Imagination: A Way to Remake the World - Iain McGilchrist & Phoebe Tickell

thank you so much Lee I hope you can all hear me okay you might be wondering why it looks like a horror movie here I'm currently uh in Kerala India with my family and there's been a power cut just a few minutes before coming on online which means weirdly the the system preserves certain things like Wi-Fi but allows other things to die like lights so I currently have my phone light beaming in on me which is why you have this effect so don't be scared um do imagine the best and not the worst for me in this context um we are speaking about imagination today after all and it's a great pleasure to invite well to to welcome you all here first of all um and this is now the fourth inner series of talks with Ian about the the um the thing the ah the matter with things um I get confused with that because I wrote a book once myself called the moves that matter and every so often I I the two books kind of flip in my head this is about the matter with things and it's the fourth in our series and we're particularly interested tonight to speak about imagination um our prior event was more about sanity prior to that about value and prior to that um matters of Ian's work more generally um tonight we've arranged the conversation with uh Phoebe takeel whom I'm very pleased to introduce you to all many of you will know her already Phoebe is uh I'll give the formal definition before the informal one a biologist systems thinker and founder of moral imaginations it's an organization driving a movement of imagination-powered activism placing life back at the center of the economy politics and systems of governance Phoebe Works across multiple societal contexts and has advised government the education sector and the food informing sector more recently she has worked with Camden Council to train Council officers in the skills of collective imagination and horizontal leadership and people will speak a bit more about what all that means um but I can say that I know her personally I was also part of a sort of imagination uh practice that she did with a large group of people in Berlin a few years ago so I have first-hand experience of how she evokes and elicits uh sort of imagination in large groups of people for the greater good and it's a practice that continuing to develop and be refined as we go and Phoebe is a scientist by background and like Ian they have in common this kind of uh deep deep Spirit of scientific inquiry leading you beyond science which I think all the best scientists somehow on the one hand remain loyal to science and yet somehow move themselves Beyond it as well I think they they share that at the very least I think the way I've seen this conversation in outline is that this is um a chance for um Ian who's fascinated by imagination and makes it one of his main Pathways to truth in the matter with things um to to speak with someone who's working very seriously and in a very dedicated way to bring imagination to walk the talk of imagination in practice in Civil Society context where we say we need greater imagination but don't always know how to go about doing it Phoebe is actually taking it very seriously and trying to do that um and for Phoebe it's a chance to get a rich richer more more full theoretical take on what exactly imagination is and why and I believe they're going to explore many things including moral imagination um so it's a great pleasure to let them speak to each other and um I can release you from the terror of this image of me with the the light and the Darkness um I will I hope to be back for the Q a looking slightly more respectable um but until then I welcome the chance to introduce you to Phoebe tickle and Ian mcgilchrist and I hope they'll have a great 50 or so minutes talking between them and then we'll we'll speak about how to do the Q a once it starts then thank you all very much and I'll see you a bit later bye Ian is it just me who thinks Jonathan should probably stick to that that kind of intro in the dark with the with the light I think I think it's a it's a marvelous Improvement and so often um a negation proves to be extremely positive I agree what better introduction to a session on the imagination indeed indeed no no I'd like you to fire away okay so I mean I wanted to just start by um by saying that it's not an exaggeration to say that it's a huge honor to have this conversation um and just to say a big thank you for your work um you know on on reading at the master and his Emissary and also you know the the two huge tones which I've got here on my desk the two latest books massive I've been using it as a laptop stand but also really amazing really fantastic incredible but really grateful because I as I have been reading your work what I have been finding is that there is a resonance to the work that goes beyond just the content there's a sort of grammar of meaning um and it kind of reminded me of the conversation you and Zach were having about you know how meaning and value are so inherent in the universe and I really had this sense as I read had no sense as I read your book that um there is something resonating in your work that is much deeper than the the left hemispheric kind of oh that's an interesting fact and oh that's a great quote and that's a fantastic bit of research there is something going on at a deeper level um which perhaps also has something to do with um identity because actually as a scientist as somebody who started Life In The Sciences and felt profoundly um dissatisfied by the kind of scientific route to truth um and and you know really felt that the Sciences as a whole were just quite impoverished as a way to understand reality um as I'm reading your books I'm feeling like you know you've done me and probably many others a huge favor to give us a stack of kind of um research and backing for what that feeling is the feeling of like this can't be all there is there must be more um and you know I found my way from science you know how long ago was it about seven years ago I left the lab at Imperial College London finally kind of said okay I love science but there's something more and actually if we want to try and address what's wrong with the world clearly Science and Technology don't have the answers because we've been trying that route for the last 200 plus years so there's something else um and you know I found my way to imagination which is obviously the topic of what we're going to focus on today and I found it profoundly um encouraging that you know the final chapter of your of the first volume of the matter of things is is Imagination it kind of feels like you went on a similar path from questioning you know science is the only root re-science and reason is the only route to truth um to questioning well what how are we on making the world you know through perception through um some kind of divorce from reality because clearly there's something going on if if we're so out of touch with reality um that we're creating the kind of Destruction that we see today um and I'll stop in a second but one of the other things I found profoundly um satisfying was that you also came to the same conclusion that imagination is not a faculty and a capacity that takes us away from the world it's actually one that brings us closer to reality and I feel like this is what I've been trying to say for the last kind of four or five years when I started the work with moral imagination I was saying I think imagination can get us closer to what really matters and what is real um but I felt like I was sounding like a crazy person so that's where I want to start it's just a big thank you really um and I'm curious to hear you know any thoughts you've got in response to that no that's that's a very kind introduction and there were so many things in what you said that I I would love to um pick up on um I mean one one that just comes to mind is the the difficulty of articulating the really important things and these are the things that don't therefore get um adequate treatment in science and in the discourse of Reason both of which I honor hugely um as I believe you do too but I don't accept that they are the only ways of reaching reality or even necessarily the most profound ones um but they make a very very valuable contribution and they worry about the way in which sometimes nowadays people are too ready to disparage either science or Reason um so um yes but essentially it's going to defeat language because what we're what we're what we're going for what we're talking about when we're thinking about imagination is a resonance between ourselves and another and that other isn't necessarily well specified but it's absolutely real it may be the existence of a phenomenological world around us it may be a realm in which the better ways to talk about ourselves are as um embodied Souls but there is here something that language will always um bring to the to the ground with a great flood which is it which is in no way um does Justice to what it is that we're talking about so I do think that imagination is Central and that's why in a way I did work towards that at the end of part one and that section on epistemology and you'll notice at the end of part two which is the metaphysics I might have a chapter on the sense of the Sacred which is also another thing you you know you know from the very word Gary it's going to defeat language but we mustn't be put off by that we must stick to our perceptions and you can have perceptions and you can have insights without them necessarily having to be explicit in language in fact all the best ones are not which is why we have poetry why we have music why we have ritual why we have narrative myths all these things are able to put us in touch with things that importantly need to remain implicit unless they're going to be degraded by this the common coin of everyday language which makes everything similar to something else that we already know but so what are we going to do about the realm where we're going to find things that we don't already know because language only deals with the stuff that we do unless it works against itself and you may know that my first book and was called against criticism I wrote it in my 20s and it well anyway yes it I think it was um it sold about 400 copies and after that was unceremoniously reminded um and Faber made a big loss on it but but um the idea there was to argue with something wrong with the way in which we conceived academic criticism which was to take an entity that was living entirely imaginative implicit embodied and utterly unique and turn it into something every day that was General in nature decontextualized disembodied and from which the the magic of imagination had disappeared but there was another meaning to the title which was that criticism could work if it worked against criticism in other words there is a kind of discourse which is aware of its own limitations and can incorporate them there is a kind of science that can be aware of the limitations and therefore not become hubristic about what it can definitely State and it's getting into that area where you've neither rubbished something nor said this is our savior this will give us all the story there will never be the whole story because I believe that whatever it is we're trying to contact is essentially infinite and also of infinite importance which gives us a bit of a thing to think about during our lifetime because we have a short period in which to make use of this amazing gift so that that's what I'd say in the outset anyway how would you what would you think about that um the some of them so a metaphor a couple of things so um the metaphor that I can't remember where it is in the book but where you talk about um the flat maybe it's an equator the flashlight and the the fertile duct yes by a chemist who is talking about how you know with Irwin Chuck yes yes yes and I loved that so he was saying you know I think people think that science is about Illuminating the darkness but actually science needs that needs this fertile darkness and if you think that you're Illuminating it it's the it's the kind of flashlight in the in the void you know in the the dark Starry skies and and you know kind of incredible mystical ineffable you know universe and you've got this flashlight and you're saying well we've found we found it it's this room here that we can see and I thought that was such a good such a great metaphor for what we what you know what what the situation we're in and then it also made me think about um but obviously as an imagination activist you know person ex you know what was her obsessive I've read quite a lot with Blake William Blake oh wonderful yes you know his work has been huge hugely um not just inspirational but like your work the kind of work where I read his work and I think ah like yes this is this is resonating with what I'm finding in my practice and you know in the kind of lab of imagination where we're trying out practices and working with people and actually seeing some of you know what he's talking about in in kind of 17 hours feeling like yes um and he I think there's a work of his art where he paints Newton um you know he's painted Isaac Newton with this and he's like staring at this at this piece of paper which has got like a beautiful graph on it and then there's like the big chaotic mystical Universe around him um but he's just you know he's focusing on this kind of perfect um you know perfect equations or you know some sort of representation of the world um and so that that's what comes up for me is that you know science is beautiful and elegant and that the reason why I chose to study science and I loved it like I'm sure you did as well um but we think that we are discovering everything thing you know it's quite often that um that I hear people say like oh what if we run out of things to discover of the uni you know it's covered so much and actually what if we run out um wow what an impoverished reality you need imagination to see how little you know if you don't have any you think we know it all but yes I'm so glad you brought up Blake who by the way uh um you know we both know that Blake was a wonderful man also quite frustrating in some ways and he did tend to for his own purposes demonize Newton who you know interestingly was was um more fascinated by spiritual um inklings of his than he was in his physics but it just goes to show that a great mind can I believe Encompass both and many of the Great physicists of the last hundred years show that exactly that they are able to see Into the Heart of things matter and see in there something Beyond and more profound and that that brings me back to Blake and I hope this is a fruitful connection I think the quote is to the man of imagination nature is Imagination itself I think I used that at the beginning of the chapter and what's really interesting about that you can puzzle every what do you mean the man of imagination nature is Imagination itself but just before it I quote Richard Feynman who says that nature has a far far greater imagination than a human being which is really a way of saying oh puny imagination can only get so far in investigating what there is but I think that Blake is making a more profound point and it's a very good point which I entirely agree but I think what Blake is saying is that imagination you are not inspecting or something over there but in imagination you are already in whatever it is so that the subject object divide is actually transcended so that if you really look into nature you are already in nature and this is what imagination is about it's about healing The Divide not in some terribly weird and new edgy way which means we can stop thinking but but there is something desperately profound in this idea that in the realm of imagination we are actually contacting not a representation which is what the left hemisphere offers us not at drawing a picture a graph a theory but the actual experience of what it is in which we finally see sort of through it but not in the sense of seeing through to something that's separate from it Beyond but seeing through the veil of familiarity to its real core you know so I think that that's that's one thing I'd like to say about imagination is that it it brings us to this this place we're not sort of just making stuff up or we're definitely not making stuff up in fact that's the exact opposite of what we're doing we're respectfully honorably humbly with awe approaching whatever it is and thereby allowing ourselves for once to get close to it and into it I'm so glad you said that um there have been you know during the work of finding the thread of imagination and kind of pulling on it and starting to unravel you know huge amount um what I've been uncovering in my research and and you know thinking and writing and practice is that imagination I think is one of the most deeply misunderstood things um not non-things actually because I think one of the reasons it's been so exactly did is because it's been so thingified it's been so you know it's like oh the imagination the thing that is over there that we do sometimes on the weekend and we have it when we are children but we don't have it when we're out you know and it's this ridiculous kind of even the language we use around imagination is completely um it's not just inaccurate but it leads us into completely confused Realms um and and creates quite an odd relationship between ourselves and Imagination and this has been a lot of the work of the last few years is like actually before I even get to do the work of actually you know testing and experimenting with how can we increase you know increase imagination capacity which is also a bit of a an odd term um because actually what I've been finding is that you there is no need to there's nothing to increase because it's not a volume or a thing there is just unblocking to be done from from the exact relationship to it yeah I mean I I can keep going [Laughter] um what I just wanted a comment about it there since we've had a little Hiatus is um the idea that imagination is not something that has somehow to be drummed up uh it's something that is there all the time if a certain way of thinking doesn't get between us and it so we use and have to use the left hemisphere's mode of apprehension in order to be able to function properly but as I'm always saying there's nothing wrong with that there's something good about that as long as we can then remember to go beyond it to have finished that process of unpacking explicitly and then say right it's none of that although that has actually helped us on the way so it's as people say in so many religious Traditions that the seeking of God is is not that God is hiding somewhere but God is there if only you don't stop yourself from seeing and that's that could be said I think about the imagination that it is there and we it's by not doing things and by not espousing certain views and not acting and so on but allowing permitting something that it will come into being for us exactly um and and one of the things that the participants of you know the programs that we're running with moral imagination say is that one of the most valuable things that we're doing when we go into local councils is giving them planned unplanned time and to start with the the kind of managers were like what you know what what do you think unplanned unplanned time but that's actually what it takes is to just is you know how can we expect exercise imagination when there's no space or time and we're completely flooded by the need to deliver to produce to perform worst conditions for imagination exactly modern day and those are all expressions of the left hemispheric mentality that we must have something we can measure that must always be a utility there must be a product to this otherwise this has been completely wasted even if the time that you you spent was profoundly useful but didn't actually turn up anything measurable at the time so it's all this Administration managerial thinking that in my view is mushrooming in the world I mean so fast that I think there's a very palpable difference between now and five years ago I mean it was bad all the time I was growing up I complained about it in the 70s and the 80s but I hadn't seen anything until you get to 2023 where and I think this is partly to do with machines which of course have no imagination have no understanding of context individuality embodiedness feeling the spiritual anything but our following simple left hemisphere rules so it's much worse it's much worse than talking to an administrator is having to deal with the machine and now most of the time when you want to do anything you have to interface with the machine so that is the death of imagination and I'm sure you know Paul kingsmaus uses the the term the machine as I think it's a perfectly good way of talking about what I mean by the left hemisphere all I'd say is that it's bigger than the machine in the machine is an expression of this left hemisphere mentality but the left hemisphere mentality is behind the machine and behind many other things so for example we we look at various predicaments the obviously the destruction of the planet the the the catastrophic changes in climate all of these things and we see them as something either bad luck or bad planning or something we did wrong um and we and we look at other things like you know the the the the the growing disparity not the diminishing disparity between the um unimaginably rich and the poor and we think we must have got a problem here and what did we do and there's all these different problems what's the solution and the answer is they're not problems but in dual Heinz terms their predicaments that we have brought about by a certain way of thinking which leads inexorably to each of these and to a de-spiritualized desacralized sense of the world in which we live hmm yes so so um I'm just holding in mind you know there's a couple things I'd like to cover in this conversation so I'm I'm just following the thread of where it's going but I will pull us into a couple of things because I'd really like this yeah I'd love to spend some time on the brain and Imagination Neuroscience because that's something that you know I've done a lot of thinking and research around and and we'd love to talk to you about you know linking it with the right right and left um Hemisphere and also um talking about moral imagination which was my way into imagination we must talk about both of those yes we must yes um I didn't just want to have you know hat tip to chat GPT because you mentioned you know machines don't have imagination and I'm sure that it's on everybody's mind as you know right now there's a a lot of talk about how chat GPT seems to have imagination you know it's it's kind of churning out poems and um rap battles and um you know and seems to be creative even though it's you know through a mimicry of all the information you know kind of emergent property of all the information it's Gathering and kind of yes and then fair enough but you know do you want to say anything about um oh gosh I do yes because I mean I I want to say that I can't intellectually completely rule out that at some point some creation of ours might might achieve a kind of Consciousness I I just can't rule that out partly because I believe the Consciousness is the original primary staff of the cosmos in any case um but what you mean there and what I mean by imagination is not what this is doing what it is doing is exactly what an imaginative person doesn't do which is do a very quick which of course a human being couldn't do in this speed What machines do is just do things very first is to sort of do a trolley Dash around Wikipedia and come up with with an answer and it will even make stuff up and be quite sure that it's right because it sees a pattern and jumps to conclusions which is what the left hemisphere does um and really this is no different from something that existed oh decades ago I can't remember the name of the man but basically what he did was he fed all of Bath's Works into a computer and then it set some sort of you know let the computer look at these things and then imitate a work of Bach but none of these Works has anything like the power of Park and by his very first composition when he was 19 years old is already one of the most staggering pieces of musical writing in history and it wasn't derived from anywhere so we're looking at things that we must be careful you know because a machine can be made by human Ingenuity to simulate almost anything I mean there's no limit to how far you can help it simulate the question is is it simulating something or is it actually achieving it and so far there's no evidence that it's achieving it hmm and is there was this something about you know again it's almost like a left hemisphere response to art or to the sacred it's like oh but you know we can just churn out you know it does the sacredness of Art become affected if it's something that's being churned out through random you know re organization of of you know fact and um and existing art I mean that I think we could talk for the whole hour just about this I did just you know to touch on it it's relevant well really it's it's really the The Logical conclusion of the Industrial Revolution which was to take things um that took a lot of craftsmanship and or you know occurred in nature and try and imitate them and then produce thousands of them very very fast so it's exactly what was going on already in the early part of the 19th century it's just been heightened to to another level of technological sophistication but it's it's it's not going to produce it's never going to produce works that have profound human meaning because you have to have a body emotions the sense of relationship the knowledge that you're going to die to have suffered and to be aware of the limitations to what it is that you can experience and I just think this is this can be this can be fed by a clever I.T expert into a computer that seems to say those things but it can't actually do them hmm so back to imagine it the the organic yeah um you know so I said at the beginning that I felt it was one of the most steeply misunderstood and we yes yes about the signifying of imagination you know I also in your you know chapter 19 um of your book you talk about how I guess the the parallel is that um many people when they think of imagination think of fantasy think of you know daydreaming and this is often what I get um when I talk to people about what I do it's like oh oh yeah you know we need more imagination we need more fiction you know we need more creativity another another big misconception I've um been fighting is that people think that my work is all about the future it's not about the future then it's about it's not it's not about time in fact I actually think in the imaginative imaginal realm there is no time it's not a Time bound place and so that's been quite an interesting thing to unpack is that people immediately think that what I'm doing is helping people imagine the future and when actually the work of moral imaginations is really about shifting perspective and unblocking and seeing what is there so it's not we're not trying to get people to think about the future and you're about we're about I mean now it's very interesting because I mean you know that um um you sent me some things to look at about an hour before this I know therefore didn't have time to look at them in any depth but I was interested by your three pillars which would seem on the face of it to suggest that you are interested in the past and the future as well as our relationships with the natural world I like that actually because I think that one thing we've lost is the sense that we are is part of our atomistic way of thinking um we are part of a flow which includes the past and includes the future and our ancestors and any of our um offspring are already present in our lives in some way and we only reach a moral obligation we have a moral obligation to those who who worked hard sacrificed died to produce the things that we take for granted and all the wisdom that they stored up which is now just being trashed and thrown out of the window and we have a uh we have a moral obligation a very big one to those that come after us not to carry on defiling and destroying what is their um Birthright so I I like that I but maybe what you're saying is that in the realm of imagination there is no time I wouldn't know really whether there was or not but I think that when you're really in the realm of imagination you're not aware of time you're not aware of time passing so that when you make contact after all imagination is not only not a thing it's a relationship and that relationship is reverberative so if something is going on that is bringing something into being and this is why you have to do the kind of one foot in in either campus saying it's not just something I make up but it's not something just out there given it's something that comes into being that is utterly real an aspect of what it is is revealed in the relationship with my imagination and so we're dealing there with something that it is the only hope we have of getting into reality because if you just look at words with and Coleridge I have the great the greatest philosophical writers on imagination in any language I believe um but I mean what they were saying is that when we think we see something we look at the mountain and we just see a lump of rock and so on but it's only when we use our imagination that we see into it and in doing so we don't see something that's other than a lamp of rock we see what a lump of rock is that lump of rock is by the way not any that lamp rock is for the first time and this reminds me of um you know the Zen master dogen in the 12th century who said when I sought enlightenment the mountains were just Mountains and the rivers were just Rivers when I was in the process of seeking Enlightenment the mountains were no longer mountains the rivers were no longer Rivers when I achieved Enlightenment the mountains with mountains and the rivers were rivers and I think that's the point is we're not putting something in place or something we're allowing the real entity for the first time to become real in this world and we each to link tomorrow imagination the reason I believe that attention is moral is because the way we attend changes what it is we find and what we find is part of the imaginative world that is the only thing that is real and so we are actually creating something either something terrible or something good by what we do and that that means that we each bear the burden of a certain kind of responsibility for what we do um Blake talks about twofold Vision which I think is very relevant here and I love the you know his couplets of oh God may may us keep um from single Vision Newton's sleep and you know I love is it you know what he talked about was actually the the view of the world is just material that's Newton's sleep you know calling you into a sleep but away from reality which you actually feel through twofold vision meaning one eye and you know and seeing what is but the other eye having this internal Mind's Eye of imagination and that is the twofold vision of what is real and we've been lulled into a sleep you know by he clearly has an issue in Newton but he also depicts Newton as like a beautiful healthy God yes but it's not only him and as you say he also had a great interest in the mystical and the Mysterious um I loved that that kind of you know this is lulling us into a dangerous sleep which we might not wake up from before it's too late and that's why this works so urgent and so as potential actually um because actually we're asleep at the wheel and we're heading towards a cliff um and and I completely agree yeah and I did that imagination can can wake us up I I it needs to because as I as I say in in one of the books I don't know that we're like some nebulist wandering towards the abyss humming a Happy tune as we go and that's the left hemisphere it doesn't see what's happening and yet it thinks all is fine because I know and I'm in control um so we need to see I think Blake also said that you know that the men of imagination sees not with the eye but through the eye and again it gives this idea of a depth to what we're seeing but that what one shouldn't think is that what one sees through the eye is some hidden reality behind what it is once he is into the depths of things as words were said this this is a very very important idea that he in fact he talks about lulling our intellectual words with talks about in the Centenary about lulling our intellectual faculties asleep so that the that we can see into the depth of things so um there's a kind of sleep of Reason which is either what um what Goya thought was terrible and I know what he was talking about because it's happening in our own time when people um just decide that they're going to dispense with reason because it doesn't Accord with what they want to believe so they'll just believe it anyway um and so there is a sleep of reason but there's sometimes a need to silence the hemisphere that does all the processing of language so that the other hemisphere the right hemisphere can for one see the whole which is that which is actually what happens during sleep you know and which gives rise to dreams isn't it that the kind of dominant I've been you know my research has led me to the default mode Network which I don't know if that is left hemispheric you know dominant Network because it's it seems to be the seat of rationality Reason also the sense of self we don't you know when we're born we don't have a default mode Network so as babies we don't have memories because the default mode network is what gives us that autobiographical sense of self um but it's also it's also what constrains the imagination so as children we have imaginary friends and those imaginary friends are not close our eyes and somewhere over there they're here with us they're you know people see children talking to their imagining imaginary friend because it's yes it's there um and so you know interesting that there that the default mode Network becomes stronger and stronger you know into adulthood and I think it was either Blake or somebody writing about Blake talked about how compared adulthood to the falling out of Eden you know the kind of innocent childlike wonder and awe um and Imagination that we have um and then as we older there's a kind of divorce from that and the the strengthening of these networks and also our culture and society that is constantly strengthening the neural Pathways um you know of reason of rationality of modeling predicting controlling um and it's interesting that often when people go through our workshops they talk about re-kindling or reconnecting with a kind of inner sense of childlike Wonder or you know something someone's even said like I feel like I've discovered the five-year-old you know that was kind of asleep inside me which sounds sounds a bit contrived or you know that silly but there's something interesting going on that people are finding a reconnection to a child like the witch which has a huge pain you know that they feel a great sense of grief that that's been lost um and and this is all connected you know that your work of the the kind of dominant rationality reason anyway that's a jumble of of thought no no yes as that well no um of course there are different kinds of imagination there's the imagination of a Michelangelo or a Bach and this imagination of a um a thoughtful Lively five-year-old um and there's a in a way there's a sort of parallel to the way in which there is kind of um knowing um which gets in the way of Unknowing I mean it's not the same as the unknowing you have when you're ignorant and still have to learn it's the unknowing that in fact it goes beyond knowing when you know enough to know that you have to practice unknowing similarly there's a kind of Innocence a child has which is as it were a gift that they have but there is a kind of Innocence that a saint has that comes the other side of experience and is greater than either the Innocence or experience and so I would say that there is a kind of sense of imagination imagination can grow it doesn't have to be stunted by life but the process is whereby we educate people can certainly contribute to a process of you know making them feel small and making them feel silly if they confess to imaginative ideas such as you know an imaginative friend and then somebody says now don't be so silly there isn't really anyone there and so on and and of course this this links to bigger topics it's like um amongst other people and poor old Dawkins he's become like Newton for Blake but he just keeps on saying these things he he sort of believes he has a terrible it's his own worst photo how dare people indoctrinate children into these ideas of a spiritual realm and a Divine realm as well they never think of this if they weren't indoctrinated into it but actually there's a lot of research some of which I quote in that book which shows that children are naturally are aware of things beyond what we call the realm of the five senses but that this is kind of um drummed out of them by being told it's wrong and humiliating them and then they go oh well and they're lucky if they can then reconnect with it and of course what in my experience certainly helps to re-connect one with that is the greatness of Art in all its various forms and the experience of what Everyone likes to call it religious or spiritual life and nature is core to all of this yes absolutely yes so in tomorrow's imagination because I um this is really you know I find imagination is absolutely fascinating and it's uh to me it's you know the most convincing route towards um getting us out of this mess you know yeah existential crisis as many people do in their 20s and really felt like you know what are we doing to the world and and it that crisis has essentially led me to imagination but through that crisis you know the question I was really asking was like how is it that we're making such immoral decisions how is it that we are making decisions that are so self-serving so greedy um you know what is that about how how does that come about so I became really fascinated by morality and ethics you know and thinking probably with with a hangover of my scientific you know brain thinking like okay so the problem is a lack of morality or you know a lack of the Sacred or some sort of death of what is good beautiful and true so how what can we do about that started reading about you know morality and and didn't find a lot of very interesting um and then came across you know came across you know the thing I was thinking about was that actually the way that we've approached Morality In The West has a lot of parallels to the way that we approached you know science that it's very much Tangled Up In reason in rationality and and you know the kind of Enlightenment breeds of morality like utilitarianism or cantianism feel like they're very much left brain um schools of morality and thought and you know kantianism suffers from extreme abstract you know abstraction utilitarianism suffers from extreme reductionism um and so I started wondering what would morality with um a kind of upswell of imagination like where where could those two things come together and I think it's interesting that a lot of Western morality is based on you know this is a very simple model um that Mark Johnson talks about the the kind of moral um moral folklore so a very basic model of the mind um having you know four four components you could think of it as perception uh will um you know the mental realm it's got for let's say it's got these four members as perception reason passion and will and the way this works is you know perception receives sense Impressions from the body passes them to reason or passion and these two things affect our will and passions become active through bodily experience um you know either directly through perception or through memory uh reason receives this information and calculates and analyzes sets data and passes it to the will and um you know basically it's up to the will to decide how to act um based on these two influences and so um you know as I said reason calculates passion exerts force on the will and we think of passion as kind of unpredictable difficult to control um reason you know exerts force on the will but the will will can sometimes resist reason um it can't resist you know it can sometimes resist the force of passion so there's something here about you know that the a model of morality being the ability to use reason to make the right decision and to resist the force of passion and we also think of animals as as lacking reason and so humans being these um you know like a reason a rational animal or a reasonable animal um but but the role of imagination doesn't doesn't play any role here at all um and to be a moral to be moral um in this folk model of morality is to exert reason and is is to resist the force of passion are you am I are you with me on this or you know is there anything to no no I am um I am broadly with you um what I'm thinking though here is that um as you're well aware there are different um schools of thought about morality and very different approaches to religion and the religious life and like everything else the left hemisphere and the right Hemisphere have different takes on them and what you're pointing to is what joins together all these various things the excesses of capitalism of rationalism of mechanism and so on is that these are expressions of the will for power which is essentially the only value as I've said before in previous occasions the only value that really drives the left hemisphere it's evolved to be the one that manipulates and that leaves all the other values that I to you and me and I think to all human beings so important and uh so neglected it leaves them out of the picture and out of the calculation and I I would say that you know foreign autistic and and Hyper rationalistic in some ways and he did say you know the two things that that fill you with or the The Starry Vault above me and the moral law within me so I mean he was in awe of the fact that there was a morality at all and indeed he he thought it must be a God because there was morality he didn't think there must be morality because it was a God so he thought that this moral thing was actually very important and intuitive although his particular approach to it I'm slightly different from but one of the things that well now she is in the way we talk about morality is exactly what you were getting at that it seems to be about a logical process that will result in the utility and maximize utility and I don't want to recap on this because I think I talked about it probably did to them yeah I think you covered it in that conversation with Zach exactly but there is a huge problem with this approach and that what it rules out as you also are in changing is the depth and importance of our intuitive imagination which helps us to be human and we I think we're just becoming less than human because of the assault on all sides on intuition and Imagination and the substitution of an incredibly mediocre thing which is a rationalizing system and I'm not saying that there is no virtue in having such a way of thinking at certain stages in any kind of process you need it I keep reiterating that because I you know I don't want to fall into this thing people think oh yeah the right hemisphere is all creative and wonderful and the left hemisphere is this bogeyman left hemisphere is very very useful but it doesn't know its own limitations and that is the problem we now find ourselves in so in a way I feel rather like I've just read actually and very much admire um Dougal Heinz latest book he just came and visited on the day that it came out a week or two ago and conversation the week after don't have much time these days for reading but I started reading I thought I think I'm going to have to finish this and I thought it was brilliant but really what he's saying is you know very much this thing that there's just answered you know a a sort of wicked network of this problem and that problem and the other problem but there is a whole way of thinking that underlies very clearly the whole package and it's no good just addressing it at the top level that would be like putting a sticking plaster on a cancer you've covered that but it's going to keep growing what we have to do is to emphasize that the only way out of this is to rethink our moral stance and what I mean by that is to embrace above all a degree of humility about what it is that we as humans can do she therefore listen to the wisdom that comes through silence and through traditions and through ART and through nature if you attend to it and to express compassion and moderation in the way in which we try to deal with these I don't mean moderation in the sense of you know averaging everything out but I mean not supposing that this one thing if we just do this we'll answer everything and being extreme about it we we have to know that there are people who have differing angles on this and they can contribute something and so what you the work you're doing which is to liberate people's imaginations from whatever it is that they're constantly being told they have to believe is wonderful because it will bring different facets of truth to life thank you I I also I mean I'm in a really important part of the work is also the connection to what matters you know this moral imagination the way I see that is that rather than following moral laws and rules that can actually be you know massively manipulated religion you know it can can be be wonderful it can also be very harmful absolutely you're looking to kind of top-down morality and morality has become a really dirty word you know but a lot of people have raised their eyebrows at the name of um moral imaginations and what we're doing and yet we're trying to reclaim that and say actually what we need what everybody needs is to is to kind of build a muscle of moral imagination and metaphor and the ability to really connect with what you know matters and is beautiful and good and true and not wait to be told that or to follow rules or to try and work out what the right law or rule or principle is but to get this kind of coming alive through the imagination through you know through the the kind of faculties that we're talking about the kind of right hemispheric intuitive imaginative um capacities to to develop that Compass of what is right and wrong and what are we not going to let happen does that does that make sense there's a kind of what I'm trying to do is knit them together I'd love that I love that and I think you ought to where the superciliousness of these people who um raise an eyebrow when you talk about morality as a as a badger of Pride it shows that you're really on to something important because nowadays everything that's really important is being attacked and destroyed because it demands of some degree of self-restraint it demands that we are aware of the limitations and boundaries in things we can't just have everything we want and have it now um we need actually to exercise some some virtuous restraint on how we behave and how we think and without it we're utterly lost and it comes from an intuitive level what really interests me is that there's a couple of cases I refer to in the book in which scientists who completely convinced of course that human beings are naturally um uh competitive self-interested competitive and self-interested egotistical and so on and set up experiments to show this and we're honest enough to report that the answer showed exact opposite that people aren't normally naturally and you see this in children but they don't have to be torched unless it's something very wrong with them I know but but generally speaking you see this that they they love to help one another they love to be cooperative we are naturally generous and it's further thinking and ratiocination that leads us to be greedy and self-seeking and speak for our own interests rather than others so you know once again it's a case of the not being a predicament how on Earth do we reverse the way we are however do we it's actually there it's all there ready if you can just tear down the edifice that's been built in front of it if you see what I mean completely and and the systemic you know we haven't really talked much about you know this systemic um forces that keep us into you know that really encouraged the kind of qualities yeah let's do so I listen you know what do you I haven't didn't seek capitalism uh mentioned so much explicitly in in your book but I'd be really curious to hear you know where where the place for the kind of systemic critique of where we find ourselves is well I suppose the thing about capitalism is that in in a in a in a word um it's a product of the left hemisphere it's however um people will say well what would you like to put in its place well I certainly wouldn't want to put communism in this place um but there are other Alternatives we could talk about based on it would take that to reach a kind of more communitarian way of living would require probably some some disaster I hope doesn't occur but which would sufficiently disrupt the structures we have now and people would be thrown back on having to help one another trust one another work together and so on because at the moment we've become lazy um so to go back to capitalism I think that there are ways of thinking of capitalism in which it's tempered by other things and so anything that is um dogmatic is going to be inhuman and damaging and so whatever system you come up with it needs to be tempered it needs to be qualified whatever it is it's going to have to have those and that's not wrong that's just showing that you're taking into account various different things but I don't talk about it largely because I'm not myself particularly um involved in political thinking um and I I don't want to I'm more interested in the things behind politics than in the politics themselves I didn't want to start a big conversation about that which would have been a whole other book one which I'm absolutely not equipped to write um so yeah um I mean it is an interesting question what what could you know imagining to imagine what is a right hemispheric system if if capitalism is created by the left hemisphere what and I thought thought this quite often when as I've read your work is um you know we live in a society dominated by the left hemisphere indoctrine and and it's too far and it needs to swing back but what would a society look like if if it had if it was kind of swung too far the other way um you know just to yes I mean if it swung too far the other way I'm often asked so what would the right hemisphere Society look like and they say well um very moderate because the thing about the right hemisphere is that it understands the need for the left hemispheres contribution I mean the story of the master and the embassy the master appointed the atmosphere it's just the industry now thinks it's the master that's the problem so um there isn't really um the right hemispheric system what would that look like you know oh yes what would it look like yes yes but and we have had periods in history I think where um they're not what we would probably suggest to ourselves no but we're obviously massively creative periods in which society flourished in the west but they were fairly short-lived now the thing is that every civilization is fairly short-lived um and I can't remember the name of the guy now but um early 20th century um writer who looked at 30 past civilizations and reckoned that I mean of course it's not scientific to say when does it begin and when does it end but a reasonable Gestalt was that they tended to come up and then fade over about three to four hundred years that seems to be the normal passion and one way of thinking about that is um in the terms of um William waffles I can never remember whether he's William or Patrick one is his real name the other is his pseudonym um not a good pseudonym awful is op-h-u-l-s who wrote um a moderate greatness which is a quote from Gibbon but effectively it's a very short book only 80 pages long all of you go out and buy it after this doesn't cost anything and um or much and he gives us six reasons why civilizations always undermine themselves by overreaching themselves in various ways and one way of thinking of that is that this um self-satisfying thing of the left hemisphere takes over but one fairly I think we would all resonate with this one um image he has is that civilizations tend to go through phases in the first phase they require enormous levels of mutual trust Valor self-sacrifice courage hard work you know honor the building something valuable and then when that's been built as it where the next wave comes along and they can build on top of that and they produce works of science they produce great works of art they elaborate on top of this and then the next wave which is the final wave comes along where they are basically now soft weak selfish lack self-discipline think that they're entitled to everything on a plate because they're born and I believe this is the one we're written now we believe that somehow it's it's our right to carry on living in a totally absurd way which is destroying everything we value that thank you for answering that I know it seems as if we diverged from imagination but I think a lot of what really brings people's imaginations alive at the moment is the question of what could an alternative look like and and also yes be unimaginable you know I I that that brings me a lot of um hope actually the idea that it's all big social change or huge you know societal change was always unimaginable before it happened and the you know 50 years World we're living in now it was completely unimaginable and so when people say okay there is a there is an air of hopelessness and and kind of Despair and um you know a Darkness around you know what's coming next there is a cliff Edge there is there is so I I find it very uh encouraging to hear you kind of gesture at the unimaginable alternative well one of the points that um and maybe we need to start winding up our bit and hand over but one of the things in um in dougal's book um is this um idea that the reason we're so despairing about what's coming is that we think too narrowly about ourselves um and we and the life that we are living now probably won't exist in the future and it didn't exist in the past either but some creatures will live with any luck I imagine substantial numbers of human beings will live and the world will begin to heal and regenerate and what I hope is that those human beings will be will have their eyes opened to things that we're now blinded to by being too comfortable and too convinced that we know it all and that that will lead them to to a kind humane courageous working together in which people you know are bound together by the ties that really make life worth living and and it will be in smaller communities than the ones we have now I mean it's not a human faculty to be able to understand very large numbers especially not very large numbers of people is it 3 million or is it 3 billion or three trillion we just don't know but you know we're we're we're famously fitted to knowing about 150 people that makes sense and so I think one of the problems is we've simply agglomerated everything and that's been partly due to technology and partly due to capitalism anyway maybe that's where we is that where we begin to we'll have to have another one of these yeah it's great I hope it's just the first thank you thank you no thank you very much Phoebe thank you Vivian Ian um that was really really interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole Arc of the conversation so I'm looking forward to hearing the various questions that have that will be coming through shortly and I should say that Jonathan has encountered a further difficulties with the power where he is so I'll be conveying the questions and and moderating this next part so I'm actually going to start by asking the question that Jonathan had hoped to ask if he were able to do it out loud so I'm just gonna read that out for you and you have to imagine Jonathan's Scottish accent which unfortunately am not capable of reproducing and nor would you want me to um so Jonathan wrote and he put this in the chat as well but you'll have to scroll up a bit to see it um Ian often suggests that the left atmosphere is power seeking in some sense and both Phoebe and Ian suggest imagination may be critical to wake ourselves up to our predicament and be some part of the solution and yet power in some shape or form will always be part of reality so what then can we say about the relationship between imagination and Power and in particular what might it mean to imagine power is something wisely wielded in a way that does not sound naive or wishful thinking so I think this is actually quite good as a follow-up to the kind of systemic description that you were just having at the end yes um do you want to go first in okay and before saying anything I see a number of people want to know about do gold Heinz book it's called at work in the ruins um and it has a very long subtitle which is so long it's almost comical and I can't remember it um power you see there's a paradox that the more we seek power the less we really have any control or influence over what happens things control us the power seeking mentality is always frustrated always unhappy always unfulfilled and one sees this I have seen it as a psychiatrist very often but one season if one looks around there is and this is often said by people in particularly Eastern traditions that what we're talking about is not a kind of helplessness but a kind of affirming acknowledgment of one's vulnerability of the fact that there are limitations and that in all humility and honesty and with all one puts oneself open to something bigger than oneself and that in doing that one finds a new Direction one finds that one is no longer frustrating oneself one finds a freedom and autonomy that by seeking freedom and autonomy and that aggressive left hemisphere way we just destroy it I mean there never has been a period in in in the west when Freedom has been more in Jeopardy than it is now unless one says well what about the Soviet era and the Nazi era but we're going back into one of these areas right now because of a strident unnuanced naive view about freedom and um and those sort of things so that's what I'd say is that I I don't think power is this simple thing about controlling others it's about letting go of control in order to be filled with a spiritual sense of things to be one with the world and therefore to to to be empowered by it I mean it is an empowering experience I can say from my own poor poor experience that I find it such hmm yeah thank you for that Ian I think um what I was struck by is that I I worry that we thingify power like we thinkify imagination like and and power is not a thing that we try you know that we're trying to get and grab and you know achieve there's no end to it it's a kind as you say and it's a kind of bottomless um pit of like that you can never really reach the end of it um I also you know another thing that comes to mind is that I I think you know the systems thinking which I think is very right hemisphere um the kind of systems thinking view on power yes is not like the physics kind of cause and effect like you know I push the world I push someone and they fall you know right that kind of mechanistic view on the world of power so you know that kind of model would mean you know if if the way the power is exerted is through kind of pushing on the the world and things happening then the way to kind of get power is to barricade yourself from being pushed and to kind of get more and more powerful that actually we know through you know through systems thinking through looking at how nature works that Pat it doesn't work like that it's not the only way it works you know power can also be not Zero Sum there can be win-win there can be different kinds of Power where you win and I win and we and and you know everything there's a kind of mutual flourishing or a kind of a different kind of power that doesn't need to mean that other people get pushed down we could all be powerful so I wonder if that's you know a different kind of power I I love that and I can't resist coming back to it um thank you very much um because the thing about a complex system and all living things and all living communities and environments are complex is that they they don't have this um efficient causation at the back of them that pushes things forward instead there is as much bottom down as top up causation if you'd like to think of it in those ways but there are also different kinds of causes we've selected one of Aristotle's four causes the efficient cause and think that is what causation is but in fact people's behavior is caused also by aspirations towards certain things by being drawn effortlessly towards something that is good beautiful and true what he called a final cause and there are also formal causes which are becoming important in both biology and physics Where is the information about form in that DNA code actually there must be form Fields as physics suggests so in biology and this is now entering into the mainstream it was a bit Fringe but it's now entering mainstream so there are other ways of thinking about how things are caused which are in the round and are beautiful and attractive not being pushed from behind yeah yeah beautiful Botanical power and a culture I like it [Laughter] um all right well let's um ask Stuart Campbell to ask the next question so Stuart if you can I will ask you unmute you here and if you can ask your question out loud please yeah thanks Lee so um I have a bit of a concern with the term imagination or idea of imagination is it's kind of commonly conceived and that is that human beings can imagine quite wildly and quite disconnectedly from reality so my interest is in getting a clearer sense of how you discern imagination and maybe as differentiated for from what um in other words how do we temper imagination or have imagination re relate fittingly to reality I mean we could say that the left hemisphere imagines itself the master so I I if you get the tension that I'm trying to talk speak to here I'd love to hear what you have to say I certainly do see what you're talking about and of course imagination is not just some kind of um faulty thinking and I'm tempted just to refer to the saying by their fruits you shall know them that in a way you you know imagination when you experience it and you know when you find it in others that it is not a fantasy of theirs imagination can include dark things but it's General trend is towards life and vivification whereas the appropriation of masterhood by the left hemisphere is a kind of blow for death if you like from for mechanism so there isn't of course unfortunately a way we can measure in any sense imagination and of course we can't image it on a on a on a wretched pet scan or anything like that we're talking about something which is profoundly and only experiential and so um Imagination can lead people astray this is right but I think it's rather like being in the groove that you know when your imagination is taking you somewhere good if you have ever had which I only very occasionally have had the experience of really writing a poem rather than just versifying you kind of know when something is happening through you and I think that imagination is like that it's rather like playing music while singing well or dancing well that's the best I can say it's completely won't stand up in a court of law but it's it's the best I can do help me out Phoebe I'm sure you've got something better to say well I've got an easy out which is moral imagination obviously because it you know what I like to say is um that you know imagination gave rise to nuclear weapons you know imagination is not it's not a but it's not necessarily positive but I resonate with what you're saying Ian which is that there is you know we're talking about a kind of opening the doors of perception and allowing the sacred to flow through and exactly imagination being the kind of seeing through um and allowing you know that real sense of connection to the world or experience of reality and whereas what I think Stuart you were talking about is more kind of almost like active imagination actively imagining things um and yes and obviously lead to bad things and good things and are kind of directed um Imagination and I I don't think that stands up in a court of law either but I I think I think it's a good question I think there's there's also something about imagine not being just a head you know head-based thing it's also hard it's also embodied and it's it's throughout and how do we bring alive the that imagination that that you know that is not just using the neurons of the head but the neurons of the gut and the heart and and there's so much more there um I hate that yeah I love that yeah and I I think also well maybe we've had enough on this question but um you know um when people want to be imaginative and I'm sure you this has nothing to do with anything you do but you know they say come on let's have a a brainstorming session you know and you know I bet Noir it's a brainstorming session doesn't matter how crazy it is we put it on the board and tell him to let it all hang out this is not actually how creativity works and I make a big distinct I have a whole chapter separate to the imagination around creativity because I'm talking really about how the brain it can be helped in this and it is nothing to do with this um uh simply letting it all hang out that that is not likely to end up with anything very useful and when you look at people who are truly creative they operate in a completely different way from the person who is trying to be creative if you're not creative then don't worry you're not a creator person for now maybe later you will be but right now you're not a creative person but don't try to be creative because it's counterproductive I feel like that's a kind of Yoda there's a yoga quote there don't try just do um [Laughter] I'm afraid but there we are segue into the next question which is from uh Rosalind Murray so I've just um um unmuted you rather than if you'd like to ask your question live please go ahead oh thank you um yeah I was just interested in well you know William Bright Blake is great but he passed away in 1827. so I'm just kind of wondering if you can speak to contemporary art ideas and Imagination I mean there's a whole world in contemporary art that touches on all the things you're speaking about it's a huge area um at a lot of talks like this and many others maybe that come from a literature side often you're getting conversation that relates to artists that are very long ago and not about what's going on now and this is a huge area which already is exploring what you're talking about so I'm just all of the things you're talking about but kind of gets left out of the conversation so I'm just wondering is there any space within that that influences your work but from a much more contemporary perspective who who is that aimed at both of us um yeah that would be great you're still there I'd like I would also love to hear you know the artists you that really you know I feel like there are some artists that perhaps you're holding um hit dear to to imagination if there's any that you'd like to name before I yeah speak about before we speak about our own I would you know I wouldn't because there's so many artists from so many cultures that if I started to even dig into specific artists specific approaches um you know and even that brings me back to this question another aspect of the question which tonight and often this idea of we like there is no one single we we is a conglomerate so I'm kind of interested in the positioning of us we because we are not and so even when we say we as a group of people act in this way with imagination that's not true because there's a whole group of people who are maybe artists or naturally creative or have invested a huge amount of time in a particular practice of Art and art understanding and learning creativity and Imagination you know developing that that are not operating in that way and then there are people in other cultures don't that don't operate in that way so I think I wouldn't like to pick specific people because there's so much rising and so many people I just be interested in if you had anything from a more contemporary place that you were coming with yourselves so however you don't want to answer the question but you're asking us to answer it that's absolutely fine and the reason that Blake came up I think it's fair I don't think that's fair no no no I'm not okay that's not a fair response Ian okay because well it sounds like I'm just asking those Contemporary Art influence your thought and practice in this area maybe there that's a better way the reason the reason that Blake came up I think was twofold one is that he's a he's very unusual in that he writes about imagination all the time he not only uses imagination but he rather unusually writes about it most great poets don't Wordsworth perhaps was another um and possibly courage but it's not very common I mean the other is that he is a towering genius I mean he there's nobody like him in the history of of literature he's absolutely unique and Incredibly important and the fact that he died in 1827 has no nothing would ever to do with it if he died in 1827 BC he would be worth exactly as much as if he were alive now because as Phoebe says there is no time in the realm of true imagination these are Timeless words Timeless truths but if you ask me to say what poets do I like what painters do I like and so on I I can say that I mean one of the things that often happens when I'm giving a talk is that I have a painting behind me by Ross loveday which I think is a perfect expression of the modern imagination and that it is it is a kind of absolutely non-pin downable landscape and it's also a fantastic abstract that seems to mean something Beyond whatever landscape is being hinted at so that would be an example of modern work which is deeply imaginative and it's not trying to um give me a message I mean it's death to a work of art when it's got a message and there's a little plot beside what the artist was trying to do was you know what the composer really meant were no great art speaks for itself and is not trying to persuade you of anything that's what I say but apologies if I offended the the question I I was being a bit frivolous and you have to take that as part of the game anyway um over to you Phoebe um so rather than naming um specific artists or musicians that I might end up doing that but I think what the question um what what it brought up for me which I think is a very relevant and interesting one is the kind of movement ecology around imagination you know what who who who's there and I speak about something called imagination Justice which is actually who gets to imagine you know who where is the imagination capital in the world like at the moment it's being hoarded by usually kind of tech CEOs in Silicon Valley who will look and sound a certain way and also have a lot of money you know and there's a there's a thing around who gets to imagine um which is also not just um who gets to imagine but whose imaginations get to then translate into you know affecting and creating and uh worlding you know this concept of worlding from um I think from feminist critical theory is about how some people get you know it get to create the world um you know and and as um I know I think I'm going to forget who who said this but it matters who world's worlds um it's a very famous quote by uh a writer who does influence me a lot in imagination I'm having a blank now um you know it matters what words words and words it's not just me um is her book um anyway um but so something we didn't sorry for just Ian just to add that something we didn't know far away thank you so much madalina um something we didn't come on to which I think is really relevant is that there are there is a living you know living um group of people who indigenous people who whose whole culture you know who have been keeping alive a culture of imagination and and you know resisting not all again it's very easy exactly all into generalizations and labels like not all indigenous people but indigenous cultures I think really deserve a mention here because there is a a living breathing Continuum of a of a way of being in the world and Prince you know principles ways of living relationship to the natural world so there is a stewarded culture um that is keeping imagination alive in the ways that we've just been talking about Ian I'd love to hear you know if you have anything to say about that because I think it's very relevant to the question I just say a hundred percent agree I mean I resonated with everything you said and we're interestingly driving to Extinction the little pockets of wisdom that we could be learning from and unfortunately one very great pocket namely China has chosen instead of to offering wisdom that it once had has chosen to become um a a delinquent western state but I I love what you say about the indigenous people and the wisdom that is there and it's very very important thank you um I'd like to invite Mark Reed to ask her a question please and this might be the last one depending on um the response time just because we'd like to end it 40 minutes after as we've promised the hundred minutes event but let's see thanks thanks very much thank Phoebe and and Ian McGill Christine I love your books your incredible writer and Phoebe this is great to hear about you and the more imagination my questions about tomorrow imagination uh first of all the first time I heard about moral imagination was in a book by Rudolph Steiner who I've talked to Ian about before it's the philosophy of freedom and there's more imagination we can see but anyway my question is and we talked about like you talked about developing the imagination you know do you either of you Advocate any spiritual practices or do you do any spiritual practice yourself to develop the imagination and uh well I asked the question because you because he talked moral development Steiner talks about developing uh imagination inspiration and intuition but he said in every step in Spiritual Development should be it should be three steps in moral development that's really important and I think that's often what happens the people do develop these and actually you know just something might sound crazy but something like Trump who was uh who's is a big fan of Norman Vincent peel and the power of positive thinking I think it has developed a great powers of imagination believe it or not and that and as well to power allied with that but no moral development whatsoever so I'm just curious about yourselves do you uh have spiritual practice to develop imagination if it's you Phoebe go ahead you're the moral imagination person here I um it's interesting I avoid the word spiritual usually um I think there's a lot of baggage and I also think there's a huge amount of spiritual bypassing that goes on you know the things that use the word spiritual and are incredibly harmful and Incredibly lacking in any kind of sense of the Sacred or morality so I stay away from that word um I think the work that we're doing in moral imaginations the work that Ian talked about the three pillars of um future Generations ancestors and the more than human world is profoundly spiritual like I think part of why I mean I feel incredibly grateful um and and kind of honored to do this work every day is because it I wouldn't call it that you know we're going into local councils we're working with um you know large Institute but what we are trying to do is create a space and practice that is profoundly connecting to the sacred when you imagine having a conversation with a person Seven Generations in the future you know to touch on Iroquois indigenous thinking that is profoundly spiritual and sacred so to me this imagination work that I'm doing it's it's not frivolous it's not about the future it's not about Innovation and Technology it is deeply sacred and spiritual and you know personally you know I I meditate I spent try and spend a lot of time in nature I think meditation you know that Rob babaya is a really interesting Buddhist teacher who actually works a lot with imagination within the kind of Buddhist practice if anybody is interested I'd recommend looking at his work um but I think right now that I I guess I only have so much capacity for Spiritual work and basically my my job is um doing that that kind of spiritual work and bring people together and creating spaces where people can um connect with the with the imaginal with their sense of what's important what matters um and and so that's my that's my answer and Ian do you meditate I'm just curious yes I do um at least it's what I call meditation which is my understanding of mindfulness yeah um which I think is an important practice that should be taught in schools so that everyone knows how to do this it's not it's not like there's some complicated technique it's just remembering to stop certain things happening and as I keep saying the first step in creativity sounds negative to the Western mind because we think in these polar ways that you must be push push push but sometimes actually you get if you're pushing at a door Mark pull then you're doing the wrong thing and a lot of the time it's about stopping stopping doing the things that are going on in my head and remembering with gratitude the things that I do love and and learn from and feel connected to in in my day in my days I'm lucky that I Live Well by choice in a rather remote place where I'm surrounded by nature which is a constant companion and reminder and I like um Phoebe I dislike the word spiritual which can be anything from having a scented mouth with candles too um you know I I I just don't I think the term is terribly produced but on the other hand people react very badly if you talk about religion for reasons I completely understand although in the end I would I would caution people not to dismiss by any means right the incredible traditions of the great religions of the world um including Buddhism if you call it a religion which I think a lot of Buddhists do and quite rightly because it's in touch with the Divine so I I what am I saying I'm saying I don't I don't I don't actually sign up through anything this is bad I believe I don't go to a church partly because any of the churches that are within Striking Distance for me would not be of the kind that I particularly want to go to um and I would find it very difficult I think but I don't approve of that point of view I approve of the point of view where you go and you you form part of a community so I'm putting my hands up here um as you know I'm not not any expert on any of this I'm just like I guess a lot of people listening to this muddling my way through life as best I can you know and when I last checked I was still alive and that's good thanks I I expect the word spiritual it's funny I I I'm trying I'm trying to reclaim that word because I know it has a dirty you know Association like religion and and very much I I was brought up you know hating religion as a Catholic because it was very moralistic um in a bad way in a exterior way but uh but it yeah meditation mindfulness and that's what it meant really you know I suppose yeah look thank you very much for your can I loop back around because I just to say that I think there you know I said I I do meditate um but I think just really in parallel to the conversation we just had about imagination I think there's something about bringing you know to me being alive in the you know the anthropocene whether we use that word or not but being alive in this time and being really awake and sensitive to what is going on is a spiritual you know it is spiritual like I think that's kind of what you ended on Ian is like I'm alive I'm you know that is a spiritual experience and going and sitting and closing my eyes and meditating I don't actually think of as more spiritual than the the kind of constantly waking up being like this is what's happening who am I what am I choosing to do how do I sensitive um to the the pain of the world to what is happening I'm just saying that we are reaching to 100 100 minutes I don't want to upset Jonathan even though he's not here um by taking us over um but it's a really good question it really got me thinking that there's a you know the answer I gave first and then there was a sort of emergency yes one and and what the hell about the timing so I'm just going to say something um the you know the idea that one should push towards a spiritual goal is also something that requires awareness of its negative side so you know to be extremely Zen you know the answer to being spiritual is to not try and be spiritual at all you know however it's very good putting on my Western hat to have a routine of sitting down and perhaps reading a certain text or being quiet and meditative there we are and somebody put a paradox mindset but we haven't got time to talk about it there's so many good questions Ian and Phoebe will send you the questions um so that you have a chance to look at them and um and for everyone thank you so much um for being here and for those of you that were asking questions and who wanted to ask that didn't have the time please bring them to the connection session next Tuesday and um I also wanted to mention that in two weeks time there's um Isabella granich who's going to be in conversation with Ian um she's a researcher and facilitator she works in kind of from a developmental Science Background works with adolescents um we'll have more information about who she is and the topic of the conversation very shortly Michael's put it in the chat so if you want to register already for that next session um and this will also go in a sort of modified form on YouTube once we make the edit so um if you want to replay this you'll be able to do that and you'll see that link come out in a few days but I think just for now I wanted to really thank Phoebe and Ian for taking the time to speak together I personally found it incredibly interesting to listen to the two of you in conversation so thank you very much and good evening and good afternoon to everyone thank you thank you

Channel: PERSPECTIVA

Views: 21,883

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Id: 7c9vyj_0zSs

Length: 97min 19sec (5839 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023