Iain McGilchrist: The Coincidence of Opposites

do thank you everyone i'm sorry a little trouble getting my uh my video to stop there i'm not yet the master of the zoom medium uh though you'd think after a year and a half of covert we would all be great experts it's a uh it's a huge pleasure today to welcome you all to this live lecture with dr ian mcgilchrist i'm stephen blackwood i'm the president of ralston college a new institution of higher education i'm streaming live from the beautiful city of savannah in the state of georgia in the united states i welcome you all here i know we have a wide range of time zones so it's good morning good afternoon or good evening depending on where you are i know that dr ian mcgilchrist needs little introduction we're honored to have him as a visitor of the college he is a psychiatrist a literary scholar a philosopher in the true sense of the term a polymath a man who has learned about many different disciplines and fields of knowledge uh in very deep and interconnected ways and in fact that interconnection is one of the persistent themes of his work that i think is sure to come out today dr mill gilchrist has written a new book which is about to be published it's a landmark uh work or going to be uh it's a very substantial two-volume book called the matter with things and the lecture today is going to be a as it were an introduction to at least some of the themes that are are sketched or not sketched but argued at length in that book his title today is called the coincidence of opposites and those of you who've had the chance perhaps to study philosophy will know that this is an ancient theme going back to the earliest moments of recorded human thinking and i i know that we're all looking forward to see just how dr mcgill christ introduces this to us i wanted to note that he has shared with us a couple of pages of preliminary reading i know that was shared with all of you in advance but it's on our website at www.ralston.ac on the webpage for this event if you haven't had a chance to read that you can do so afterwards all right the format today will be that dr mcgillcrist who to whom i'll turn things over momentarily is going to give us a lecture of somewhere around uh an hour or thereabouts and then we're going to open things up for a conversation and uh audience questions so please feel free to shoot as many questions as you like through the chat uh dr mcguire and i will do our best to get through as many of them as we can and uh to make this as conversational and richly participatory as we can anyway with that said uh dr mcgill christ oh i need to say one more thing and that is that uh you'll see that dr mcgill chris screen is a little um low resolution well i received an email from him just a couple of hours ago saying that on the isle of skye off the northwest coast of scotland where he lives on the talisker bay some of you may know the whiskey talisker if you don't i encourage you to sample it um that there is a torrential rainstorm currently underway a violent bit of weather and because his his internet uh capabilities are mediated by a satellite it is affected by the weather we're independently recording this lecture uh uh in ian's uh uh office there in both video and audio so we anticipate having a high level of of of production in what we can subsequently share as a podcast on youtube but i i uh must uh dr mcgilkins and i both ask for your patience with respect to the what could be some interruptions today um stick with us i know it will be worthwhile and perhaps there's something good in being reminded about the the insurmountable realities of nature that even our confident technology cannot ultimately reliably always tame anyway with that introduction ian what a great pleasure to see you thank you so much for joining us today oh thank you so much stephen and it's been a great honor to be uh accepted as a visitor of rollson college and i wish rolsen college and yourself every conceivable success as it flourishes and goes forward so thank you for inviting me along here tonight as as you hear um i have a a rather oppositional relationship with technology and uh usually it finds ways of frustrating me and tonight it's it's doing so mediated by a good old storm so i'll do my best now as um stephen was mentioning uh i've been spending the last 10 12 years writing a book called the matter with things which is a pun as you can possibly imagine on several levels um and one of the things that we in my view get wrong is that we fail to understand anymore that things and their opposites are not as uh irreconcilable and as far apart from one another as they might seem that may be a product of a number of things the history of philosophy but it's imaged in our love of straight lines the two ends of a straight line you think as far as you project them in one direction they get further and further away from the end of the line in the opposite as we call it direction uh since my teens i've not thought that this was actually the case and that opposites tended eventually to coincide anyway i'll have some reflections to say about this on from a number of uh viewpoints and a few reflections on the current state of things in our society where i believe if we could grasp the idea that opposites do not have this linearly uh irreconcilable relationship we might produce a happier world and a better society what we call opposites are often facets of one and the same thing so i'm going to talk about this from a number of angles and i wanted to start with three quotations which are actually also on the the little piece that i shared with you earlier which relates the most extraordinary iroquois legend the legend uh legend of the onondaga people and i do urge you to read it it was brought to my attention by an anthropologist who commented on the extraordinary number of parallels between it and the thesis of the master and his emissary and i will refer to it very briefly but first of all i want to mention three sayings the first is from a philosopher the second from a physicist and the third from a poet and i find myself in my writing often drawing these three strands together incidentally from cs purse the american pragmatist philosopher a thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist existence lies in opposition existence lies in opposition then from niels bohr it is a hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth so that not only things have this contrary constitution as perce was pointing out but that the things that we see as opposites often are not opposites at a deep level there are many superficial truths that are obviously mutually exclusive either i had milk in my coffee at breakfast time or i didn't and bohr was very willing to accept that but he saw more and more the the deeper you went into the structure of reality the more it was the case that a thing in its opposite could be true at the same time and the third is from the german romantic poet friedrich the heart's wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray and become spirit where it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way another theme that's very important in my work is that of the creative nature of resistance in fact nothing can be created nothing can come into being without resistance as you know if you know anything about my work i have been involved for 30 years or more in researching differences between the two brain hemispheres and these two brain hemispheres illustrate something rather important that they work together but apart they cooperate by opposing one another and that is actually very much like the way nature in general works we've brought into a myth that actually all the history of nature is one of competition but it's as much or more i would argue and many biologists would argue it's more a history of cooperation and the coming together of competition and cooperation produces what i call collaboration and the two hemispheres need to inhibit one another to inform one another they need to stand back and away from one another and at times to work in unison they have an interesting relationship which is oppositional but by no means contradictory and that is really beautifully brought out in the iroquois legend of these two brothers that create the world and they have this difference of stance but one knows more than the other and needs to keep the other one under its aegis under its watchful eye and that is as i argued in the book the master in his emissary the relationship between the right and the left hemisphere so the right hemisphere understands and sees things that the left hemisphere doesn't and that for that reason the left hemisphere should always be in service to the right hemisphere it makes a very good servant but a very poor master everything that exists could be thought of as a form of energy after all one of the most famous equations in the world e equals m c squared tells us that energy and mass are interconvertible energy is always characterized by the coming together of apparent opposites apparent because this is how we've conceived things left hemisphere fashion as in the positive and negative poles of electricity the north and south poles of the magnet or in a quite different sense the merging of male and female gametes in the origin of new life and interestingly if you see cell division under a microscope it looks extraordinary like the work of a magnet with iron filings there are famous illustrations of this and it's been commented on since the middle of the 19th century the best known expression of the idea of complementary opposites is that of the taijitu symbol commonly known as the yin yang symbol and yin yang is probably the most sophisticated expression of an idea that is existent in cultures all over the world from all parts of the world that i know through anthropology there is a myth of two opposite forces that need one another and the fact that it's been somewhat vulgarized it's not a any argument against it any more than the fact that there are mistaken followers of a religion vitiates the importance of that religion but we do live in a world in which we want to try and simplify and this business of the coming together of opposites frustrates that wish to be simple you often hear people of a spiritual bent saying all is one and it sounds wonderful doesn't it it sounds so calming it sounds so deep all is one and it's true but so is it that all is many and now what neither of these truths is a lesser truth than the other indeed one of the ways of looking at the whole creative cosmos is of the continuing unfolding the endless unfolding of individuation out of union not so as to sunder or fragment but so as to enrich that whole so i would say the very drive of the cosmos is about distinction without separation goethe said and goethe to me is one of the all-time greatest minds indeed a true polymath a poet a philosopher a playwright a statesman a scientist a man of enormous wisdom and what he said was dividing the united uniting the divided is the very life of nature this is the eternal sisterly and diastole the eternal coalescence of separation the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live and where our existence is woven a very beautiful and important word that woven about the coming together of different threads in the tapestry or in the net to create something new and we think of this idea as essentially um one that is eastern in origin but as i've just pointed out it's there in the western tradition even goethe at the time of the enlightenment was saying it and in the earliest and in my view greatest of all the greek philosophers heraclitus he said many things that are relevant but i just want to mention two they do not understand he said how a thing agrees at variance with itself it is an attunement turning back on itself like that of the bow and the liar the word he used there is harmonia the origin of our concept of harmony and the idea of harmony of course is not that everything is the same but that everything within the harmony is different but is brought into a fruitful union with all the other parts of the harmony and the image of the bow and the liar are simple and very powerful the ends of a liar string are pulled apart effort is put into toughening that string and you might think why pull in opposite directions why not just simplify and not pull at all but then the string goes to slack it's no longer taught and there is no note that comes forth from the string of the lie there is no arrow that comes forth from the string of the bow its existence depends on exactly this balance of pulling in opposite directions harmony in the greek of heraclitus had three principle meanings one was the fitting together of surfaces as we say surfaces that are true to one another or as we say marry if you're a carpenter you talk about a true fit or of surfaces marrying the second is the reconciling of warring parties so heraclitus famously said that war is the father of all things but he could have said that peace is the queen of all things because both this war and peace need to be harmonized and it's in its most common modern meaning the accord of musical strings the second saying of heraclitus i'd like to advert to is another one i think probably the richest and the most difficult to understand and it begins with the word celebsis or in his uh ionic greek syllabus but anyway we would say cylipsis graspings it's translated whole and not holes convergent divergent consonant dissonant from all things one and from one thing's all now the greek word celebsis here translated grasping seems again to suggest several ideas something grasped perhaps suggesting sudden comprehension something that brings elements together and fertility aristotle uses the word to mean the sexual generation of life coming together as i mentioned earlier of the male and female gametes it's hard to overestimate the richness of this fragment it says so many things at once that a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses or graspings moments of insight that in that insight which by the way is very robustly associated with the right cerebral hemisphere particularly with the right superior temporal area that in those moments of insight all is neither simply single nor simply manifold neither simply whole nor simply not whole neither simply like nor simply unlike each thing working with and by the same token working against the others that the one and the many bring one another forth into being together generating the reality that has this structure at its core and that despite or in light of all this perhaps because of the nature of this multiplicity all is held together in a syllabus the only word here not to be paired with its antithesis and the whole saying is itself of course a cylipsis a gathering which in its fertility births a salipsis a moment of dawning insight in us so to move right forward from the 6th century bc to the last 100 years we've discovered that not only can small elements in mata manifest either as a wave or as a particle that seem contrary types of element but they can manifest as waves and particle simultaneously and here again is a very important idea that we don't have to see one and then the other but see them nested within one another thus we're used to thinking of the individual and the general the temporal and the eternal the embodied and the disembodied as exclusive pairings but it was possibly goethe's greatest insight to see that they're present simultaneously in one another they're found not by turning one's back on the supposed opposite but by going more deeply into it thus the general is found in the individual the eternal in the temporal the spiritual in the embodied this tension is creative generative although a thing and its opposite or a thing and its negative are customarily thought of as separate warring entities they are i argue mutually sustaining inseparable and intertwined you cannot have heat without cold or brightness without darkness we can't keep the mountains as alan watts put it and get rid of the valleys and we have one such enigma at the very core of our being the corpus callosum the body of fibers that connects the two hemispheres at their base in connecting it separates in separating it connects and as if being intuitively aware of this in the upanishads we read in the space within the heart lies the controller of all he is the bridge that serves as the boundary to keep the different worlds apart an interesting gloss on the idea of a bridge quite a homely example of that of course is the eardrum the eardrum separates one part of the ear from another but without it we couldn't hear sound at all it's actually caused by the vibrations the reverberations the to and fro movement of this separative element often inhibition releases and creates often delimitation is what makes a thing come into being indeed that is what defines anything and friction is an interesting example of something that is in a way in opposition to movement but in its absence movement becomes impossible the it's the very constraint isn't it on movement friction but it's also what makes movement possible at all it's true in its success we're immobilized yet so we are in its absence there's nothing to push against resistance can put the brakes on motion or cause motion it can prevent or cause change it prevents us with an obstacle and thereby forces us to shift our point of view it helps us shift the plane of focus so that we see something new in itself resistance is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad it's just necessary to make a good apple pie you don't need bland apples you need nice tart apples and very good sweet honey william blake wrote without contraries is no progression attraction and repulsion reasoned and energy love and hate are necessary to human existence and we shouldn't try to get around this by saying well yes actually but there's a way of blending them so that we don't have to deal with that the philosopher jacob needleman wrote stay with the contradiction if you stay you will see that there's always something more than two opposing truths the whole truth always includes a third part which is the reconciliation those of you who are familiar with the philosophy of hegel will know uh the concept of auf hebong that coming together of two things that appear to be opposite into a fruitful new union but it's not just hegel one of my favorite philosophers and i believe one of the greatest of the last hundred years is alfred north whitehead again a great philosopher mathematician um and to have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it he also said by the way that there are no whole truths only half truths is taking the half truths for whole truths that plays the devil my word i wish politicians and their over vocal spokesmen on the internet remembered that fact opposites please remember this genuinely coincide while remaining opposites some philosophies tend to collapse into the monism that opposites are identical others into the dualism that opposites remain irreconcilable and merely at most juxtaposed the important perception is that opposites not only cohen exist but give rise to and fulfill one another as nils bohr said contraria sunt complementa he took that as his family motto and he was ennobled by the danish government contraries fulfill one another and they're conjoined like the poles of a magnet you can't have one without the other but without there being any intervening boundary they nonetheless remain distinct as opposites this idea of complementarity is foundational in nature it's foundational certainly in everything in modern physics i would say in morality and i would say in spirituality so for example to turn one's back on the parts the work that the left hemisphere brings forward for us and accept only the whole the work that the right hemisphere gives us is not to get back to wholeness because the whole is never an annihilation but rather a subsumption of the parts the true whole exists precisely in this relationship the tension between parts and an apparent whole moreover morally speaking every angel has his devil and i wish i could show you but for copyright reasons i don't dare show you a wonderful image by m.c escher called circle limit four often called angels and devils if you look that up that up perhaps later i hope um you will see why it is a particularly beautiful illustration of what i'm talking about but you know in our society we are beset aren't we by what we call paradoxes we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time we privilege autonomy and end up bound by rules to which we never assented and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time we pursue leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever and that we have less time than we had before the means to our ends are ever more available while we have less sense of what our end should be or whether this purpose in anything at all economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash they promptly crash we're so eager that all scientific research results in positive findings that has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking we grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian in order to get value for money and thus render it pointless and in this form certainly a waste of resource we improve education by dictating curricula and focusing on exam results to the point where free thinking arguably an overarching goal of true education is discouraged in our universities many students are in any case so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically and their teachers who should know better in a serious dereliction of duty collude we over sanitize and cause vulnerability to infection we overuse antibiotics leading to super bacteria that no antibiotic can kill we make drugs illegal to protect society and while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs we create a fertile field for crime we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with let alone relish uncertainty or risk and are rendered vulnerable the left hemisphere's motivation is control and its means of achieving achieving it alarmingly linear as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of recursive interactions at any one time which is all it can i want to mention something called hormesis it's a term from chemistry and what it refers to is a familiar phenomenon which a very small amount of something may have highly beneficial effects but a larger amount may kill you some scientists were rather puzzled when they were trying to account for what happened in an experimental environment called biosphere 2 which is a very large covered sheltered environment in which plants and trees are given what are seen as an optimal environment in which to flourish and it was discovered that trees rarely reached maturity before they fell over why was this well it turns out that actually being subject to stressful winds is extremely important for the growth and survival of a tree it produces something called stress wood which is the core strength of it as so often nietzsche got there a long time before the 21st century scientists examined the lives he said of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourself whether a tree which is supposed to grow to a proud height could do without bad weather and storms whether misfortune and external resistance whether any kinds of hatred jealousy stubbornness mistrust hardness greed and violence do not belong to the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible and there are many examples in medicine digitalis atropine arsenic uh will be familiar to doctors and to some patients even radiation in small amounts uh can suppress tumors relative to uh creatures who are um raised in a an environment entirely free of radiation and a deadly poison called dioxin in very small amounts can heal tumors i am not by any means please understand me excusing in any sense the pollution of our environment my whole point is that these are highly toxic but that in very small amounts they may be beneficial changing of context completely changes what can be said to be true so that something can come to mean its opposite uh there are many profound examples of this from religious text and from poetry but one i rather like just because it's so everyday is the sizes of cereal packets you know i think in america there are four sizes of cereal packets there's one called jumbo which means very large then there's one called economy which means large then there's one called family which means medium and finally there's one called large which means small things change depending on the context which is why taking a statement that anyone says out of the context without everything else that's said or even without the tone of voice which may betray a completely different meaning is so treacherous from anyone's standpoint true also only a a part of the picture is possible and i say that not because as it we might be able to get around this if we had some other way of doing things intrinsically it is possible only to take in one part of a reality at a time and what i conceive objectivity to be is not to affect some kind of mind in which there is nothing human that would be very strange a way of looking at things that wouldn't be um particularly rich in its ability to reveal the nature of the thing but to instead see as many points of view on something as you possibly can and and that's part of what whitehead meant talking about uh half truths and you're needing the other half of the truth to see it from one side only it's not to seen it and in fact in japanese there's a a a term tamban khan for a person who only sees one side and what it means is somebody who carries a board on their shoulder so that they only see with one half of their field of vision also another japanese image comes to mind that i love one of the greatest of all the zen gardens ryanji has i think 15 rocks in it but it is so constructed that there is no place in the garden from which you can see all of the rocks the most you can see at any one point would be 14. and in our world i'm afraid we neglect often the dark side everything has its dark side that is really a central message to be taken home there is nothing so good that it cannot have negative consequences and indeed there is nothing so bad that it cannot occasionally give rise to good neglecting this unfortunately leads to extremism as a psychiatrist one of the hardest things to deal with is a person who believes they should be perfect and are therefore in denial about their imperfections these people become very stressed anxious and unhappy and actually spread anxiety and unhappiness around them in their families trying to control everything for good instead of realizing that actually they can't do that and that they would be better to exercise a wise ability to move flexibly with the flow i've talked a bit about a straight line the german great highly eccentric uh painter and architect actually sorry i'm i did him a uh well not an injustice but i i made an error there and calling him german he was in fact an austrian frieden's right wrote in 1953 i realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind but the straight line has become an absolute tyranny the straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule without thought or feeling it is a line which does not exist in nature and that line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization the straight line is atheistic and immoral it is the only sterile line the only line which does not suit man as the image of god the straight line is the forbidden fruit the straight line is the curse of our civilization any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how and yet at the same time we find ourselves confronted with emptiness an aesthetic void a desert of uniformity criminal sterility loss of creative power even creativity is prefabricated we have become impotent we are no longer able to create that is our real illiteracy well he certainly put it like it is um and i think it's a very fine piece of writing it's not his only words on this topic but i like to put this together with something communicated to me personally by a member of the swiss parliament lucas fiat who is a founding member of the green party in switzerland who recalled a meeting as a boy with his neighbor carl gustav jung and in the course of conversation jung told us says lucas fierce about his encounter with the pueblo chief whose name was mountain lake the chief told him that the white man was doomed when asked why the chief took both hands before his eyes and jung imitating the gesture moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly towards one point before him saying because the white man looks only at one point excluding all other aspects many years later dr fitz who's a physician recalls that a significant adversary of the green party movement was a successful industrialist and self-made billionaire i asked him what in his view was the reason for his incredible entrepreneurial and political success he took both hands before his eyes and moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly towards one point before him saying because i am able to concentrate on only one point excluding all other aspects i remember that i had to swallow hard two or three times so as not to say anything so some reflections on this perfect linearity and the structure of reality william blake thought that there even must be sorrow in heaven if there was to be joy and in a well-known poem he wrote it is right that it should be so man was made for joy and woe joy and woe are woven fine a clothing for the soul divine under every grief and pain runs a joy with silken twine perfection can constitute a floor in traditional chinese houses the last three tiles always left off the roof because the saying is even heaven is not perfect and in oriental rug making there is something called the imperfect stitch which is deliberately lacking my first book against criticism was in a way a description of a strange phenomenon why it is that when you start taking apart the qualities of analyzing the greatness of a great literary figure you end up with a handful of things that are in themselves imperfections and yet they put them together they do not in any way account for the greatness of the individual i wrote about three of them in that book in particular one the essayist and general philosopher and thinker sam johnson then the novelist lauren stern and then the poet william wordsworth in physics we again have both a combination of order with disorder and it wouldn't be good to have just one without the other as david oliver says a physicist nature is neither inevitably random nor completely lawful and predictable quantum spontaneity is only one half the story the other half is the regularity and that what's often called the edge of chaos is terribly important existence coexistence of order with disorder the critic and poet william empson wrote extremely often in dealing with the world one arrives at two ideas or ways of dealing with things which both work and are needed but which entirely contradict one another and we we all experience this don't we at every level from the most innocently trivial uh or at least trivial seeming to the most sublime we need universality and particularity precision and flexibility restriction and openness freedom and constraint simultaneously everything flows from the pairing we as we say lose ourselves and consequently find ourselves in music dance or contemplation of a beautiful painting or landscape there is an innocence the other side of experience and knowledge the other side of knowing a wisdom the other side of folly which is not really its opposite the only simplicity for which i would give a straw said that rather down-to-earth jurist oliver wendell holmes is that which is on the other side of the complex not that which is never divided and joseph campbell writes i think there are three states of being one is the innocent expression of nature another is when you pause analyze think about it then having analyzed becomes a state in which you're able to live as nature again but with more competence more control more flexibility that to me summarizes the proper relationship between the right and the left hemisphere the right seeing the initial whole the left uh taking it apart in certain ways but crucially not ending there but giving it back to the right hemisphere that can understand it now in an enriched um unfolded whole according to jung the grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil way not evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by what he called enantiodromia which basically means the tendency of things to change into their opposites and what good may very possibly lead to evil a very striking example from the natural sphere is the concept of a ketone key stone species in yellowstone park the wolves were more or less eliminated in the 1930s the ecosphere as we now say deteriorated the number of elk dwindled the number of beaver dwindled the number of willow trees dwindled and then it was decided that actually the wolves played a very important part and they were reintroduced and since they were reintroduced there are more elk there are more beavers and there are more willows it sounds paradoxical but the thing is that the presence of the predator keeps the elks moving so they don't over graze and destroy the landscape they move and flourish and because the the trees flourish and are no longer eaten up by the elk the beavers which need the trees come back and flourish and so on and there are many many examples of this in nature where what looks like the evil predator is in fact the key to life so instead of a um a linear model i would prefer one of circularity or to modify that of a spiral the circle simply comes back to the same place and is static a spiral is constantly moving and changing and as you come back round a loop of the spiral you seem to be at the same place you were before but you're not actually you're above it and you see what it was you thought you knew when you were there before but you don't yet anticipate what you will know when you go on yet another loop of the spiral and come back to the cognate point again on a higher loop and what i particularly like about the spiral is the images when you look down its axis it images the circularity but when you look at it from the side it images the linearity impedicles who is another great uh pre-socratic philosopher thought there were two opposing and equal forces that gave rise to everything love philotes that is and strife nikos in the presence of love only or strife only nothing could exist these forces for union and for division according to empedocles are present in the very stuff of all things not just in their ultimate origin and they're imaged as a circle not just as a straight line the idea of complementarity coming back to the parts and and the whole again recognizes the nature of the earth's true essence this was something particularly well expressed by the scientist and philosopher shelling who i have come more and more greatly to honor and admire early 19th late 18th early 19th german philosophy he says this about the relationship between the one and the many between the unique and the general which is actually another chapter of my book and could be another talk but not for tonight only in the bond by virtue of which it eternally asserts its unity as the multiplicity of its things and conversely this multiplicity as its unity is the earth expressive of its true essence and it's not that you think that apart from this infinity of things to be found in the earth there's another one which is the unity of these things rather the same that is the multiplicity is also the unity and the same that is the unity is also the multiplicity and so on existence is the conjunction of one with itself as a many and this conjunction of one and many is a very important topic and and this process may sound as though it is linear but it's not it is a circular process and this depends on an inter-hemispheric relationship functioning properly in which like the two brothers in the onondagan myth um flint uh the left hemisphere representative who actually in the story this was before neuroscience could have prompted this um has the arrow and speech and the two great things about manipulation using the the right hand to grasp things and to use language to pin them down that are the most i suppose aspects of left hemisphere these were flint's characteristics and they are necessary we we're enriched by language we are enriched by enabling to use a bow and arrow but only in the service of something greater that the that flint doesn't understand that his brother does understand and his brother sees that he needs to keep relatively close to the the less wise the less intelligent brother in order that the work of that brother should be profitable and good but not too close because he can't afford to lose what it is that he is able to do through his goodness and his greater wisdom in the cabala a great corpus of jewish mystical literature the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right hand side and a left hand side very interesting to me humanity's task is to integrate them both laterally and vertically specifically it's held that the mind is made up of two faculties wisdom on the right which receives the gestalt of a situation in a single flash and understanding bina opposite it on the left which builds them up in a replicable step-by-step way this is the distinction between the right and left hemisphere at least one way of looking at it are considered two friends who never part because you cannot have one without the other gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other while bainer gives rise to judgment which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits their integration is another faculty called dart which is a bit like aristotle's phronesis or even sofia and embodied overarching intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it what is more this tree is a true organism each part reflected in and qualified by co-presence with each of the others so what is united is to be divided and what divided is to be united this involves cyclical returns it follows from this cyclical nature that if you go far enough in any one direction you reach not more of what you desired but it's opposite go east and you eventually reach the west and it follows that both of two opposites are simultaneously present and need to be so just as east and west are simultaneously present on the campus and need to be so not just to navigate the world but to have a world to navigate i finally want to reflect on an asymmetry at the heart of the coincidentia positorum union and division which i've mentioned a lot in this talk are asymmetrical the principle for division and the principle for union are both needed but they're needed to be brought together not divided we need the union of union and division not the division of union and division and in our thinking today we need not either both and or either or but we need both both and and either or equally we need not non-duality only but we need the non-duality of duality and non-duality there's also an asymmetry between symmetry and asymmetry not just an asymmetry of quality which the obviously is but an inequality of value asymmetry is more important than symmetry actual occurrence of anything involves the breaking of what is considered in the abstract symmetrical small imbalances differences among sameness at all levels in nature make it work starting with the initial inequality of matter and antimatter i'm told by physicists that if there had not been a small inequality between mata and antimatter at the very beginning of things with the big bang there would have been nothing at all and this is nicely referred to by two great late 19th century french scientists one a biologist the other a physicist already in the 1870s louis pasteur was writing sentences that would have anguished his enlightenment forebears the universe as a whole he wrote is asymmetrical and i've come to believe that life as it is manifest to us is a function of the asymmetry of the universe without any doubt i repeat of the basic principles of life are asymmetrical it is because asymmetrical forces of the cosmos preside over their unfolding life is dominated by the effects of asymmetrical forces whose enveloping cosmic existence we sense intuitively i would even say that living species are primordially in their structure in their external forms functions of the cosmic asymmetry and here is the physicist pierre kiri writing in 1894 certain elements of symmetry may coexist with certain phenomena but they are not necessary what is necessary is that certain elements of symmetry do not exist it is asymmetry which creates the phenomenon and he adds the effects produced may be more symmetrical than their causes in terms of the hemispheres it's once more not a symmetrical but an asymmetrical arrangement not just between two dispositions that of the left hemisphere and that of the right towards the world but between the disposition that sees the two dispositions as an antagonism that must ultimately lead to the triumph of one and the annihilation of the other that's the left hemispheres take on their relation and a disposition that of the right that sees they need to be preserved together neither being allowed to extinguish the other even though they're not of equal value one the disposition of the right overarches and takes into account the other much as he grasps the sky with both hands not just protects flint but enables the fulfillment of flint's contribution here there's an interesting reflection of william james who i think again is one of the great philosophers of the last hundred years and more looking back on my own experiences they all converge towards a kind of insight to which i cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance the key note of it is invariably a reconciliation it is as if the opposites of the world whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles were melted into unity not only do they as contrasted species belong to one and the same genus but one of the species the nobler and better one is itself the genus and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself now we mentioned sisterly and diastole and on this nature of asymmetry and irregularity being more important than symmetry and and regularity uh i just want to mention something about the movement and rhythm of biological processes these are necessarily not entirely rhythmical they have a kind of flexibility built into them which for those of you who are musicians you will recognize as rubato music that is played entirely mechanically loses its soul and it is the ability to make very small differences in the length of notes that makes a great musical performance you may not even be aware of them in fact you're not necessarily aware of them at all but they are what give life and i was very struck when i was a medical student and i was learning obstetrics on the obstrecting ward when learned that the trace of the fetal heart when it became regular this was a medical emergency and you called the team urgently the when the fetus is thriving the heartbeat has a flexibility and irregularity that also the adult human heart has if it's functioning properly and this is something also like half rhyme the sort of yes and no at the same time i i'd like to write a book called yes and no or in a zen saying not always so and i can't resist just quoting because i'm about to conclude that wonderful poem by wilfred owen who used half rhymes so effectively a visionary spine-chilling poem called strange meeting in which he imagines encountering the german soldier that he's killed the other that is not really an other at all and the poem famously ends with the dead soldier's words to owen i am the enemy you killed my friend i knew you in this dark for so you frowned yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed i parried but my hands were loath and cold let us sleep now those lines couldn't be so great if they had had full rhymes instead of half rhymes it's interesting by the way that the russian word for other or different drugoy has the same etymological root as the word drug which means a friend anyway i'm going to just wrap up in some final words so i've argued that at the origin of everything that lies uh con a coincidence or conjunction of opposites that is profoundly generative indeed necessary for creation gives rise to all that we know and this coincidence of opposites is by no means contrary to reason i've stressed that we must not be tempted left hemisphere fashion to resolve the necessary tension by pretending one of the pairs of opposites can safely be dispensed with or is not real denying the concealed opposite is dangerous the coincidence of opposites does not compromise their nature as opposites rather they fulfill themselves through one another the foundation of everything is this opposition recognized from empedocles to goethe between love and strife we need the union of division and union the union of multiplicity and unity the left hemisphere needs ultimately to act as servant to the right hemisphere since unbridled the left hemisphere is capable of destroying the world which i believe it is engaged in doing now and was foretold in the iroquois legend moreover what we think of as good may conceal much harm and what we consider harmful may bring something of great value i've suggested two geometrical images we should be wary of linear models in our attempts to understand the world except at the most minutely local level and replace straight lines with helices which incorporate an acknowledgement of the coincidence of opposites with the idea that there's always change and growth not mere repetition as the image of the circle risks suggesting and just as there's an asymmetry in the relationship of the hemispheres there's an asymmetry in the coincidencia opposition we need not difference in union but the union of the two we need not non-duality but the non-duality of duality with on duality and we need not just asymmetry alone or symmetry alone but the asymmetry that is symmetry and asymmetry taken together and my last words are those of rabbi jonathan sax the chief rabbi of great britain who died alas recently i heard him by accident one day on the radio and he told the following short story a holy man is reading the talmud and he reads that rabbi x says that a certain thing is the case and he reads further and he finds that another equally revered rabbi says that x is absolutely not the case in a sort of spiritual turmoil he does what any spiritual man would do he prays to god which of them is right and god answers both of them are right somewhat exasperated the man says but what do you mean they can't both be right to which god replies all three of you are right thank you very much my goodness ian what and uh what a beautifully rich lecture you've just given us i know that there would be resounding applause from the uh from the the the very the significant number we had 150 or so with us here right now uh people would be there'd be thunderous applause right now and uh on top of that there will there would be many many hands raised as the digital hands have indeed been raised um that was just a splendid um not only examination of a very rich philosophical question but you beautifully brought us in to the very complexity and the unity and the division of unity the division that you're the the the unity of those things that you were seeking to bring about in us um as we were sitting here with you there are many questions here and i have some of my own but uh it's important to say because there have been several people who've asked will this lecture be available later yes absolutely we'll we'll work the audio in the video in post-production and release it as a podcast and on youtube so stay stay tuned for that we'll make sure to alert you if you sign up for our newsletter which you're free to do on our website if you like um i also want to say very importantly that this is a reflection that emerges from dr mcgilkin's new book the matter with things which will be available if i'm not mistaken on november 9th in the united states uh perhaps sooner in other locales but do pay attention for that announcement and pick up a copy of this wonderfully rich text when and as you can now there are many questions here as i say and we we could spend our whole lives in a way in this question in a way we do spend our whole lives in the reality that you have been making manifest to us in this lecture i mean this is the world this is the this is precisely what we're living in all the time and it is in fact i would say also precisely this insight that in some sense ralston college as a whole venture aims to help bring about you know there's a kind of post-enlightenment conceit that the only thing we can know so as far as we can know anything at all is in kind of empirical propositional uh manner and in a sense from that standpoint you know beauty or justice or love or indeed properly speaking even truth itself these are incomprehensible and so your lecture has is bringing about the the kind of thinking that is necessary to really think about these deepest realities and so my first question ian is how must our conception of reason change in order for us to see that a grasp of the unity of opposites is not incompatible with reason a very very good question thank you stephen um takes me to another very important point um there are different meanings the word reason and in the book i have three chapters on the nature of reason it will not surprise you that i am a great fan of reason as i am a great fan of empirical science and i do also happen to believe that it's a mistake to try and take empirical science into areas where it simply has no jurisdiction and to take um certain kinds of rationalizing into areas where it cannot be illuminating um but i believe we need to make a distinction between things that are beyond the grasp of well we need to make two distinctions one is between things that are beyond the grasp of um what people commonly conceive of as reason and things that are within its grasp and the other distinction is between kinds of reason on the first one um there is nothing irrational about my love for and my um defense of a great piece of music um i often say schubert c major quintet because uh increasingly it has come over my life to be um seen as one of the most powerful pieces of music ever written one of the deepest and yet i cannot in any way rationalize why it works or how it works and if i could i'd i'd be only talking about a few mechanisms either in the brain or in the structure of harmonics that would leave the real truth of it what it is doing and what it is untouched so there should be a realm for a word for a realm which is trans rational or supra rational and that is i think a concept we need to take back into our lives much that we value in in nature in art in music in human life in um approach to the sacred is not irrational just because it cannot be um stated purely in logical terms um the other is a defense of a different kind of reason so in english unfortunately we don't make much of a distinction but in greek in latin and in german there are distinct words for two kinds of reason one is the carrying out of logical procedures in the way that a computer could be taught to do and the other is what was always considered the flower of education and the flower of a civilization the capacity to produce people who were reasonable people my god how nostalgic that makes me when i look at the world around me and how very few voices i hear that i can call reasonable voices and what i mean by reasonable are not consumed with hatred of rage misunderstanding malice the ability to take things out of context to understand them in some purely reduced abstracted way but to put together the fruits of being able to think reasonably rationally and and logically together with an understanding of humanity in all its complexity and that life simply isn't a matter of following certain rules and that the more you know the more you understand you don't know that's a very different kind of reasoning one that cannot emerge from a computer but in an age in which everything is increasingly handed over to a system a computerized system with which we have to interact whatever it is we're doing we are encouraged into a black and white either or abstracted disembodied decontextualized this is what it is or it isn't black and white way of thinking which is the precise opposite the precise opposite of everything i've just argued for i am so glad we're recording this um ian let me uh let me take us back for a minute i want to talk a little bit later in our q a and there are several questions pertaining to education and to sort of the question of what can we do but i want to go back for a minute to the ancient greeks because there's just following the pre-socratics that you described in greek history we have the sophists and one of the things the sophists do and i think people who are paying attention to our current intellectual climate will see this move all around them is they their their expertise is in showing that any particular position is partial that it's insufficient on its own but then to use that apparent insufficiency to conclude essentially that there is no truth at all as the protagonist says man is the measure of all things that is to say there is no there is no coherence to reality uh itself there is no truth beyond the insufficiency of the particulars and so what i'm what i'm wanting to ask you is this is what does all this mean that truth is that rather than the insufficiency of the particular showing that there is no truth and certainly today the claim is that truth itself is just a a mechanism or construct of the will to power that rather than that that precisely in these particularities in the movement between the opposites is revealed uncovered made real made manifest uh something larger deeper more sovereign than the insufficiency of the particulars might initially have us believe well you do you do ask the best questions stephen um again a very difficult one i'll try to answer as economically as i can i think the first thing i'd say is behind the title the matter with things is my dissatisfaction with the way in which we think of everything not just material things which the matter with things refers to as things we think about reality as a thing we think about truth as a thing and actually interestingly etymologically it begins as a process that involves a relationship between people and i argue that there is truth there is no one truth there is no one single truth and we can never ultimately know the whole of that truth but some things are truer than others otherwise we wouldn't say anything there'll be no reason for saying anything at all or even getting out of bed or moving because really everything would be as worthless or pointless or as meaningful or meaningless as everything else this cannot possibly be the case nobody acts like this so the problem arises from two positions that i call rot and mumbo rot is the acronym reality out there that the just is a reality somewhere out there and it's untouched by us and it's our job to find it and when we do find it it has nothing of us about it the other i call mumbo which is that reality is made up miraculously by ourselves another acronym and what i'm talking about there is the opposite position um beloved of some uh uh post-modernists that there is no truth because everybody's truth has its own validity i argue from the very word go and uh if people want to find this they will find what my my comments on it of course are extended over the entire book which is a very long book but i have something to say about it in the first 10 pages or so of volume 1 of the book and what i'm really emphasizing is that it is neither a thing in here nor a thing out there but is a a relationship a reverberative relationship between whatever it is i mean by my consciousness and the conscious cosmos outside of what i consider my consciousness and it's in that coming together of my internal sense of myself with whatever it is that exists that is apart from me at least never ultimately separate from me but utterly distinct from me um it's in that coming together that we embark on the process of reality of discovering reality and the first volume my books in two volumes the first volume is called the ways to truth so not a suggestion that it is a journey that may never actually be achieved but it's still an important journey and the second volume is called what then is true an open question but effectively what i'm doing in the first part of the book is saying what can we take as a guide on our journey towards truth i think knowing more about what the brain is telling us can help that's part one neuroscience and i think epistemology the business of studying the values of reason science um intuition and imagination their strengths and values that can tell us when we take those together and look at the cosmos what do we find and what i suggest in part three which is metaphysics is that we find a cosmos very different from the one made up of just a heap of bits that we are told is the nature of the universe we find something that has inherent beauty complexity order a drive has is not alien to us has this paradoxical structure that i've alluded to partly here and in which time is very real consciousness is very real foundational indeed an element in the cosmos that cannot be reduced and that values too are foundational so that's where the whole drift goes my goodness uh we're never going to get through all these questions because they're so they're so difficult and i just want to thank everyone who we do have some time and we're going to get through many of them but i want to thank everyone for sending your questions and i am going to share these afterwards with dr mcgilchrist uh in the event he should ever uh find an occasion or wish to undertake he does have a channel in which he he shares his work called channel mcgillcrist and it may be that he will find time to answer some additional questions there beyond our session today um here is uh here's one from benedict ian he says i'd be interested to hear more on the origins of your understanding of this idea at what point did the notion of the coincidence of opposites and in particular of the symmetry of symmetry and asymmetry first occurred to you and how did this awareness come to you and this may this question may uh lead us a bit later to the many questions on what we can do and what forms of education are adequate to bring about the reasonable kind of disposition that you were describing and praising a moment ago i think that probably like most i've certainly i can only speak for myself but most of the ideas that still inspire me intrigue me and draw me onwards to further attempts at understanding they started in my teens um i had a very philosophical education i was very lucky in that respect and i was taught a number of things as not dogmatically that these were true but they were the assumptions behind what i was told one would be that a thing in its opposite are you know irreconcilable um and this is an aristotelian position that's perfectly respectable um another was that history moves in linear trajectories and i thought no i already thought in my teens no it moves in sort of circles or spirals and i thought when you you know one of the things i noticed in politics was that there was more in common between people on either the extreme left or the extreme right than there was with people who might be thought of as in a completely different realm in a much more moderate realm um i i now incidentally think that it's hard to get a razor blade between fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist theists and that these people share um very left hemisphere assumptions about the nature of the world that are completely foreign to most people who call themselves honest diagnostics or honest believers but there we go that's for another time um but i think that what it was perceptions like that that bitterness and sweetness often complemented one another and led into one another that in certain ways pain and pleasure were necessary to one another that you know that as blake says contrary is fulfill one another i already was feeling that experiencing that as a young person [Music] um and i thought also that the world is not inert and unresponsive but something that is responsive essentially that all experience all reality is reverberative i can't think of a better word a resonance a coming a responsibility we have a responsibility for it and it for us response of course comes from the root of calling to and calling back and forth so this sound of this idea of a sound resonance going back and forth um a movement reverberation or back and forwards between two things that we thought of as distinct and perhaps not not not mutually influencing one another was another profound perception so i think that that together with my rejection of linearity as a useful model for anything living or anything i experienced and the sense that opposites came here and that when you pursued one you soon found that you were achieving the opposite of the thing that you the very thing you thought you were trying to achieve um that i noticed in my teens and you know when i look around me now i i i'm astonished that people don't see how in pursuing goals that they would call you know humane goals to do with all kinds of high ideals that the result can be so different from anything um resembling those ideals so there you go famously political systems that are founded on great ideals of liberty equality and fraternity end up to be illiberal unfraternal and inequal you know i want to ask you i want to make this as concrete in a way as i can uh one of the things that comes out in the lovely iroquois rhett legend that you shared with us to read is that uh the he grasps the sky with both hands the the one figure represents as you write one's higher identity in the midst of action in the world and what what the fact that we're able to perceive opposites as we go through time and find our way through them to deeper understanding what that must mean is that our own subjectivity our own souls our own personhoods whatever we are as entities in some sense is in the image of or has access to that unity that is both higher than but also revealed by and in and through uh division and so i have of course we're in big matters here but i have a few questions about that um and some of these are try doing my best to gather up the questions that are one wonderfully wonderfully expressed let me say in this q a we have 55 questions here um beautiful deep questions we're really this is really the question in a way of our time um how do we move to a standpoint in which we don't lose ourselves in division and i don't mean simply culturally we can come to that but i mean ourselves how do we ourselves develop habits or practices what are the the manners and modes according to which we can recollect or come to the awareness that we are in in the hall yes what of course is strange is that we have to talk about that because in most cultures other than our own modern western one it would seem obvious that we were part of a whole one of the most difficult things is the concept of the environment to me i reject the term because it suggests something that is around you but is not you whereas nature is something out of which we are born which is what the word nature means something that is giving birth and um back into which we go so being surrounded by nature as well as bringing a host of um health benefits incidentally both physical and psychological and spiritual benefits helps us see ourselves not as isolated beings as it were skittering around on the repellent surface of an alien world but actually deeply deeply embedded in a world that has roots and we have roots in it um music poetry um and painting but for me particularly music and poetry um bring us together with other minds and spirits though those of those who made them and those that we can feel respond to them one of the most rewarding things for me during the first year of lockdown was that every day for 365 days i read a new poem not one of mine but a poem i considered a great poem on the internet and i must say i found it very healing myself and a lot of people wrote to me in very moving terms saying that in this spell of isolation that it made them feel more together with humanity then i think there is the whole way in which we conceive what a society is not an agglomeration of atomistic individuals each out to fulfill their um whatever they can get for themselves and whatever they can make of themselves but to see that only in service to society as a whole that what you achieve is only valuable in as much as it goes back to making a society a better place what you what you want you need of course yourself we're not saints we need food and we need a lot more in order to to be happy but we don't need extraordinary amounts of things and in our society um our attitudes that our self-esteem our independence of mind our independence of action that we can do what we like is is odd historically it's hard and i know from talking to some um people from other oriental cultures that to them this emphasis on self-esteem and self-determination seems literally sick i mean that's the word that's being used i mean that's sick and i would like of course as always to be able to try and see the virtues in individuation which is very important and i don't think that oriental cultures negate that at all they believe it's very important but in the service of fulfillment of the whole so once again that force for division that left hemisphere a bit is incredibly creative and important but in service of a bigger differentiated whole so i see the whole business of things coming into being as not splitting apart but rather like some very unfolded flower imagine a sort of infinitely enfolded infinitely rich flower that had florets within florets in some sort of um fractal way and what happened was that they unfolded and within them something else unfolded and so on the flower was still a flower the flower had that potential but now that potential has been fulfilled and you therefore have togetherness with and and wholeness but at the same time individuation i hope that's a sort of relatively brief glass on that yes i want to i want to drive further into the question of what you know if we're if as i think it's clear we're living in a time of uh very significant alienation and division i mean there are all kinds of metrics according to which we can understand that uh uh we can see the proofs or signs of that the the the question on many of our questioners minds is is is what can we do what are the the the forms of life and culture the institutions the the practices that that that bring us or foster the bringing of us both into ourselves more fully precisely by awakening us in the way that you're describing to our place within in the whole what are the you mention of course music and poetry and painting and the in the arts um i have the sense that some of our questioners are are trying to ask the question of or indeed are asking the question very explicitly at the big picture where have we gone wrong and what can we rebuild and how well of course that is uh the big question an easy one to ask in the very very difficult one to answer um not just in the sense that it's hard to make a prescription but that the very fact of trying to make a prescription may be the wrong thing to do in that my prescription may close down options rather than open them up and what the left hemisphere always wants is to close down on the certainty whereas the right hand this wants to open up into a possibility and i'll just say it very briefly because people may have heard me say it before but as a psychiatrist one of the things you learn very early on is you may know exactly what a person needs to do but you must not tell them not because you're being sort of frustrating but because to begin with you make the mistake of telling people and they go oh no i can't do that that wouldn't make any sense for me and then you have to allow them to come to a place where they see for themselves and sometimes a year or 18 months later they will come to you and say you know i know what it is i need to do and it's exactly what you told them 18 months ago but see it's no good giving a prescription because people won't follow it or they will think if there's a prescription i can relax because then i do these six bullet points that dr mcgill chris has mentioned and phew it's all going to be fine again but it isn't all going to be fine again it may be fine but it will never be fine again in the same way the world that we are leaving behind cannot be recreated and cannot and must not be perpetuated and i often say if we could reverse the poisoning of the oceans the felling of the forest and the destruction of the ways of life of indigenous people around the world which i very much hope we can it would all be in vain if we just carried on being the same dissatisfied unhappy isolated neurotic people that we now are looking for stuff to get oh thank god we haven't destroyed the rain forest that means the world economy won't collapse and the weather patterns won't be damaging no the reason for not destroying the rainforest is that they are the most extraordinary expression of what this whole cosmos is about they are a wonder of complexity and beauty that is valuable in itself not as the left hemisphere always thinks for some utility of its own so having said that is there anything i can say um to to indicate ways of going well i'm going to say some rather in the tradition of my talk slightly opposite things i think first of all very obviously that education needs to be much more concerned with things like philosophy teaching people how to think which is not done by shoving information in and then seeing whether they've retained it that is the opposite of teaching people how to think one exercise that every school child every school child should do regularly and shouldn't be allowed to be to leave school without knowing how to do this is to take any point of view argue forcibly for it and then immediately turn around and argue more emphatically for the or more convincingly let me say for the opposite point of view because every point of view has its prose and its cons and i think that yes things like poetry music and so on and history in fact the humanities in general how do we understand ourselves we know nothing about our history and not just a caricature version of history through a filter that happens to be a a set of conceptions and preconceptions we have now but more broadly as broadly and generously as we can um one of the things about the humanities is not um imposing on it a grid of your own but trying to come to it and see another way of thinking that other people before you had that may be very different from your own but was by no means stupid and may conceal values that you yourself don't see so all of that i think but i also think it's very important for education to be rigorous children like to be challenged and they do actually need to learn things that are difficult you know perhaps an ancient language certainly mathematics they do need to understand good science imaginative science science doesn't have to be killingly boring in the way that it's so often taught science is a is an adventure and if science is not taught as an adventure the teachers need to be sacked because it is it's a wonderful exciting adventure just as exciting as learning poetry and music these things are not at war with one another they are part of one another but if we are only soft on ourselves and on our children our civilization won't survive because there's a sort of prisoner's dilemma here is that it's okay for us to go oh well we're just going to be very relaxed and we're going to do tai chi and we you know all of which i you know don't have any problem with and would enrich an education and doing some mindfulness ought to be part of any school day everybody should learn it but we actually also do need to learn some toughness of mind and toughness of body because there are nations in this world who will aren't just waiting peacefully for um you know it's the old story that if you if you want peace prepare for war now i'm not this is not a remark about uh military strategy at all it's just saying that we can't afford to be off our guard there's a wonderful book um called um immoderate greatness by patrick offals it's only 80 pages long and it's considerably the best 80 pages in terms of bang for buck that you could ever read and it's why all civilizations fail eventually and often quite quickly and it has six reasons three of them are sort of more or less environmental ones and to do with the resource issues and the other three are to do with the way we stop behaving and to stop thinking and in amongst them is this inability to think the way you need to think and act the way you need to act if you're going to defend a civilization yes clearly we're dealing with a civilizational matter here and i think it's very important that we underline that these the truth you're pointing to uh the unity that transcends and is made manifest by the opposites these modes of thinking these are not uh mere you know speculations but an uncovering of what is most fundamentally real uh this is not an exercise uh simply or a uh uh as a a a kind of trivial mental show but to uncover most rigorously what is most profound and animating um on a on a kind of optimistic or questioningly optimistic note one question uh ramirez asks uh beginning with a quote from what you've said many aspects of our current plight can be related to our complete failure to understand this essential truth of opposites and quote that was from the abstract that you kindly circulated and then the question continues but given that we are part of creation existence itself is not this failure to understand also part of the journey on a deeper plane that is does not the plight and failure of understanding in itself in and of itself provide an opposite of sorts to actual understanding and from once we might say and thus perhaps we might hope that our encounter with this opposite of probation and division may precisely be a move towards a recovery of a deeper higher more sovereign unity well well that's another fabulous question i mean um they're just coming in thick and fast this is wonderful uh i mean in brief i absolutely agree with that um i think one of my themes was that we do not know out of what apparent um down turns of fortune something good may come and out of what apparent upturns of fortune um bad makeup and i think we've seen and are seeing both so i absolutely agree with that it's the famous chinese story you know bad luck good luck who knows you can't see what's coming down the line as the outcome of a certain particular set of circumstances and i think i'd go further and say that actually out of a certain degree of suffering comes a degree of wisdom it's not a popular point of view these days and there is certainly not an argument for in any sense increasing or not doing what you can to minimize suffering don't misunderstand me but nonetheless suffering will exist and life has a lot of suffering in it for anybody who's at all um alive to um the suffering of others for a start but out of it some good can come and that's a profound truth in all spiritual traditions also i think that not knowing is very important a sense of perplexity a sense of i really don't understand this not just because i'm not bright enough to but because actually this is something that is beyond the understanding of any single human individual at this point is a very healthful point of view and i argue in the second part of the book particularly for the wisdom which is hardly a new thing to anyone who understands the um wisdom traditions of of china and of india and japan and of the far east in general the wisdom of unknowing and the wisdom of not doing i mean in a way a lot of the questions are going so what do we what do we do you know and i always say well actually one of the first things to do and actually this is true of talking to a psychiatric patient is well have you thought of trying not doing all the things that you currently are doing because they're not making things better are they and the image that that i think is useful here is because we think we make everything happen this is the left hemisphere talking it is the one that makes things happen it has an agenda it makes things accord to its will but in fact in fact very little in life can be made to accord to your will again all the the wise philosophers and sages have said to this said this the secret of happiness and fulfillment in life is not trying to force the world to to your will but according your will to the world and allow and learning how to as it were surf the waves rather than stand there and be smashed to pieces by them so the image that helped me is that of a gardener does a gardener make a plant grow absolutely not a gardener can either make everything as beneficial as it can for that plant to grow to foster the the um flourishing of the plant um or it can stifle the plant those are the options but they can't make the plant grow so when people are talking about so what do we do how do we make the right human beings well the first thing is to stop doing a lot of what we're doing now and listen listen and despite i mean one of the ways to understand things is to stop constantly um holding forth i'm sorry i mean by the nature of this thing i'm spending a lot of time holding forth right now but one of the things i try to build into my days is is listening sitting listening um and so i don't think we do enough of that it's it's not a passive process it's it's what i call active passivity um it's putting yourself in a position of readiness receptiveness and often you understand an answer to what needs to be done at this point when you do that whereas if you carry on arguing what in the oriental tradition is called monkey mind chattering away about what we must do you miss it all together so once again it's not that we need do nothing and that we know nothing but it's that we need to combine our knowingness with unknowingness and we need to combine our idea of action with a kind of active passivity again the conjunction of opposites is important yes and certainly in for example the play by sophocles oedipus rex in a way that whole play is about the tragedy of what happens when we assume that what we think we know is absolute and in a way that is related to this next question from elizabeth about the pain and alienation of our moment she asks do you think the suicide crisis amongst young people is partially a result of discouraging creative and critical thinking in the school system thereby imprisoning them in the no exit left brain um yet again i'm sorry i don't always say to every question what a wonderful question but it is we're just getting all the important questions um i mean obviously in part i i would it is part of the answer yes undoubtedly the case um however that epidemic of suicide and the underlying angst depression despair emptiness boredom that seemed to characterize um the world that young people are inheriting has many causes and really one way of looking at my book uh the matter with things uh is i'm trying to say well what is the matter with things um and one is this view that we are nothing but uh i talk about the school of nothing buttery in which you know people say oh it's nothing but or we're nothing but and so on this is always fallacious it's always um hiding a piece of shoddy thinking because nothing is ever nothing but anything else um however um i think it comes from many causes i think all the things that what we essentially need is meaning a life without meaning is not a worth living it's not worth life worth living um and i want to get rid of one misconception right away this doesn't mean that we should invent meaning it means that we should discover meaning meaning is there all right beauty is there all right complexity is there all right purpose is there i argue and i haven't got time to argue that but i do in the book all right they're there but it is our task to respond to them to see them and to incorporate them and when we do life becomes rich we start to flourish society starts to flourish when we don't the opposite of all those things is the case and what has very much struck me and i referred to one of these in the end of the mastering chemistry is the effect of social cohesion so belonging to a cohesive social group which is not just a group of people a bubble sphere on the internet that just happen to share opinions but a living group of people who are able hard at the moment i know but to share their lives you know i refer to the research on close italian communities in the east coast of america where um communities carried on the ways of life that they brought from italy in which they they had they did all kinds of things that were very bad for their health like eat fatty food drink loads smoked loads not taken huge amount of exercise and they turned out have lower rates of heart disease and so on and were very much happier than the rest of the population and why was this because they had huge what's called social capital social belonging they they all knew where they belonged in society that's the first the second is belonging in nature and we've done everything we can to alienate ourselves from nature to treat it as a resource that is to be exploited and many of us don't live surrounded by nature sadly i mean you have no choice other than to live in this dispossessed concrete world but that that research on this is massive makes a huge difference to cognitive ability to memory but also to sense of happiness and anxiety to um sense of worth and to behavior and the third one surprise surprise is spirituality is believing in a spiritual world and um preferably being actively involved in a community that worship together so these three things are now rather rare in our world where they exist they do help but if you really wanted to make a totally miserable world what you do is take people as far away from the natural world as possible and surround them by by machines and virtuality you would disrupt society set individual against individual and say that everybody has a right to do whatever they want to do quite regardless of what might be good for the well-being of a community in a society and you tell people that religion was all rot and that essentially they didn't mean anything the world didn't mean anything and the sooner it was over the better if you do that you'll make a very very unhappy world and the evidence is that we are i'll finish with just one thing i have to mention because it's so staggering research by american psychologist gene twenge on adolescence between the 1930s and now is based on the same tests being administered in the same words to the same age group over that period of over 70 years so it's not the retrospectoscope and open to interpretation they just asked them the same questions about how happy they were how anxious they were etc etc there's quite a lot of these questions and what it found was that anxiety depression loneliness and a sense of the worthlessness of life was five to eight times higher in 2007 than it had been in 1930. so for all the improvements that we think we've brought about in our world where everybody must be much happier now people are not much happier now that should stop us thinking and it's not five to eight percent higher which would be kind of significant it's five to eight times as many there's such deep matters ian i i i know our time is is short i want to ask you just a a couple of final questions and one of them i want to begin just by reading back this lovely line of of of herdolin that you've given us in the reading the hearts wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray and become spirit were it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way we have a questioner who is asking about love does love show away and if i can try to put this together what i want to ask is first you know love in our own personal you know in our lives you know the lives in which we we encounter love this does have to do with the unity of the opposites you know we that's what forgiveness is is the overcoming in a way of of an opposite it's the the the holding on to someone to to discover in that relationship and in them and for them to discover in themselves a a beauty a unity that abides and that perhaps becomes more beautiful in and through the the the suffering or division or difficulty or hardness of life and and yet i i think one thing that many people struggle with uh the alienation the the sense of of sadness of of loneliness somehow at a deep level psychologically that's giving up on belief that that they that they are loved that they have in themselves a abiding hole that they are they're connected with a trend called a transcendent whole that is manifest in themselves but that they something very deep in the nature of things has their back and so i'm wondering if you would say something about love as we move towards concluding yes well of course it's not everybody's gift to be able to feel that they are loved or have the capacity of love or that there is something that has their back and the the utter terribleness of depression which is something of which i have too much personal experience and of which i've seen so much over 40 years of trying to help other people with it is that you lose the sense that you have any of the things that normally make life worth living it's so terrible that it can well induce despair so obviously that is a pathological state but i'm just saying that to help anybody who's listening who doesn't feel that comfortable feeling that they're not alone in that and that it can be got through and that coming through it can hard as it may seem also be part of enrichment which actually oddly relates to the grim cliff of destiny in a way that your spirit grows through overcoming things it can be crushed and never recover for some people and that of course is a terrible tragedy what you do with your spirit what you do with the opposition's the resistance of which life largely consists is is our business it's each person's business what they do with that and how they respond to it and i you know i'm already aware aware how very very difficult it is so i wouldn't wish to preach in any sense but if it's possible to get to a position where you can see that love is not annihilated by by suffering but often actually incorporates suffering and heals suffering but is never going to be devoid of suffering and then you've reached a position of considerable wisdom and you've said a couple are a kind of opposites and i know what you're getting at but of course they're not really opposites in a bad way that they're individually separate beings but they're also part of one something which is the coming together of them and uh there i suppose the image that i would leave people with it's like two heavenly bodies that are orbiting one another and what you don't want is them to be so alien that they fly off into space but what you don't want either is for them to be so sucked into one another's gravity gravitation that their orbits collapse and they crash together and there are couples who become as we say in the trade fused and this is usually not a good sign and relationship rarely survives there needs to be a healthful distance but that distance doesn't mean alienation just as distinction doesn't mean separation if we could only get those distinctions right in our own minds then many many good vivifying things would follow so let me leave it at that but love i mean is when i talk about these things and i talk about the union of things the ultimate forces it seems to me that we know of are gravity and love and these are forces that that there are opposite forces to them that cause other movements but that they are what gives the structure the complexity the beauty the shape the order to everything and stop division triumphing over union in the end that unifying force is more powerful than its opposite i don't duck the question of the existence of evil because i think it's it's really having your cake and eat it to say there is good but there is no evil i mean if there's a conjunction of opposites then there will be and no religion tells you that everything is just fine and everything is good and there is no suffering and and so on and and jesus himself didn't pray that we should all um just not be quite as bad but played for deliverance from evil i mean that those are the very words of the lord's prayer if they mean anything it means that there is some counterbalancing force i i personally believe that but i also believe in the same spirit that i've said everything tonight that there is an asymmetry and i argue about that much greater length of course in a very long chapter in the book which is like a short book itself on the sense of the sacred but there i would say that in the end it is love that triumphs it is love that holds the day and it is love that grounds the cosmos well those are words i think on which we should conclude today ian and in gratitude i just want to return to your image of the of the spiral and it seems that these are weighty but also exciting times that we are living in you you talked about the way in which the temporal and eternal come together the universal and the particular in a certain sense the universal has its life only in the particulars and what i want to thank you for on behalf of all of those who've been with us today and who and the many who will will will listen to your lecture later online is the way that you haven't enlightened us to embrace our own particularity and to be open to it as a site of revelation it's been a very very beautiful uh time of discussion and illumination ian thank you very much thank you thank you very much uh stephen and thank you all of you for listening and for such very good questions i will be sure to send you the rest of these uh magnificent questions uh your way as soon as as soon as we conclude that is all for now everyone thank you bye you

Channel: Ralston College

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Length: 120min 46sec (7246 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021