The Beshara Lecture - the Coincidence of Opposites

last year I had the opportunity to interview in Gilchrist uh together with Jane Clark the editor of bushara magazine and that interview was published in the magazine earlier this year now I was a very great honor to introduce Ian mcgilchrist himself as our speaker this year now as we all know we are each of us unique this was a point that Ian brings out in one of his in the book the matter with things but although we are each unique I think some people seem more unique than others and even with Chris is one of these people he has had the most extraordinary career beginning as a literary scholar at Oxford University and then switching to Medicine where he had a distinguished career as a psychiatrist a neurologist following the publication in 2009 of his book The Master in the amnesty he came to a much broader public attention that book and his more recent book the matter with things have established him as a distinguished philosopher and it's in that capacity I think that we are working here today well as a philosopher Ian has asked the question which probably most philosophers have asked and probably each of us has also asked at once one point what exactly is this reality that we find ourselves thrust into and he has gone gone about answering this question by first asking well how is it that we come to understand reality at all though perhaps not unsurprising answer is that our brain has a role to play but Ian has gone further and distinguished or recognize the fact that the brain has two hemispheres and he has revealed that these hemispheres have rather distinct if complementary roles now he goes into what exactly the the roles are in great detail in his books but very broadly our left hemisphere is the one we use for seeking out details and particulars in the environment around us we could say that with the left hemisphere we zoom in the right hemisphere of my contrast we zoom out to see the bigger picture to see the context and it's only within the context that the details that we've seen through the left hemisphere begin to make sense to have come to have meaning now Ian has shown that in the time under society in which we live the left hemisphere has come to dominate and in doing so it has given rise to the world view with which all of us I think are familiar and which is the generally accepted worldview namely the mechanistic materialistic reductionist one Ian was also argued that this worldview is uh not the best worldview in fact they can help explain why we are facing so many crises today for example the fact that we don't zoom out to get the context can explain why we have environment environmental crises and it also suggests that unless we change our worldview we're not going to solve these crises so Ian's plea is that the right hemisphere should once again become the master and through its um dominance a better worldview will arise much of the latter part of his most recent book is an explanation of what that worldview would be it's a much richer world view than the rather meaningless and impoverished one that the materialistic worldview offers us in my reviewers book I tried to very briefly outline what that what what metaphysics he was suggesting amongst the key points that I brought out were that he's suggesting that Consciousness is absolutely foundational rather than matter he also suggests that values are ontologically primitive so that beauty truth justice are not constructs of the mind which we paste on to the reality that we see around it he also suggests that relationships are more fundamental than the things which are related is also much to say about time and in particular he argues that Newton got it wrong it's not that motion needs that it's not motion that needs explanation it's stasis because reality is movement process flow he also urges us to get in touch with the divine writing a review of such an enormous magnificent book was a challenge the worthy challenge rewarding challenge and when I finished writing it I submitted it to the journal to the magazine and it was published when I read what I'd actually written when it was published I realized that I'd overlooked something quite important because one of the main points that or what have been a very important point that Ian brings out in his book is The Coincidence of opposite and I did not highlight this in my review so I personally am extremely pleased that Ian has chosen this as the subject of the lecture today he will make good my Omission I'm sure and so with this I will hand over to Ian I'll show you and we look forward to your lecture thank you very much thank you very much for those lovely words um Richard and if we can just begin with the first slide I'm delighted to be able to give this Bashar a lecture um it's going to be a cooperation between me and Mike who's going to be doing the the slide now um the next slide shows um the book no matter what things which I spent the last decade writing published in November 21. um and as Richard hinted it's an attempt to answer the question Who We Are um what our lives are what the cosmos is and how these things relate and in brief I suggest that we're um in we've become mesmerized by a way of looking at the world which is out of the left hemisphere which is simplified and reduced in the way that a map or a diagram or a theory stands in relation to the real world that is mapped diagrammed or theorized about and and we've taken this very um scanty reality this very simplified schema as um as the truth the reality of experience and as such I believe we are misunderstanding uh wholly our responsibilities to the world and that word responsibility contains in it the idea of a reverberative relationship in which one calls to the other and the other responds that's what responsibility is about so I will cut to the chase because I haven't got very much time um the first part of the book is neuropsychology the second part of the book is epistemology what paths can we um follow in in trying to pursue some idea of what we can take to be true and the third part of the book begins um it's a book about the structure of the cosmos and it begins with a chapter on The Coincidence of opposites which is my topic today and what I'm giving you today is just some some small highlights taken out of that chapter now the idea of The Coincidence of opposites has been foreign to the Western mind with some exceptions among Mystics for a couple of thousand years really since Aristotle um suggested that a thing in its country couldn't both be true and this idea is much better understood in eastern societies where there is the concept of Yin and Yang so next slide please and and you will be familiar with this symbol the Thai G2 which shows yin and yang with their different qualities what's special is that they make up a perfect circle and that each one contains a little of the other in its uh in its structure and so there's something rather nice about this that makes it more numerous than it might otherwise be however there is no question that this idea is very important it is something to do with the whole process of Creation The Very Drive of the cosmos and this is if you like it seems to me a drive towards individuation and distinguishing um unique cases without separating them so the process of individuating and distinguishing doesn't involve separation so that the Integrity of the whole is preserved and one image of this that I like is that of the unfolding of a bad so the bad unfolds to display the the the Deep structure and in opening up it doesn't destroy itself it actually fulfills Itself by the process of out folding and I think that that's a good image to go with for the way in which the cosmos works now after those initial um notices of high level or almost mystical conceptions I will go right down to the ground level and say why is this a question that's important to us in the world we see immediately around us so can I have the next slide please next next um click okay our everyday world so I'm going to go down to our everyday world and build back up again to the more mystical Realm and what I'd suggest that we can probably all see is that as a society we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time we're the most miserable people that have ever existed in the time that we've been measuring it we privilege autonomy and end up Bound by rules to which we never ascended and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time we pursue Leisure through technology and discover that the average working day is longer than ever and that we have less time than we had before nowadays things that used to be solvable with a five-minute telephone call can involve MCS are like Loops in which one goes round and round something on the Internet for a few hours before giving up and trying to find a telephone number where one talks to somebody in uh probably the subcontinent of Asia who has a an algorithm to follow and therefore answers in the way that a machine would answer the means to our ends are ever more available while we have less sense of what our ends should be or whether there's a purpose in anything at all economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash they promptly crash we are so eager that all scientific research result in what's called positive findings that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable and therefore discovers less and less that is truly significant and it doesn't Aid advance in scientific thinking in the way that it once did we grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian in order to get value for money and thus render it pointless and in this form certainly a waste of resource we improve education by dictating curricula and focusing on exam results to the point where free thinking arguably an overarching goal of through education is discouraged in our universities many students are in any case so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threatened to examine the model critically and their teachers who should know better in a serious dereliction of Duty collude we over sanitize and cause vulnerability to infection we overuse antibiotics leading to Super bacteria that no antibiotic can kill we make drugs illegal to protect society and while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs we create a fertile field for crime we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope let alone relish you can't cope with uncertainty or risk and are rendered vulnerable the left hemisphere's motivation is control it is the part of the brain that controls the right hand with which we do the grabbing the grasping the getting and it only sees the straight path to getting more of something it doesn't understand the big picture and its means of achieving its goal is alarmingly linear a point that I will come back to at various points during the talk as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions at any one time which is all it can moving out a little there are two points to make one of them's just gone up on the screen similarity deceives the Greeks have a saying I rather like when God builds a church the devil builds one right next door and we need to be aware of look-alikes because they are the dangers and puritanism is one that presents itself as self-righteous as the only true path it Brooks no opposition it drives out art music laughter all the things that help us towards wisdom and pretends that it is the only path to spirituality I believe is motivation is very far from benign and next line please not acknowledging the dark side causes actual harm both in the individual psyche and in society so it leads to tyranny in the private sphere I've often had to try to explain to somebody who couldn't accept that they were imperfect and had a dark side that their attempt to project this idea of caring for everybody and getting everything right ended up tyrannizing an entire family and achieving the opposite of what they wished so accepting the dark side as young pointed out is extremely important aspect of spiritual maturity and it leads also to extremism and ultimately tyranny in the public sphere so we don't see the dark side of what it is we're currently advocating though of course it exists and instead we promote it at the cost of everything else and in life the good things are not ever as good as they're said to be they carry hidden dark elements with them and the things that are despised and we attempt to eliminate from our lives might teach us things that are important so moving up from there to what I'm calling intermediate Reflections next slide please the first thing is extent so the extent to which a truth is a truth um truths are only really ever half true because it depends on in what situation to what end in watch context for which person and so with Whitehead put it there are no whole truths all trees are half Tunes it's trying to treat them as Whole Foods that plays the devil says he to have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it moving down that leads nicely to the idea of context context makes a huge difference to everything that you're looking at and one of the things that I'd want to emphasize is that when we argue about values it's often the opposition of standpoints and from different standpoints we see a different context and we see something quite different from what the other person may be speaking about to give you a very simple example of how context can actually reverse the meaning of something I sometimes refer to the size of Serial packets in America there are basically four there's jumbo which means very large then there's economy which means large and then there's family which means medium and finally this large which means small so the context can change completely the meaning of a word or phrase and it's extreme extremely perilous in an age in which we're very good at taking sound bites and quotes from people out of context and the context might have made them appear very different from the one they uh seem to be when they're decontextualized and then there's the next line please the effects of perspective um so famously heraclitus proclaimed that the way up is the way down and of course it's true the way up the hill from where I live is also the way down when I come back to have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it and in a way that you can never see all of of anything our vision is partial not in the sense that we only Go part way to seeing it and there's some kind of a war between us and reality I don't believe that at all I think what we see is the real deal it's just that we can only ever see one part of the whole picture and that's not a criticism that's a necessary part of being a living individual now I want to move on from these rather adventitious Reflections um to the more foundational reflections and the first of these is necessary coexistence of the good and the bad in whatever way we think of it um you can put up the next slide because it illustrates this quite nicely every Angel has his devil and this is of course a famous picture by MC Escher and at rest you probably see the pictures of the Devils with their back-like wings but in between them you can see the entire space is occupied by an Angel and I often say that every Angel has his devil and every devil has his angel I'd like to quote Jung here on what he called enantiodomia which just means the tendency of things to change into their opposites the grand plan in which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodomia and what good may very possibly lead to evil I see that very forcibly in the world surrounding me now an interesting example to me was the concept of the keystone species sometimes there is a predator in an environment that you think the environment might flourish if you took the Predator out of it on these grounds the Wolves were killed off in Yellowstone Park in the 1930s and it was expected that the rest of the um the biosphere there would would um would flourish but in fact the number of elk uh which the wolves um prey on diminished and um though they rather grew in certain areas but were not allowed to move not made to chased on to somewhere else and so they Stripped Away the Willows which were important for the Beavers which which created the dams in the streams which caused etc etc etc so um since about the 1990s I think wolves have been reintroduced in Yellowstone and the number of elk have gone up the number of Willows have gone up the beavers have returned and so on so this idea of the necessity of a predator um it complicates our idea of what is necessarily benign or not in a complex system and also at bottom we recognize that there are things that are absolutely incompatible but we need a bit of both of them so for example in order to make children free we need to free thinkers we need to indoctrinate them into the power of reasoning um in order to have freedom in a society we need to have a set of rules by which people are willing to abide and so on empson Road Williamson the the critican poet wrote and and he wrote this in his twenties I think extremely often in dealing with the world one arrives at two ideas or ways of dealing with things which both work and are needed but which entirely contradict one another and I'd say we all experience this at every level from the most innocent the trivial seeming to the most Sublime we need universality and particularity precision and flexibility restriction and openness freedom and constraint simultaneously everything flows from the pairing we say we lose ourselves and consequently find ourselves in music dance or contemplation of a beautiful painting or landscape foreign then there is can we have the next slide please the notion of uh you'll have to yeah and another one next line yeah the concept of co-creation which is even an even tighter binding so for example the the co-creation could be I mean it's a concept of course in in Buddhism um and I think a very deep one but it can be thought of in terms of a bar magnet you cannot have the North Pole of a magnet only you must have the South Pole if you don't like the South Pole and you saw it off all you have is a shorter dipolar magnet and each gives rise to the other and what's more they're not entirely separable there isn't a neat margin where the North Pole stops in the South Pole begins that we can specify exactly as um Alan Watts said we can't have mountains only and no valleys these opposites are mutually sustaining Inseparable and intertwined the profound idea here is again for me an Insight of whiteheads that first of all all is in process and therefore the whole Cosmos is continually in process and I'm a process philosopher I believe that the things we call things are actually processes and in calling them things we make them sound separate and static whereas if we thought of them as processes we would see that nothing is static or ever unconnected with everything else but his profound idea was that God or the ground of being and the cosmos that was underwritten by that ground of being were brought into being by that God in a way evolved together it's complicated in the case of God because God can be both Transcendent and eternal and part imminent in the creation and thus as it were unfolding like the flower what was in and coming to know itself more fully in the process of creation and this idea can be thought of as complementarity the idea of complementarity is foundational in the natural world so for example to turn ones back on the parts the workings of the left hemisphere which analyzes and breaks things up into fragments and accept only the whole the vision of the right hemisphere in which everything is connected and embodied flowing changing and contextualized is not to get back to wholeness because the whole is never an Annihilation but rather a subsuming of the part the true hole exists precisely in this relationship the tension between parts and an apparent whole I'm going to complicate that slightly in the next so can you click again please correct yes that was right fractality um here I want to suggest that again it's a question of point of view what is a person what is a whole I think that everything we can call apart is a hole at another level and that everything we call a whole could be seen as a part of something greater and it's this nested nature of reality which Arthur kersler called um hollons these these holes that are not fully accounted for by anything that constitutes them but are a whole lot of new level that contributes to a whole at another level and this idea of fractality is very interesting because what it shows is that the same element that is there in the hole is also there in the part as you go down and so you've got like a chest a nest of Russian dolls you've got um the same pattern being worked out at different levels can you click again please and this should begin to move yes it is that's good um just to illustrate this idea of fractality that I'm sure you're very used to and it's now seen to be a very important element in mathematical and physical understanding of the cosmos next slide please so there are further points on what I need to make and I think we've had that so next next please and the next and the next and the next that's it energy so energy is very interesting where is energy it's a very hard thing to say where energy exactly is it forms fields we know and these fields can collapse and extend but let's just go back to very simple things like um household electrical Goods where is the electricity in a circuit is it in the positive terminal no is it in the negative terminal no is it then just in the space between the terminals no it's in what happens when you put the positive and negative terminals together and something new evolves which has extraordinary power and so in a way I'd like to say that this is the structure of the world that the coming together of things leads to something else at another level that will somehow implicit in it and this is the same as the North and South Poles of the magnet whereas the magnetic power it's not in one or the other it's in the hole and in a quite different sense you can think of it as the merging of male and female gametes in the origin of new life and of course if you've ever actually seen a cell dividing you'll be familiar with this astonishing awe-inspiring dance that is conducted within the cells by the chromosomes dividing and it looks for all the world like a field of iron filings moving under the power of a magnet as it happens [Music] William Blake wrote without contras is no progression in other words power comes from contraries attraction and repulsion reason and energy love and hate are necessary to human existence those were all the words of Blake and even in heaven Blake believed there must be grief as well as Joy because you couldn't have meaningful Joy unless there was something that was a part of its opposite also present and in verse he wrote it is right it should be so man was made for joy and woe joy and woe are woven fine a clothing for the soul Divine under every grief and pain runs a joy with sulk and Twine so this kind of contouring us or contradiction or coincidence and opposites can be seen in all kinds of ways threaded through the structure of the world some of them are more superficial level some of them is a deeper level and reaching down into the territory of the Soul the American philosopher Jacob needleman wrote stay with the contradiction if you stay you'll see that there's always something more than two opposing truths the whole truth always includes a third part which is the reconciliation remember that because I want to come back to that um in a short while one very hungry way of thinking of it is to make a good apple pie you don't want Bland apples you need very tart Sour Apples and extremely good honey and the combination is absolutely resistible and I think that's important because a lot of people think that um the business of holding the Opposites is to allow them to collapse into a sort of tepid midpoint between the two extremes and this is not the case what you often need is to hold the tension between them and see what comes out of it now if we could have the next slide please this is a quote from I think with no exception the greatest of Greek philosophers a pre-socratic philosopher heraclitus who's taught me more than probably any other philosopher in my lifetime he says they do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself it is an Attunement the word he uses in Greek is harmonia or actually Harmony because of the dialect he wrote in it is an Attunement turning back on itself like that of the bow and the liar next slide please and here I just wanted to put out these two images the point is that the tension of the string in the layer being pulled in opposite directions at once is what gives it the power to let fly the note it's the tension in the bow pulling the string apart that creates the tension that allows the arrow to fly forth and you might well say in a logical way but what's the point in pulling something in two opposite directions why not save energy and just allow it to sit the answer is no creation no Arrow no note of music from The Lion um harmonia is also a very interesting Concept in itself and he probably meant three things by it one was the fitting or at this time at any rate in Greek it could be used to mean the fitting together of surfaces that are um true as we carpenters will say if two surfaces or two joint points of a joint meet correctly that they are true or even that they marry which is rather wonderful and it can also mean the reconciling of Warring parties and it can also of course mean the Accord of musical strings and I think all three of these are present in this Rich idea of Harmony Unison is when there is just one voice or everyone is taking the same voice harmony is the beautiful coming together of the right differences not just any ill differences next slide please yes this is the dentist and probably the richest of all heraclitis epigrammatic utterances ground Springs the Greek word is solipses holes and not holes convergent Divergent consonant dissonant from all things one and from one thing all now that's about as deep as it gets really um the Greek word graspings I mean it's not a perfect translation of solipses um but seems according to Charles Kuhn um who's I think heraclitus's most rewarding commentator to suggest several ideas something grasped perhaps suggesting the sudden comprehension of a Gestalt something that comes in an intuition something that brings elements together and fertility for example Aristotle uses the word to mean the sexual generation of life it's hard to overestimate the richness then of this fragment it says many things at once that a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses or graspings moments of insight that in that Insight all is neither simply single nor simply manifold neither simply a whole nor simply not hoe neither simply like nor simply unalike each thing working with and by the same token against the other that the one and the many bring one another Force into being together generating the reality that has this structure at its core and that despite or in light of all this perhaps because of the nature of this multiplicity all is held together in a solipsis the only word here not to be paired with an antithesis and the whole saying is in itself for synopsis if you like it's a gathering which in its fertility bursts a solipsis a moment of dawning insight for us and this opposition of what was what he called Apollo and Dionysus was behind Nietzsche's philosophy that each gives birth to the other and both are necessary this is very relevant in thinking about the brain hemispheres as it happens but I haven't got time to go into that in much detail now so there's a holding together of opposites not the collapsing Autumn opposites genuinely coincide while remaining opposites some philosophies tend to collapse into the monism that opposites are identical others into the dualism that opposites remain irreconcilable and immediate most juxtaposed the important perception is that opposites not only coexist but give rise to and fulfill one another um Neil Spore when he was in Noble by the Danish government for his absolutely groundbreaking work in um in in quantum physics chose as his motto contrary to complementer contrary's complement or fulfill one another and he also actually took the sign of the taijitu the yin yang symbol that we started with as the core of his coat of arms and they're conjoined like the poles of a magnet without any intervening boundary well nonetheless remaining distinct as opposites now can we move on please I want to say something about I think yes that's all right we've dealt with that and the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one deep structure the Deep structure of reality well I mentioned the name of Neil Sporter there and he said something very interesting it is the Hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth and he contrasted that with simple truths like um whether I had milk in my coffee at breakfast I mean either I did or I didn't there's no two ways about it um but as you get deeper into the fabric of reality you find this what looks to the left hemisphere paradoxical elements that a thing and its opposite come closer to one another and another great um philosopher of the pragmatic or pragmatist I should say tradition um CS pass an American philosopher who along with William James um was one of the most important philosophical influences in the late 19th and early 20th century CSP said a thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist existence lies in opposition so we are all in a way taught strings relationships between points that vibrate that reciprocate that reverberate and out of that comes the creative business that is each one of us now this brings me to talk about shapes um I think we might need to move on a slide yes so heraclitis also said this famous thing um was reportedly reported as saying everything flows which is not quite the same as the Buddhist idea that everything changes it includes that that it makes an important distinction between the large spread of the idea of change and there are other specific idea of flow so it's not just that one thing ceases to exist and another thing comes about but there is a seamless Evolution that is like the evolution of a personality over time or the evolution of a melody or a light Motif environment that it keeps on flowing it keeps on changing and everything has this important structure and I I like this when it comes to the idea of the difference between individuality and the general because I believe that individuality is not set against the general but is something through which we can see the general and I like to mention this image of the early 19th century um philosopher shelling who refers to a whirlpool in a stream the whirlpool is not in the water in a way that a stone is in the water or somebody might toss a ball into the water the whirlpool is the water it's not in it it is the water for a time being and it's very real it's photographable it can move Stones it's a definite Force it's measurable but it's only part of the water for a while and the water flows on and does something else and I believe that each one of us could be seen as every living thing or perhaps everything could be what we call a thing could be seen as a Whirlpool or something of this kind within the overall ocean of consciousness and Democritus said a number of unwise things he started the um the baleful story of atomism but he also did say with a great deal of insight the cause of coming into being of all things is the vortex and and I'd like just to show you some slides and comment on them briefly so next one please so here you see that Vortex and you see that it has a depth so it it goes down or deeply into the screen but it also moves around and it is this round motion and the elongated motion that I want to draw your attention to next slide please and you probably know the words of T.S Eliot um in the four quartets I think it's in little getting I might be wrong where he says you know the end of all uh traveling is to arrive back at the place we started from and know it for the first time and that of course makes progress sound circular whereas I believe that the reality is that we can't come back to the place we started from because it's gone and time has moved on we have changed and so where we are is if you like on the same curve but further up the spiral so we've come round to the point but we are moving upwards as well as around as we go and the progress in all things could be better imaged as neither simply following a straight line which is extremely um uh poor image of how most things developed nor just as moving in circles I mean lots of civilizations have thought that time moves in circles or Cycles um in in each I thought that as well but what I'm suggesting here is it's more like a spiral staircase in which you can look down on your where you were before and you can see upwards to where you're going and now if you wouldn't mind just bringing back the next slide which is um an illustration by Blake of the of Jacob's Ladder I've never seen an illustration of Jacob's Ladder that isn't just a linear stepladder and it's rather wonderful to see this idea that the progress from heaven from Earth to heaven and from Heaven coming down to earth is of the nature of a spiral where we pass over where we were and as you can see in the picture it goes on um infinitely far into the distance next slide please yes um as you know um waves and particles are considered to be two possible ways of looking at the Deep structure of matter and something that is a wave can collapse into a particle and and I want to suggest to you that as well as this very interesting finding having a particular meaning for physicists it also is an echo of what I'm just saying because if you look at a wave function and I have taken this from a physics textbook at the bottom here of a wave function it's also exactly what a spring or a coil would look like viewed from the side but also if you look down it you see what's on top of the picture there which is the perfect circle and so in a way that spiral has from a very particular viewpoint the nature of a finite or well not a finite Circle because circles are infinite in the sense they can you can progress around them forever but if you see what I mean that it's not moving anywhere in depth it's staying where it is whereas the other doesn't show the circular movement but shows the wave movement and and that is an interesting pairing for me um I'd like the reflections of physicists on it um next please yes and here you see a ripple in a stream and you can see that it's almost like the yin yang symbol that there are these two overlapping Parts in the flow that um pulling contrary directions for the part of the flow that moves together next slide please yes and this is something to do with the creativity of negation which is a point I'm going to come to and these are the patterns made in the uniform flow in a in a rigid tube by inserting um rods I think of cylindrical or hexagonal not hexagonal um um quadrilateral cross-section into the flow and what comes is this rather unforeseen shapes not exactly what everyone would anticipate next slide please ultimately you get something called a Carman Vortex Street which is image here and it starts from Simply um a disturbance that is put into the flow and that can be a very simple disturbance next slide please in fact Leonardo what did Leonardo not know and saw this when he was watching movement in water and he shows his sort of braided effect of things coming and going and intertwining after a man an old man allows his stick that he's leaning on to go into the water and he draws the the the the the the shapes that come out in the play next slide please yes and what we see here is the necessity of resistance I mean again from the simple point of view the resistance is um just something we would like to do without but it's actually very important and the trouble with most of our images are that they are of progress along a linear path and if there's anything that kind of interrupted or opposes it we should get rid of it and I just want to read quickly this um passage from um Friedrich no sorry friends um an Austrian uh painter and architect um in 1953 I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind but the straight line has become an absolute tyranny the straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule without thought or feeling it is a line which does not exist in nature and that line is the rotten Foundation of our doomed civilization the straight line is atheistic and immoral the straight line is the only sterile line the only line which doesn't suit man as the image of God the straight line is the forbidden fruit the straight line is the curse of our civilization any design undertaken with the straight line will be still born today we are witnessing the Triumph of rationalist know-how and yet at the same time we find ourselves confined and confronted with emptiness and he void desert of uniformity criminal sterility loss of creative power even creativity is prefabricated we've become impotent we are no longer able to create that is our real illiteracy well as you gather he wasn't a fan of the straight line and I think we are all tyrannized by this thought that things should be most effectively um pursued in a straight line and I had a correspondent with um a Swiss politician who Lucas fiatz who recalled it as a boy he met his celebrated neighbor called Gustav young in the course of conversation Jung quote told us about his encounter with the Pueblo Chief whose name was Mountain Lake the chief told him that the white man was doomed when asked why the chief took both hands before his eyes and Jung imitating the gesture moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly floors to one point saying because the white man looks at only one point excluding all other aspects many years later Dr fifth who is a vet who is a physician and a founding member of the green party in Switzerland recalls that a significant adversary of that movement the green movement was a successful industrialist and self-made billionaire he says I asked him what in his view was the reason for his incredible entrepreneurial and political success he took both hands before his eyes and moved the outstretched index fingers convergingly towards one point before him saying because I'm able to concentrate on only one point excluding all other aspects I remember that I had to swallow her two or three times so as not to say anything so to return to this um the idea of necessary resistance um a lovely quote from the great romantic poet German poet Friedrich herderlin the heart's wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray and become Spirit were it not for the Grim olds Cliff of Destiny standing in its way and there's something important about the nature of matter in creation I think in his introduction Richard mentioned that I believe that Consciousness is foundational and it is not that I don't think matter is also foundational it's that I think that matter is simply a form that Consciousness can take under certain circumstances so we don't know that we have Consciousness because of matter we might or might not but what we do know is that we know matter only because of Consciousness and it's an element in Consciousness that nobody's seen all they've seen is phenomenal in Consciousness that have the nature we describe as material what is that nature it does a couple of important things it allows something to persist for longer than it would otherwise persist and it makes it more um if you like a drag on whatever the process is it resists the process of creation but out of that resistance comes all the beauty that we know so I believe that matter is a very important aspect of creation but it is only a certain way of Consciousness being and people say but it doesn't look like consciousness of course it doesn't ice doesn't look like water the the the the water in the atmosphere in this room doesn't look like a stream Consciousness can take different forms and of course when you think about something coming into being what defines it is its boundaries in fact defining means setting edges or ends to it and then there's something very important here there's the nature of opposition in creation for example friction what is friction friction is what stops motion we all know that but it's also what starts motion without friction I would be unable to move so these things have dual qualities and just think about the eardrum the eardrum is a blockage in the passage of sound but it's the effects on the eardrum that allow us to hear and if the eardrum is missing or punctured we can't hear I hope I've just got time to talk very briefly about something that's rather fun which is more mises and there is something called Biosphere 2 In America which I think is the largest artificial covered environment in the world and it was developed by scientists to contain fauna and Flora and to see how they would get on in an entirely protected environment one of the things they noticed uh that puzzled them was that trees never reached their full growth but fell over um when they were still not yet mature and what they came to realize was that a tree needs wind it needs opposition it needs a storm to blow on it and this causes it to create the core wood that is its strength and of course again nature was there before the scientist he says examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a chi which is supposed to grow to a proud height could do without bad weather and storms where The Misfortune and external resistance um were there any kinds of heterogeneous stubbornness mistrust hardness greed and violence do not belong to the favorable conditions without which any great growth even if virtue is scarcely possible and you will know that medicines um are often poisoned everything depends on the dosage as paracelsus said so I think there is a Reconciliation next slide please and in in this thought I'm going to conclude there is an innocence the other side of experience acknowledge the other side of Unknowing a wisdom the other side of folly we have to go through its opposite for it to be fully realized the innocence of a child is fine but it's much less powerful and fulfilled than the innocence of a saint Oliver Wendell holds rather down to earth American jurists said the only Simplicity for which I'd give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex not that which has never divined it and here you may well know the the famous Zen saying that's attributed to Gogan before I sought Enlightenment the mountains were Mountains and the rivers were Rivers while I sought Enlightenment the mountains were not Mountains and the rivers were not rivers and after I attained indictment the mountains were Mountains and the rivers were Rivers on this James Campbell rates I think a good observation I think there are three states of being one is the innocent expression of nature another is when you pause analyze think about it then having analyzed there comes a state in which you're able to live as nature again but with more competence more control more flexibility and this exactly reflects I believe the proper reciprocal function of the two brain hemispheres can you just click the next slide please yes and this is just to show the two brain hemispheres uh vestigially connected at the base by the corpus callosum the band of fibers in the middle there which has an L on it the um left hemisphere on the viewer's right has been drawn aside slightly so that you can see it and I I believe the way the hemispheres work is the right hemispheres to use the whole the left hemisphere then takes it analyzes it categorizes it loses its uniqueness and loses its Integra integrity and all that is very helpful if once again it is re-embraced by the right hemisphere into a now more complex more Rich whole and this is like learning a piece of music you first are attracted to the piece of music you try to play it you realize you have to take it apart you have to practice a certain bar over and over again you see the harmonic structure but when you go back on the stage to perform you must forget all of that we won't perform well and that's not because what you did was a waste of time it was very important it was a stepping stone in other words the opposite is always a means to the greater good but see that these are not symmetrical that the right hemisphere is the master it's more important than the leftovers once the left hemisphere thinks it's the master then we are in for trouble and I believe that's where we're at today there's um I think a relation between the brain and the cosmos I mean either the brain is structured like this because the cosmos is and its job is to try and give us an idea of it or the cosmos looks like this because the brain is the one that has um allowed us to have experienced it but I think as Rowan Williams once said when I was in a public discussion with him I didn't think it matters because I absolutely agree with him they both stem from the same place so um next slide please foreign there is a force for division and a force for Union and we need both of these they both play an important role next but what we need is not just the force for division and the force for Union in a symmetry at a method level we need them to be unified so if you like Unity Trump's difference at a higher level we need the unity of difference and unity and that's the first asymmetry there are many others I haven't got time to go into them alas move on next slide please um so again and this is from a physicist who's in fact professor of physics at Cambridge David Tong at a fundamental level is nature discrete or continuous I see no evidence whatever for discreteness all the discreetness we see in the world is something which emerges from an underlying Continuum like the right giving its way to the left but in the end it goes back to the vision of the right hemisphere the union quanta are emergent they're not built into the heart of nature next slide please so we need sameness and difference difference within sameness and sameness with indifference next slide please our next line this is a quote from Gerta that I love dividing the United uniting The Divided is the very life of nature this is the Eternal system and diastole that's the two beats of the heart the Eternal coalescence and separation the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live and where our existence is woven a wonderful word um next slide please it could well be there yes this is really just to show how even when forms uh have sameness about them we know before looking what structure a snowflake will have at one level we can't predict the exact structure of that individual every one of these is unique and beautifully reflects in each part the other parts next slide and even here at the heart of life you see here the male and the female um sex chromosomes the X and Y for the male and the x and x and the female then it's sameness and there is difference and there is difference that includes the famous and and in in some beautiful way this sets up both togetherness and the partners and the result is the creation of a new life next slide please yes and that's really the end of what I have to say uh I had hoped to talk a bit about the corpusculation um but I won't see if somebody wants to speak about it but I I have to say these these words the principle for division and the principles in Union need to be brought together not divided we need not non-duality only but the non-duality of Duality and on duality and um in terms of the hemispheres I think I've said that it's once more of a symmetrical but an asymmetrical Arrangement not just between two dispositions that of the left and right hemispheres towards the world but between the disposition that of the left that sees the two positions as an antagonism that must ultimately lead to the Triumph of one and the annihilation of the other and the disposition that of the right that sees that they need to be preserved together neither being allowed to extinguish the other even though they're not of equal value so the right hemisphere needs to be the one that superintends the actions and reinterprets them of the left hemisphere and William James said looking back on my own experiences they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance the keynote of it is invariably a Reconciliation it is as if the Opposites of the world whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles were melted into Unity not only do they as contrasted species belong to one of the same genus but one of the species the nobler and better one is itself the genus and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself um and a final joke and then I'm going to say no and one time um I was listening to radio 4 and I heard the late lamented Jonathan sacks telling a story about um a palace uh Jewish man who was reading the talmud and in it he found that one of the um great um voices the great rabbis of the past redeemed um highly esteemed Rabbi said that on no account must you do X later he came across another Rabbi who said you must always do X and so being confronted with this conundrum he did what any Pious man would do he prayed to God and he said which should I believe which is true and God said both of them are true and slightly exasperated he said but they can't both be true to which God replied all three of you are correct I like that anyway there you go

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 45,156

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Id: PNNMTEJ3KWQ

Length: 64min 6sec (3846 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023