The Sense of the Sacred | Iain McGilchrist with Jnanavaca

it's a complete delight to have you here ian i'm going to carry on in a way hopefully seamlessly from where ian left off and where my tribandu left off particularly i want to explore with you the final chapter chapter 28 i believe the sense of the sacred which um over dinner i was saying that to me it feels like the culmination of the whole magnificent two-volume part epic that is the matter with things the sense of the sacred is where you conclude and um perhaps we could start with um you talk about the limits of reason you talk about how well you've mentioned unknowing you talked about not knowing is not the same as ignorance if i could just read a couple of sentences there is an unknowing the other side of ignorance which is far superior to both knowing and ignorance there is an innocence the other side of experience which is superior to both experience and naivety and the wisdom the other side of folly which is superior to both folly and common sense so i wonder if you could say something more about the limits of reason and the importance of unknowing when approaching the sacred yes i suppose i should begin by saying that i am no foe of reason as i am no foe of science i immerse myself in both and i'm hugely reliant on what they can give us but it would be itself irrational and incidentally unscientific to suppose that science and reason had answers to everything it doesn't really make any sense um and there's plenty that is not irrational as we say but is simply not contained by reason for example response to a piece of music it's it's not encompassed by reason but it's if you like super irrational or trans-rational it's beyond reason it's it's not limited by reason but it would be a fool who thought that because it couldn't be reasoned into existence for us it didn't exist and of course the same is true of many kinds of human experience well you you argue is not the right word but you posit that there is a divine a sacred uh however we want to term it because there has to be something beyond uh what we can apprehend through through reason you ask why the why is there something rather than nothing at all in the cosmos yes yes i i suppose i would just resist slightly the formula because in that this is again not a matter of simple reason although there's nothing irrational about supposing there's a divine and it accords with experience in my view um it would be very extraordinary wouldn't it if our minds and our brains were so constructed that they could understand everything i mean why especially if you believe that we evolved then presumably we're part way along a path i mean no doubt a mouse if it could formulate it might say i know everything you know but we know it doesn't yes you might know things we don't so it's always a matter of um you know the context so i i don't as you i think we're saying yourself you know i don't exactly argue this but i do begin from a very important question which um modern anglo-american analytic philosophers have got round by declaring it a not permissible question so all the really important issues all the really difficult questions which are the ones that philosophers should be dealing with philosophers say they're not real questions so that's makes life simple you know but really these things carry on for any of us who are thinking and reflecting while we're living being very important questions and they don't lead just to dead ends because we have no final answer the process of addressing them alone is rather as i was saying before that it's something that contains its its purpose or its meaning or whatever in the process um that we need to examine this and a number of people said to me who had read my text i think you shouldn't go into this sacred thing you know um because there's a lot of really good science really good philosophy here but you know and well i wasn't open to that idea at all because in a way i felt that it was the key keystone of the whole thing really and one reviewer said to me and i thought it was rather a nice thing to say that having read the book that he felt that there was something coming ever more about today as wordsworth says coming into being in the process of reading and it was fractal so there were bits of all of it in the parts of it which i really like because i think that if you followed me through the thing though i don't talk about the divine at all i'm opening up i hope people's minds to a place where they can entertain this and until one's entertained it one has no way of knowing whether it's worth rejecting or not i mean and to entertain it means not just um saying well it might be and then moving on one needs to be able positively to open oneself to the possibility that this exists yeah and i'm in the mastering cemetery i say you know that people who who believe don't have a certainty it's not a propositional certainty it's a disposition of the spiritual soul in which we place ourselves in a certain relation to the world and it's out of that that something comes forth and that they they act as if god were and that's the most we can know and if we act as if god were we may well find that probably this is a reality that has changed my life and given back to life and that's all we can know we can't have the facts written down and look them up in a book you know which is why i always say that religious fundamentalists and religious uh fundamentalist atheists are you know cut from the same class yes yes both left hemispheres very left hemispheric i'm right you're wrong it's in a book here we know what it is these are the rules you buy by those these and your home and drive but actually nothing in life is at all like that and in this area particularly not you talk about a sense of wonder don't you as part of this disposition i think that's a terribly important part yeah and you know i might just mention that both plato and aristotle said that uh philosophy begins in wonder and goethe said the same and said and ends in one another and i think gertrude always was right on the money i mean most brilliant philosopher scientist thinker of the last 500 years in europe well einstein said something similar didn't he about uh there are two ways to live your life one is as if nothing is a miracle and the other is as if everything is a miracle yes yes certainly it's attributed to him yes indeed i wonder if you can say something more about this responsiveness as in in relation to this disposition towards the divine so we've talked you've touched on wonder but there's a receptivity and active receptivity as well [Music] well that receptivity is bound up with negation and this is where i want to mention two things i want to mention the kabbalah the jewish body of mystical literature and i want to mention meister eckhart the most important mystic of the medieval west i think and first the kabbalah which i only came across in the last five years um and it was completely a revelation to me uh there's something called the lurianic cabala which means the cabala according to the version of isaac luria who lived in the 17th century 16th century um and there is a creation myth which i'm sorry some of you who follow my things would have heard me say this before but i think it's so important i'm going to say it again it talks about creation in three phases and the first state of affairs is that there is just a single being about whom we can say nothing and its name ends off either means what is or it means nothing actually and enzo's nature was relational had love in it and for that to be relation and to be loved there must be something other and if it's not truly other but really secretly part of it then it doesn't the relationship doesn't doesn't manifest so what was enzo's first act of creation was it to reach out a hand and make mountains no it was to withdraw to make a space in which there could be something other and then in that space there were certain vessels that were to receive what was to be created in this space and one single spark came out of ainsof and fell on these vessels and shattered them and then there was a third phase which is repair and this is a phase in which according to this tradition human beings play a very important part which is the repair of these broken vessels in such a way that they are more beautiful and more spiritually rich than they were before and that reminds me of a tradition in japanese ceramics called kintsugi i think which in which a broken bowl or something of the kind can be repaired using gold in such a way that it's actually more beautiful than it was before and i sometimes think also it's a something one can say about human beings that have lived you know they're like an old wine or a wonderful old piece of furniture that there's there's damage to them there's sort of you know things have changed and there's marks on them but it's that that makes them beautiful anyway yeah um where was it yeah so that's that's one thing and of course for those of you who know my stuff um i believe that the way in which things come into being for us is that they first are taken in by the receptivity of the right hemisphere which which we know it's not just an opinion of mine we know from experimentation this has been much written about by elkin and goldberg that the first experience of anything comes to the right hemisphere and almost immediately i mean the split second is taken up by the left hemisphere where it has boxes like the urns the vessels and it says it's one of those but actually it's much bigger than any of those and so the categories don't really suffice and so something has to be put together again which is better than it was before and it wouldn't have been better if there'd never been the breaking up part that the left hemisphere does so it goes from right hemisphere the initial receptivity the left hemisphere with the analysis into parts the right hemisphere with the bringing it together again as a new home and i sometimes say that's like learning a piece of music your first attraction to the whole thing you then practice it and you have to break it up into bits and you see it from the point of your music theory but then when you actually go to play it for somebody you forget all that you must forget it otherwise you wouldn't play well but it's not that it would have been better had you not done that work you had to do that work slightly like sorry too many analogies but it's slightly like the thing about you know before enlightenment chopping wood and carrying water after enlightenment shopping but slightly different chopping wood and so uh the other thing was yes for a meister egg carton i'd have see really what i wanted to say is that in um the buddhist tradition and in i think most spiritual traditions there was this idea of emptying undoing unknowing unsaying and as a fertile darkness emptiness and silence which is not just a blank but is something richly poised to bring things into be a field of potential and um i say we switch out the light in order to see the stars in one sermon eckhart expands on the meaning of darkness this is my strike hard 14th century mystic you cannot do better than to place yourself in darkness and unknowing he says and he imagines a bystander asking him but what is this darkness and unknowing and what is its name 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 it's jordan isn't it wonderful and you you yourself have coined the unword the term the unworthy and uh i mean you talk about god and you talk but but the way you talk about god as a buddhist i have no issue with buddhism as you know doesn't use the language of god absolutely that language predominantly helpful uh and tries to find other ways of talking about the the divine the transcendent but this this concept of onwards is very very resonant yes it's a wonderful concept well yes i'm referring there to the fact that in all the philosophical and you know traditions of different cultures there is a word for this thing that underlies everything and gives it being and brings it about and to the greeks this was logos to the chinese it is to um in sanskrit um it's it's also allah um and in in the jewish tradition it's yahweh but there is also tradition that this word is somehow special and sacred and shouldn't be said in fact to say it is to bring something bad about and i think the idea there is that the whole business of naming is a way of taking control of something finding a place for it and saying i see and this can't be found a place for alongside other things whatever we mean by this god is not just something like a human being only much more so it is something else yeah and so what i wanted to do was to suggest that if we don't have a word at all it disappears from our discourse but if we have a word we we run the risk that we will think we've now got it and so you get things like at the beginning of the dao de ching the dao that can be named is not the real doubt and saint augustine says see comprehend he's known as deos if you understand it it's not god that you understand and love lovely fact there's a parallel there with richard feynman who said if you understand quantum mechanics you don't understand quantum mechanics and i think that's not an accidental parallel actually so it's about unthinking the ways we normally think in order to have a space to understand this um and so i i say look with many reservations we need to bring this concept into the picture because it's what lies behind it that matters it's all that's implicit in it it's not the thing we focus on with the left hemisphere that likes the language you notice that the bystander in aircraft and what is its name by the way because then i've got it in my directory we can't exactly avoid discussing it but on the other hand we mustn't discuss it in such a way that we think we've ever um pinned it down and this leads to what's known in in um certainly in the western tradition christianity is the apophatic mode which is the no saying word way in which you don't affirm what god is but you say all the things that people might mistake for god and clear away so it was like this idea as i say of discovering and in um in greek the the word for truth is alithea which means unforgetting in other words we live in a cloud of forgetting and it's unforgetting that allows us to understand so that's the thing that we must and you know i end the book really saying i can't specify this thing i know it may seem to some people very difficult but my sense is that it's the most important element we can have in our picture of the cosmos and if we if we as we say if we don't talk about it we forget it yes and we assume that there's nothing there yes buddhism tries to tread this very fine line the middle way between eternalism and nihilism absolutely and constantly uh has to correct itself because anything that you say yes will veer one one way or the other and i think you do a marvelous job in in in this book and in this final chapter of steering well thank you uh uh something of of that middle way yeah it was very very difficult yeah i mean it cost me more pains than anything i've ever written because everything i wrote seemed wrong which is true yeah yeah and in a way i felt a bit of a fool because what you're telling everyone is that it's foolish to try and say these things but i thought i know therefore that i'm going to fail but it's better that i fail as best i can than i give up the task well it's courageous well whatever thank you yeah um [Music] i'm saying nothing well at the risk of moving into a sort of um a model that can could be misinterpreted i i was struck by your discussion of panentheism right yes uh yeah because i hadn't come across pronunciation before that that it unites or or seems to unify the notion of both imminence and transcendence yes as the divine in all things but also more than the yes more than the sum of all things yes that's right i wonder if you can say something more about panentheism because i'm not sure everybody will be familiar with that and also distinguishing it from anti-ism yes yes well pantheism comes from two greek roots pan meaning all and theos meaning god and it basically is the belief that god is all things the sum of all things and they're all things are god panicism puts n in the middle which is which means in and this is a an importantly different belief that god is in all things but is not exhausted by an inventory of all these things and that all things are in god although they don't all themselves add up to god so this this brings again a field of further the something more there's something further whereas pantheism seems to me to close things down and go we know we know we've got it now yeah and and it's a very beautiful idea because as you say it combines this idea that god is imminent is in all things but also that god is something transcendent that is more than and beyond and you said earlier something about um holding these two difficult positions together in buddhism and as you know um i spend in fact i have a chapter called the coincidence of opposites which explores this whole idea which niels bohr one of the great figures in in the founding of quantum mechanics said that really deep truths also have an opposite which is deeply true and the trivial things don't have this structure say for example either i had milk in my coffee this morning or i didn't it's not sensible to say well i had a boat on the other hand the really important things embrace their opposites and the trick is not to allow this to collapse into it's this or its latch and this i call a dipole and the image of it that i often use is that of a magnet um the north pole and the south pole are simply not the same thing at all and yet both of them combine to make the magnet and there isn't a clear demarcation between them either and if you cut one of them off because you didn't like it it would reinstate itself because that's the nature of a magnet so that's what i'm thinking of by the concept of the dipole and incidentally i think it's very important that there is a role for saying it's either this or it's that i don't think we should ignore that but it's very important that we should also maintain that it's both this and that in cases where this is true and so i sometimes say we don't want to have either either or or both and we need to have both either or and both hand in our vision and i think that that's not just playing with words and and one of the lovely things about it is that it makes sense of of a number of things it makes sense of what wordsworth i think he's describing where he he talks about a spirit that rolls through all things you know and this idea again something ever more about to be this coming into being which is actually curiously enough there and they i'm sorry i can't resist these asides but it it's there in the the story of moses and the burning bush because god is recorded as saying at least in the in the english translations i am that i am but i gather that the the the hebrew words actually mean i will be what i will be which suggests that god is also coming into being all the time becoming more and more god through the coming into being of god's creation and it's only through the existence of the dipole of these two things that each of them comes to be what they are and the other nice thing about it is that it makes sense of a concept which otherwise seems like believing three impossible things before breakfast which is the trinity and this idea is not actually peculiar to christianity and a simple franciscan monk once said to me something which may or not be be accepted by clever theologians but it helped to explain things to me was that the idea of the trinity is like a book is the book what was in your mind or the rind of the writer when they were writing it or is it this book here on the table or is it what happens when somebody takes the book up and reads it each of them is the book but they have different qualities and this means this this business of pananthism brings together these concepts of the thing and the and the mentality behind it and in fact you find it in sufism as well yeah so i think rooney says that um the the water is both the spring it is the cup that bears the water to the mouth and the analogy in buddhism is that enlightenment is is to be found nowhere else but here and now in this form in this individual form and yet it is a transcendent reality yeah uh it's not just mere matter or mere form and paradox there uh can only be unified in this higher kind of perspective i think yeah yeah moving on i just want to again in um in this chapter if i can if i can just quote you you say throughout part three so there's three parts to this two volume but throughout part three i've emphasized the number of positions that are not the norm in our culture though they are i believe accepted by many contemporary physicists which was you know music to my ears and then then you you list five things the primacy of motion over stasis and the importance in particular flow something of which you've touched on the reality of time as an expression of that extended flow exactly not a series of linear moments which against you touched on with zeno's paradox and then the third is that consciousness and matter are not simply irreconcilable leaving us with the problem of how to get consciousness out of matter yes but in reality aspects of one another in which consciousness is nonetheless primary yeah so before i come on to the other two i wonder if you can say a little bit more when when i interviewed you in the pandemic yeah you talked about mata as resistance and the importance of resistance yes anyway you might want to touch on that if no i would because of course it connects with what we've been talking about the creativity of negation which is thought of in the western tradition of somehow negative yes yes um and yet of course famously keats had this concept of negative capability which was denying the thing that one hastens to do in order that something much richer should come forth um just to remain in doubts and whatever it is without uncertainty yeah a very important point for me is that resistance is part of this picture it's not just a sort of uniform flow of whatever that has no other in it because what creates everything in the flow in a river is the turbulence that comes from other shapes and forms which may be generated by rocks or stones or by other parts of the flow and so forth and it's this that brings forth things so that everything creative comes from a flow that also has resistance to it in it um and cone ridge actually has this image that you know a piece of soap you know it moves about slippery if you put it down on the surface it moves about but if you leave it for a while the very same thing that made it slip now makes it stick and what i think about in terms of matter and consciousness is there's a long chapter in there which is really the length of a short book and one day i may separately publish it as a short book which looks at all the looks through and i hope in a rational spirit all the possible ways in which brain and mind mind and matter can relate to one another and i come to the conclusion that it's not reasonable to suppose that matter emits consciousness it might be better said that it transmits consciousness but even better bringing in the idea of resistance is that it permits consciousness in other words it's it's its job is to form something by offering resistance and it's that resistance that brings the individual consciousness into being and william james another person who please you know william james alfred north whitehead you know spend some time reading them because they're so so rich but anyway james says so many wonderful things but one of them is that the image that comes forth for him is that of the vocal chords that what enables his voice is resistance to the flow of air it's not the flow of air because there were no vocal cords it got no vocal cords he wouldn't have a voice but it's the existence obviously of the flow but the resistance to it that brings brings forth that individuality and so i see creation as a matter of this um this resistance and the resistance is provided by matter because what is matter it's something i know in my consciousness i mean i may or may not have consciousness because there's matter we don't know that but certainly i can only know matter because i've got consciousness matter is something i experience and it's experienced in consciousness so we can't deny consciousness we're denying the whole thing but what i'd like to think of is that matter is a sort of different phase of consciousness in which it has different characteristics and people say but matters is not a look at all light consciousness to which i say well ice is not at all like water and water vapor is not at all like ice they have completely different qualities one is invisible another is translucent another is opaque and so on and so forth but they're all phases according to physical chemistry of the same entity besides if if for a quantum physicist you wouldn't be so easily able to say matter is nothing like consciousness it's not at all by consciousness we forget don't we that matter itself is not understood at all and is is completely mysterious absolutely and what physicists say is that you know biologists think they're being very hard-nosed when they come along and say it's all made up by matter yeah and they kind of say isn't that right you know to physicists and they they sort of shift about uneasily and look at their feet and mumble yes but actually we don't know what matter is at all because i mean there's a principle in science which is a good one which you explain something you don't understand by reference to something that you already do understand yes but the assumption that we already do understand matter is completely false yeah it's just an aspect about consciousness yes yes yes that's right yeah so i've got about four different directions i want to go from here because it opens up so much doesn't it this this idea of resistance and and mata being unnecessary [Music] resistance sort of going back to the myth that you were talking about if the divine needs to love it needs another yes and and therefore form is necessary yes embodiment helps to shape something into being and it also helps it persist for longer because consciousness can move as fast as you like and you can think of this and think of that but actually matter slows the whole process down so since we can't do away with time and everything exists in time matter can be thought of as the element that allows a degree of persistence yes yes again that goes back to heraclitus in a way yes it does yes indeed well everything in the end goes back to here as as nietzsche said you know um yeah yeah yeah yeah so so then this resistance and this need need maybe not the right word but this desire to love another opens up the possibility of evil yes it does yes you talked a little bit about evil yes i find that very very interesting uh my own teacher sangratshita some of his last writings were on the nature of evil which isn't evil is a word that perhaps is is not used in buddhism very much anyway i find it very interesting what you had to say about evil i that's an evil question um well particularly it just feels so necessary that we face the dark i think it's an unavoidable aspect of the freedom of creation that things can be other than [Music] we might think was the perfect way in which they should be and usually our judgements are formed on what we know here and now but later we may see things in a different light um jung talked about what he called enantiodromia which means roads going in opposite directions and basically he thought that things and i think this is so true that things that we think of as just good may contain in the kernels of things that are evil and things that we think of as just evil may contain within them the kernel of something good and in the nowadays we have such a kind of simplistic idea of the world that there are just things that are good and more and more and more and more of those better and better and better but actually by going too far in a certain direction because space is curved and moral space is curved you come back round to the very thing you didn't want so that too much emphasis on freedom can lead to tyranny and so forth he's well known and so i think it's it's unavoidable um and i suppose what i would say about it is that it's surely it's something about which nobody should speak glibly and and therefore nobody should have feel that they can answer these questions they are as it were impossible and yet need to be pondered and [Music] what i would say is is that it's rather like by referring earlier as it happens to the idea that we need union and division but we need the union of union and division and this also um can be reflected on the nature of good and evil in that good can embrace and neutralize evil but evil can never embrace and neutralize good hate can never embrace love but love can embrace hate it has a different status and we always think that opposites must be equal but this is an obsession of our age often they're not equal as the left and right hemisphere are not equal in their capacity to convey reality they're both necessary but it doesn't make them equal and so at the moment we're in the middle of a process in which i think it's so um evasive to say there's no such thing as evil i mean if you've had your eyes open and you know something about what's happened in just my lifetime it's impossible to say it's just a falling away of goodness there is a drive to something which has its own life and pursues distraction yeah and i i think you know i'm not convinced at all by this idea that it's falling away and indeed in christianity in the lord's prayer which is i suppose the ultimate thing for which christ's word for which christ is remembered he doesn't pray that we should be a little bit better than we are at the moment he prays that we should be delivered from evil and he himself was tempted by the devil this is what the bible says how you understand that of course is another matter and so on but i think that what it draws attention to is an idea that this is something in the core of reality and that it possibly is part of the creative nature of the cosmos and it's certainly not our job either to ignore it or to try and explain it or to feel we've got it but not to ignore it yeah to ignore it well in buddhism greed and hatred and delusion are said to be so so they go very very very deep as well as the potential for transcendence and yes but but to ignore uh how deep they go is to somehow yes step into folly really yes somehow um this is not good to trivialize it yes yes yes yes yes i i wonder though if we can um it's a sort of going back to this fractal nature of your work which i think is is a really apt way of talking about it but the fractal nature of reality itself the the one and the many yes and you talk about um indra's net which is an image that's very familiar to buddhists is it yes it is it's it's there in later buddhism right right in mahayana buddhism in fact it there's a whole sort of school of buddhism that um talks about that mutual interpenetration of whole phenomenon right or all phenomena being reflected in each but the one in the many i wonder if you can yeah and the centre's net image yeah why it's so important yes yes and and i have a chapter also on the one and the many because i think it's so central to our understanding of everything and again heraclitus has a saying listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to accept that one is all things and the greek can mean all things are one or one is all things right yes it's ambivalent and that is so beautiful um yes the the the image of indra's net is that uh if i believe and you correct me if i've got this wrong but is a net that sort of covers the universe and it at each intestinal point in the net where the filaments cross there is a jewel in which all the other jewels in the net are reflected so that everything is within partially in a sort of hologram-like way contained as you said the part in the hole and the hole in the part so i like that the other thing i like about it is it's a very good image of of a way of saying that relation comes before the relata because in a way to begin with before there is a gnat there are just these threads and as they cross they make things we go oh there's a thing there's a crossing point that make that can make a net okay so that we our attention is drawn to the thing which is this part of the whole yes but you know there's something else which is interesting and i don't know that i'm going to be able to deal with this in in this maybe it's a herring red herring i shouldn't follow it um [Music] that scale makes a difference ah we think that things are the same at a large scale as they are at a small scale or an intermediate scale but they're not they have different qualities at different scales so the amount quantity actually changes quality and actually we all know that from our experience that as i say more or some things just make things worse but it's but it's also profoundly true in in in in terms of physics and i quote uh mike abramovic's work on on this in that book and i won't try and give it to you no but i just wanted to pass reflection on that that you see different things at different scales and you know i think it's um capratos and teaser who who who describe looking at an ant colony and from a distance it looks like a single black thing and as you move in it seems to be these separate things and as you move into the various ants you see something completely different yes yes and a point made by freeman dyson who was a very great man i mean a physicist but also a great thinker um was that um as people look at large agglomerates human beings they see them as possibly not as mechanical as parts so you go down a simpler animal seems more mechanical and then somehow the cell seems more and you've got the dna code it seems mechanical and by the way it isn't at all an old chapter on that um but um he then says as you go deeper and deeper it starts being much less mechanical again yeah until the bits that you were hoping would give you the clue to everything just vanished away and you're left with you know the simplest thing of all which is a is a quantum vacuum called which is a field complex which is which is itself extraordinarily complex and it cannot get more basic in it yeah yeah and it's no way mechanical doesn't behave in a mechanical way yeah and you know it's a very important point to make i mean really my dear friends if there's one thing i would want you to go away with this it's a desire and a need to resist the simplistic idea that we are best understood by liking us through machines there are so many reasons why we are not and in one particular chapter chapter 12 on the science of life i i make you know i give about eight reasons if you like why why we're not like machines but the fascinating thing is that as david bone predicted and he of course is a great physicist and you'll find i refer to his work in the book a lot but as he said we're in the paradoxical position that while the physicists are finding that the the inanimate universe is animated the biologists the scientists of life are discovering that it's inanimate they think this this um well there's so much there that is rather than resonant for me as a buddhist but the one in the many it said that the enlightened mind sees one of the wisdoms of the enlightened mind is to see the sameness of all form that it's all empty insubstantial but also another wisdom a complimentary as it were wisdom of the enlightened mind is to see the uniqueness of all forms yes uh and you need the boat i love this the sameness and uniqueness absolutely and and none of it is is as it were [Music] reducible to one or the other no and much of the thrust of of of the creation of whatever you whatever it means by that but this ongoing drive that is in the cosmos is towards uniqueness it's the creation of uniqueness not so is to split up the wholeness or integrity but to to give one an insight into what that integrity holds what its potential is in the is that empty space that is utterly fertile and it's the realization of all these things and one of the things about our culture and our way of thinking is that we're constantly denying uniqueness we're categorizing everything and seeing living people as exemplars of certain categories where they're all quite unique yeah yeah and you can you have to generalize i understand that so it's always a tension between these things but we've lost the sense of the unique yes the individual which is where beauty also lies exactly categories aren't beautiful the catholics are not beautiful we're going to have to i'm aware of time or maybe just carrying on with this one and many which seems very very profound somehow very very important but let me let me just quote what you say about um buddhism buddhism sometimes does say not to that it doesn't say that all things are one no uh but it does say things are not too uh trying i think to get something to do with this sameness and uniqueness yes but also perhaps this relational aspect that things are not separate yes yes but i i i think there's even something more and i love what you say here and i'm um uh you you appear to be disagreeing with buddhism but i don't think you are let me just read you what you say i i love this i admire the serenity of those buddhists who are able to say not to and see the whole concern about good and evil as a misunderstanding caused by making false distinctions and while i indeed believe the end point is right that the two eventually come together and that we cannot know what good may flow from what we call evil or what evil may flow from what we call good my response to not to is yes but to [Laughter] as my response to to is yes but not to in buddhism central to to the enlightened experience is not just wisdom but compassion yes and compassion is somehow predicated on this this censoric world that we inhabit this conditioned world we inhabit as being also an experience that's relatively real uh it is true [Music] for me and it's also all of us who are in life it is too and yes it's also not to yes if it was just not true yes there would be no compassion there would be no other to love once again it can it conflates and collapses the collapse there's the relationship the encounter rather than transcend i think the concept of encounter is is important yes because when we know that we encounter a person or a place or whatever it is we know that something is called force when well something is enriched enough something is happening to the other place as well i think often holy places become holy because of the attention that has been paid to them yes and so forth again as i say attention as a moral act because it creates the world and creates us yes so yes i mean i i would say we need um not just non-duality but we want the non-duality of duality and non-demandability yes yes and and if we can bear that in mind then things start to to mean more but i i perhaps we should take up the thing about compassion um while there's still time to do it because it it seems to me as i think i said in the first part of an earlier part of our talk we need to have the sense of or and we need to have this sense of humility and we need to have the sense of compassion but the way we think about them in the west and these seem to be the fruits of a spiritual life but the way we think about them in the west is is dualistic in the sense that people say oh why do you have to have wonder or or before something that just makes you small but i think exactly the opposite that when you are in awe of something and you you have a true sense of the wonder of something you know that whatever it is that exists includes you and this and that it tells you more about who you are yes and that there is nothing um there is nothing negatively abasing about humility humility is a way of opening things and is a necessary part of you know not knowing and simple it's rich and fruitful and compassion too is not doing something just for somebody else that you sort of wish you didn't have to do or resent but it's the opening of the spirit to somebody who is linked to you yes well i think it's marvelous that after is it 1300 1400 pages 1300 and something if this uh magnificent work you end with unknowing uh with or with wonder and with this the importance of humility i think that's just what i find a very very inspiring inspiring place and maybe a good place to finish may i just read the last word because what you've said what you said just brings true to what i say at the end of the epilogue in the epilogue i sort of look a bit at our world and so on and how it how it relates to what i've been talking about i don't want to reduce what i've said to that but i say at the end um despite being deeply suspicious of a great deal of god talk myself and while fully acknowledging the problematic nature of the very word god i feel our repudiation of god is not a wise move it's easy to misunderstand what cultures wiser than ours were trying to express by speaking of god still easier to reject the idea of god entirely but easy is not enough it is our duty to do the more difficult thing to find out the core of wisdom in this ill understood though universal insight for that there is such an inestimable valuable core seems to me more credible than anything else i know i've said what i can if you wish more i can do no better than repeat the words of the 17th century priest and physician and by the way poet angelus silesius friend that is surely enough and should you want to read more then go and become yourself the words and yourself the being that's beautiful thank you thank you very much

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 2,747

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Id: yHkXN8Oxhx8

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022