Iain McGilchrist Dialogue, Part 2/2

yeah well i think it would be interesting just to get to the role of attachment in all of this just because one element that we we notice and so in buddhism we're quite keen that the the the second noble truth that all suffering ultimately stems from attachment i think one thing that seems to be missing or as far as this how to resist uh this creation of a interior world is that is grasping at form and it has a certain feeling which you can directly sense and that's part of what we spend so much time attention attending to is the is it feels like something to want form and there's a there's a sense of grasping at the form and to this to the extent that we're aware of doing that all the time and watch it we always find that ultimately that's the source of suffering and the deep more deeply we're aware of that the more we find ourselves in in this expanded world because we're not grasping for form and it seems to me that one of the the biggest things that's missing really from our understanding is and i and i'd say this to relate this to the rest of the the dialogues because we've had a few people were doing doing neurophenomenal neurophenomenological studies rather on on essentially the second noble truth and and science because we are not interested in first-person experience because essentially respectable academic discourse hasn't touched on uh first-person experience the second double truth is more or less invisible to science and if it were not invisible it seems to me but we're accepted as the in the culture we might have a vastly greater chance of living in this uh world of presence because we we would would be able to respectably take on the practice of seeing the suffering that comes from grasping forms well yes um a lot a lot to say there and first of all the second person form uh is different altogether in kind isn't it from first person and third person coming back to what i was talking about there is a kind of grandiosity or sort of um yes an overreaching quality to both the aspiration to be third person and to be just first first we need this bridge all true discourse has to be second person and all intellectual life is a form of discourse which doesn't mean that there aren't truth or there isn't true that that we have to give up hope of establishing things that we can all broadly agree on um in a nightial world of course and i'm a great believer that there are truths to a degree i mean nothing is absolute but some things are truer than others and it's not just the case what i say goes what you say goes and there we are so it's a discourse it's um it's an ongoing process an idea that i think is very important not a kind of not an entity but the problem of attachment is very interesting for me because i it's the one thing in buddhism that i may i need help with understanding i think the the best understanding i have of it is that not that one should be somehow detached in the sense of untouched by the experience of others and of the world and the suffering of others that one should therefore not be detached one would be a kind of monster if one was but not to allow that to control one to such an extent that it becomes the sort of primary element that colors one's way of interacting with others and the way of being there for the world so i i really i don't know i mean maybe you can help help me there because to me it's very unattractive that one should be wholly unattached um and certainly jesus was an image of somebody who was not wholly detached and who very clearly suffered with and alongside and which is one of the things i love about the christian mythos i mean a word i use without prejudice or whether it's true or not so yes um and i was slightly worried by brothers brother frapple lynn's remark um having no point of view because i don't think that's can be done and i think it might be an illusion that there can be no point of view i i don't want to contradict um buddhist wisdom i think that what one ought to do is detach from just one point of view one's own point of view and the one the richness of objectivity is not to pretend that you don't have a point of view but to try and see as many points of view as you possibly can i i just throw that out thank you so i um first of all about attachment this is of interest for me too because i i feel like it's a common sort of misperception of buddhism in in the west and i it might really just be a question of translation of the word sometimes that i think what is meant is certainly not indifference there's an enormous emphasis in the buddhist tradition on compassion and that really the more we free ourselves from the illusion of separateness the illusion of uh you know that i am me and you are you and you know that everything is outside of everything else then the more we um compassion spontaneously arises and with that a a very powerful desire to engage and to relieve that suffering in whatever way we can so the freedom is is really or the detachment is from detaching from the idea of separateness it doesn't mean becoming indifferent and detaching ourselves from the world quite the opposite because as soon as we remove that idea of separateness what happens is that we come more into the world we we are the world and the cosmos and we we recognize this profound interdependence and interconnection of all things and then how can one not act you know how can one say that how can one not feel then the the pain and the suffering of every other living being and even perhaps beings that you know that we considered previously to be non-living or inanimate you know it's like we you feel the pain of the planet not just of animals and people but these these things we we see that they're part of our flesh and bones and so it's certainly for me the very opposite of of indifference that um that arises as the more that we we remove these uh these kind of very these views of yeah the views of of separateness another way to talk about right view sorry liam i'll let you come in in just a moment um perhaps before we jump all the way to no view is a view which is free from the uh notions of being and non-being so this would be also another way to characterize uh right view and then there's there are several sutures in which this is you know a monk goes to the buddha and says you speak often about right view so what is this thing called right view he says well it is a view that is free from the notions of being and non-being and i think that is also you know it's it's it's very very um close to many of the points that you made uh in in the book and in your work about what the right hemisphere is able to to hold and to able to to experience which is not this kind of uh forcing things into these categories of either it it is it's there it exists or it doesn't exist and this also has vast implications for how we feel and how we relate to the events of life for example death you know losing a loved one or contemplating our own death or the ideas of disappearance or non-existence after death are really just a manifestation of that idea of being now i am i exist i'm me here i am and after death i will cease to exist but as soon as we we remove these notions and we're able to see that we are just a kind of uh an uh a weaving of this web maybe we're kind of like a focal point in this incredible endless web of interactions which includes our our actions of body speech and mind which then ripple and continue us you know in all dimensions and all directions we're just part of this sort of field of interactions and then one can neither it becomes impossible to identify a beginning point or an ending point in that there's there is only uh continuation which which i think you know the more that we cultivate that and translate it from also a notion because of course we can also grasp at the notion of inter being the notion of i get it no being no non-being everything is independent that can also become a notion that we can get caught in but the more that we can experience this uh as as a sort of direct awareness of interconnection and into interdependence then i think that that that can remove a lot of the the and and suffering and anxiety we have about uh about life and you know the challenges that we face of death and getting and losing and things coming and going and i think and change and all you know all of these things that we are subject to yeah just to add briefly to that um just also the word detachment has just these connotations in english like a judge is detached which probably means they're quite biased towards one person who comes into a courtroom and an irish person comes into the courtroom you have to detach you still have this feeling towards the person but you're consciously distancing yourself from that so it has that that association which is just not really what we're talking about at all it's more also letting go uh gently letting go of expectations particularly right so when you look at a water fountain and you start expecting something you lose the beauty the moment you don't have expectations about water you get the beauty right anything which is constantly changing from your mind knows on a subtle level it can't expect things that's why water mountains water fountains are so beautiful because you know that you can't realistically hold on to an expectation you just watched it ripple and then therefore the beauty is kind of open to you right and so that's sort of on attachment that we learn on a basic level it's a bit like when i was a a young child we used to have these these little tickets in in candy and the kids would get we'd get very uh upset about not getting the candy you know the lottery ticket whereas i look at the adults and the adults realize that lottery tickets didn't actually come in they were they weren't attached to it right so we would get into these little spats about who was going to get the the the candy prize it was never going to come whereas people with a greater experience realize that it wasn't sure and you can look at the whole buddhist reflections realizing nothing sure so be unattached i think what we what we could do as a simple remedy sorry just brief parenthesis would be to replace this idea of detachment with uh with non-grasping that would be possible it's also sorry the main kind of suffering that arises that we identify in the buddhist tradition is is actually what we call the double grasping which is the simultaneous creation in our mind of the notion of the uh subject of perception and the object of perception and we simultaneously grasp at those two and we create them in our experience that we invent them essentially so this is really also a big cause of suffering is the the double grasping well that's the opposite of the perception of betweenness and and seems exactly what i was saying that for the left hemisphere there is subject and object the right hemisphere it's not that way because there is a flow it's the one that perceives flow an image i'm very i find very powerful because of course it's the central image of taoism but it's also the central image of the philosophy of heraclitus one of the more important images in it who i consider to be the greatest western philosopher and re capturing this notion of a flow seems to be important because rightly or wrongly i do hear people say in the buddhist tradition all is one and when you realize that all is one there is no suffering now i admire the peace of mind that enables you to say that but when i think of the holocaust saying all is one doesn't really seem an adequate response because the business of the cosmos is unifying and particularizing at the same time the whole business of creation is making individuals that are not separate but distinguishable and in that sense distinct so we have and we have a duty to to nurture the bit of the cosmos that is given to us for a while to nurture in our own way so to transcend or get rid of what is unique to you or me is in a way wrong but it needs to be taken up into a greater hole in which it is not seen as an indigestible part the image that i like here is is one again from flow that in every stream that flows through turbulence in every turbulence there are whirlpools or vortices and these are separate elements that are absolutely distinct in the sense that you could photograph them you can measure them they have force for a while but they're never separate from the river they just are the river in that place at that time so they're not separable but they are individual and they're important and they have effects so i i think it's awfully important myself to maintain this balance between you know people say to me all this one and i say yes and all is many now what and i think holding both of them together is very good my favorite buddhist saying is yes but and i don't think there should be any one line that is is right you know nagarjuna's saying neither assert that it is nor that it is not nor that it both is and is not nor that it neither is nor is not that might be your thing about the place of being a non-being exactly exactly that's the uh the you know before sort of positions to refute and and this is exactly this freedom from these notions of being and non-being and yes the image of the whirlpool is one that i i love very much i think i first came across it in uh in david bohm's writings um wholeness in the implica order he used the image of a whirlpool uh of a vortex in a stream really to sort of be an yeah a metaphor for things that are temporarily identifiable and have characteristics and properties that we can measure but are clearly really have no edge in a sense they're not that they're a continuous part of a bigger a bigger hole and and the separateness is only a kind of convenience for the purpose of speech and communication and analysis and and and none of those things are bad it's just that we have to hold that ability to see things as separate and distinct in this wider context of of a whole and um yes i think it's uh it's wonderful to please the image is also for those who are interested in a philosopher 200 years before bone shelling who is a neglected particular is quite hard to understand philosopher but he is i think profound and rich and would take one of prizes in my pantheon for great philosophers so anyway but these images i think are very helpful because the human mind needs them in order to try and transcend rather rigid modes of operation right and when it comes to saying that all is one i i think you know this is this is what happens it's sometimes what we refer to in buddhism as the zen sickness when we first come in touch with the ideas of you know everything's interconnected and isn't it all wonderful then we might actually just jump to that extreme um which for me is kind of like turning the cosmos into a smoothie you know you just put it in the blender and and then it's just you know but it's not a smoothie it's interesting it does have bits that are different and that are beautiful and each is beautiful in its own way in relation to the whole and so it's important you know as a student of buddhism not to get caught in in any extreme views and that would be one and the buddha often said my teaching is like a snake and if you catch it by the tail it will it will bite you so it's very easy to misunderstand um and uh yes i think we're in we're all as students of buddhism in a constant kind of uh process of um trying not to grasp also at the teaching trying not to reify it as a final explanation of how things are because that was not what the teaching was meant to be so the teaching is often referred to as as a raft which helps us to cross from the shore of suffering to the shore of freedom but then if you keep hold of the raft and you carry it on your head and you become proud of it and you say i've understood then actually you just look like a fool because you're carrying a raft around on your head and you're not free at all and that's another kind of kind of grasping or attachment which which limits our our freedom so the point is to make use of the teaching but then to know when to when to release it not to get stuck with it especially as um a truth and it's opposite will always turn out to be true in certain respects right so this the the profound idea of their incidence of opposites is very very important one again in my recent work um which doesn't mean that you can say anything and nothing has meaning not at all but the the deeper things you have to see that they contain within them um they're they're opposite much as a you can fall in love with the north pole of a magnet but you however much you love it you can't get rid of the south pole of the magnet if you cut it off you've just got a shorter magnet with a south pole but this is almost precisely what again it's it's quite striking some of the things you say how close they are to uh you know well-known sayings of our teacher he we would often take a marker in his in his teaching he said you know if you look at the right and the left you can't have the right without the left and if you try to cut off the left you take a knife well as soon as that place where you cut then that becomes the left so the you would say that the left is imminent in the right and the right is imminent in the left and the two manifest together and can never be separated and of course that's just a metaphor too for many many other things yes quickly well i just it's i don't know if it's worth exploring where you can edit this but but it seems to me in response to your all is one comment it's also i mean it's very similar in many ways the the buddhist concept of essentially that we can some people call it action through an action right essentially you don't because you say everything is one doesn't preclude you from being guided towards uh movement right it's a bit like the first time i had a very a great uh first introduction to plum village because when we went to walking meditation with tiknot han bee started sting everybody and the people the back of the line who'd never been to a walking meditation before it sat there and got stung by a bee where and all the people at the front of the body just got away from the piece they didn't continue walking exactly the same pace as as all the rest of the people were trying to sort of think you know perform their knowledge of all is one i suppose you know that that you're guided to to take an action right and it's a bit similar to this idea that you discuss in the in the book that the right hemisphere can't make complex decisions right it sees it all as one but it but people with the right hemisphere are still guided to moral action well the right hand is particularly good actually at conflict situations so when there is not a straightforward way of understanding something or a straightforward way of resolving something the right hemisphere is immediately engaged in overdrive because it's much better at seeing how to negotiate a subtle complex self-conflicting hole then the left hemisphere which keeps meeting a brick wall down every path it goes so being able to see and hold together these in a way opposites without allowing them to collapse into one or the other pole seems to be enormously important is that being able to be patient with something that can't now be resolved that you have to not resolve it by just ruling one of these out like the mind body thing like so many important things in our lives we can't take what we can but if we do we we we forfeited understanding as soon as we've simplified it by just choosing one which makes life easier for us i think this corresponds to a very helpful um frame that we can use to to look at life and reality is within buddhist teaching is the concept of the ultimate dimension and the historical dimension and often we also make the mistake of confusing the two or trying to collapse them into one or trying to say that one is more real than the other and this is sometimes an artifact again of the translation because when we say ultimate uh and conventional or ultimate and historical it sounds to our western ears that what we're saying is the ultimate is better or more true in some way and i i remember one question and answer session with our teacher that really kind of comforted me in that sense uh and he said the the ultimate truth has no right to declare itself to be the only truth or a higher truth than the relative truth or conventional and then really the two are also woven together and can't be separated but at the same time for the purposes of thought and analysis and discourse we have this other very helpful guideline which is the separate investigation of numina and phenomena that we have to know when we are speaking about one and when we are speaking about the other and not to mix up the two because sometimes it's appropriate to talk about oneness and how you look into a part and you see the whole but at other times it's very important to know that you know there is there are there's a level of reality at which things are distinct and you know identify have identifiable characteristics and properties and we we can't just claim that one way of seeing uh dominates the other or is is the final answer and we can't collapse them onto each other what what perhaps the final answer but i wonder if the solution has to be that they are of equal importance going back to by thinking about the mass from the atmosphere so the right hemisphere understands that it needs the left and the left has value but the left chemistry doesn't understand that it needs to write so the vision that sees the two is different from the vision that sees the one and it is better than that vision and so what we need is both union and division to by division i don't mean ultimately you know what i'm talking about distinctifying um so we need things to be individuated but we need them still to be connected and so we need union and we need division but we need at a meta level the union of union and division so in that sense union and division are both necessary but union in a way is more important than division ultimately so it may be true that the oldest one is more important but it must never do without the all as many and it's the problem is when we have to choose one or the other and or when we think that they're only of equal thing because i mean it's not for me to to comment on what you report your master is saying to your teacher but i wonder if when he said that the um that the as it were the ultimate truth has no right to say i'm the only truth he was pointing to this that first of all it's not the only truth we're agreed and then secondly it it's typical of the master not to say but i exert my righteous master it's typical of the atmosphere to say i exert my right as master wrongly so it could be that he would still agree that somehow this ultimate truth whatever you'd like to call it can subsume the other truth but it doesn't annihilate it by substituting it it is enriched indeed do you mean what is implicit gets explicated and it only becomes bad when as long as it's kept within the hole it's enriched i love this idea of transcend and include or transcend and unfold yeah i i think that because the quote is not not does not have the right to declare itself greater than right which would be a comparison right and so this i think is where we're getting tripped up here is it it does not have the right to declare itself greater than then it's already in relatives and then it would be then it would be falsifying its own truth you see so so i think that that would be you know the source of the of the difficulty there well that's perfectly isn't it that's nice i like that yes and the danger of course uh in reporting anything that uh that i said is that i i'm probably getting it wrong so i may be misreporting and then the other thing is the compassion of the teacher to say something in words knowing that it cannot actually represent the truth and that automatically somebody probably me is going to misunderstand it and get get tangled up in knots but but out of compassion the teacher still tries to say something and using metaphor using poetry using the sort of finger pointing he said don't look at the finger look at where i'm pointing um but it is of course very easy to to misunderstand and this is very useful to always remember this this discourse that ends i mean it's not really within our tradition but as soon as you say anything you're already in duality right and then this is this is always the difficulty and why so many people misunderstand both are tradition and probably your book right i mean i always say this that you know part of the reason why the master of the hemisphere may not be better understood is that most books have a viral thesis have a thesis that can be explained in one line and then argued for the rest of the book whereas the your book is more like one half of the book is saying something similar like be here now you know the right hemisphere is the hemisphere that we're talking about when we say be here now which typically is a full-length book explanation then describing history through awareness of that sort of talking about be here now in terms of neurological function which is is not a one sentence thesis that you can just tell somebody and expect them to then see where you're going with it you know it's it's so it's an extraordinarily uh demanding tome in that way you know similar to the tradition has always been demanding well the whole culture of the sound bite is the very antithesis of what you've been describing that as soon as you say something you know you're in duality and there's another truth that's being neglected so the discourse has to be almost infinite but when one has to nowadays summarize your thesis in the case what is it called the the lift pitch the pitch that you make to somebody in the time it takes to go down in the lift this is not not reassuring and not easy partly because of course an important part of all wisdom and i know it is of buddhist tradition is that if one knows then one is wrong what one knows is wrong what when one begins to know when one knows what it is one doesn't know which after all is a distinction between the left and the right hemisphere and and probably the most important um uh european mystic in the 15th century was nicholas accuser husainis who you may or may not know he was many things he was a philosopher and a scientist and a theologian and many other things but he wrote a book called the doctor ignorance which means about learned ignorance and this is a kind of ignorance that is the other side of knowing not the ignorance you have before you start but the ignorance that you end up without have you been there and it's a very rich ignorance so and what's lovely about that is that it contains this idea of the the growing of knowledge in kind of if one has to say dialectical way so at first everything is implicit and he talks about the explication of what is implicatum so it is then explicated but that is not a good place to stop because you only now think you've got something that you know and what you've done is you've given it to the left hemisphere it goes yeah i know i'm on the case i've got it it's one of those and two of those and we put them together we've got this phew but his next stage is called complication which is not the same as complication so when things are in folded they are implicit when they are unfolded they are explicit and when they are folded together they are complicit or complicated and that is the third stage in which this stuff is then taken together into a new home which you don't grasp but which you have acquainted with so that is that unfolding taken to another state i love that anyway it's very beautiful that's very beautiful i think that uh we could find many many parallels uh to that in well both bomb obviously the implicate and the explicat order and our teacher has spoken a lot about drawing parallels between burmese work and and and buddhist thought similarly the way in which we speak of knowledge in buddhism as an obstacle to insight and that actually uh of course there's part of us that wants to accumulate more and more intellectual knowledge and we think that that will somehow you know shore us up but but we learned that to be in contact with life and with the present moment and with you know the constant sort of arising of new truths we have to be able to release that which we hold to be true um yes so we we we are yeah we're speaking about misery about openness and not closing down to what you think to be true or certain then that's a very rich element of course also in in christianity in central augustine and maester eckhart and all these wonderful writers that unknowing and dwelling in the place of emptiness is fulfillment and richness because of course again it's not emptiness as we normally mean it it's an emptiness which is full of potential and the more we actualize it into the things we think we know the more we fill it up with rubbish there's no room there again so empty empty again and allow the potential this is another misperception of buddhism that we equate emptiness with non-existence or with a kind of it's been so sometimes buddhism uh gets misunderstood in the west and drifts towards a kind of nihilism saying that everything is empty and meaningless and uh you know this is very far from what was meant by the teaching on on emptiness and i i like what you said about emptiness and and fullness because this again is very close to how our teacher speaks about emptiness that we um when when somebody says something is empty he says we have to ask empty of what so he says you know mr bodhisattva you said everything is empty but empty of what and uh and then the the bodhisattva would reply it was empty of only one thing which is a separate self and so whenever we look into anything in fact it's full it's full of the entire cosmos we look into ourselves we find our father our mother our education all our ancestors our culture the food the land you know the air the planet the cosmos itself there's nothing that uh you know we're only made of non-us elements and so we are full we are empty of separateness and we are full of the entire cosmos i'm told that the root of the word sunyata meaning emptiness is actually in sanskrit which means um the the the the what is in the hollow of seed that is going to grow potentially yes so again it's a misunderstanding arising from a poor translation yes yes probably yeah well we've talked a lot i'm sure we have everything yeah i think we should uh draw things to a close yeah yeah and uh it's it's it's really uh it's an honor for us to to have you uh join us in the context of this retreat and i'm sure that uh this conversation will be enriching uh for everyone who who participates in it and so just on behalf of all of us here in plum village i want to express our deep gratitude for for you joining us in this moment but also for the work that you have done and that you do um yes and really uh on a personal note i yeah i just want to express gratitude as well for the kind of um what i feel is that the depth of compassion and humanity that um shines through your your work and i for me it's it's very uh it's yes it resonates very closely with my own aspiration to to try to understand the brokenness potentially of our world and how one might go about doing whatever we can in our small way to to to to to bring a bomb to that and to to heal uh to heal it wherever we we can so thank you thank you very much for all of that thank you very much and i can't believe without saying i'm almost overwhelmed by such lovely words and i'm deeply honored also to be to have been allowed to be with you in this period and to hear your wisdom and you may or may not know that i originally was going to become a america christian monk that i decided in the end not to i don't think i'd have made a very good one but i have an enduring um shall i say deep respect um for anyone who adopts such life so thank you very much for allowing me to be for a while part of your your presence your tradition and all that you can tell me thank you thank you thank you ian thank you

Channel: Plum Village

Views: 2,264

Rating: 4.949367 out of 5

Keywords: Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh, mindfulness, zen

Id: dKCJmGzLBMo

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021