EP 29 Dr. Iain McGilchrist: Longing and the Matter with Things

[Music] uh [Music] do [Music] hi welcome to morning talk show um today is a special day for me because this is my interview with one of my personal um heroes dr ian mcgilchrist he wrote the book the master and his emissary the divided brain and the making of the western world which is a sprawling work that covers um so much more than just the divide between the left and right brain but it actually just explodes that divided brain and the two sides of the brain out and and and expounds upon it finding evidence for this divided brain uh in in art and and literature and history and it's really been a huge book for me and even before i read it in interviews with him and lectures that he gave on the internet have just made a huge impact on my life so he's got a new book called um his new book is called the matter with things and it picks up uh where the divided brain left off and answers or at least begins to set a context for answering uh or approaching some of the deepest questions about being a human so i couldn't believe that i was able to speak to him and and i enjoyed the conversation so much so we talked about his new book and then part way through i kind of took it in the direction of talking about longing and and desire as uh kind of one of our possible entry points into um a transform transformation and a transformed life and possibly kind of transcending the materialist just world view that has been kind of passively passed on to all of us so yeah i hope you like the conversation please like and subscribe and ring the bell to get notified about further conversations leave a comment uh below and and we've had some great conversation and comments on other videos so i hope to get more of that so thanks for watching this is my interview with ian mcgilchrist and i still can't believe i get to say that uh well i see the sun shining through from the isle of skye behind you um a very rare occasion is that right is it kind of a a gloomy place yes uh a lot of mist and and rain um and utterly wonderful days you know because you get light playing in fact pure sunshine is quite disappointing because you need the clouds and the mists and things to give it the whole drama you know right yeah i i've uh i've listened to you speak enough and uh that uh i actually unlike most uh people that i would watch on youtube or listen to i actually imagine where you are like i i've i've looked up the isle of skye i kind of imagine you situated there do you do you tend to have do you wander around like do you like to uh get out and wander have you done that today or anything this this afternoon i went on a walk between half past one and a half past five with some uh people that i've never met before but uh got an introduction from a friend and so yes i mean i don't take as much exercise as i should because the business of working on this new book has been all-consuming i mean it's really been shattering wow it's been such a labor i've been a junior doctor in a in a system where they could make you work 120 hours a week and you're dealing with all kinds of incredibly stressful situations but you know this has been very stressful well it's it's an internal thing as well right like it's it a lot of it probably is taking place in your mind and and yeah that's a totally different kind of inescapable uh effort yeah and clearly i mean clearly there's some some internal drive that you have to to clarify and illuminate all of these things that you probably can't shut off like a you know like a shift at a job in the same way or something no no exactly right i got to a point where i could see that i was so far into this that i had to carry on and there was a very long haul ahead but there really wasn't any way to avoid it at a certain point it was as if the book took over my life and me for a while and just demand it to be written well does it feel different than the master in his emissary did or did you have a similar kind of possession for that no it it it's different in a number of ways i mean the master in his embassy i wrote well unbelievably well i was still working 60 hours a week as a clinician and i don't quite know how i did that actually um i sometimes look at it and think how did you find the time to do this but in writing this new book the matter with things um i've written it in the last 10 years during which i've i've done no clinical work i've really devoted myself to lecturing writing talking um so it's different in that respect and i think it's just the sheer scale of it to give you an idea it's 1600 pages in two volumes with 5800 notes a bibliography that's about 230 pages long in small print and i've read them yeah because you have to in this area yeah and it's got over 100 illustrations um oh everything about it is unusual and everything about it demands the most incredible attention to detail it's what i call the left hemispheres revenge you know the last eight or nine months i've just been my brain's gone into a lot of phenomenal attention to detail right yeah yeah yeah the left the left that's kind of hilarious because your first book i mean we're just right into things here but uh your your first book which i i listened to the 54 hours of uh on audiobook um all right is uh is attempting to uh you know uh for people who i mean i can't imagine someone watching this interview who knows me but doesn't know you that seems impossible but anyway if they don't that book was was about kind of re-establishing the the preeminence of the right brain of the less detail-oriented the less abstracted the more holistic part of the brain and so uh um and now you're saying that the the left the left side of your brain which got short shrift in that uh or was maybe uh spoken about in uh in not the most glowing terms in uh in the first in the first book well not your first book but in the master and his emissary is now a necessary and extremely necessary part of this second book even more so than than before um so so how would you how would you sum up the the matter with things you've probably done it briefly many times do you have a brief way to say what it is i've i've heard but yeah i i i should have the elevator pitch yes um it's basically taking on where the mastering has embassy left off because it was obvious to me that if i'm right that the world comes into being differently for the two halves of the brain because they pay different attention and the kind of attention you pay alters what you find and it also is used it's a reciprocal reciprocal effect um and so it really meant thinking about not just in abstract terms about the difference between the hemispheres and not just about the historical way in which this has played out in the history of western europe which i dealt with in the second part of the master and chemistry but really about the most basic questions who are we what is the world and what is our relationship with the cosmos small questions eh so that's why it's a big book um but it seems to me very important because i don't have to mention obviously the terrific problems that we face the the business of the assault on nature the um devastation of the way of life of indigenous peoples all over the world and even it seems to me that we are now rapidly committing suicide as a civilization we're doing everything we can to destroy what is best about it um this is these are very serious problems but if there's one thing that's more serious it's about the philosophy of who we are and what the world is it underlies all those problems it's because we don't have a proper idea at all of who we are or what the world is that we've got ourselves into these situations and even if we could get out of those situations it wouldn't be any good if we carried on thinking and behaving in the same way so we have to change and it's my attempt to explain why the way that we have often been told to think about ourselves in the world which is a materialist reductionist account that effectively the world is an inert mechanism that we human beings are the play things of chance that we [Music] are basically programmed to compete with one another to the death all of this is completely wrong not just philosophically but it has no basis in science science doesn't compel you to believe any of this it's a philosophy that has hijacked the sane and dignified voice of science and it's very loud these days in a lot of the public voices of science and not just science of politics and beyond so what i'm trying to do is to show first of all that this is a very unusual way to think about the world and when you look at how the two houses the hemis the two halves of the brain conceive the world you can see that this is deeply skewed towards a certain viewpoint which is the one that the left hemisphere holds and i'm able to show that i don't know if you want me to go into any more detail at this stage but oh please okay yeah no i yeah i think it goes in three parts there are three parts to the book actually although it's in two volumes the first two parts in volume one uh entitled the way to truth or the ways to truth now that's uh rather a bold thing to say because like most people i'm prepared to believe that truth is never simple or single but we can't dispense with the idea of truth if we didn't think that some things were truer than others we couldn't say anything we couldn't do anything we wouldn't have any reason for getting out of bed in the morning certainly not for listening to this podcast so we must believe there is some kind of a truth it's how do we access it and i suggest that there are six or seven ways in which we have if you like access to whatever reality there is that is not simply generated by our minds because i don't believe that everything i'm doing now is just generated by my mind that you are a phantasm of my imagination i believe there is a world and that we all in our different ways we see different aspects of it we bring it into being slightly differently but nonetheless there is a core reality now how do we get any kind of portals on that any part any sort of ways in which we can look into that reality and and take it on board well i i believe that the main ones would be probably we could argue about the detail but they're probably things like attention in the first place if you don't attend in a certain way you won't find anything there and the way you attend alters what you find then there's perception which is not the same as attention but is obviously related to attention and then thirdly there's the judgments that we form both on our attention and our perception and those judgments in turn are informed by our emotional and social intelligence and by our cognitive intelligence good old-fashioned iq and by our capacity for creative thinking these are the ways in which we get to grips with and understand reality at the most basic level i take each of these at a time and show that the right hemisphere is better able to use these and uses them more intelligently than the left hemisphere the left hemisphere is prone to delusions so the subtitle of my book is our brains our delusions and the unmaking of the world because that's what i believe we're doing we're unmaking the world with our brains our brains are there to make the world but we're using them now to destroy the world i love that so so the thing that the the uh the part one tells us is two things really two important things one is that quite simply the right hemisphere is more reliable in other words we would get caught out by reality much more often if we trusted in the world according to the left hemisphere um we would believe all kinds of crazy things and we'd certainly find that life was unlivable because we simply weren't in touch with it whereas if you believe largely what the right hemisphere believes we've got an in on realities that's the first thing the second thing is that we now know what the signature or the hallmark of a left hemisphere take on something is and if you want to avoid being mistakenly um taken by by a paradigm by a by a take on the world if we wish to avoid being mistaken it's good for us to know whether this kind of a way of looking at the world is likely to come from the right hemisphere or from the left because we can establish that the right hemisphere is more theoretical now that's a step forward because mainly in philosophy one is faced with the fact that well there are two different ways of looking at this or you know half a dozen ways of course but there are often paradoxes and we have to say well this is this looks you know like it's probably true this which doesn't fit with it at all also looks like it's possibly true we just have to shrug our shoulders and go well we don't know well now we don't need to because in fact i have a whole chapter on paradox in which i take i don't know about 30 academic paradoxes recognized by philosophers and show how they can be viewed with with benefit as being the two ways in which the same thing is construed by the left and the right hemisphere wonderful and the left hemisphere's take on it is usually the one that we can't possibly believe thus for example achilles and the tortoise um should i just gloss that and say yeah yeah very briefly because i don't know that particular one sorry yeah so this is a paradox of zeno you know who's a an ancient greek philosopher and um achilles was famed for his swiftness of foot and the um tortoise uh challenges achilles to a race and achilles just sort of laughs and the tortoise says no no no no you can never overtake me and so ecclesias laughs and he gives being a generous guy he gives the tortoise a big head start now zeno can prove that in fact the tortoise is right that achilles can never overtake the tortoise because the khaleesi's first task is to get to where the the tortoise started okay by the time he gets there the tortoise has moved on so now he's got to get to the place where the tortoise then is but by the time he's got there the tortoise has moved on and so in smaller and smaller increments he's getting closer to his daughters but never able to overtake it right now that i can explain why that is a typical fallacy that comes from the thinking of the left hemisphere and obviously we know that achilles can overtake the tortoise so and most of these paradoxes we know perfectly well that in the real world certain things happen that way but something a logical argument appears to suggest something that's deeply counter-intuitive yeah right so that's that's the point of part one part two i can sum up very quickly it's like which we've talked about the portals or the the the the entry points on reality what about the powers that we would follow the longer term powers towards some truth about reality well i think everyone would agree that science is going to be one of them a very important one and another is likely to be reason i think most people would accept that not everybody but most people would probably accept that intuition there's another important way in which we arrive at certain understandings of truth and i would argue the imagination is too very important i think actually that we misunderstand what is meant by imagination what is meant by science what is meant by reason but that's another story but when you look at them as they are most valuable again each of them is required they're not necessarily in conflict and the best part of them is provided by the right hemisphere not the left and this is true of science and it's true of reason i spent a lot of time rehearsing um how it was that scientists and mathematicians made their great discoveries and great leaps forward and as um has been recognized by a number of important 20th century scientists they never or very rarely made their great advances by following the scientific method by testing to exhaust them all sorts of possibilities and you know yeah instead they saw something that they they saw a gestalt a new form right that answered something and it often came in a flash it doesn't mean that they didn't have to do a lot of hard work before that flash would come but it didn't come from the left hemispheres procedural plotting it came from the right chemistry and there's a absolutely incontrovertible evidence that those aha moments of intuitive insight come from the right superior temporal sulcus einstein on the bus i believe there was uh there was a time when einstein was uh on the bus imagining this uh the theory of relativity uh as an imaginary an imaginative exercise uh that kind of thing is what you're kind of referring to it wasn't uh it wasn't a formula it was like imagining the bus traveling and the light traveling and it was all in the imagination yes yes his daughter uh refers to him sometimes in the middle of trying to work out his theory of relativity sitting at the piano and playing chords and then suddenly going i've got it and going upstairs and you know writing things down um amazing and interestingly there is a story also of uh poincare honorary poincare he was an early 20th century uh late 19th century early 20th century french mathematician and he um sorry that's shredding his cat that's got it oh awesome no no he's welcome he or she i told you to keep that cat out of it i thought it was dead it's all too alive and if well that answers that i guess yeah you're dead off you go um so yes franco ray anyway um it describes this thing about how he was he spent two weeks um trying to come to an understanding of what he later called foxy and equations and one day he just sort of gave up and went into town and as he put his foot on the step of the bus to go back to his house suddenly he saw what it was and it took him you know a while to write it down but so any in any case what i'm really saying is that the most valuable parts of reason without the right hemisphere's contributions to reason it makes a big contribution to reason it's completely wrong to think that sort of science and reason and left hemisphere they're not they're a balance substitute and if they lose the balance they become you know pale imitations of what they should be right um so effectively what i'm suggesting is that you can't tackle a problem by simply using one of science reason intuition or imagination they need to be held in balance and we need to respect the right hemisphere contributions so that's volume one wow and then there's volume then there's volume two which is the part three which this has been leading to and it's called what then is true so in other words it's an interrogative not a statement but i'm asking what can we come to feel we have a reasonable understanding of that it's more likely that it's like this than not yeah and i'm looking at the really fundamental questions the structure of the cosmos time space matter consciousness um value purpose and the sense of the sacred wow and um so this is why it's a long book yeah and in the first first two chapters of that part i look at the coincidentia oppositorium the coincidence of opposites which is an important point that in our newtonian world we have failed to respect but in other cultures is understood and was in our own in up until about the 17th century and then the paradoxes of the one and the many how the these elements of uniqueness and the general the one and the many how they relate to one another and then off into as i say time space matter consciousness and the rest of it so sorry that was a very very long you said you must have a short version of what's going on sorry i don't oh well i mean my level of my level of interest will support any amount of words you wanted to say on it um so that it was a long elevator ride but but it but it was it could still it could still have been said on an elevator if there were a lot of people getting on and off at different floors but uh no impulse state building yeah exactly yeah it's it's wonderful though and so one one of the first things that struck me when you were describing what this book is about is how um it actually really answered something that um was coming up in my mind over and over as i finished the masters emissary which was that um okay how will i put this okay the master is emissary i found the uh discussions of things like art and and uh and and that kind of thing near the end to be so kind of nuanced that there wasn't a clear and obvious um agenda that you had you know like many times when i've heard people discuss like modern art for example they'll kind of ascribe a negative motivation to modern art in a way that doesn't jive with the modern artists that i know um but what you were discussing was so kind of like you'd go in a certain direction and i'd say okay maybe he's going this way and then and then you'd kind of express uh that okay the great contribution of modernism was was this and here's this book of poetry that suggests that with the freedom the seeming freedom that modernism brought there was a lot of dross but there was a lot of gold that would never have been discovered in the romantic era in which there were fewer luminaries uh and more tepid um you know uh people at the margins yes um and so the ques the thing that kept coming up the only conclusion i could come up with is that we're really left if if we really want to engage with all of that left brain right brain stuff we're really left with just trying to be more human just trying to understand what the human is because it seems to me that the right brain is the right brain is what connects us to being uh increasingly human whatever that which is a mysterious thing and the left brain is what increasingly cuts us off from our humanity which is kind of an unfortunate thing that i mean it's really unfortunate that we even have that capacity to be cut off from our humanity and i think it's what's being described in in the garden of eden i think it's the first you know the first human story in the bible is the i mean that's just an agreement the eating of the apple from the yeah exactly yeah it was the beginning of the intellect that was able to separate us from from god uh i mean the the the that that myth of the the apple uh of the tree of knowledge is really the tree of the kind of knowledge that the left hemisphere has yes no no no that's okay uh that's i i'm glad to know that you agree with that because that's kind of one of the things that comes up for me quite a lot so then it was it it's really great to see that you tackle um the issues that kind of feel it kind of felt like i needed that whole master and his emissary to get to these very simple questions you know a 54-hour audio book that leaves you with nothing but some simple questions like what am i which are simple but obviously you know like the you know simple but massive like move this mountain from there to there you know it's a simple it's a simple task but but it's not easy um and so one of one of the um i guess elephants in the room for me when we're talking about this um this new book and and and this um this materialist uh mindset that has been developing um is that uh maybe you can comment on this i come from a a religious background a very religious background and one of the things that i was certain was calling me away from religion and probably away from god at one point you know i was i was preparing for that uh eventuality um was that there was this oddly now i'm describing it as left hemispheric view of god that that predominated the religion that i was in and so all i knew was i had to get out of what i'm now recognizing as an ideology i had to i actually had a kind of an impactful moment with scripture where i read go from this uh place in your father's house to the land that i will show you uh which hit me like a ton of bricks in kind of a revelatory way and i knew that i had to get out and i didn't know what that meant and as i went along that path um i discovered people like yourself and then lo and behold um i did not become a materialist but i realized that in some ways i was more of a materialist when i was deeply involved in a religion which is is kind of a massive tension because it feels like uh belief in in a a a grand mysterious god should be the least materialist you know position to hold in a way but then but then god was made into a material was brought into the known was brought into the left hemisphere and there was a there were a lot of fences put up so um i guess what's your sense because like historically religion has probably been part of what kept the right hemispheric sense alive and then and nowadays there is at least a at least a noisy strand of it that seems to be doing the opposite does that does that resonate does that seem true with what you're what you've been researching and thinking yes um i'd like to talk more about that the chapter of the book um cost me most pains was um the chapter called the sense of the sacred which apart from the epilogue is the last chapter in the book and it's pretty much the length of a short book itself because this it's such a a difficult and important topic and i found that everything that one could say was was problematic and that you know it was going to need what you're calling a lot of nuancing and one thing i'd like to say about that uh just before we come to talk about um the religious thing is that you you i know you were you were shorthand you were speaking in shorthand but you sort of said um you gave the impression that i think the left hemisphere is entirely negative you know that it's um and i think it is when it takes control and this comes back to this very simple idea that it's a very good emissary but a very poor master and in fact it turns out that einstein said something almost exactly like that um which i didn't know at the time i read the book and i think he said the rational mind is a is a useful servant and the intuitive mind is a precious gift oh wow um we we worship the um servant and have forgotten the gift actually i can't trace that to anywhere in einstein but there we go and but the idea is a good one and it's in many religions around the world actually it's in um it's in it's in zen it's in taoism it's in the in the venanta it's even in um north american native peoples mythologies all over the world people have this sense that it's something that is constantly striving to use up the part of our mind that is really ways that and it can talk loudly and it can be very pushy but largely because it doesn't know very much it thinks it knows everything and that's the danger of it so we need a left hammock and one of the important i mean you know i wouldn't think it would be better if you all had a left hemisphere stroke no so the point is that we need often contradictory elements this comes back to the um the the um the the union of opposites that i was talking about as you know in in the first chapter of um part three of the book nothing good happens without resistance everything needs its opposite everything needs there is there's no creative anything that can happen without that resistance being acknowledged two things that may make that sound slightly more plausible just small images one is that in order to move there must be friction and the whole point about friction is it stops movement but without it we couldn't move at all and in psychiatry one of the things that i found i was constantly helping people to do was to accept what jung would have called the dark side not to try and deny it or excite it because then it becomes powerful dangerous tyrannical but to accept it humbly and it brings healing when you do that it's extraordinarily important but it's something that particularly in a culture in which we're constantly told that we must you know do this and excel at that and be beautiful and be healthy and you know everybody is so highly competitive in the social media world that it's very hard for anyone to acknowledge any longer their vulnerability the one thing that's missing from debate at the moment is all about power we must have power you must have power there must be power against power but one of the great insights of all great religions and the mystical traditions of them is the power of no the power of not saying the power of not doing the power of not acting um in fact of making oneself in a certain way vulnerable that makes one extraordinarily powerful to be able to do good things so anyway that's just a vignette there but um so i think it's very important that they're supposed to right and the left and when you come to talk about religion and one of the things that i you know knew very little about until recently until perhaps the last 10 years was um the uh the scriptures in the jew the mythology of judaism and particularly the kabbalah and it's been a complete revelation to me and in the judaic tradition there are two uh kind of um brother or sister elements in the soul and they're called halika and agoda and halika is the one that makes rules and boundaries and rituals and makes things explicit and wants them written down and is much more you know less nuanced more about it's right this way it's not right that way yeah um whereas agatha is uh open to the understanding of all the things that essentially are what the right hemisphere is good at understanding the implicit that things are a matter of degree that they're interconnected with many other things including their opposites that they're always changing and flowing that you know we must respect things uniqueness not just the fact that they belong in a certain box or category of rules so both of those are important uh says abraham herschel who is a i think a roughly brilliant and i know that very um good man um a new york uh rabbi uh of the last century uh and he says you know halakhah and agra need one another but when god made gave his people corn and wine halacha was the corn agardar was the wine and that reminds me of sort of sushism which in sufism when you see the very much more agoda like aspect of um islam the part that accepts the mysterious coming together of opposites of the implicit of the place of humor of paradox of music of poetry uh and obviously against it there is a fundamentalist streak which is the caricature of this left hemisphere way of looking at religion it reminds me of apollo and dionysus well there is that as well and of course in that book i do um you know flirt a little bit with that nietzsche an idea in the master in his emissary um although i think that that's somewhat different because well anyway we go into there because it'll go up on a whole tangent but to come back to the religion yes what i think is that most religious traditions have these two elements in them and because so much of religion has been presented as to do with propositions believing certain truths a creed that a lot of people are put off by the idea that you know in order to have any kind of understanding of the divine or the sacred they've got to believe six impossible things before breakfast you know and that is not the case belief is not a matter of subscribing to um propositions and those propositions by the way are to be understood as the right hemisphere would understand them as myths narratives parables not as factual literal truths like a chemistry book right and this causes a lot of confusion when um people like um uh what's his name jerry coyne you know he wrote a book called faith versus fact and he's he rather like a number of these um extreme uh atheists fundamentalist atheists and takes the view that if it's not true in the sense that it is in a in a a chemistry book then it's just not true it's just a way of saying it's a lie well yeah you know uh so it's all great art and music you know is king lear just a lie because does it not contain truth even though it's a a fable the real king lear was not at all like the one that shakespeare talked about and so yeah no so i think that you know science has got itself into a locked horns with um religion i don't know quite why although i have some thoughts on why this happened but it seems to have happened in the middle of the 19th century 1830s 1840s through particularly to the 50s 60s and 70s and that really did come from um from science it picked battles with religion and religion behaved rather badly in response because you tend to mirror the faults that have you know been demonstrated to you and so they became defensive and extreme in their positions too in the most unenlightening way and there were lots of things put about such as that you know until columbus sailed to america people believed the world was flat and if you went to the edge you'd fall off it you know well actually that's a that's a 19th century invention and actually um going back to you know 2000 years most educated people knew that the world was around so and so on and so forth interesting yeah um but i can understand how you you'd want to get back to an aspect of religion that is more right hemisphere base and i think that if we could help people to see that it's not this matter of dogmatism it would i think a lot of people who call themselves agnostics would start to see themselves as open to something spiritual because if you ask people and are you a you know a signed up believer in a certain religion in england i think because we're a very godless race and i think about 11 percent of people will say they are but if you ask people um do you believe there's more to the world than the materialist account gives credit for yeah and ninety percent of people will say oh yes yeah and a lot of them have had experiences they say you know we're to them like an experience of the divine so you know it's not a rare experience it's just that people are terribly put off by the dogmatism of certain kinds of christianity and i see the big divide as not being between believers and atheists but being between fundamentalist believers and fundamentalist atheists on the one hand who are very very similar yes and the more nuanced agnostics uh on the other and believers who are able to admit uh elements of what i would call the subtlety of the right hemisphere into this right transcendent atheism is something that i've been kind of searching for because i have this deep suspicion that there are some really inspiring atheists who have had really amazing insights because they've kind of set god aside but they've not made that into a fundamentalist um presupposition they're just like i i don't i i've never seen that god so let's let's you know let's examine life from that perspective and i don't yeah i don't really consider those people to be materialists in a way um so yeah um what i found with with my own religion was that you talked about uh you know belief and and truth being contained in uh in myth mythology and story and that's what i found was that you know i was raised in a southern baptist fundamentalist situation and yet i think just probably it was a blessing of my personality that the uh that that the encoded uh truths and the encoded wisdom and beauty of the bible and of of christianity was always there and occasionally it was a guilty pleasure you know i could as i got older i could imagine uh you know what if god is is all of reality you know what what if god is another description for reality and for the animating principle that causes cells to divide and that you know uh that rupert sheldrake would say is is is the is the you know god is creating echoes or god is the echoes of uh you know of of form and function uh throughout time and all of that kind of thing what if and my brain was always able to go there and so it was kind of this paradoxical thing where i think my brain was probably able to go there because it exists in uh mythology and it it it exists there it communicates like the the depths of these stories communicated with the depths of of my well my subconscious and my right brain and so i i am cons well concerned or i i devote a surprising amount of my time sort of like this book for you was um uh almost inescapable a part of my brain is always is always churning on what you know on religion and faith and on god specifically because i can never drop it i can never just drop it and walk away and i can never embrace it you know i don't feel i feel uh at odds with many people and uh and even uh one of the people one of some of the people who's been on the show a couple of times on the podcast john verveiki um has been for a long time uh flirting with religion and he's i just noticed he was even recently on uh unbelievable which is uh a british uh um you know christian uh show and and yet he'll never he's not a christian and so their his idea is that we need a religion that's not a religion and he's kind of trying to begin uh hashing out what that would be and i have extreme reservations about that you know like at one point he was calling for artists uh to express these ideas and i thought oh i had just this this almost like a trauma response from being a young musician at church and being told i needed to put my musician my musicianship towards uh singing you know these fairly vapid songs for jesus um and uh and so it just this isn't really a question so much as um i i wonder if we're kind of in an axial age between religion actually being a a portal for access to the to to the right brain world or access to this sort of more mysterious world we're in an axial age where religion needs to kind of evolve to continue doing maybe what it has done and what it's supposed to have done in in history you know like never perfectly uh because it's been uh human beings you know human beings uh pushing religion forward and and moving religion forward um i guess okay i'll try and turn this into a question instead of a rant because i have one of my favorite intellectuals on the screen and i'm talking um way too much but uh uh what do you [Music] what do you see as a way forward especially in the light of and i don't mean this as an offense to you but that many people will not read something like the master and his emissary they won't read the new book and nor nor do i have judgment uh for people who you know in this world with with 40 hour work weeks and more you know and and so much you know so so much to try and do um so what is what is a way forward like everything in what you've written resists uh to me a rigid ideology and what it actually implies is is is looking for a real understanding of the reality of being a human being and of the reality of being a group and an of a culture the reality of being an animal on a on a on a planet with other animals and the reality of being a kind of a transcendent animal on that planet um so yeah what do you d do you have a sense of the way forward um uh to sort of get communicate some of these things out and and try and actually start shifting the you know the mass consciousness yes i suppose what i would say is that what i aim to do is to help people see things that they really already know in fact if they don't already know it at some level they won't understand it and that's not because it's something peculiar about my work that's true of everything every kind of philosophy if you don't in a sense already understand it then the understanding won't come to you so what i'm hoping to do is to unveil a way of looking at the world to say i think we can do better than this intellectually impoverished morally jejune and spiritually um unfulfilling view that we are just pieces of machinery and the world is pieces of machinery and just get used to it i don't believe this at all everything about um everything i've studied and i'm a person who's encourageable and keeps going off down different paths but everywhere i find a coherent picture one of the things i like in my book is that if you take the best in neurology in philosophy and in modern physics although they start from very different places they end up describing a very similar reality and that's very reassuring because you'd like to believe that if they were aiming for a reality that it would be a similar reality and what's even more wonderful is that that reality is one that would not surprise or shock um somebody 2 000 years ago it's just that we've completely forgotten a lot of these things so i do think that we need to as well put out the the messages that i try to deliver in these books and i don't want to tell people what to do people often say so what should we do and i always think well that's the left hemisphere kind of getting sort of windy and thinking oh goodness what are we going to do we've got to sort this problem and it's really not like that because if we do that we'll just do the sorts of things that we've been doing and we'll have eight bullet points and those will be the things that if we do them everything will be fine but it's not going to be like that we're going to have to re-envision what a human being is and what the world is so that's that's really what i hope with this book i know it's it's too long really for for most people and they usually sympathize i i usually say about the master in his emissary that it's so long that you know if i hadn't actually written it i'd never have had time to read it and you know ipso facto this book is is going to be a problem and because it's bigger um but what i like to think is that it doesn't have to be digested at one go that you know people can there's a structure to it and there are three chapters on science so three chapters on reason there are three chapters on intuition and imagination and so one can dip into those and one can look at the world picture that i well i show what the world would look like if we had failed really to take into account all the right hemispheres able to tell us and i look at patients and people who suffer in this way and the parallels with the way our world is and is increasingly going are shocking and i think readers will see that very clearly so i think those things are there almost as resources and i like to think that i've got something new to say about really big questions like the relationships between matter and consciousness and about the nature and importance of time you know a lot of people including the great religious people say that time is not real time is an illusion it's a very comforting thing to say but i don't believe it you know one thing that makes me cross is that people say that you know people who believe in religious things do so in order to comfort themselves certainly not sometimes it's not something and i mean i've been in this world through having at times um thankfully short-lived but very severe bouts of depression three or four times that are so dark those places i know they exist i know they're there that a soul can be tormented in that way and you know that's in this world i don't know what happens at death there may be absolutely no more of anything that continues for me in which case i won't be there to complain about it but i think it's quite possible that in some form my consciousness will contribute to whatever global consciousness there is and in that case you know religion is hardly um wholly a comfort and also um you know i was brought up by parents who really had very little time for religion and it was never forced on me but i just as soon as i um encountered it um my school had a medieval chapel 14th century chapel and to hear the the music of the renaissance you know from palestrina and victoria and talis and bird and glasses and all these great people and to hear the words of the book of common prayer written you know by cranmer in at the point where the english language was absolute most expressive this was a complete eye-opener it was wonderful and i didn't say oh this doesn't make any sense i thought this is talking about the things that can only be talked about in this way neil spohr said you know two important things one is that we can only talk about um the physics of the summertime subatomic world in what is effectively poetic terms and he also said about religion religions talk in terms of metaphors narratives and myths because that is actually the only way in which certain profound truths can be conveyed which is why we have a very high opinion of great poets and playwrights and because they are the ones that are able to communicate things that if we just broadly state them we've missed completely right um yeah oh sorry glenn yeah uh one of the things that that comes to mind actually uh that i i can see in your work uh perhaps you can tell me if if i'm wrong is that one of the way forward weighs forward um and and by the way i don't mean to insult your books by saying people won't read them and and that kind of thing i just i'm not not that easily insulted okay good good you're good you're true i mean it's blatantly true so you know okay but um but i think what is sort of taking shape in my mind is a sense that um the truths that that uh you're referring to are actually things that we we deeply long for and that maybe one of the modernist maybe one of the modernist one of the downsides of the modernist view and of the left hemisphere view is that we begin to try to dictate or deny our longings and that really um the the moment of change for people you know the reason i was able to read um and i'm not actually a very good uh reader i have i have issues with reading i can listen and but uh i have issues with reading but the reason i was able to get through the masters emissary was because i longed for what you were giving in that book and something in me really needed to hear it and wasn't hearing it in a lot of places and and and it strikes me that art and religion and all of that speak to the longing and we actually um as a as a function of not being transparent to ourselves we don't know what our longings might be these days it's increasingly uh people are increasingly unaware and actually a bit of your book came to mind as uh in in regards to longing and it was when you were speaking about modernist art and the attempts to step outside of of artistic traditions and and of of considerations of sort of making art for the human being and almost um in a self-conscious way dictating uh a new aesthetic out of seemingly out of nowhere and what what struck me was that when modernism occurred art was probably as as accessible to people as it had ever been people could see art there were there are increasingly an increasing number of ways to to rep to reproduce art to uh to show people you know i can look at the mona lisa on my screen and uh it it almost struck me that possibly one level of the of the most modernist the most inhuman art is that it reveals a longing in people that they and and i don't think it ever comes to the conscious uh mind because the performative side of viewing that art won't really let you acknowledge this but i wonder if maybe even in that most inhuman uh you know uh form of art if they're if people might be experiencing a vacuum that is speaking to that longing and so i wonder if one of the ways forward is not not really intellectual so much as just just trying to help people to acknowledge their own longings and then see where they go from there because um you know even those even those modern artists had a longing to escape something or you know possibly escape a tyranny or something like that and it's kind of it's a relatable impetus uh in a way um so yeah i wonder if there's anything anything to that idea because i feel like it took shape based on your writings that longing is one of our kind of non-intellectual ways that we can begin that the dominoes can begin to fall absolutely and um i'd just like to mention a book by um a famous biochemist professor at yale called erwin chargaff who wrote a book called heraclity and fire which is absolutely wonderful on this topic and about how this relates to [Music] really creative scientific work but that theme of longing is an important one because it can be deconstructed as something which is just um wishful thinking as it were um and what you and i are talking about is not that it's an awareness of the fact that we are limited and that there are things outside that we can sense out beyond almost at the fringes of what we're capable of getting that are very very important and that at times we do get them that's the thing that reinforces this that at times we are granted some sort of fulfillment of that longing and the image is a very good one because you know the word comes from an anglo-saxon rude language which means to stretch out and one of the ways i think of individual consciousness is that it's somehow like an out pouching of a vast sea of consciousness because what creation wants is neither to deny union or division there should be individuation it's all about the individuation that we couldn't have foreseen the creative newness of all these wonderful beings and yet at the same time they're not atomistically distinct or at war with one another they are if you like um generated out of this field of consciousness so the idea for me is that in this world we are often aware of connections to things that we know we are connected to and they are the profoundest moments of our lives and for people who are not in any way religiously inclined if they've ever really been in love then they know just how powerful and quite remarkable the feeling of longing is how it brings with it actually a sense of the transcendental of all kinds of things that you know for many people now are cut off because they're almost brought up to believe that religion is you know irrational and probably a bad a bad element in our culture but of course um if we actually turn our backs on those longings then we miss most of the things that are valuable and in fact by paying attention to the things that i have longed for that i have had such an enriched life really you know my passion for poetry um you know my fascination with neurology the the the sort of really transcendental feel of a wild and beautiful landscape these are the things music you know which can't be exchanged for anything in the universe it's just itself and it's so powerful and so moving yes and it can't be reduced to any kind of a formula or to anything else at all and if you take it apart you're just left hopelessly with a heap of notes none of which mean anything so these these processes that to which one feels oneself somehow attached and one responds i like to think of the stretching not as inert but as elastic in a sense that there is something that it is calling to us we are responding to that calling and even calling back to it and so on this is an idea that george steiner is extraordinarily good at expressing in his book real presences anyway um so longing is important and indeed i gave a talk which is on the internet called um either longing and wanting or wanting and longing okay because i wanted to make the distinction between wanting something and longing for something and the different qualities of these experiences and how one opened the door to spirituality and how one closed it down right so i mean it's a it's a longish um talk which i will discuss anyway yes i will look it up it was a heathrow college in london which is a theological college they asked me to to give the talk so yeah yes i i think that that idea is is an utterly profound one and again it's if one denies it then one loses a sense when it automatically becomes smaller than when one becomes a dwarf of oneself really if you know what i mean yeah in fact somebody said actually that i can't remember who it was who said you know modern men are dwarves of themselves they're no longer what they have the potential to be as something i feel very strongly but you know we don't fulfill a quarter of our potential because first of all we're told that we don't have that potential and secondly we're told not to strive for anything really that we should just accept whatever it is that we have and you know uh are you familiar with the hymn uh come now oh love divine i am yes the uh it's something that struck me i wrote it down i keep a list of kind of uh inspiring i guess you could say uh poetry i call it call them prayers but i wrote that one down and one of the things that struck me about that uh was that the you know it's come no love divine seek now this soul of mine and visit it with thine own art or glowing you know it begins with an invitation but it the last verse and this is what makes i think poetry instead of just uh you know a wanting uh is it says uh it says and so the yearning strong with which the soul will long will far out past the the power of human telling for none can guess its grace until they become the place in which the uh the holy spirit finds a dwelling uh and and that that's kind of a that's kind of what i think of uh when when you're when you're talking here that that came into my mind and i also think about uh um i've got a a seven month old baby and it strikes me that life begins life begins with what the with unfortunately what could be the illusion of uh uncomplicated and total communion uh between mother and and and child um and uh and and there's not a great i mean there there may be a great sense of longing for a few moments when the when the baby is hungry um and maybe this is a weird analogy to uh to throw at you but um then as self-consciousness take begins and as as the baby individuates um that becomes a kind of a lifelong longing to return uh to the kind of connection that they they had at the very beginning and i think um maybe another um left brain uh possible red herring is is the idea of the the capturing of and the finding of the achieving of the of what we're longing for uh being a satisfying thing um whereas you know when we get what we want it might be a satisfying thing when we eat the ice cream cone um but uh but any any actual capturing of that thing we're longing for will will probably you know if it's that deepest lung it will probably end up being having been a surrogate or uh or a stand-in um and yeah go ahead when we're wanting something we're wanting a gift but the longing is itself the gift yes it's it fulfills itself in a way and it's a deep way of being if you like in the world without longing we seem to skate more over the surface of it it seems to me um and it's a very powerful human feeling um which in most people has been attached also to place but we're now so uprooted and um you know we lived such extraordinarily um hermetically sealed and insulated lives away from the natural world and the communities in which we would until quite recently have lived that that sense of longing for a place has been it's it's a richness that we've lost but but in any case yes um i think yes i think that the idea of um fulfillment of a longing as you say if you if you i mean one really unfortunate way to think of what you said about the separation of the child from the mother is that really our longings were just sort of freudian displacements for something that um we're looking for i think you know i don't rule out that that may be an element but the trouble is that it it somehow immediately devalues and degrades something that is actually powerful and is valued by us in the feeling of it and seems to communicate with very much more than that for us for instance i think it is very strong in wordsworth who you know for me is perhaps the greatest of all poets of all time um and in him there is this feeling of oneness with the natural world which is not as it were a surrogate for the feeling of oneness with the mother but you could equally say that the feeling of oneness with the mother was an important preparation for his illumination that he and the natural world were not uh distinct but we're part of something that he has all these wonderful phrases like something far more deeply interfused and something ever more about to be again suggesting this business of a process that is always happening not a finished act or a finished fact and one of the one of the themes that i've um i'm just going to pull a blind down oh yes i'm noticing that sorry no no no problem yes one of the themes in the books i've been writing is the idea that although there is value in thinking about things that really much more important is to understand them as processes which is not to say that there are no things but that i want people to reconceive them in the light of the way in which they are processes and that also includes um my attitude to spiritual beliefs religious beliefs that i i don't want to go off into all that but it is quite an interesting topic for me which is the idea that whatever it is that the divine element in the cosmos and the cosmos are in a process of co-evolution a constant coming into being which is creative and this is an idea that um you also find in alfred north whitehead um i think the brilliant philosopher i mean you know one of the um authors of principia mathematica but still um a man of consummate sort of wise understanding and imagination so yeah so i would like to say yes that you know we shouldn't constantly be trying to cast one in you know our feelings about something now in terms of something to do with you know an unresolved problem in childhood because after all the really wonderful thing about the growing child is that at first it needs this feeling of fusion and so on but it soon starts to recognize very soon starts to recognize that actually it is not swallowed up by the mother but it's distinct from the mother and what i believe is that over that period of three four years in which this process gets fulfilled what a stable relationship between the mother and the child brings and it depends very much on the right ventrimedial frontal cortex of the mother in communion with the right ventricular frontal cortex of the infant and by the way it is mothers effectively i'm sorry infants are not really that interested in their fathers until later so but what i'm saying is that that process enables a child to make the wonderful transition to being independent but also not estranged or separate or atomistically divided from the mother and that situation of being together but not fused is the richer experience and it's carrying that forward into adulthood that leads to sane personalities that are able to um you know to to to navigate this relationship we have with what is other than ourselves which includes the divine yeah and you can give of yourself when you are individuated you can give something to the mother who who bore you and yeah no it's rich and i'm glad you i'm really glad you nuanced that because i was grasping and i certainly didn't want to be transmitting a freudian uh you know uh world view except that except that it does it does highlight that you know an unhealthy uh parent an unhealthy mother could uh instead of um kind of facilitating that um healthy distinction could actually try to um keep the the coherence going the cohesion going or the you know the deep you know and that would be that would be false and then you would have a longing you know possibly for something that you you can't achieve again and you might not appreciate the separation that that you do have that allows you to you know have that perspective so a lot of psychopathology um centers on this fusion of a mother with her often by now grown up daughter or son or whatever it may be and or a father but it usually again is the mother and that and the child that have this unhealthy fusion which of course they inevitably think of was extremely positive right you know yeah um it's so wonderful that we're so close that we have to do everything together and you know and what one has to gently convey very kindly is that you know this is not in any way bad but there are other ways of being that may be more fulfilling because it's always and this is a really really important point it's always about the the balance of centripetal forces with centrifugal forces oh so what is this i know centrifugal is when things fly off apart centripetal is when they they come the other way together and so if there is not a ballot for example if there's a balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces between the earth and the moon the moon will continue to circle the earth at a proper distance but if the centrifugal forces became too strong it would fly off into space it's a centrifugal centripetal forces became too powerful it would it would crash into the planet and i often think that a good analogy or image of a healthy relationship is like these two celestial bodies that circle one another and they're not just one but then they're not flying apart either and in that relationship they become more of themselves not less themselves which brings me back to the the image of the proper evolution of the child in the loving care of the mother who doesn't suffocate the child and try to keep it as a child the the the thing there is that the child becomes more itself and the mother actually becomes more herself it's a pathological diminution of both when they stay toxically few and you know these things [Music] by so many places but the structure that really really um is is so important to me is one that was absolutely the call of goethe's philosophy it's this one of we need union and division and we need them to be unified not divided another way of putting that is we need both both and and either or we don't need either both and or either all right so we have to have both the both and kind of dipole and the either or kind of dipole and preferably they should be or actually necessarily they should both be under the aegis of a both and sure might yes this is the um also happens to the reality about the relationship between the right and left hemispheres the right hemisphere tends to see both and which is why it's able to see the possibility that something in its opposite may both be true which the left hemisphere just goes doesn't compute so the right hemisphere is able to see the both and the left hemisphere tends to one either or black and white it's got to be this or it's got to be that and we all know people who are like who are like that and certain movements in society that are like that but what we desperately need is the overarching base and that can accommodate sometimes it's got to be either or but let's try to make it as much as possible both and that their relationship is like that in the left hemisphere seems to not um want to communicate so much with the right hemispheres the right hemisphere is willing to communicate with the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere has no kind of illusions about what it knows it's able to acknowledge things that it doesn't know because it knows so much whereas the left hemisphere because it knows so little um thinks that it knows everything yes um again we all know people like that yes yeah well i mean this is i i really like the uh yeah i really like this as kind of a conclusion to the conversation in a way to to to i like that uh way of looking at things and so uh uh i guess uh i will kind of kind of wind down the situation uh and and say that it's been uh an enormous i mean life life goal lifelong uh i shouldn't say lifelong because i didn't know who you were when i was young but uh you know speaking to you is is a real honor and uh and i'm i'm very very grateful for the opportunity to do that and i'm i'm very excited uh about your new book which i will um chip away at uh over over time because the longing for what you're saying is there uh and uh and so uh yeah it when when is it being published you know like when will it be available yes it will be published on the 9th of november by perspective press in london but from next week i think from the tuesday of next week you will be able to pre-order a copy on either channel mcgilchrist or on perspectiva's own website and there are two advantages to doing that one is that you get a discount and the other is that you stand a tolerable chance of getting the book ahead of its official publication date um so if you're at all interested next week go to channel the girl christian yes click the button and as you know i am or you may know i may not i am a member of channel mcgill christ and uh have have really enjoyed the uh discussions on there and everything and i encourage people to to uh you know if they if they engage deeply with your work to go and uh and join uh join up channel gentlemen gilchrist and meet other people i i do have to laugh at times uh at how accomplished the people there are like i i feel like the uh i feel like the beggar at the banquet at times you know because everyone there is so yes i've been uh studying human psychology and i'm also in my spare time i'm a rocket uh scientist and you know like it's it's some amazing people so i recommend it but yeah well i should also just lost that by saying there are lots of very good intuitively wise people who um are not telling us about all their marvelous things but so don't be put off enjoy what i think is a very friendly um forum it is very friendly and it's been a good exercise in humility for me to to yeah because they've all been wonderful so um yeah thank you very much for for speaking to me today this has been everything i hoped it would be well you're very kind erin and thank you very much for inviting [Music] me bye [Music]

Channel: Mourning Talk

Views: 8,454

Keywords:

Id: cOxAQTJEoaw

Length: 83min 10sec (4990 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021