Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain and Perceiving the Sacred

[Music] hello and welcome to the sacred my name is Elizabeth Oldfield this is a podcast about our common life and the Deep values of the people who are shaping it in every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of platform or Voice or ability to feed into public conversations and I want to get beneath the surface with them to their principles to their values to their story to get a sense of who they really are in our public conversations very often uh we have them in one of two ways in very adversarial ways where two people from opposite positions are put up against each other to have a ding-dong or We Gather people who are like us or who we know already agree with us and we Talk Amongst ourselves on the sacred we're trying to break that mold and do something a little bit different and so I speak to people from a very wide range of philosophical political and metaphysical positions from different professions different tribes and try and get a sense of what drives them this means that if you listen long enough you will almost certainly hear someone who you would not otherwise have chosen to spend an hour in the company of and I want you to encourage I want to encourage you to push through the discomfort of this because I think this is how we together build a more Curious open empathetic common life in this episode you will hear a conversation I had with Dr Ian mcgilchrist Ian has worn many hats as you will hear he studied English literature at Oxford and went on to be a fellow in English at All Souls college and if you don't know about All Souls it's this very weird kind of wonderful um quite archaic purely post-graduate College I think of it as a kind of Hogwarts SL holding pen for geniuses um and if you if someone's been to All Souls someone's been a fellow of All Souls at least once you know they have a really kind of um generation defining mind and so Ian was there pursuing a career as an English scholar but in his 20s he changed path um as you'll hear a bit about wanting to study medicine and went on to be among other things a consultant psychiatrist at morsley which my guess is the um the leading Mental Health Hospital in the UK he came to much more public prominence over the last decade or so decade or so because of two books that he's written first was called the master and his Emissary and the most recent which comes in two enormous volumes is called the matter with things we spoke about Ian's uh childhood being brought up with um non-religious parents about how formative his experience experiences at boarding school were why he has decided to kind of follow the threads that he has in his career and to my joy and broadly unprompted we talked a lot about God there are some Reflections from me at the end and I really hope you enjoy listening Ian we are going to Dive Right In with a question that I know that you will not Ball cat but some people do which is about what is sacred to you and you can go at that however um however feels right to you deep values something else you can challenge my premise what bubbled up for you I certainly wouldn't challenge the premise I think the concept is extremely important famously it's not incompass in language and so it's a difficult thing to say but I can hint at it um it's something I think that I would say speaks to to us of something beyond that is powerfully Rich beautiful good and draws us forward in life by its attractive Force so I don't know quite how to sum it up it's one of those things rather like being in love that if you haven't had the experience you can't really convey it to someone else yes and we'll come back to some of the reasons that maybe we to not fight that but surrender to it you write um in various places about the importance of um truth goodness and Beauty as a a threep part something set of values famously how Thomas aquinus summed up God could you tell me a little bit about what those me what they mean to you gosh another really difficult one um I know that they're important and I believe that it's clear that we're not heeding them in the way that we once did so I find that truth is travest in our world that Beauty has somehow been sidelined if not banished even by Arts that should know better um and that goodness is very much something we don't really understand we think it's about following rules and having right opinions where it's actually about a matter of the disposition of one's Soul the disposition of one's mind and heart at any rate if one doesn't like this word soul but I think it's an important one yes so I I find they're very important uh they've always called to me um and particularly I suppose well in in my intellectual life truth in in in my more embodied life Beauty um and goodness is something one comes to understand with experience it seems to me and as I say um one has to to keep revising what one thinks of it because when one's young one one latches on to what adults tell one about rules and principles but it seems to me to go deeper than that well let's stay with that then and try and get a sense of you as a as a child I find it very helpful as we're trying to listen deeply and openly and curiosity curiously to the people shaping our common life um to start with where they came from could you talk about some of the big ideas that were in the air in your childhood that formed you well at home um certainly nothing to do with religion um not that my parents were rabid atheists but they just didn't really think there was any point in worrying about religion um so my first experience of it really was when I went to um I mean of course we had school prayers and so on but my first really proper experience of something religious as opposed to just spiritual world when I went to um my secondary school which was Winchester at the age of 12 um and the ideas that were in the air there were complicated because um it was a rather wonderful mix I mean on the one hand officially we were taught how to um to reason well um to do math and science and to decode um the famously difficult Classical Languages of Latin and Greek but there was also for me something else there which was partly to do with a person who was very formative for me my housem it was a boarding school and um he was a completely remarkable person far more influential really on me than my father who was a very decent man a GP um I think he was liked by his patience he was definitely a kind man but I don't think he really understood anything much Beyond The Fairly straightforward everyday mechanical view of things um he was terribly good at setting a joint but I think he thought that Psychiatry was rather funny um however my housem was a spiritual man with an amazing sense of humor he was rather like a everybody's idea of a medieval Abbot he was extremely large I think he about 6' three had been a very good rugger player but he was also he had he he become rather rund and he had a sort of hair like a Tona and gleaming blue eyes and he was always his lips were always puckering up will laugh so all the time he managed to bridge this wonderful thing of humor seeing things in proportion seeing the absurd but also seeing the deep and not mocking it but actually nourishing it and he helped me through that by recommending holy books um poetry mainly uh but also the sermons of Lal Andrews and and and the works of Thomas Brown and so on which I came to to love um and the other thing was that the the school was very rounded and we were not and we were taught that it's very important to have a sort of General reasonable attitude based on an experience of all kinds of things not just as I say on a kind of logarithmic working out of of what the answer must be but one that is sensitive to experience and the experience that that school gave me was of I was a scholar there my parents would never have have sent me there otherwise um and it was all paid for amazingly um uh but it gave me um a setting which was ancient there were these very old buildings 14th century monastic buildings which definitely had an aor of something about them they were very beautiful they were they' stood for a long time they had sort of the feeling of ancient ages in the stonework somehow um and and um daily rituals because we had to go to church twice a day initially um I didn't know anything about this but I got to know prayers I got to know um beautiful music I was in the chapel choir I made the acquaintance of Renaissance composers Palestina Talis Victoria Gib all these people um and uh I un bird and I also um was close to Nature the school ran out into water Meadows which was a a very lovely place to just wander in a slightly Melancholy way that adolescents do or at least this adolescent did and so that was that was how I got sense of a rich rich world around me that was not at all um something superstitious or made up but was contacted deeply through one's embodied and emotional experience as well as one's intellectual life yes I smiled halfway through that because my dad is also a GP and was an orthopedic surgeon prior to it so the idea of medicine as DIY is very um is is very familiar to me you've painted this beautiful picture of a kind of melancholy adolescence uh adolescent out in the water Meadows if how would you describe yourself during that time or how might someone who knew you have described yourself describe to you oh gosh well I think they would have thought I was a bit um uh precious really they would have thought I was too interested in poy or I mean although that was not scorned at that school I mean that was an important part of things it wasn't a sort of um hearty Sports only kind of atmosphere as I hope I can it was anything but that but I think they would have seen me as a rather sort of a rather shy perhaps a bit sharp um uh bright but um Moody perhaps uh at lesson yes I I don't know I've never asked people but I I IM it's pretty insufferable really because um I I was aware that that I did know an enormous amount as an early age and and um that's a bit offputting really yeah so I listened to an interview in which you mentioned a sense of having a kind of longlasting lack of confidence or the confidence being sometimes a challenge and I have to confess to you Ian that one of the things that this podcast repeatedly does it challenges my preconceptions about people and uh we'll talk a bit later about tribalism and polarization and the sort of quite left hosic mental shortcuts that we use to categorize people and I thought you know all Souls fellow boarding school psychiatrist male of course he hasn't got a problem with confidence um could you say partly as schooling me as I repent for these preconceptions could you say a little bit about that thread in your life yes I think it was a very strong one at Winchester um so it won't be interesting to most of your listeners but there is a big difference in culture between Winchester and say Eaton in Eaton and it's a great gift actually um at least to the person themselves uh people are taught very much to have confidence in themselves to believe in themselves and so forth we were taught almost the exact opposite to doubt ourselves all the time and uh in Greek there is a way in which things are argued in which you have two particles men and de and it means and you start men on the one hand and de on the other so everything was on the one hand and on the other and it this was the way we were taught to think so as soon as we Express something we were to question it and to see if there wasn't something to be said for the opposite point of view so actually that was drilled into me from a very early age that seeing both sides of a question is incredibly important and I wish that was part of more people's education because it could save a lot of unpleasantness and violence and aggression and anger and resentment and so forth um so that was it but also I cannot account for it my parents did not in any way undermine me they rather supported me uh and and would have given me confidence and at school I certainly wasn't told I was not good enough for anything like that but I've always gone through life with the you know what they call the Imposter syndrome I I I'm aware of how little I know and um so you sort of you feel like you're skating on thin ice all the time and you can never have enough knowledge of an area so when I'm writing I'm drilling down and gathering in and trying to make sure that what I'm saying is grounded on something that that is very hard to refute but I I i' I'm a shy person but I've developed a Persona as many shy people do for performing and um it's interesting to me as as a psychiatrist that some of the people who had what's now diagnosed with social phobia in the past they just have been said to be rather a shy retiring person um often take jobs that involve them being on stage or or being a DJ is another famous one but You' think you'd have to have a lot of confidence to do these things but actually it's a kind of way of of performing which is which is not too threatening and when you were at Winchester and going to Chapel twice a day sometimes and listening to been listening to a lot of um talis's Lamentations this week uh it's been in my ears did you you know coming from a non-religious or not explicitly religious family did you feel drawn to Christianity to God did you what was the kind of Journey around that for you and your teams no I I I was drawn very much uh so much so that I was pretty certain that what I wanted to do after school was to study Theology and be ordained and then go into a monastery I mean that was that was definitely my ambition um it was based on very little experience of life and um as soon as I had a little I repented me of this this idea and um good thing too I I I say for me and for the monastery um I I'm a bit of a rebel uh um I don't like to just take things because somebody says so um so I'm often adopting another position from the one that's fashionable in in order to see what's been lost here and to recover the valuable in it uh and I often say that I'm the believer amongst Skeptics but I'm the skeptic amongst Believers that I often think well yes but hang on you know so my I I've never been one of those people who has 100% certainty about anything in the spiritual and religious realm um I'd go so far as to say that you know I admire and envy people who have that certainty but I think there should be a bit of a question mark over it because these are not really Realms unless one has a very very convincing and undeniable personal experience that just absolutely convinces one this is not an area in which 100% certainty can be had indeed it's a matter of faith and it wouldn't be faith if it could be certain faith is a matter of having trust in something and trust is part of a relationship and Trust can be upheld fulfilled or it can be betrayed and so I see whatever it is as a two-way relationship between between God I I say the word in that slightly hesitant way because the word God Is So surrounded by by uh assumptions and images that I think are are damaging and I'd want to distance myself from but nonetheless in the end one has to call it that um God the divine the sacred realm whatever that that it is something that is responsive um to to us um that we are called to respond to yet that it is always a relationship that it is in fact to do with love and love is another very powerful thing that can be reciprocated or can be lost so I think that it's a good way to think um sorry I may have wandered off the question there but no I love it and I um I'm about to wonderand off as well so who knows if this will stay in but I am I have been WR trying to write a chapter on God myself which I just finished before I started reading your chapter the sense of the sac and the way I got round that um is for most of my book the word God is in square brackets and um and then I got to you and you started talking about a nonword we need we need an unword we need a word that N word and you know trying to find those linguistic signals like you know Orthodox Jews not saying the name or we need to find some way to signal that you can't drop this into a conversation casually and expect that it doesn't drag with it this this kind of Semitic baggage um that will be setting off you know existential that's right fireworks in the person who's receiving it and just I very much valued um yes uh that on his wrestle but I will try and stay on track and we'll come back to it um okay um tell me um so you said you thought you would study Theology and go be a monk but that's not what happened what how did you study end up studying English instead well um in order to get into Oxford in those days I don't know if it's still true you had to sit an exam and you had to sit it in some school subject and uh theology wasn't a school subject so instead I thought well I I like English literature um and I'll I'll do that so I I did the examine that I was called for interview uh and uh my interviewers were John Bailey who's better known as the husband of Irish Murdoch um but was a very brilliant writer and critic in his own right and uh Christopher tolken the son of JRR who was to be my Anglo-Saxon tutor wow and um there were also a couple of philosophers Anthony Quinton and a theologian Gary Bennett uh and they they said you can't do um Theology and philosophy which is what I'd applied to do because I I wasn't really interested in theology if it was mainly about the Bible I was interested in theology it was mainly philosophical Theology and I also wasn't interested in philosophy politics and economics which was the obvious alternative but Oxford because I really hadn't and still have very little um interest in politics and economics I'm mainly interested in the kind of philosophy which has room in it for God so Theology and philosophy look like prec prely the course but it had only been set up that year and it wasn't yet an honors degree and they all said no you can't do a non-honors degree you need to do a degree in which you can you know show your strength so um either I think you need to do theology or you need to do English and I wasn't at that stage sure enough that I just wanted to do theology I really wanted that philosophy because I've always really been basically interested in philosophy even when I was a school boy and so I I did English they said come and do English and and and they they gave me a scholarship and I went and did English um and I enjoyed it very much but I didn't really want to go on with it forever because I liked literature so much that I didn't want to spend my whole life as I sometimes say operating on my friends you know it I I wanted to have a different relationship with literature and uh as soon as I got my degree um I was encouraged by John Bailey I'd never heard of it but to sit the All Souls College examination which I it's amazing what you don't know I mean I was in new college right next door to it I just knew there was a funny college there that had only nons in it and was rather weird um but he said no no go and sit this exam so I did and amazingly I got a fellowship there which gave me seven years to do what I liked and I had provisionally arranged to do a doctorate in uh late 18th and early 19th century literature but Derek parfit the philosopher was very kind man and he took me under his wing really and he said you um you shouldn't do uh something like that you can do a doctorate anywhere but you've been given something very special which is s years to do exactly what you like and he said instead why don't you read widely around things that interest you go to different seminars in different faculties and decide what you want to do which I did and in the process I'm thinking about literature I I I came to the the conclusion that there was something wrong with the way we processed literature in the in the academic world um and in brief um I I thought of works of literature not as something clever for critics to show off in relation to it was a sort of terrible um feeling that critics knew more than the author they were criticizing they worked from a superior position in which they saw what the author himself never saw and um and often the work of artart the poem the novel the play was really more like a trampoline on which the critic could do acrobatics and show off how clever he was but distracted attention from the actual work which required a patient close openness for the work to speak and so I wrote a book called against criticism which was then published by Faber in my 20s um and that was uh really on what we do wrong with literature which was to take something that really meant something to the person who wrote it wanted to communicate with other human beings that was absolutely unique in its nature if it was good if it was second R and mediocre then it could be yes rather just an example of bad something but if it was a great poem or a great play it couldn't possibly be substituted by anything else that's the first thing second thing was that it was an embodied statement it wasn't just a bunch of ideas it was something that worked on you physically and emotionally when you read it in much the way that you know music does and and the third thing was the ignor ignoring of context so when you take a phrase out and transliterate it if you like into Pros um it means something different from what it meant when it was embodied in the plan and so I I I thought there's something wrong with this and I I thought it was about the Mind Body problem essentially that in other words we we were entirely sble in the way we approached it whereas in fact it asked for something else from us and um I went to the Mind Body um problem seminars in the philosophy faculty and I just didn't find them at all satisfactory because they were just too disembodied so I thought I better do yes I know and and so what I really conceived was um it came from two places one was I wanted to understand how when something changes in the brain it changes the mind of the person and how when something changes in the mind of somebody it can have bodily effects they can develop diseases that are based on a psychological problem so this relationship seem to be much more fertile and i' you know just come across Sax's Awakenings at that point uh and that was his greatest work and to me it was wonderful because it combined the ability to see individual cases as individuals but to see what general truth could be recovered from them and I thought I want to be something like this yes and so I went to the Medical Faculty in Oxford and said I want to do medicine I was 28 so 10 years older than most never straight out of school and they said yes yes of course you can but you'll have to go to the um you have to go to get your a level you know um and I I've just been a fellow of All Souls for seven years and I thought well I don't really want to do that so at the time I'm sorry this is just you asked for a bit of autobiography and I'm I went to Southampton University which had just been set up by somebody from Oxford who decided that what we needed was a medical training which brought together the humanities and Science and and it wanted also to Encompass the possibility of people turning to Medicine slightly later not just as a well you're doing well at chemistry so you better become a doctor but somebody who' actually lived for a decade or so and thought no no I really want to be a doctor and the second place in which this idea came to me because it was almost like the equivalent of my wish to be ordained or whatever it was I I'm afraid in a corny way I did see being a doctor as a way of of devoting oneself of serving others and I think vocation is the opposite of Cory Ian and the fact that we feel like we have to apologize for it is a bit of a tragedy it is a bit of a tragedy and it tells us something about the age in which we live but in any case so that that's what I did I rent studied medicine um did a bit of Neurology uh and neuro neuros surgery in a very low level and then went to the morly and um and that the rest is well not quite but the rest is history yes gosh in so much in there it's making me think about how we read scripture and that I want to I want I imagine someone who's already written the against criticism for scripture you know don't dissect it into dry doctrines just let it work on work on you um I want to hear about the time when you were working in Psychiatry and uh you know uh having great success in this second career essentially and the hemisphere hypothesis this sense that there are different modes of attention um that the different hemispheres of the brain have and that that impacts much more than um has been thought in the past I'd love to hear as you were kind of you know building essentially on against criticism and and bringing in all these disciplines and this was emerging in you how obvious it was that this was your project you know that this was the thing that you needed to say in the world or whether there were times where you thought this is too big I need to go at one small area or no one's going to take me seriously I'm just going to read a bit from the beginning of I can't remember which of your books but it says something like you know this is the book about the nature of reality the cosmos morality Consciousness and God you just like what was it like coming to realize that that's what you needed to write oh well there are two things two different ways appropriately one is that in a sense they had always been what I was interested in and therefore it wasn't that they came to me um since my teens I had found these Concepts as I've really already mentioned very important how I came back to them at that time uh is is a is a different story and in and I never saw where I was going looking forwards but I can see where I was going looking backwards and of course it's famous that we we make sense of a route we followed as though it had a kind of Direction afterwards but it may be that actually there is a kind of Direction uh at work but just not one of which one's fully conscious I I I somehow needed this foot in the both camps of the mind and the body of the you know dealing with with human beings in the sense that medicine enables one to be part of their their lives and their embodied existence and help them with that and also be in this more rarified realm and um being an academic by by disposition and a philosopher really and all my all my um teens and adult life I went to The Institute of Psychiatry when I got to the morle and said I want to do some research they said what do you want to research into and I said I want to research into how children develop a concept of time I still think this is a fascinating topic and the person who uh interviewed me who was a quite well-known psychologist um looked at me and her eyes glazed over and she said come and clone the p450 receptor um and I said I don't want to clone the p450 receptor as part of a research team that's what they wanted some A New Pair of Hands who would be the dogs body on the team where they had a project to clone the p450 receptor I wanted to do my own research and I realized that the only way to do this actually because I I I was so much going after philosophical things that the mainstream psychi are not interested was to was to plow my own Furrow and almost by accident I happened to go one day to a lecture by John ing who was an older um colleague uh well uh I was still in training he was a consultant uh and a lecturer at The Institute um and he was giving a talk based on a book he just written published by o called the WR C Hemisphere and psychiatric disorders and I suppose it was um an Eureka moment for me it wasn't just that um I like the general drift of what he was saying there were three things that struck me very forcibly at the time which was that he said that the left hemisphere understands more literal language and the right hemisphere alone understands metaphor irony tone of voice the manner in which things are said secondly it understands unique cases whereas the right sorry the left hemisphere tends to have already aggregated whatever it is into a category and and thirdly that the right hemisphere was just more in touch with the body than the left and I can expand on that but I've done that in other places and I won't spend time on it now but those three things really um struck me very forcibly because in a way they were the three things I'd found that was wrong with the academic approach to works of art specifically works of literature but it applies right across the board of course um and after the lecture I went up to John who's very humble and and um not at all one of these um ambitious academics um but was a very thoughtful man and he said uh I'm glad you're interested and I said well I wrote this book again SCU I gave him a copy he said fascinating come and work with me and do help me with some research so I was the beneficiary of some work he'd been doing for a long time on hemisphere differences and he unlike almost anybody else had spent a lot of time sitting at the bedside of people who' had um right hemisphere insult as we say I a stroke or an injury or a tumor and how this had changed lives in a way that um the hurried doctor wouldn't notice so much because they certainly noticed after a left hemisphere stroke the person couldn't move their right hand often couldn't speak this is the kind of stuff that's so bondor that even the average medic can spot it but the other sorry no disrespect to my colleagues who are in general a very intelligent Bunch but um no the the the after a right hemisphere stroke actually much more of the world has gone and It's oddly enough much harder to rehabilitate somebody after the right hemisphere stroke than after a left and uh this struck me as absolutely fascinating we we produce a couple of papers I think together and then I got the opportunity to go and do research at John's Hopkins in Baltimore where we were researching on asymmetries in the brain I was already interested in asymmetry from talking to John and this was in to do with schizophrenia and again I won't go into the detail but it was about the importance of the normal asymmetry in in the brain how this is lost in schizophrenia and sometimes reversed in schizophrenia and how this results in a very different way of looking at the world and around that time I also was um advised by John to read a book called madness and modernism um by uh Lou sass a very distinguished psychologist at rutas and that book in again a nutshell showed that the were EXT extraordinary parallels between the experiences reported by people with schizophrenia and works of art since about 1910 so modernism and they're so striking and they're so deep and interesting that it couldn't possibly be just a coincident but on the other hand we couldn't all have got schizophrenia suddenly so it was something else what was that something else it was inability to incorporate into one's vision of the world what is offered to us by the right hemisphere in other words a vision of the world based on how the left hemisphere sees it which is very bizarre as much Modern Art of course became yes and so that's the story really I I then thought right this is so important and I I'd had so much experience in neurology of patients who had typically had left-sided or right-sided symptoms um and certain diseases certain conditions certain syndromes are known to be preponderantly Left sided or right sided and I just thought that in itself was very interesting why and that got me into thinking there's going to be some big differences here and of course there are they just weren't the ones that people had talked about earlier in in the 60s and' 70s and all my colleagues you know who had my interest at heart begged me not to take this path they said you you've got a promising career don't do this nobody will take you seriously if you talk about hemisphere differences it's all baloney it's all pop psychology don't do this but in fact I had the confidence to carry on because I kept finding things that were just too interesting and couldn't be dismissed in this way yes I'm GNA ask you to do something which always seems a a bit violent because of the three and almost detailed complex multi-disciplinary books you've written about it and quite left hemispheric which is to ask you to to summarize what are the key differences in the way the left and right hemisphere tends to the world yes first of all on left hemispheric um it seems to me that if you're going to win people to a point of view you have to do it by speaking the language that they understand and so people say you certainly Ed your left hemisphere I always say well of course I use my left hemisphere it's my second favorite Hemisphere and without it I wouldn't really be performing very well at all so I rely on my ability to think clearly to construct an argument into martial data the short version of what happens is this it seems that the fundamental difference and this exists in all the neural networks and that we know going back hundreds of millions of years uh is that creatures have to solve the problem of how to eat without being eaten they have to be able to focus on something that they can grab and get very quickly for this they need detailed precise attention to a very small thing that they need to manipulate um but that's not the only attention they need they need at the same time to have a broad would open Vigilant attention for the Predator who will make them its lunch while they're getting theirs and more than that it needs to be open to everything to its mate to its Offspring to everything that's going on in the world and in a sound fite the left hemisphere has evolved in all of us to serve well I say all of us but I mean in general throughout the history of the evolution of this Arrangement the left hemisphere has evolved to be the one that helps us manipulate the world and the right hemisphere is the one that helps us understand the world make sense of it because of these two different kinds of attention the left hemisphere which sustains this very very narrow perhaps three degrees out of the 360 targeted attention to something it already knows it want the world is made up of things that are familiar known unchanging unmoving isolated um decontextualized individual inanimate that one really stuck with me yes and it's it's true and in the right hemisphere it sees a world in which everything is ultimately connected to everything else nothing is ever finally certain nor completely fixed it's on the move all the time that often what is important there is something that is implicit in the context and is ruined if you decontextualize um it in touch with embodied feeling with emotion with the physicality uh of our existence um and this Vision also has place for the unique individual and it's an animate world and just to gloss that you can in a perfectly painless procedure now um suppress one or other hemisphere for 20 minutes at a time and when you do this if you suppress the right hemisphere people see things that they would normally call living as just mechanical whereas if you suppress the left hemisphere they see things that we would probably think of as inanimate like the sun as a living thing so it is quite interesting and the other couple of things that are very very important and they they they one of them sound fascinating and but it's not as important as the other that first one is that the left hemisphere is very full of self-confidence because it knows so little effectively it thinks it knows everything and the right hemisphere on the other hand is much less certain and has a much um more modest opinion of its capacities whereas the left hemisphere has a greatly inflated optimism about what it is and what it can do uh but the last thing which is really really crucial that it must not might not grab people's attention in the same way is the difference between the presence of something in a representation so the right hemisphere is able to deal with the presence of something as it comes into being for us um actually just being there with it and actually experiencing that presence whereas the left hemisphere takes it and makes it a representation literally something that is present after it's no longer present actually represented and it's the difference between um a two-dimensional depiction of something and the embodied thing that is there so for example an image is static it's fixed it's two-dimensional whereas the lands Cape that his image is everything else that is left out and um a quick and dirty way of putting it is the left hemisphere deals in the map and the right hemisphere in the terrain that is mapped and you have um you described something which sounds like it could be healthy and useful when we're functioning with both H hemospheres in their proper and you talk about the fact they do take over functions of each other it's not kind of you know um no hermetically sealed but not all I think the the reason that your work has been so influential and so moving for lots of people including myself is um the kind of consequences of an a culturally embodied imbalance that we are effectively continually strengthening because the brain is plastic we are using the left hemispheric form of attention and then reinforcing the left hemispheric form attention and then denigrating dismissing right hemispheric forms of attention in ways that change fundamentally our experience of being in the world could you narrate just a little bit of the consequences of that for me yes well as you say the left time here is not to be dismissed it's very important it's a tool much as it is itself interested in tools but it's got to be as it were in the service of something beyond that as lesing said what is the use of Youth I mean if you just have use but use for what and if the answer is only well use there's got to be something else like the famous goodness Beauty and Truth the phonic virtues so we need it but it needs always to be under the the superintendence of the right hemisphere that sees more and in a way it should be acting as a functionary or something rather like a desktop computer I I resist the equation of anything to do with the brain with a computer but in this one respect it's slightly like that in that it's very good at carrying out procedures rapidly but it's not good at understanding what those procedures mean or imply so it must take material do a useful preparation and then give it back to the right hemisphere which then incorporates it into the full picture but what happens is that as it were the normal passage from left to right is then interrupt from sorry from right let me rephrase that what happens is that the normal passage from right to left stops now at the left hemis and is not taken back into the right hemisphere in other words we think what the left hemisphere shows once it's broken the thing down is the reality but having broken it down into bits it will seem meaningless it will seem uh unattractive and senseless and it it it's lost all its meaning if you take a piece of music that is profoundly moving and just turn it into a bunch of notes and perhaps catalog all the notes and say well we have 37 flats and we've got this is not going to help you understand the piece of music because it's all in what has been lost in breaking it up into bits it's all in the what I call the betweenness not the space between but actually the construction of relations and that's another thing that I can only just throw out but I believe and argue in this book the matter of things that relations are are the the foundation of everything and that things are not primary then have to be related but relationships are primary and the things we call things emerge from a network of relations now if we if we if we lose sight of [Music] this what happens is that we start to view a theory which is extremely thin stuff as more real than experience we start to see the map as more real than the land in which people live that appears on the map as just a few lines we lose all the subtle stuff all the stuff that comes the skills that come from experience it's the downgrading of experience the downgrading of one's intuitions the downgrading of one's judgments uh as though the only thing that can VA validate or verify anything is an argument inevitably based on things that have been isolated decontextualized and so forth because if it's not based on that then once again again one finds oneself appealing to people's judgments and their intuitions and so on which which we're being taught to disregard to there's a whole industry of psychologists who move around businesses making a small fortunate out of telling people they shouldn't trust their intuitions but as you know in the matter of things I have three whole chapters uh on intuition and it's important place um and although it's quite true that intuitions can sometimes mislead us as I say there are optical illusions I can show you that you can't believe are right but they are but after seeing one one doesn't say well in that case I'm going to close my eyes from now on I'm never going to rely on eyesight because it can sometimes deceive me and the the cases in which it can sometimes deceive you in inition are a consequence of it being 99% right if something is 99% right most of the time it will not cover those very occasional things when it's not right but to just Chuck it out is to become a because it's intuition that makes one intelligent and one what intelligence means is understanding so we we're making ourselves fools we're following very black and white uh positions because the left hemisphere wants decision now it doesn't want ambiguity it doesn't like uncertainty because remember it's the one that's grabbing and once again look is that a seed or is it a pebble you can't tell me it could be one or the other I'm going to get it and so the left hemisphere is quick and dirty it's not the one that is more reflective more ramach chandan vs ramachandran very very well-known distinguished neuroscientist calls the right hemisphere The Devil's Advocate because it's not the one that jumps to conclusions it goes yeah but it might be this whereas the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions all the time so it has a quick and diry way of thinking it tends to put people into categories and everything into categories so um you know you are what you are by virtue of being as you started off by reflecting I I'm worse than you said I'm not only um a male but I'm old and I'm white you know Christy we better not listen to him so you know it's this categorization which is so healers and yet at the same time we're being encouraged to think flexibly and diversely but we're not we're being channeled into very very rigid very foolish ways of thinking and then having battles with one another over it instead of going well that's very interesting you see it that way but what would you say to this you know and having a proper discussion that's what the civilization is grown up to enable us to do it's what education is for and we're throwing that away it seems to me by a very cut and DED simplistic decisions and ways of looking at things yes and if I may just add there'll be a growth of bureaucracy and um an enormous burgeoning of bureaucracy which works according to purely left hemisphere principles algorithms based on categories it never takes account of the unique case and the other thing is AI which again is based on general principles sorry let me no I mean as The Listener will be able to hear this this connects to everything and so knowing uh where to focus but I think what's coming to mind is I I I sort of want to tell you a little story about something that happened to me recently um because I was on the radio was on radio 3 free thinking with Daniel dennet um and Philip Goff um and um yes so radio for kind non-uk listeners radio 3 is probably the most hbr radio station that we have and freeth thinking is amongst the most highbrow shows on it um and uh we were asked on to talk about meaning Consciousness and God and uh yeah uh Daniel dennet one of the most famous atheist philosophers in the world you know him and Dawkins uh um Horseman of the apoc Apocalypse um and Philip got very interesting kind of consciousness psychist some sort of sits in between me and Dan dennit in one sense believes that there's Cosmic purpose that the world has um Consciousness that various kind of scientific arguments lead him to believe etc etc but not not a not a theist in the same way that I am and Daniel dennit did what Daniel dennit does which was speak in an incredibly mechanistic way about the world and human beings and use the brain is a computer met because I'd recently been reading you and a bunch of other feminist philosophers who I think are so good have been banging the drum for embodied knowledge and i' reading a lot of black theologians who have been so key at putting emotion and experience and um again embodiment kind of back in the center of theology I I had gone into the conversation quite cow because we live in a left hemispheric world and these were two left hemispheric men and I am not a philosopher I am whatever I am but I felt emboldened to say Dan I think that is disgusting I think that metaphor is disgusting and dehumanizing and um when we get to these questions of the Sacred and Consciousness and meaning left hemispheric ways of thinking come to the end of their usefulness and I asked him at the end do you think it's possible because of your formation that there are some things that you can't see and I don't think I would have been brave enough to ask that question before because my intuitions my experience my voice felt less legitimate than his but I'm not sure that he heard me and I'm not sure that's telling him that the computer metaphor is disgusting was necessarily helpful so forgive me that's long but I'm getting to a question about this divide when those of us who feel an intuition that there is more that there is something deeper that there is a sacred Beyond us that our imagination and our intuition and our emotion and our bodies are as important as our reason or Reason as it is you know thinly defined um what actually helps us see and hear each other how have you found people who might be hostile to the argument that you're making are best able to actually hear it and respond to it so that's um a very good question um first of all um it's interesting that uh I did a piece of research uh some many many years ago on this may not sound relevant but it is on the degrees that young people who had psychotic breakdowns at University were studying for um because a lot of them went through the Morley the bman Morley because it's a you know tertiary referral unit or even quary referral so I I looked at this and I found a very very strong correlation between developing bipolar disorder and studying the humanities and a strong relation very strong relation between studying um engineering and developing schizophrenia and schizophrenia is an example of a world in which the right hemisphere is not really contributing and um it this is a way of saying it's quite interesting that Dan dennit um says that he would have been an engineer if he wasn't a philosopher and by the way the second most um uh populated category after engineering was philosophy so I think a lot of philosophers that I've written in that book slightly tactlessly um do seem to have a very special way of thinking which is an exaggeration of the left hemisphere's way of thinking at the expense of what the right hemisphere would contribute not phenomenologists um they are quite different from this and I think the um uh people like uh jwy and and James and and so on were different again the pragmatist but the modern anglo-american analytic philosophers um seem to have gone down a rabbit hole and what you have flagged up is the importance of metaphor and we only uh understand things by using metaphors so we say oh I see it's like this something we reckon we've already understood but depending on the metaphor we choose we will see different things in it so if I compare um going to um a football match with um doing the football pools and betting on a on a sport I see one thing if I reflect on going to a football match as something more like going to church I will see something else completely going on so how we what metaphor we use really changes the experience we have and the Machine metaphor is pernicious uh machines are things we made and we made them according to our very fallible understanding of what what things um are doing in our bodies and our bodies are not like machines in chapter 12 of the matter with things I put forward eight uh reasons why they're not at all like machines now the further question you ask is how do you get through to these people I think there's two answers to that one is to write a book which I hope is pretty convincing in the sense that it's I I've never found anybody yet who said um your your science space is is flaw because that would involve them in reading 6 to 7,000 papers and and and showing me what was wrong with them um and and that's not really going to be very helpful and so and the other thing is um arguing for it in in in a as far as I can a sort of rational way well if you understand this then you understand that let me take you by steps and as it will take you to where I want you to see a different vision and most people are able to do this but there are always some people who can't and one thing that Psychiatry teaches one is that one cannot help everyone so in order to be helped people have to be willing to be helped to a degree there are certain conditions where they're not able to give um informed consent the mental health Act deals with that and they get treatment anyway but but really there are people who will never see certain things and I believe Dan Dennis is one of those people um he's a very very brilliant man obviously um but he's also not able to see and things and there are people who can't in in the book I actually um do some uh exposition of um personality types and uh and indeed um the relationship between Autism and an ability to understand or not understand the Divine and on the whole people who are Autistic or have personalities with um certain characteristics as I I list are more likely not inevitably so but are more likely to find it impossible to understand the Divine gosh there's so much in there I want to um uh land us somewhere about what might this teach us about divides in general we live in a time when we our default formation is to polarization tribalism you know our natural homophilia our natural preference for people like us is continually being reinforced by the technology that we use and the news and a kind of ongoing theme of this project is wanting to find ways to resist that as a spiritual practice essentially what might the hemispheric hypothesis have to um I mean it it helps explain a lot but how I guess how might this um how might your work help those of us who are wanting to resist that growing tribalism and polarization and is there anything that you personally do any practices that you use to keep yourself healthy in this way I think the first thing is to know to see what's happening because I think a lot of people are have no context in which to set their unease with I think a lot of people would agree with us that there's something wrong um but they don't know what it is and I suppose what I aim to do in the matter with things which is my final word I will never write a book of that length or magnitude can um it it is an attempt to provide a wholly new philosophy of life to see the world a different way and and this is not really a way of just saying by my book but I I don't think it would do any harm to you so if you read it because I Tred to explain that what we're doing is seeing only a very very partial and degraded version of reality we've been trained by the culture that we that has evolved since the Industrial Revolution particularly but really also so earlier than that with parts of the Enlightenment to ignore um they had value in themselves but they helped us to be hubristic to be um arrogant and and that has made us think that we understand everything and we know what we're doing but we're really actually more like the sort of apprentice in the famous Fable who knew to get how to get things started but didn't know what it was he started or how to stop it this is where we are at the moment um I think that one of the things that would help with the sacred specifically is to see that from the descriptions I've given and I won't recap them of the world CED up by the left hemisphere and the right if you are buying into the left hemisphere world of certainties isolation uh nothing unique categories abstractions disembodiment in animacy you're not going to understand what we're talking about here because it all comes indirectly it comes through through things that don't speak to us in the literal language of a dishwasher manual but in fact speak to us through things like poetry through music through narrative through myth um through rituals all these things that if you are able to open yourself to them and experience them you will know you are contacting something at a much deeper level you'll actually experience you know your body responding to it even if it's only to feel the hair on the back of your head stand up when you feel these things now so that's one thing um the way we think now is directly opposed to any way of encompassing the sacred and I rather blame I'm afraid um the church I I mean in a way they were in a cond they saw congregations dropping how can we entice people back by making it all more mundane and more like life at home and more simple and more popular but actually what people crave is not more of what's going on at home because that's exactly what they finding is not satisfying they want to be told there's something here that will take patience silence prayer uh some singing and going through rituals and then you may see it and you won't get it by sitting outside it and going well you do this you do that is I always say it's like learning to swim by sitting on the bank with with with a book and say okay now I understand I'll get in the water and swim you have to get in the water and swim to understand swimming and I'm afraid the spiritual life is like that um other things that one can do I'm afraid I just become very Bal here but I think that the two things that apart from the obvious thing of listening to music and and playing and reading poetry and and so on which I I probably ought to do more of I'm just so busy a lot of the time that I I I don't but I do try to make time for two things one is mindfulness which is really about steing the left hemisphere it's about trying to get the left hemisphere out of the picture and enabling the right hemisphere to speak and it people think because this is the left hemisphere way of thinking that we make things happen let's do this and it'll happen but often it's not doing that Ena something to happen because what it is you are doing is itself part of the problem even if the doing is trying to achieve you know a more spiritual approach what you need to do is stop doing many of the things you're doing and listen and in the silence that you create in the creative space that you bring about something may come to you and I can almost guarantee it will come to you if you have created that open space properly and I'm not going but where is it I need an intuition now I've got to do you know you can't do that so um and I often say it's like a gardener you know Gard can't make a plant and can't even make it grow but what it can do is it can create the circumstances in which the plant will flourish or the circumstances in which it won't and we've created the circumstances in which the spiritual life can't flourish we therefore need to begin reversing many of the things that we do that get in the way and this is not unlike Psychiatry so for example when somebody comes with a problem if you're a very naive and um inexperienced psychiatrist as we all were once um and I did this I used to sort of say after seeing I I had a pretty good idea of what this person needed to start doing and I made the mistake of telling them and they said oh no no because they weren't ready to hear that and they said oh I've tried that or something and then I would say well all right but let's do something else and and then a year later they'd come back to me and say I've had an Insight I've had a revelation I've changed and I'm much better and then they would tell me what they were doing and it was exactly what I had recommended but they hadn't been able to hear so it's no good my saying you should do the following things for two reasons one is that people won't be able to hear it because if they did they be already doing it and the the other is that I would narrow down the field of what can be done to my prescriptions you know and I don't want to do that I I believe people will come up with their own answers which will be imaginative and things I haven't thought of so it's not really about prescribing things to do it's about prescribing if prescribing is even the right word it's recommending people to invoke a certain disposition towards the world a dis position that is marked by gentleness and compassion by a sense of awe and wonder and some humility uh not in some ghastly self-abasing way but just recognizing that you know as William James said our ignorance is an ocean our knowledge is a drop and that's still true 100 years later we think we know so much more but what we've done is develop a lot of techniques for putting into practice what we know or don't know and I'm afraid our ignorance will be played out upon the world very powerfully unless we're able to get back into a vision of the Divine and the sacred that would would lead us to see that there are things we're missing there are things that we need there are things that can flourish but they they will draw us there not by recommendations of the following bullet points but by just being there I sometimes think of the face of Christ as um displayed in in that amazing um painting in the Church of Savior of for which I actually um reproduced in the master and hstry it was one of the most electrifying experiences of my life I think it's it's 12th 13th century I I can't remember maybe even 14th century but it's it's ancient and there's a picture of Christ and his mother and it's in this ruin Church in Istanbul and and I remember going in there and just feeling I'm even just talking about it I can feel something inside me that is it it was just so so rolent of so much it seemed to say everything without saying anything that I can report and so I think images like that I have quite a lot of icons I don't pay enough attention to them but things that that speak to one of something Beyond even if it begins with spending more time in the natural world because I think the natural world is an embodiment of the Divine it's a way in which the Divine is expressed in matter but again that takes us to another conversation what is matter and is it indeed separate from Consciousness and in brief my answer is they are not separate they aspects of one in the same underlying reality but that's another talk to be continued I hope very much Ian Miguel Christ thank you so much for being a guest on the sacred thank you very much Elizabeth it's been a great pleasure so gosh lots to chew on in that conversation as I knew there would be and lots of areas that I really wanted to get to and that we just didn't have time for so I do hope we'll be able to invite I to come back on um but we obviously started with the sacred and at the end of the matter with things which is Ian's most recent book is this very long chapter called the sense of the Sacred and he's spoken elsewhere about how that was the hardest chapter to write it took him a year it's the longest chapter in the book I believe um and so I knew going into the interview having read that um and you're going into the interview having read that chapter uh carefully that it would be something he was prepared and happy to talk about but wanting to be very careful around he's both uh a great proponent of um the word spiritual sometimes seems helpful and sometimes unhelpful but a kind of and maybe the sacred is the better word for it that the a sense of the Sacred a sense of the Divine a sense that there is something Beyond us and our narrow human lives it's kind of vital for our flourishing is vital for us being fully human um but he is aware as am I how easy it is to speak about those things badly and so um he does it very very carefully and it was you know salutary for a words based person to be reminded again of how limited language is um in this area and one of the things I kept coming back to us preparing for this interview is the question sort of why didn't you just write a poem and even that you know it's words the the the forms of attention which lead us into this more balanced more Humane more whole kind of life that Ian is um proposing that we uh that we need to attend to um we haven't our formation hasn't given us the tools to know how to think talk create contemplate in that way so we kind of scrabbled around trying to put something around the sacred into Words which is a suitably humbling thing to do I really I really valued getting this snapshot of Ian as a teenager as a child and a teenager at school and it's really interesting to me that he came from non-religious parents I speak to a lot of people who are having a kind of metaphysical midlife crisis I I'm in the strange position of thinking that there is a huge spike in spiritual openness happening that lots and lots of people want to talk to me me privately or in public about um Faith about the Divine about meaning um but for a lot of people for whom that's taken um a more religious or explicitly Christian form they are there's a sense of homecoming they are coming from something in their childhood that they rejected and are kind of finding their way back to it's interesting to me that Ian although I'm not sure that's how he described his path didn't really have that in his childhood but what he did have was this um real sense of a kind of spiritual Mentor at school this housem that he's spoken about as both funny and uh and serious about the Divine about the sacred about um the good and I just feel so glad that Ian went to that school it it this this whole process this whole interview has made left me thinking so much about formation which is something I write and think about a lot you know the repeated practices the cultures that we're part of the people that we surround ourselves with are what make us we are formed through those things um often unconsciously I'm trying to be more conscious about my own formation the way in my language my soul is growing and what is it growing towards who is it growing with um and it was so interesting to hear the ways that the formation of Ian school left such a lasting Legacy on him and he was able to be this it sounds like very you know he said something about shy but spiky which I kind of can so see you know a bit precious a bit too into poetry and this tension in him he said you know I knew from a very young age that I knew a vast amount and yet has struggled with confidence and imposter syndrome and because of the culture of the school knowing how much he didn't know you know that's a strange place to live I think most of us like to settle and maybe this is a very left hemisphere feric thing you know we we like to settle on um a binary something clear you know either broadly we know stuff or proboly we don't know stuff but Ian's always trying to walk these kind of middle middle ways even even even in his own sense of himself was helpful as often it is in this podcast who admit my prejudices I hope listeners find this helpful it I know it sometimes just makes me look like an idiot and um I don't love doing it but I think naming that we all have these um tribal boxes these signifiers that these mental shortcuts that we Ed to put people in categories and again and again they're shown to be broadly useless uh at least when you're encountering a real person that my like as he said you know pick me up on it like uh white male um academic man equals no problems with confidence you know these these um these scripts that we write for ourselves uh part of the project of the podcast just challenging myself on them and sticking to that thing which is really becoming a theme this series which is rigorous particularity Unapologetic particularity approaching each person in front of me as a complicated fragile beautiful foolish um person in my language an image error of the Divine so yes he said no one will be interested in this thing about different School cultures but actually because I'm English and we're obsessed with class I am interested that the school culture of eon is so different from the school culture of Winchester that you can be taught in ways that send you out into the world with the confidence to become a prime minister and attempt to steer us through a global crisis seemingly on um you know jokes or you can go into the world with a sense of how much you don't know with a sense that there is always the other side of things and again of course that comes back to formation and um the way we allow ourselves to be shaped interesting about English he didn't want to spend his life operating on his friends I think a lot of us who've done English and Humanities degrees have felt that that some and even possibly in the past dominant models of criticism require us to emotionally disengage for from the very thing that Drew us into the subject in the first place that we are supposed to dissect the um artwork in order to understand it and that that gets to us somehow a higher form of understanding than just experiencing or contemplating or being moved by a form of artwork um yeah it it's connecting with the interview we did the series with James Marriott about criticism and literary criticism and he's very much a champion for literary criticism as some of the highest form of writing and I really think it can be but maybe only when it is um not trying to reduce something to the sum of its parts but that contemplative form of attention that says to others um look you know look listen see contemplate don't exploit attend to don't dis dissect you know just be in the presence of this thing um and let your attention your right hemispheric forms of attention work on it vocation it was really uh it's always really helpful for me who has been broadly downwardly or at least uh orthogonally mobile um to hear what I suspected which was that Ian's colleagues basically said don't do this you know you've got very successful second careers Accord consultant psychiatrist um don't go after brain hemispheres it's discredited it's pop science you know it's not important anyway uh because the most interesting people doing the most interesting work often seem to me to have had to be quite Brave courage is a big word for me how do we build enough courage to uh to follow our intuitions to pull the threads to use our gift in the world for the common good um and how often you're having to resist other forms of formation you're having to choose against established paths in order to do [Music] that yeah formation that the thing that we didn't get to talk about in detail was um this phrase that comes out a lot in Ian's work which is attention as a moral act and it really it really speaks to me about what we attend to what and how we choose to pay attention completely changes what we're able to see completely changes what we're able to encounter it literally builds the world for us and so you know in this project repeatedly and consciously and intentionally paying attention to different types of people who I might not have chosen to sit next to on the bus or might not have had a reason to encounter otherwise listening to the stories of people whose lives have been very different from mine which is basically everyone um changes what I see continually reshapes my understanding of what a human is of what a life is of what someone who is you know in this political box or this ideological category um their what their experience of Might being in the world might be um yeah just more and more the the the great privilege of stewarding our attention we were in the middle of the um Middle East crisis the current Middle East crisis as we're recording and I'm so aware that how I use social media and how I choose to receive news of what's going on there is not a neutral decision that that is not a functional pragmatic decision that it will it will form me it will shape me it will literally shape my neurobiology it will form my soul it will um trigger me into reactions depending on who I listen to and how I listen and when I listen and so I'm thinking deeply about what is a healthy form of attention to tragedy what is the kind of Lament and solidarity that is required for suffering and what is not you know what kinds of attention are actually unproductive unhelpful unfruitful both for those that are suffering and for my own own formation my own soul finally I think I asked a question I um have a subsect newsletter uh at more ful alive.com and I wrote an essay about preparing for this interview and how it relates to one of my sacred values which is relationships and I wrote there about this tension of Ian talking about the dangers of left hemispheric forms of attention you know inanimate concrete um no inanimate abstract linear um Parts not holes uh that that he is trying to say we have put too much emphasis on this form of attention and built a world in this way that only values you know outputs and outcomes and goals and money and things and we have not um we have not attended in ways that allow our right hemisphere to do its job basically keeping us fully human reminding us that we are not machines and there is more and that the fundamental logic of the cosmos is relationship but as he says he's done it in a very left hemispheric way he's written a book that is the first book is full of brain scans you know it is um it is a sort of Trojan Horse and I do wonder about it it I'm glad he has and it's very effective but a lot of people and there is there is a gender element here we didn't even get on to a lot of women frankly or people who've kind of been outside the norm um kind of want to go well duh to his work you know not in a dismissive way but in a yes that's what we've been saying you know I I remember um Cole arthury quoting UD Lord to me uh in the very first episode of this series is you know the white fathers say I think therefore I am black mothers which is the poet in us I think the quote says you know the black mothers which is the poet and US says I feel therefore I can be free and it's not that the left hemisphere is thinking and the right hemispheric is feeling you know Ian will be the first to say it's much more complicated than that both can do both but it's the way it's the way they do [Music] it yeah I guess I guess what I wish I'd asked is is there danger in communicating the importance of right hemispheric forms of attention in left hemispheric ways are we not continually strengthening those Pathways rather than letting the value of these contemplative relational intuitive ways of being in the world speak for themselves what would it look like to strengthen those Pathways please let me know I'd be really interested in your thoughts on any episode this episode you can find me at my substat you can find me on Instagram you can find me on Twitter potentially using my attention in unhealthy ways um and you can contact us at all the sacred uh social media addresses as usual you have been listening to the sacred with in Migel Christ I'm Elizabeth Oldfield our production team are Dan Turner and Fiona hanskin we are edited by Drew Hy and music is by Luke Stanley the sacred is a project of a think tank called Theos which works on a wide range of subjects related to Faith identity pluralism is wonderful and it is uh something I'd love you to go check out Theos think tank. co.uk as I said we have a sister podcast reading our times which is a great way to get into the big books of our times and what they are telling us about ourselves and our conception of what a human being is in the meantime I look forward to speaking to you at the next episode and I hope you've enjoyed [Music] listening

Channel: The Sacred

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Id: 2So6GC6OS6E

Length: 82min 39sec (4959 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023