer and fewer really deep pieces of work in science uh being done i mean people may say how do you know that but i mean read my new book because the data in there that suggests that this is true but good work comes out of living with ideas for quite a long time using our unconscious mind to do the creative part of seeing how this comes together in a new gestalt into a new form and then if you force people to become to crystallize it make it explicit in small slices every few months you ruin the possibility of something fruitful coming out it's true that if you don't monitor everything to the nth degree some energy will be wasted but will our energy be wasted if we keep micromanaging everything to the point where nothing really creative can ever be done and the the other thing is silence i find that silence is a very rare commodity these days and it's one of the reasons i live where i live i love it i can eat and drink silence it is not a negative it is a very rich uh fountain or source of all the things that matter and in this time when people have not been um hastily rushing around with their phones i rather hope that people have taken some time to discover the pleasures of reflection of meditation of quietness of being just with yourself being with nature for our imagination to be free we need to go slower we need to go deeper and we need to cultivate quiet and lack of stimulation because in that you will find richness that is an ancient oriental you know the idea of emptiness is not just a vacancy in a negative way it's something very very rich they all say in this emptiness you will find greater riches than anywhere else and the root of the word comes from a root in sanskrit which means hollow like a womb or the hollowness of a seed as it swells so it's the birthplace of something i think that's important the way we need to live is actually what's going to make us happier and is it and healthier physically healthier mentally healthier so isn't that an amazing you know gift that's really yeah it's wonderful it's true and it's very positive and it's a perfect place for us to draw close lovely conversations one day thank you so so much ian

Channel: Local Futures

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Id: j3oOnLiJos8

Length: 48min 5sec (2885 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020