McGilchrist - Hemispheric Asymmetry and the Approach to the Divine

to start off i'm glad to hear that that's what i wanted to know um i'm honored to be starting this [Music] conference a series of days of discussions and thank you very much for inviting me along as uh andrew was saying um i'm very interested in the question of understanding which is not at all the same as explanation and it's not just the same as being clever it is feeding oneself into the reality of another thing outside of oneself and what i try to do in this book which is called the matter with things coming out in november is to ask the question platinus's question who are we and what is the world and what are we to make of the cosmos and our place in it i'll just mention that now and i may touch on it a little bit later so let me just see can we get rid of that this meeting is being recorded i don't know yeah good right in the 9th century chinese classic the secret of the golden flower it's written that the conscious mind is like a violent general of a strong fiefdom controlling things from the distance until the sword is turned around in the sinologist thomas cleary comments zen buddhism traditionally describes the mechanism of delusion as mistaking the servant for the master in the metaphor of this passage the general is supposed to be a servant but instead usurps authority well those of you who know my book the master and his emissary will see how very relevant that 9th century insight into how our minds work because that is the description of what he calls what the writer calls the conscious mind uh is is vividly portrayed and what i've found in the last decade since writing the master in his emissary is that there are many such myths and fables in many languages in the iroquois in the inward in people in the south sea islands in various lands across the world that have this image of a force that becomes above itself and usurps a proper authority in the results that things fall apart one reason for worrying about this is that i see the world at the moment in the west as being dominated by a certain way of thinking and looking at the world that was entailed on us by evolution in order to make us good at grabbing and getting it is effectively not good at understanding it's very good at helping us get stuff manipulating the world the right hemisphere of the brain is good at understanding the world and the left hemisphere more or less leaves understanding to the right hemisphere this is partly because we've developed language in the human brain and language is a map of the world and a way of utilizing it or finding your way around it and annexing territories in it so the the business of having a left hemisphere has i can demonstrate driven out a lot of the things that we need for understanding the world and replace them with powerful abstractions maps and schemas so the left hemisphere's view has evolved to map the world and it prefers therefore what is certain fixed abstracted familiar decontextualized two-dimensional general in nature categorized quantifiable and represented as the world is on a map that is to say no longer present but in some icon-like version of itself after the event re-presented this view of the world sees parts not holes an inanimate world in fact a bureaucrat's dream and it's given to an unwarranted optimism the other hemisphere the right hemisphere sees the world that is being mapped where things are often new essentially unique are possible rather than certain never certain in fact flowing and interconnected always inseparable from the context in which they exist and must be viewed whole an animate world where things presence to us rather than being represented in other words a bureaucrat's nightmare and its outlook the right hemisphere's outlook is essentially realistic when we look at the world we don't unless we stop and reflect notice that we're alternating different views of the world life goes on without our being aware of it because if we're aware of it we wouldn't be able to act but when we do stop and reflect as we do increasingly in a culture which is a verbal culture in which we are in discourse with one another philosophizing about the world we come to find the world paradoxical and paradox is a whole issue that i deal with that's central to the new book there are two aspects to this that concern the hemispheres the first is the right hemisphere is able to see that two things that are superficially opposite may in fact both be true but also at another level often what turns out to be what we call a paradox is actually a conflict between what the left hemisphere sees and what the right hemisphere sees and in one of the chapters of the book i go through perhaps 30 plus examples of paradoxes that are familiar to philosophers and indicate the way in which that is true so if that's the case how do we know what we can trust well what i do very very briefly and then i'm going to move on because we just don't have time to go into what i have written i want to talk to you about what is interesting me this evening um what i've looked at is in order to understand what's trustable we need to look at the ways the portals we have on the world the ways in which we get access to the world at all and i would say that the most primary of these is attention which those of you who know my work is a very important concept because i believe it's creative of reality it changes what we find in the world and it changes us who attend but it's also perception of the judgments that we form on the basis of what we perceive or attend to emotional and social intelligence good old-fashioned cognitive intelligence virtually speaking iq and uh creative potential and in all these respects the right hemisphere from a vast uh survey of the available neuropsychological literature i can demonstrate that in all of these respects the right hemisphere is superior to the left hemisphere you may say that's a little bit odd but as i say there is a reason why in humans the left hemispheres become specialized in a kind of disembodied map-making schema finding theorizing about the world where it is pretty much impervious to reality and then in the second part of the book i look at what are the powers those are the portals but what are the powers we follow in seeking an understanding of the world i think most people would agree that they're probably science reason intuition and imagination and what i suggest is that we need all four of these wherever possible at least we certainly need more than one or two which is all i reckon much of the time anyone brings to bear on these resoundingly important problems and i also show that in each case not just in intuition and imagination but also in the discoveries of science and mathematics and in the application of reasons of the world the right hemisphere is very much superior to the left it understands what's going on actually that is the point it understands whereas the left hemisphere is good at procedures very fast following of procedures but what the procedures mean is another matter altogether i think probably if you look around you in the modern world you can see this triumph of procedure over meaning everywhere that you look and if we can see the signature of the left hemisphere and the signature of the right hemisphere in any particular position on a particular topic it helps us because we can no longer just go oh well there are these two and they're in conflict yeah shrug the shoulders and go off and have supper no we can go further now we can say one of these is likely to be a better guide than the other not invariably but it is in all probable terms going to be a much profounder guide to an understanding of the world than a vision of it which we can recognize from its signature has all the qualities that come from the left hemisphere and this is very important when it comes to dealing with the concept of the sacred and the divine which is my topic for this evening it seems to me that to be human in my view is to feel a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable that if we can just for once get beyond words and reasons is a matter of experience and to which we reach out often wordlessly though not without misgivings something that's outside our conceptual grasp but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of unfathomable experiences which we call spiritual now that's the experiential aspect but what is the left hemisphere going to do with it it's going to do three things particularly it's going to analyze it into parts it's very good at understanding parts it doesn't see holes so it will start to take it apart and see what it's made of in order to understand it better it also tends to see things in categories you want to say what pigeonhole can i put this in so it wants to compare it with something else and by definition there is nothing with which this can be in any way compared and to express it in language and language is expressed language we have the language that we use is there for us to negotiate pretty much the everyday world as nietzsche said language makes the uncommon common because the uncommon is always outside of our usual categories which words refer and so you have to use language in a very special way it can be done it's called poetry and it's called myth those are the ways in which we transcend that reductionist aspect of language so what are we to call this profound experience for which we have not the right words it turns out well the the problem is that whatever we call it is going to be potentially misleading obviously in most languages there is a word for this so in sanskrit it's in chinese it's lee in in islam it's um it's allah in in the judaic religions is yahweh we call it god whatever this founding principle this logos this this essence that is the beginning of being that controls we're not controls but gives rise to everything and generates everything that we know in the universe but as soon as we've got the name there we think we've understood it and that's the problem because the only way we can get to understanding understanding it is paradoxically to hang on to the realization that we have not understood it as soon as we think we've understood it we've gone wrong and so you get the idea of the name of god as the unnameable name as it is in the number of important religions and in taoism which i which is very close to my heart um the tao that can be named is not the real dao that is the first opening words of the doubted jing and in christianity the other thing to which my heart is very very close saint augustine says see comprehendes known as dales if you understand it then it's not god you've understood and there is a big misunderstanding about what belief is belief i think one of the great barriers to belief in the modern world is that it has been uh after several years of tyrannical analytic philosophy it has been taken to mean a sent to various propositions which clever men in oxford and cambridge and women in oxford and cambridge can spin logical puzzles with and prove that whatever you think you know you don't know which is fine if it would stop there unfortunately philosophers always exempt themselves from this unknowing but belief is not about signing up to six impossible things before breakfast belief is not propositional it's dispositional as so much in life is and what is more important than what the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere think is what they are disposed towards and that governs what they actually find in the world their attention is a way in which they dispose consciousness when you dispose your consciousness in one way you find one thing you dispose it in another you find quite another and that's something that i go to in great length in both these books so if you're not familiar with them that's where to go to find more on that but just because it's dispositional it's not baseless or irrational it's trans-rational there are plenty of things that are not irrational but they're not encompassed by reason for simplicity and brevity i'll just take one example music music is profoundly meaningful it is absolutely not irrational but it cannot conceivably be put into words and it cannot conceivably be got to the bottom of by taking it apart analyzing it into smaller and smaller bits because all you'll find is single notes which mean nothing at all a better idea is of a relationship because after all the disposition is in itself suggestive of a relationship and the archetypal relationship here is love that's no accident because in most religions this is what whatever we mean by god or the ultimate cause of or ultimately the first cause or the ultimate entity is love and love is a disposition and it's there in the etymology of the word belief belief the leaf part is present now only in archaic english as in shakespeare my leaf meaning my my my beloved um and it's in fact for german speakers its belief is cognate with belieben and even glauben is also from libra glauben the german word for to believe so it's about a disposition of putting your trust in something and indeed trust is also very close to truth and those words also contain the idea of a relationship between things it's not a thing but a betweenness and what i mean by a betweenness is not just the space between so in music it's not in the gaps between the notes although sometimes it's being said that it is in order to distract us from the fact that it's not in the notes itself but it's in the whole it's not analyzable in that way it's in the notes and their relationships with one another i'll come back to that in a minute but this is uh the way that we understand all the most profound experiences even those of us who are um not inclined to believe in anything spiritual understand that in the case of eros of erotic love that it's unencompassable by everyday language that one expresses it in terms of metaphor of myth of narrative and above all of the implicit as soon as you make something implicit explicit you've destroyed its meaning when you translate a poem into prose it's lost its power when you explain a joke it falls flat no there's nothing shady about this it doesn't mean that somehow we're in opposition to science absolutely not there is no opposition between science and religion something i again deal with in the book but we'll go into now but niels bohr of course one of the great physicists of the 20th century and founders of quantum theory said that physics can be described only in language that has the nature of poetry and this doesn't render physics somehow unreal rather the opposite he said the fact speaking of religion that spiritual traditions through the ages have spoken in images parables and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer but that doesn't mean that it is not a genuine reality now let's think about what a knowledge of god would entail what would be the disposition that one would have to adopt in order to have a chance of understanding what it is one's approaching if one approaches it saying well i only believe things that are cut and dried explicit measurable in the lab and so on you're going to miss the point uh fairly uh resoundingly so what does it entail well it requires first of all being open to something other something not already familiar not part of the self-consistent system which one operates within in ordinary life and viet ramachandran great neurosciences calls the right hemisphere the devil's advocate because it's always saying that this might be something new this might be something that doesn't fit into our categories and it's much better at detecting the new the unthought of the unexpected and it mustn't just ignore or simply not see whatever doesn't fit the mind's prevailing paradigm the right hemisphere is better at that and it's better at accepting uncertainty and can see that there are limits to knowledge an understanding of the divine must rely on indirect and metaphorical expression not direct and literal expression must tolerate ambiguity and it has to be at ease with accepting that both of what on the surface appear to be contradictory elements might be true in other words it must be receptive to what we call paradox importantly you must see continuous processes rather than a succession of things or isolated events a process in other words of becoming more than simply a fact of being it must be able to apprehend that betweenness i talk about a web of relationships not just an assemblage of entities and what is the primary importance in the web is the relationships not the entities related now for a long time i have believed that relationships are prior to relata to the things that are related and only in the last three or four years i discovered that a very uh important physicist david murmann has said exactly this that physics shows that relationships are prior to relation now i know that in common sense terms there can't be relationships between things that haven't yet come into being but a helpful image might be of a gnat and there's a lovely image in um in um in vedanta of indra's net which is a net that covers the cosmos and at every crossing point of the net there's a little jewel which reflects all the other crossing points in the net but of course a net uh it begins with connections and only becomes a net after there have been lots of connections made and the little nodes that we look at which we call the bit net and another way of thinking about the problem is that actually you can't start with things and then say so how are they related because fundamentally the way things are related the context in which they are tells you what they are they aren't what they will be when they're in that context of a relationship before they're in that context of relationship so it involves appreciating a cohesive whole something that comes into being together rather than sequentially and serially a gestalt as a german say a term that's gone into psychological language not a construction of parts and entering into an i thou relationship not just an i it relationship in the master in his embassy i have a chapter on language which um goes into this in some detail we have an i thou relationship is what we were talking about not and i it as they were inspecting it from the outside and trying to understand it by taking it apart or and bombarding it with neutrinos in a cloud chamber and sustaining emotional depth we must see that spirit and body are not distinct or opposed but discernibly different aspects of the same being and in epistemology in epistemological terms it requires knowing in the sense of canon more than vissen in german those are the two words for knowing we are rather unusual in english and not having more than one word for these concepts to canon is to know by acquaintance vision is to know as it were an abstract piece of knowledge um paris is the capital of france whereas you know paris after you've lived in it for a decade and in french there's the same distinction between connect and savoir in epistemological terms also we must value what i would call active receptivity not just a state of passively being there but actively listening attending um and waiting for things to approach you then answer to and it's this reciprocity this resonation between the mind the imagination the heart the spirit whatever one wants to call it it's not important how one breaks it down with whatever it is exists for that moment in that experience as something for the time being other and it involves sustaining attention and stealing the inner voice as in prayer and meditation and these are things that the right hemisphere all these things are things the right hemisphere is much better abs than the left uh um in meditation people often talk about monkey mind which is the sort of chatter that incessantly goes on in one's mind we're so um used to it that often we're not aware of it until we've learned how to still that chatter in which we can actually begin to appreciate meditatively mindfully the reality that we are experiencing and um a man called bante gunaratana one of the world's most expert meditators and has written a book called mindfulness in plain english in the book i take an account of his which is 15 lines long and point out over 20 things that he says which would suggest that mindfulness depends very much on the right hemisphere uh more than the left and there is a range of neuroimaging studies that would bear this out now there are a number of paradoxical things here for us because i've talked about silence and not speaking about being comfortable not knowing about not constantly doing but actually being there listening and attending the power of unknowing and not doing in chinese philosophy is a very important idea and those of you who know anything about buddhisms and daoism and so on will recognize what i'm saying but it's also there in the western tradition a largely neglected western tradition of medieval mysticism and there's a wonderful sermon of eckhart's in which uh he describes this unknowing this darkness that is the fruitful darkness in which one dwells an image rather reminding me of the title of an anonymous um devotional work of mysticism of the same era the cloud of unknowing and he imagines an interlocutor saying to him but what is this darkness and unknowing and what is its name you see i want to have a name for this to this he replies i can only call it a loving and open receptiveness which however in no way lacks being it is a receptive potential by means of which all is accomplished and this suggests and it's elaborated elsewhere in his sermons the idea of the fertility of union between a creative principle and a receptive womb-like space a female principle in which something is to grow so so much for thinking about the epistemological things we would need what about ethically well in ethical terms the right hemisphere places a huge emphasis on empathy and the core of almost every religion is this idea of empathy and i'm afraid to report that the left-hander says not good on empathy david hesh that ucl says quite frankly moral and immoral thinking are associated with the right hemisphere and left hemisphere respectively and he's not wrong and there is a remarkable literature on this what it demonstrates actually is that people who have little um capacitive empathy tend to rationalize about morality in a very utilitarian way and that um outside of university philosophy faculties this kind of way of thinking is confined to people with frontal lobe damage and particularly with right frontal lobe damage and the the emphasis is on the consensual rather than the individualistic self and on vulnerability a very underrated faculty that is worth spending time cultivating so it must also recognize and not deny the dark side to human consciousness a very important thing i can say from my experience as a psychiatrist is helping people to understand the dark side that exists to just about everything rather than try and deny it repress it when it comes back larger than life and of course jung's work was very much about accepting and understanding this being capable of understanding that good may despite everything emerged from suffering which is not that we shouldn't try uh wherever we can to avoid suffering but that it is not necessarily a purely as we say negative entity in fact viktor frankl has has written wonderfully about that very topic based on his experiences in the nazi extermination camps now nothing to me more economically expresses the deep distinction between a view of the cosmos on the one hand as a specifiable assemblage of distinct entities as the left hemisphere would see it and on the other as an unnamable undivided flow as the right hemisphere would see it then this insight from the dao di qing warning us against analysis and the naming of parts the tao is forever undefined once the whole is divided the parts need names there are already enough names one must know when to stop knowing when to stop averts trouble dao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea those images are very reminding to me of the poetry of wordsworth and wordsworth's panentheism again i'm talking very much in shorthand tonight because i haven't got time to unpack all these things in any detail but panentheism is different from panthers and pantheism is the belief that all things just are god and god is all things panentheism is to say that god is in all things and all things are in god but all things in god are not equated but uh paranthesism is very much um uh a a precessual vision of the world in which things come in to be within this um overarching veil of whatever it is we cannot name that is above it and it's that thing that wordsworth talks about in a wonderful phrase of something ever more about to be that comes from tintin abby and he says he talks about how at times we feel a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and roll through all things it's moving it's in everything and it causes everything to carry on being and creating now i know that some uh people including rowan williams not particularly enamored of process theology and and i have to utterly respect that to me it seems to contain important wisdom and i see ideas of it everywhere in in the theology is not just christian but of other religions that i've looked to in the old testament when god appears to abraham in the burning bush he says what is translated um into english usually as i am that i am the uh hebrew is asha and i am told that that means i will be what i will be also in the story of the creation there's this wonderful phrase after the every day of creation except the second day in which she didn't actually create so god looked and saw that it was good now to me that suggests something absolutely wonderful which is that whatever it is that is created is not just the jury following out of a plan that some omnipotent being has thought up and we are the tools of that plan but that it is genuinely something that is not yet decided not entirely fixed it is creative it is genuinely coming into being this is there in the christian idea that the word was made flesh because the greek again is it became flesh rather than was made which makes it sound rather like um a procedure that was done to it and it's important that the phrase begotten not made is understood because it's not made it's not put together it's not a fact it's begotten in other words in a chain of being of things that reproduce other things it comes about in that one flow that is the divine creation uh it's there in meister eckhart in a number of places he talks about this constant eminence which emanating presence which comes out of god which he associates with christ coming into the human soul and it's there in mexico magdeburg and in a number of other of the medieval mystics and it's becoming is a constant longing and it's fulfillment in a something that is ever more coming into being and that's not just in wordsworth but it's in yakov burma and it's in buddhism very much at the core of buddhism david bohm a very great philosopher and physicist uh famously wrote a book um about the implicat order and his idea there is that things unfold their potential this is how i see creation as the unfolding of that all into its infinite number of possible uh instantiations and it unfolds itself continually so he sees the world as constantly this unfolding of the explicit and the implicat becoming implicit but he also believed it was then re-enfolded and oddly enough this is exactly the idea of nicholas accuser 15th century polymath scientist theologian he thought that god and his creation was an implicatio and this was explicated unfolded into the many things that the ten thousand things explication and then further and later it was re-enfolded in an embrace the latin word for which he has his complication of folding together again that is very much in keeping interestingly with the way i'll tell you first of all about the cavalla i think i've got time i got to know about the cabala only in the last seven to ten years and it has transformed my life i i have time only now to talk about one myth which is the uh in the um lyrianic uh cabala that of isaac luria in the 17th century building of course on and interpreting a very ancient tradition it's a myth of creation and in the beginning it says there was a being ends off which means sort of all and nothing and aims off wanted to create what was its first act was it to stretch out a hand and go be come into existence no it was to retract to withdraw and this phase is known as sim sum it means god for went part of himself in order that something else should come into being because after all if this being is loving it can only love something other than itself and so it has to make place for something to be genuinely other genuinely free not just the porn of an engineering god but of a freely creating god then there are some vessels that fill the space where god has withdrawn and a spark of light a single spark of light and fire falls out of ends off onto these vessels and it shatters them it's called shepherd herce this means the shattering of the vessels because they simply aren't big enough to contain what it was but there is a third phase tikkun which means repair and in this phase the pieces of the broken vessels are put together again more beautifully than they were before so the business of shattering was necessary for their perfection incidentally this raises in my mind the image of a wonderful thing in japanese art in which uh pieces of porcelain that have been broken can be repaired more beautifully than they were before with lines of gold but in any case the point is that in this myth humanity plays a very important part because little sparks of the divine are in all these pieces and we as human beings achieve and see these pieces and it is our role to be putting them together so we have a positive part to play in creation what fascinates me about those three phases the sort of withdrawing to be receptive they're then trying to contain it in categories or vessels and then that being um impossible but then repairing into something greater is very much like the way in which i believe the world comes into being for us through the interaction of the hemispheres so the right hemisphere is open and attentive to whatever comes to it then whatever it is is sent to the left hemisphere for processing left hemispheres oh i see it goes into that category it goes into that category goes into that pigeonhole but this simply can't happen with something as great as this and so as it were the categories are ruined but the attempt was not a waste of time this business of trying as long as it's then handed over again to the right hemisphere to bring this back together into an overarching hole make something better think of a piece of music that you love and you want to play you're initially attracted to it then as you find you can't play it well you break it up into bits and you practice the parts and you you see the harmonic structure but then when you come to play it again if you give a performance you must forget all of that but it's not that that time was wasted without that time you wouldn't be able to give the final performance now what does the left hemisphere make of this essence of the divine well of course it wants it all to be cut and dried and it wants it to be certain it wants it to be in language preferably written language and it wants it to be structured so you get theological disputation you get the genesis of organizations hierarchies laws and structures of all kinds and when they are valuable they're most valuable as being the means for teaching healing in schools hospitals and so forth but they can also give rise to all the things that power structure can give rise to what it wants is left hemisphere analysis and argument and in this sense there is an extraordinary um coming together of militant fundamentalism with militant atheism there are mirror images of one another and the great divide in my view is not between believers and those who say they're not who mostly say they're agnostic rather than atheistic but your militant atheist and your militant believer are each of them in my view expressing simply the left hemisphere's incapacity to deal with something unless it's all written down it's certain i'm right you're wrong and um we've got the truth at last interestingly by the way dan dennett says that he not become a philosopher he would have become an engineer i'm afraid these people also see god as an engineering god which is something that i find very distasteful and what they really love and i'm afraid you see this not just in religious groups but as i say in atheistic groups and now very much in the the cultural wars the necessity for black and white categories the necessity for this is right and you shall not say anything against it no other opinions than this are even tolerable if you even touch on them your career will be finished they express not kindness but a narcissistic self-righteousness and it's accompanied as these reformations always were by the destruction of images paintings and the beauty of real art and the banishment of humor you find this in the 17th century puritans you find this in descriptions of the desecration of churches uh in holland in the same uh era and we're seeing it again in our lifetime one of the reasons for having religion is constantly to remind us of a broader context of another order that is a moral order not just a rational one a network of obligations to other humans to the earth and to the other that lies beyond extending beyond our lives that is in space and time yet rooted firmly in places spaces practices here and now without it this sense risks being dissipated trust depends on shared beliefs religion is the manifestation of that trust and the embedding of it into the fabric of daily life religion embodies awareness of god in the world through deeply resonant myths narratives and symbols enacted in rituals conducted in holy places that parallel the cyclical passage of time i'm not sure the world can afford to lose this stream of wisdom for this of course both hemispheres are important let me make that clear but the left hemisphere must always serve the right hemisphere which understands it is the emissary of the master i got to know also recently or in the last five years the work of abraham herschel um a i think new york rabbi of the last century and the wonderful passage are many but one he describes in the rabbinic tradition the two kinds of teaching that are distinguished one is literal and legalistic the other metaphorical and imaginative the first is called halakha and the other is called agarda but halakhah must serve agatha and in he shows how in the traditions of judaism you can see both elements and that they can harmonize as long as halakhah remains subservient to agoda but he said that in his own life halakhah had begun to use up agadha now as i say i can find these images of usurpation a kind of inward self cognition of the mind about the nature of our thinking and knowing and understanding in many cultures pretty much any culture in which you look for it across the world it's a very deep and ancient story that we recognize but i can begin to put some neurology with that and we're seeing it also in in modern science the best modern science which is much less dogmatic and much more aware of the way in which our consciousness and whatever it is outside of that uh personal consciousness interrelate it's there this consciousness the story of the youth survation is there in rumi and it's there in the mahavarrata and as i say it's there in chinese um wisdom literature and in our own culture it is the story that is told in paradise lost thank you very much

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Length: 46min 18sec (2778 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021