Know Thyself - E165 - Dr. Iain McGilchrist: Rediscovering Wisdom, Awe, and Balance in a Left-Brain World

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

World-renowned psychiatrist and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist explores the profound truth about the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and why understanding their relationship can change the way you see yourself, others, and the world.We go far beyond the popular myths of “creative right brain” vs “logical left brain.” Dr. McGilchrist reveals how the two hemispheres actually work together to shape perception, meaning, and even our experience of the sacred.This is a conversation about imagination, intuition, and truth... and about what we lose when the left hemisphere dominates our culture. From education and consciousness to the future of humanity, Dr. McGilchrist shows how rebalancing our relationship to the brain can awaken a deeper, more fulfilling way of living.https://fractalforest.co/knowthyself to get your free Shilajit Todayhttps://livemomentous.com and use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 35% off the best creatine in the gameAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list___________0:00 Intro 2:02 The Brain is Split in Two... Here's Why it Matters15:57 Right Hemisphere: Wisdom & Intuition24:00 The Problem with Reductionism 31:02 How Truth is Found in Paradox38:24 The World the Left vs Right Hemisphere Creates49:20 Ad: Fractal Forest50:51 By Grasping for Life, You're Missing Your Life55:52 Your Relationship to Life Shapes Your Life 1:06:20 Attention is Your Most Valuable Resource1:15:52 Ad: Momentous Creatine1:17:00 Defining & Experiencing the Sacred1:27:38 How Our Education System Should be Structured1:38:57 The Power of Imagination & Intuition1:57:13 Accessing Higher Information Through Consciousness2:07:30 Difference of Information, Knowledge, & Understanding 2:19:56 What it Means to Know Thyself2:26:22 Expanding the Self, Love & Oneness2:36:56 Suffering & Meaning of Life2:42:46 His Message for Humanity2:48:06 Conclusion___________Episode Resources: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

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chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the everyday with Amazon. The rational mind is a precious servant and the intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in a world which acknowledges the servant but has forgotten the gift. There are profound philosophical consequences to the fact that the brain is divided into but they can become very unbalanced towards the direction of the left hemisphere the one that is less intelligent, less attentive, less perceptive

about all the things the left hemisphere would want not to do. The number one thing is to slow down. Everything in our life now tells us to speed up to try and do things faster and faster and faster and faster and in doing so you can't really appreciate anything I think once you recapture the awe-inspiring nature of existence, then you're getting close to living again. 99.9% of the time, your intuition is doing a very good job.

Most important steps forward in science were not made by endless scribbling, but by a moment of insight. Intuition is a great gift that we have, and we need to pay attention to it. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a work. world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, literary scholar, his landmark works, and the master in his emissary, and the matter with things, have been fundamental in reshaping our worldview on life and the brain our place in it. And his work has evoked so much in my own personal path, getting to study it more recently, re-evoking a sense of awe, beauty, wonder, and sacred in the everyday life. Dr. Ian McGilchrist, thank you for being here.

No, thank you, Andrew, for inviting me to a rather lovely place here in Topeka Canyon. Yeah, Topeka Canyon. The pleasure is mine. Yeah. I thought we could dive right in and set some of the framework for this conversation by asking, why should anyone care that the brain is split in two? I think that's a very important question. Not often enough asked, but why should it matter?

So people might well say, well, as far as I'm concerned, as long as my brain's doing the things I wanted to do, I don't care where it's doing it or what shape it has. But there are, I believe, profound philosophical consequences to the fact that the brain is divided in two. And there are three questions that led me into this area when I was training in medicine. And I started off in the world of ideas and literature and realized that I needed to become trained in medicine to deal with people who had a physical condition, often affecting the brain, that changed their mind and their personality and their way of looking at the world profoundly. How did that happen? and equally people who were thinking in certain ways that could actually produce physical effects on their body. So it was in that area of overlap between mind and body

that I wanted to work. And in medical school, there were a couple of things that were hardly mentioned. They were glossed over. I mean, they're obviously true. One is that the brain is divided in two down the middle. and for people who haven't seen a human brain it's slightly like a large walnut

with the wrinkly mouse, this is a bit in the middle that divides in. And this is not something peculiar to humans. It's true of animals. It's true of birds. It's true of virtually all the creatures that we've looked at that have a kind of proto brain or a brain. Why are they all divided?

this way because the computational power, if you think in terms of a computer, which we've been taught to do, the computational power of a mass of neurons must be proportionate to the number of connections it can make and therefore to willfully reduce the number by cleaving it down the middle seems odd. The second thing that was odd and was mentioned but just lost over in medical school was that the brain is asymmetrical. And that too is interesting because there's no real reason for the brain again to be asymmetrical. The skull is, broadly speaking, symmetrical. And if you wanted to just get a bit more stuff into the skull, you could expand the brain symmetrically. But indeed, it has expanded asymmetrically, suggesting that there's a difference

between what's going on in one part and what's going on in another. And in school, medical school, they mentioned that that was largely due to the thing that was said to set humanity apart, which was the acquisition of language, and that there were language areas in the posterior left hemisphere, and because language was a big thing, it needed a lot of space. And so that part of the brain became bigger. But this can't be true for a couple of important reasons. Animals that don't have language, the monkey,

and even the Great Apes already have this enlarged area without any big vocabulary to take up that space. And the other thing is that it wasn't ever mentioned because it was rather embarrassing was that the largest asymmetry in the brain

was actually in favour of the right hemisphere at the front. So the frontal part of the right hemisphere was bigger than the, if you like, the same may I on the left. Why was that? The third thing was actually mentioned, and it really went home to me, which is that a lot of the communication across per corpus callosum is negative in the sense that it's saying, keep out of it, I'm dealing with it. So one hemisphere will take hold of a task,

and it will send messages to the other hemisphere which are largely inhibitory. Some of the of course are excited, but their overall function, more often than not, is to exclude the other hemisphere from getting involved at the moment with this task. Now, that seemed extraordinary. I later discovered that there was no such band of fibers, we call it the corpus callosum in humans. There was no corpus callosum until mammals. So other creatures, reptiles, amphibians, birds, whatever, however sophisticated, didn't have a corpus callosum. And so their two halves of the brain were much more independent. And then when we started to develop one in mammals,

very quickly the growth in the size of the brain was not replicated in the size of the corpus callosum. So as the brain got bigger, the corpus callosum got effectively smaller. So it's smaller again in humans. What is all this about? And it seemed to me that at the least what one can say, it was about both uniting two things and dividing two things, keeping them together but keeping them separate

because they were distinct. Why and what was that about? And the old story was, and I would ask everybody who doesn't know my work just to put out of their mind everything they think they know about the differences between the hemispheres because largely it was all nonsense. And it used to be said, for example,

that the left hemisphere was rational, and dependable, a little bit boring, but there it was, it was sensible and mature, whereas the right hemisphere was sort of eridifery and given to painting pictures. But this is a very bad, very bad picture of what's going on. In fact, both hemispheres are involved in doing everything, and that led some people to say, well, there's no question here to answer. But it led me to think, no, there is. There just needs to be a better question than what are they doing?

doing and that question was, in what way are they doing it? And I don't mean by which mechanism. I mean, in what manner, as you would say, of a person, but how does he approach this? What is he like when he's doing whatever he's doing? So the answers there are really fascinating because perhaps I should just mention that the left hemisphere is not reliable and dependable. It is actually given to delusions, far more delusional than the right hemisphere. Indeed, I'm by far not the only neurologist who said the left hemisphere is delusional when left to its own devices. Secondly, it is not devoid of emotion. It has rather strong emotions, most of themselves-regarding ones.

It gets very angry very quickly. Anger lateralizes to the left hemisphere more than to the right. And it gets quickly expresses disgust and contempt. In fact, it's a rather disagreeable creature that is not by any means free from its own emotions. The right hemisphere is far more a good guide to reality. We'll come onto that. So just to say, all of that stuff that used to be said is wrong. why there are two hemispheres is because at least this is the best explanation I can find

and nobody's produced a better one and nobody's said that I must be wrong is that all creatures have to solve a fundamental problem of survival which is how to get stuff in order to eat or to make a shelter or whatever and utilize it so to manipulate the environment to get stuff to eat, to gather stuff to make tools to use the world. But if that's all it's doing, it will miss everything else that's going on at the same time. So, well, it's getting its lunch, it's somebody else's.

It's not looking out for its kin. It's not looking out for its mate. It's not looking out for everything else that it should be looking out for. And so the solution, the only solution, it has to be, must be, and has been historically, to have two loci or loci of consciousness, one in one of the cerebral hemispheres and one in the other, and addressed to the world in different ways.

So their disposition towards the world is different. Their attention to the world is different. This is the root of the distinction. So the left hemisphere's root of attention is to a tiny thing that is isolated, already known, desired, and is easily graspable as long as you focus on it alone

and go for it. Whereas the right hemisphere's attention is exactly the opposite. It's not narrow but broad. It's not moving from here to place, but sustained. It's vigilant. It's open for everything else

without preconception of what it might be. Now, these two complement one another. They work well together. They have completely, different modes of approach, but we need those two to be able to survive. And this was imaged in the title I chose for my first book on this topic, the master and his emissary. And the idea there is that there is a wise spiritual master who looks after a community so well that it flourishes. And after a while he realizes that he can't look after all the needs of the community.

But what's more, he realizes something even more important that he mustn't get involved with certain particular detailed matters because they will draw him away from his broad, intelligent, wise oversight. So he appoints his, you know, brightest and best second in command, a sort of aspiring bureaucrat to go about on his behalf and do the number crunching and the administration and all that, while he is able to maintain the oversight. And there's a well-known principle in psychology

called the Dunning-Krooger effect, which means that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and the less you know, the more you think you know it all. The left hemisphere is an example of the one that knows rather little but thinks it knows at all, whereas the right hemisphere knows so much that it's more aware of what it can't know.

So the idea of the story is that the emissary is vain, resents the master, thinks, what does he know, he sits back there at home, meditating peacefully while I go about doing all the hard work. I'm the one that really knows I'm the master and adopted the master's cloak, and because he didn't know what it was, he didn't know, the community fell into ruins and along with it, the master and the emissary. So that story is, if you like, my way of expressing what I think is how. happening at the present moment in the 21st century, where the hemisphere, the left hemisphere that knows and sees much less, thinks it knows everything and is telling us what the answers

to things are, while we're not listening to the right hemisphere who knows a great deal more about how things are. And I've come very belatedly to your question, why should this matter. Well, obviously it does matter if our brains are, in some sense, the scene of a battle between two entities, one of which is headstrong and taking control while it knows very little. That is important in itself. But the real crux of this is that we can now,

with the help of the research I've done, we can be fairly clear when we see the stamp of left hemisphere thinking on something. And we can be pretty clear when we see the hallmark of right hemisphere thinking. And because we know that left hemisphere thinking leads us astray far more often than right hemisphere thinking, we should have now the capacity to go, well, I think a right hemisphere point of view would be like this. And so we ought to give that more credence than the other. So historically, you know, in philosophy, people have said about various questions. Oh, well, look, at one point in history, people thought like this.

There was this school that thought like this. And then later there came to this school that thought like that, you know, shrug yourself, just take your choice. But I believe no. Now, I mean, I don't want to sound as though I'm overestimating what it is I've achieved. But I think I have given an indication of how we can resolve these dilemmas in favor of the past towards what is true. This quote I'm going to pull from as you're describing the way the left hemisphere has colonized the contemporary world. This quote from your book, The Matter with Things, at the core of the contemporary world is a reductionist view that we are, nature is.

and earth is nothing but a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly colliding in a predictable fashion whose existence is purely material and whose only value is utility. And so you examine this reductionistic notion as a disease, essentially. And so I would love for you just to unpack a bit more about the clear differences, both on the left and the right way of attending to the world. and then we can go deeper into how the contemporary world is very much so overly operating within the left hemisphere. Okay, yes, good.

Well, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, search for any kind of understanding of the world. We have to begin from the question which of these hemispheres is better able to take in information about the, the world at the lowest level. And the first part of my book, The Matter of It Things, shows that it is, in every case but one, it is the right hemisphere. So the right hemisphere attends better to the world, attends to more. It perceives better than the left hemisphere in all modalities and perceives more. It makes better judgments on the basis of what it has attended to and perceived. And it also has a greater intelligence to bring on bare on understanding that information. So it's emotional and social intelligence, that of the right hemisphere, is greater than that of the left, and the cognitive intelligence of the right hemisphere. IQ is far more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left. And indeed, in terms of creativity, the right hemisphere is better at being able to see how something would fit with something else.

So it can make sense of the world better than the left hemisphere can do. And so we've got at outset those, what I call the sort of windows on the world or the modes whereby we can get whole of information. Then we work on that to try and build up a picture. and it is the second part of the matter of things, in which I say there are probably four main paths towards truth that we would all agree on to some degree. Some would emphasize one or two more than others,

but generally everyone would probably agree that we do need science, that we do need reason, that we do also need intuition and that we do also need imagination. Now those last two have had a bit of a bad rap in the last 40, 50 years from cognitive psychologists who are sort of trained to think that only rationalistic observations can work. But in fact, we know a great deal, thanks to their efforts apart from anything else, about the great importance of intuition in coming to deeper understandings of things. following a rational course can only go along one linear track at a time. But intuition is able to draw perhaps up to 15 different things that it's aware of that it knows

unconsciously and bring them to bear on making a final decision. And imagination is, I would argue, essential to getting to understand thoroughly anything else. It's not like fantasy a way of covering it up and making it untruthful and more fun. Imagination is the deep faculty within us which is true to what is true and wishes to see into it. And for those who know, the work of particularly words with and Coleridge in English, but also of philosophers like Hegel and Schelling, the same time in Germany and Goethe will know what I mean about imagination. So those are the paths.

And when we come to finally say, okay, so what is the cosmos like? What can we say about the cosmos that is truer than the opposite? And that is the very last part. It's the second volume, but the third part of the matter with things. And in it I look at the structure of the cosmos that it is not afraid of paradox. The paradox and the so-called coincidence of opposites are essential to its understanding. The one and the many, as in other cultures, particularly Chinese and Indian culture, the one and the many are both real and both parts of the creative cosmos.

I look at flow and change, much as in the spirit of Taoism, but I believe I can see that also from a Western point of view is important, that things are not fixed but flowing, the nature of time, the nature of space and matter, of matter and consciousness, and then of value and purpose and the sense of the sacred. Now, I knew I was always going to be writing about the first of those, like, time and space and matter and consciousness. But I didn't realize when I started writing the matter of the things, which was about 10 years before I finished it, that I would absolutely crucially be needing to go to chapters on value and purpose and the sense of the sacred. And for me, these are non-negotiable elements of the cosmos that didn't arise, certainly are not painted onto it by us, but didn't arise secondarily from anything else, that they cannot in fact be secondarily derived from anything else in the same way that I believe that consciousness cannot be got out of matter if matter has nothing of consciousness in it. whatever you do. You simply will never end up doing anything to lumps of completely unconscious matter and going, heck, consciousness came out of it.

So I hold a view that is now quite remarkably mainstream in even Western philosophy now, which is that psyche is fundamental to the cosmos. I'm a pan-psychist in the sense that I believe that psyche is there at the origin. And we can come on to talk about where matter fits in later, if you like. But I would point out that it's only through psyche that we can even know anything about matter at all. That matter is something that we know through our consciousness, but consciousness is not something that derives from where is based on matter. complicatedly, they may actually be facets of the same thing,

but that's what I would eventually wish to argue. So when people imagine that the world is, they've reduced it to parts by analyzing it, and then found that there's very little in the parts, and said, oh, well, that's all there is. And I am helplessly reminded here of Monty Python, not Monty Python, of 40 Towers. And I guess 40 Towers has crossed to America pretty much, hasn't it?

And I don't know if you remember there was an episode in which the chef gets drunk, and they're having a gala night. And 40 things, what can I do? And he goes to his friend Andre, who runs a restaurant in town, and brings back with him what he believes is the duck, which is to be the centerpiece of the evening. and unfortunately, unknown to him, it was swapped in the restaurant with a blemange.

So he comes into the drawing room with his trolley with a duck and he's sharpening his life and fork and making that inimitable Doren Cleese sort of fate. And he takes off the lid and does a double take because there's not a duck there, there's a blamorge. And then he goes, he goes, ducks off. Because whatever it was, there's nothing. in it.

I sometimes apply this to the decoding of the human genome because the great shock was that there was nowhere near the amount of information by billions and billions and trillion folds that we would have needed for the genome to explain all the things that we'd laid upon it to explain. So reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it's going to make. And, you know, a simple down-to-earth example of may give one is a piece of music. So if you ask somebody who is analytically banned, you know, to work out what a piece of music is doing,

well, first of all, what is a piece of music made out of? It's made of note. Well, the first thing question then to ask is, what is a note? And a note is a sound like that. What does it mean? Nothing? Okay, well, right. Well, then the music has another of these notes.

What does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I've got Mozart's G minor quintet. It's just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing. And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye, which was the web of connections in which and only in which the thing had any meaning. Now, I believe that applies to the cosmos in general, that, in fact, I argue that everything rises from relations.

So there aren't first things which are then related, but the things don't even come into being until they are in relations with other things. That's what makes them what they are. And so I sometimes use the image of, from the Vedanta of Indra's net, and Indra is a god whose net was cast over the cosmos. And this was very special net. And every crossing point in the net was suspended a jewel, and in each jewel was seen all the other jewels in the net. Now that is a very good analogy of the way,

in which I see the coming into being of everything that we call the universe, the cosmos. It stems from relations and the bits that stand forward to us in networks or in the apparent foci of interest at crossing points. These are what we then call things, but they're secondary to the net. The net is primary. And you, and you, you, you, you can see this because, you know, what is a human person? Well, in what context is that person, a person at all? And what we've lost sight of is that people are only people in the context of a society out of which they come and which help very much to create them. Even if they reject that society, that rejection is very much part of the idea of how things are that was built

into what they learned from that society. So we are social beings. We derive. We derive from sociality and we give back to sociality and we can only be said to be what we are because of the relations in which we stand. I don't know if I answered your question, but the point I think I'm trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning and if you think of the universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you've got down to with your microscope, you can't see what it makes in aggregate. A simple analogy would be like,

what is a motorbike? Oh, I'm going to find out. There's one in the garage. I'll take it apart. Several hours later, the other person comes back and says, okay, what is it? Well, it's got two of these and three of those and something else who'll search me. I have no idea what it is.

And it doesn't mean anything because it's completely destroyed by the action of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was was to get on it. and ride it. And life is like that, that you can't stand aside from it from outside and understand it. A religious belief is like that.

You can't stand aside from it and inspect it and go, well, it doesn't add up according to where I am standing now. But it only doesn't stand up from where you're standing now because of where you're standing now. Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank with a river, with a book, saying, this is how you swim. And swearing, you're not going to get to. into the river until you've learned how to swim from the book. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the difference between reading a menu and having the meal, right?

The experience. A good one, yes. I am very fascinated at this distinction you have in this example with the Vedantic lens of Indra's net where it is like the blossoming of a flower where there's an unfolding of something that is enfolded, which I've already to speak to. And so it reframes our position in the universe when we go from this left hemispheric notion of a mechanistic universe of atoms bouncing off of each other

towards a relational universe where there is meaning tied into how things are unfolding. And I'm just curious if you want to highlight any of your thoughts there specifically on the unfolding of something that is unfolded. Yes, very much. Thank you for that. There's a marvelous saying of Goethe, dividing the united, uniting the divided is the whole work of nature, and he compares it to the cisterly and diastole, the two beats of the heart and the drawing in of breath and the exhalation of it,

that there are these two complementary processes that don't somehow negate, one another, but each require the other and couldn't be without the other. You couldn't have just the fisty and not the diastity. You couldn't just breathe in and never breathe out. And the same thing exists everywhere, that there is an enrichment in the unfolding, which is not lost when it is reintegrated. So if you take the image of a bud, the bud eventually unfolds. And what you find, the bud is beautiful, but what you find is a flower in all its complexity,

and it is beautiful in a new way. But it hasn't destroyed the bud. It's completed the potential of the bud. It has fulfilled the potential of the bud. And eventually that flower will then go back again and become a fruit. And the fruit hasn't destroyed the flower. The fruit is the fulfillment of the flower, and it is the promise of new life. So these processes are constantly cycling and involve alternating unfoldings and infoldings.

Hegel used this image also as, and I'm a great believer in, I call myself Hegelian exactly, but particularly in the Martian his emissary, I do rely on Hegel quite a bit. But I think what he saw for the first time was that things in their apparent opposites have the same nature and require one another. I had a very interesting conversation just the other day with a Chinese scholar, and she was saying, well, of course, in the West you talk about paradoxes, But we don't see any paradoxes because for us, there is nothing unruly or to be explained away in the idea that a thing and its opposite come together. I remember my own intellectual unfolding that at the time that I was reading Plato in class, an older boy introduced me to the work of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher.

in whose work a lot of apparent paradoxes are displayed or examined or just left there for your curiosity. And I began to see something there that was so important that I'd intuited and thought at last, here's somebody who's expressing it, this essential paradoxical nature of things. Actually, it's not really paradoxical for there to be aware, the needs. needs to be dry. The way up needs to be also the way down. As Niels Bohr said to be the father of quantum mechanics said, although the everyday and the small do not coincide with their opposites,

the more important something is the more it will coincide with its opposite. And so I see that. in Western terms, coincidence of opposites or in Eastern terms, the fulfillment of a non-dual, dual-nature, if you like. The magnet has a North Pole and the South Pole. These are not in opposition to one another.

They do, in fact, oppose one another if you push them together, but they are, in fact, inseparable, the one cannot be had without the other. And together they make up what it is to be a magnet. And together, the things that we think of as the big opposites go to make up something important. For example, I'm a strong belief that deaths, which people nowadays are terrified of, and start running away from as soon as they can even bring themselves to look at the concept that one day they're going to die, but they just start running away from it.

And I won't talk about it and do all kinds of self-punitive things in order to they make their lives that a little bit longer. And death is not in any way the enemy of life. Death is like the rose going through another phase. It is, again, as Gerter said, death is life's way, nature's way, of making room for more life. And I, for one, have not the slightest fear of death. I'm excited by the prospect of death,

because there are only two possible outcomes. Either there will be something, in which case I'm fascinated to know what it is, or there'll be nothing at all, in which case I won't be there to be disappointed. That's a very liberating thought, you know, that there is the excitement of the adventure and continue if it does, and if not, then you won't be there for the disappointment of it.

That's great. I think of, because you mentioned Niels Bohr, another saying of his, I believe, which I love. of is the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth. That was roughly speaking exactly what I was referring to. Yeah.

And it makes me think of how we can embrace paradox more in our life and how much we've really come to see life in such a fractured and separated sense. and it can quickly fall into the camp of demonizing the left hemisphere and saying this way of, you know, viewing the world is wrong without seeing the necessary, you know, polarity and the purpose it serves. But I am fascinated to hear your thoughts on how this way of thinking has infiltrated society largely and how it will attract positions of leadership and authority that are in congruence with its perspective on life. the left hemisphere, and how that begets more of its own way of thinking. Going back to a question that you asked me right at the beginning, why is any of this important?

One way is to talk in terms of social and cultural history. And I believe that each hemisphere's experiential world has a different quality, simply because of the nature of the attention it pays to the world. And these go together to compose the way we think about the world, but they can become very unbalanced. And in particular, they can become unbalanced and tend always to become unbalanced towards the direction of the left hemisphere, the one that is less intelligent,

less attentive, less perceptive, more liable to delusion. That is kind of important. So in the second half of the master and his emissary, as you know, I effectively look at the history of the West from the ancient Greeks through to postmodernism, looking at the main shifts in the history of ideas and show that there are oscillations,

periods when the two hemispheres are working in a kind of harmony. That doesn't mean they're of equal value, It means that the left hemisphere is acting as the proper servant or emissary of the right hemisphere. And when it does, we have wonderful periods of flourishing, as we did in the 6th century BC in Athens, as we did again around the dot in Rome, and as we did at the beginning of the Renaissance in Western Europe. And in those periods, you can see everything taking a step forward, a highly imaginative, creative society that was evolving new systems of thought, making steps forward in science, in astronomy,

in map making, but also in drama, in poetry, in music, in painting, in architecture. All these things were flourishing. And then inevitably, they become more crude, more gross, more vulgar, and eventually collapse. and as they do so, they drift more and more into the left hemisphere's mode of being. Now, I believe we are in that stretch. We have been for arguably a few hundred years, but certainly since the Enlightenment, really, in a period when, though the Enlightenment was a marvellous movement, and if I'd been there at the time, I'd have been a great supporter of it,

I think it's also a hubristic movement that overestimated what it could do and what its importance was. and we're reaping the benefits now. They are that we believe we can find all the answers to everything by simply doing more experiments. Roughly speaking. So what are the differences between these two worlds like? I think that would be worth saying. Well, firstly, the left hemisphere's world,

because it's focused on one thing that it knows and it wants to get it quickly, the left hemisphere is the quick and dirty one, not the right hemisphere. is as Ramachandran says, the devil's advocate. It's always going, yeah, but it might be something different.

But the left hemisphere is in a great hurry. It wants to get it so that he can eat it, grab it and have it. So it's not particularly interested. It might get it wrong sometimes, but who cares. So that's the left hemisphere. It's made up of little things

that it knows what they are, that are separate, non-individual. I mean, it doesn't matter which rabbit it is or whether the rabbit has a family. It's a rabbit. I want to eat it. It doesn't understand anything that is not explicit.

It understands the brute fact of the something there that it can grab, pick up and take. In doing so, it's taking the individual embodied being and making it an abstract representative of a category. It's a rabbit, it's a twig, it's a whatever it is. It is also distancing itself from whatever that is in the sense that it is the manipulator of it. It's not interested in a relationship with it, it's interested in just getting it. And this kind of world builds up a picture which is literally inanimate. So people who have right hemisphere damage often talk about living creatures, including other living people, as say automata or zombies.

They begin to see themselves as possibly like that or describe themselves as having the qualities of a piece of furniture. So the animacy has been lost. But so has everything else that makes things important. And these are the things the right hemisphere sees. It doesn't see anything as ultimately entirely isolated or entirely fixed. It sees things there's always changing into weaving themselves with other things, having meaning which goes beyond the explicit. In fact, sometimes what is not said is as important.

as what is said. It understands poetry and jokes, both of which depend on not explaining what's going on. When you explain a joke, you kill it. When you explain a poem and reduce it to a few banal sentences about how painful it is when somebody who loves dies. You've destroyed the poem. The poem was also unique and it just becomes another example of something in the left hemisphere. the poem was embodied. It didn't just affect your intellect, but in reading it, it had effects on your embodied being, on your blood pressure, on your heart rate.

It can have effects on your, on the, make your hair stand on end, or bring tears to your eyes, or make you sweat, or whatever. So all the right hemisphere is is embodied, physical, complex, interconnected, never exactly pinnable down. and ever more evolving into being. Whereas the left hemisphere is these things where all that is finished and dead.

It is cut up into bits, and the bits are recognised and added up, and the more of them there are, the better. Never mind about quality, we're interested in quantity. And you can imagine that what this results is two kinds of a world. One is like the real living, unpredictable world that you actually encounter from second to second.

And the other is like a real, reproduction like a map or a film or whatever where everything is already in place and is just a representation of what was originally a living thing and present. Because after all, representation means being present again when you are no longer present. So the left hemisphere's world is this non-world and the right hemisphere's world is this vivid living world. And what I think has happened in our time is that we have come so much to be. believe in our helpful map, the schema, the diagram that enabled us to exploit, that we think that's all that there is. And it's like somebody who tries to live in the map instead of living

in the world, it is mapped. This has a lot of damaging consequences. It means that everything has to be, if you like, converted into a web of algorithms, procedures, and rules. So what used to be intuitive responses, commonsensical responses to two human situations between them is no one in which whatever you're doing, the other person is, I'm sorry, the system won't let me do that. No, the computer says no and all this. So they are only stuck in what the system allows, which is almost never a reflection of what real life is, because real life doesn't fit into those categories. So I think that happens, and leaders think that, you see, the power, let me talk a bit about

values. The one single value of the left hemisphere is power, the power to control. And this is what, going back to the evolution, of the two hemisphere system suggests, is that the left hemisphere is the grabber. It's the one that gets stuck. And so it's really only interested in having control of things. If you haven't got control of things, it's anxious.

So if the left hemisphere begins to take over, we're anxious about everything that doesn't seem to be already under control. So the natural world is intrinsically a sort of danger. It must be administrated, brought under departments, have people who go out in little uniforms and create paths and destroy the natural nature of it. There will be a hatred of the human body and attack on it because it has all kinds of unpredictable qualities. It can get ill. It can fall in love and then what on earth will happen then? And it might get ill and die. And so we resist

this thing that is the only way through which we can experience life. We see it as whatever is over and against our will. And so the left hemisphere's field is one of will. If I can just create enough departments and enough special interest groups who will investigate and evaluate, we'll get there. But of course, that process in itself uses colossal energy distracts one from everything that really is important and becomes a tyranny in itself.

There's a wonderful book, by the way, called The Tyranny of Metrics. And it's by Jerry. Can't remember his surname now. But anyway, look up the tyranny of metrics, all those who are listening or whatever. But he explains in ways that just make it clear what we all sense about the ridiculous way in which our lives are overlaid with more and more and more rules.

So much so that actually just trying to answer the questions and follow the rules and tick the boxes can take up half of one's life. And time is important. Time is life. When your time is taken away, your life is drained away from you. That's part of the well-written now. then I think that managers, instead of allowing as lighter hand on the tiller as possible, so that people are free to use their initiative, their intuitions, their insight, want to micro-control things.

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Link in description, as always. It looks like this. Try it out. See how you feel. Back to the show. This is very much so what you're getting at when you say that we nowadays, no longer live in the presence of the world,

but through our representations of it. And there's something so devastating about that understanding, because to not be in true intimacy with the gift of a human life is, yeah, it's devastating. And so I'm just curious for you to share your thoughts on that because we have become societally,

it's become so normalized to live, live life through our models of reality instead of intimate with reality itself. It's very true. And going back to what I was saying about the point in the source of constantly trying to extend your life, it seems like the less your life means, the more you want to extend it. And in other words, you're looking for quantity, which is the left hemisphere's idea, not quality of life, which it would be the right hemisphere. So what are you getting out of this life?

What are you experiencing in this life? What are you contributing to this life? And so it's about all the things the left hemisphere would want you not to do. The number one thing is to slow down. Everything in our life now tells us to speed up, to try and do things faster and faster and faster and faster. And in doing so, you can't really appreciate anything because it takes time. and you can't certainly appreciate the subtle unspoken, the intuitional and the in between the lines sort of elements in life, which need to be savored. And to take pleasure in the moment, which actually is something we need to practice, it doesn't come naturally to us anymore because we've been subjected to a culture which focuses us on surfaces, on the superficial,

on the maps, on the diagrams, on the boxes we need to take, anything to get us not to be looking at the actual world, which is still amazingly unfolding in front of us, and to recapture the awe of that. I think once you recapture and feel again the awe-inspiring nature of existence, then you're getting close to living again. And I think there are a couple of other things I say are important, One is a kind of humility, which is unusual in the modern world, because we are so hubristic.

We're guided by these practices of total control of being able to achieve so much. Just wait in 10 years' time. We've mucked everything up, but you wait. We'll have even more power to muck it up in 10 years' time. We don't need more power of it. over the world because we're exempting, sorry, exerting that power and damaging ways, what we need is greater wisdom. And wisdom begins in humility, which is the awareness of just how little you do really

understand. That doesn't mean to say you have to accept to be stupid. In fact, it's a sign of astuteness to be modest about what you know. the person who is, believes they've got the answers to everything, is by definition a fool. I would say there's ignorance comes before knowing, but there's unknowing that comes after knowing. And it's that unknowing, that one is aiming for much as, you know, Christ said, except you become as little lambs, you know, which is, of course, how should we do that? that his life was said.

But what he meant was, there is, there are two times of innocence, the innocence of a child before the child becomes experienced. But there is a much more robust innocence, if you like, of the saintly person who has achieved an innocence the hard way through having had experience. So these things, the spiritual gifts at the end,

at the end, they sound curiously like what we thought we were leaving behind, but they're in a new light, a new coming into being. I loved all of that so much, man. I resonate so deeply in the way that you described and the notions of which we can attend to life. And it is inspiring to know that we can experience more of that way of life through the way that we choose to use our attention and attend to things. And I'm curious to hear you explain how the way that we attend to life and our relationships

and circumstances in life changes very much so what we find there. Yes. Yes, and I make a slightly stronger claim, but I do make that claim. So what I would say is that depending on how we attend to things, we find. different things there in the world to attend to. And because of the way we have attended and it's brought forth whatever it is it has, we think, oh, will that work, let's pay more of that attention.

So if, for example, you're using a kind of detached, manipulative attention to people, you will see them as mechanisms that can be overcome, and directed by you. But if you see other people as objects of compassion and of love and capable of all the same kinds of things to give in life as yourself, then you will get a different experience from being around people. And to make it simple, I talk about the mountain behind my house, you know, the mountain behind my house is it's got a sloping outline which can be seen from the sea.

And it gives the name Taliska to the place where I live, because Talasca and apparently in Norse meant the sloping rock. And so what that tells you is what it was that mountain to the Vikings who came down that coast of Scotland in the year a thousand. It was a landmark which told them the difference between danger and safety because it signified a bay that was famous for its rocks and its capacity for shipwreck. But it was also the home of the gods for the Celts, sorry, the Picts, in fact, who lived in the shadow of it a thousand years before that, as we know from what they have left behind of their dwellings and their artifacts.

In the 18th century, people started to go there to paint it, and for them it was a multicolored form of different textures that was very beautiful to draw. In the 19th century, people got very interested in geology, and it happens to be an outstanding example of Columna-Bassault formation. So people went there for that, and they still go there with their bright yellow hats wandering around with their hammers. And because it's basalt to an, what shall I say, to an exploiter, it would be dollars. But to a physicist, it's 99.99-9-9 empty space and the other 0.01% percent,

We don't really know what it is. Now, these are each descriptions of the mountain, but which is the mountain? And the answer is, in my view, none of them is the mountain, because the mountain can be all kinds of things depending on how you attend to it. And if you attend with a certain goal, you see one thing.

If you attend with another goal, you see something else. So, you know, the same thing's true of a human body. There are different ways that we attend with. the doctor, the pathologist on the slab when he's dissecting a corpse, your lover, an art, an artistic model, all these bodies are all human bodies, but they require a different attention. How does the quality of the attention you pay change, not just what you find, but also you, the attender?

Oh, which is you? Absolutely. because you become, I mean, suppose you think, well, humans are just machines, and you attend to the extraordinarily complex organismic nature of the human body in a mechanistic way, you will certainly find small areas where there appear to be quite clear linear mechanisms where A affects B, affects C. In fact, if you look a bit broader, using the right hemisphere, you see that actually these systems are not one-to-one analytic linear,

but are in fact massively complex systems in which 10,000 things are happening in a cell per second and they're all interreacting with one another in ways that you simply can't map and are not just beyond our power to predict, but are intrinsically unpredictable. So on the one hand, you've got this vision. It's all predictable and mechanical.

and the other you've got no, it's infinitely complex. It has recursive loops in it, and it can't really be predicted. Now, if you are interested in having noticed a mechanism and you're able to intervene in it, you feel very clever. I think, oh, I've done something useful, I intervened in the mechanism, so on. So I think the whole thing is just a mechanism, and you just carry on paying that attention for the rest of your life, and you never see anything else.

So I think it does affect you, but I'd also go further and say that, way that we attend to things affects the world at large because none of us again is isolated. So if it grows up a culture, you may be inclined to see the world in all kinds of interesting, virtuous, revealing, creative ways. But if your culture nonetheless, all around you is saying this landscape is whatever it is, it's for extractive purposes, it can be covered in, all kinds of roads and bits of metal and so on and it'll still be what it is, then as far as the culture it's concerned, that is what it has become.

It becomes harder and harder for people to see it in any other light and to argue back against it. Two examples come to mind for me. One is a long report, 400-page report, on the impact of a certain development on an area of outstanding, natural beauty, which would effectively destroy its outstanding natural beauty. And the report mentions, you know, how money could be raised for the project, how interest could be earned on the project, how jobs could be provided during the construction of the project, the impact on the local community that might be beneficial or not, and so on. but nowhere did they mention the above all important thing

that one of the last really beautiful wild places in that part of Britain was going to be completely destroyed. And at the end they say, but we can't evaluate that so we're not saying anything about it. We can't put any numbers on it, and so it doesn't exist. The tyranny of metrics. And an even more extraordinary one is the report of UNESCO on the effectiveness of a campaign to wipe out on co-psychosis in children in very poor parts of Africa. it being a protozoan that can cause blindness.

And by washing in certain river water, you can become blind from this creature. And at the end, it said various things about the impact on the local economy, which could be measured. And it said, of course, a lot of people have been saved from blindness, but we're not going to talk about that because there's no figures we can put on it. So it is almost as, I mean, one can smile, but it is beyond belief, absurd, that that is how we now

think. So much in terms of the scheme of money and jobs and so on, and so little of beauty and goodness and truth, all of which seem to me to indicate that oncoseciasis and, and the beauty of a landscape are important. Have you ever gone people watching? Have you just gone, have you ever sat somewhere and watched people go about their life? Quite a lot, yes. I'm curious because in the deeper studying of the contemplative practices, you have the ability to train your faculty of attention

and the kind of quality of attention you pay. Many different practices, one could be staring at a candle, and being able to, which seems like an impossible task at first, maintain 20 seconds of concentration, let alone 10 seconds, without distracted thought. And it can be a cultivated practice to where the penetrative nature of your attention and awareness can glean you insights about that to which you're paying attention to.

And that can be taken from a candle flame to all of life around us, especially other people. And it's fascinating to the degree, in which we pay attention, what comes to mind, what comes into our awareness when we pay attention in a certain way, where you might just see people walking about in their daily life and their hustle, bustle, and struggles to the deeper things that you can attend to and pay attention, become aware of within their experience, their emotional landscape, things that you become much more sensitive and receptive to, that you just weren't previously aware of. And I find that

fascinating because in many ways I've seen attention as our spiritual currency, if you will. That's why we pay it. We pay attention. And it's what we do with our life in any given moment. And so I just find it so important to focus on this a bit more because attention is an area of life and an aspect of being human that is the faculty in which we engage. with and derive meaning through life. And I'm just curious if anything comes to mind as, yeah,

how you pay attention changes what you become aware of and therefore can also change how you interact with and steward life around you in a sense. It is a sense in which attention, well, I say it is a moral act because it has moral consequences in how much or what you see in a person. And it's been compared to love

by two French philosophers Simon Veix and Louis Label that attention is the pure attention that you pay to another is a kind of love that you give that person. And in it that other person can become, more reveal, they can become more themselves. And I think there are people also who have practiced very much what you describe, which, alas, I haven't over a long period,

and who are therefore able to see things in people very clearly and rather alarmingly, But they can detect what is going on for a certain person very well. It's a kind of psychic phenomenon, I suppose, and I don't claim to have it. But I do know people who can exercise it and see their way into the nature of things. This was, in a way, what the poet Wordsworth did and often describes that he was, much mocked for paying attention to, you know, very simple, ordinary things to a small tree,

not the big ones, or a lump of rock in the middle of mountains, but of focusing on these things for a while as well as, of course, all the rest of it, and seeing into them. So one of the things I think is that we may feel that it's important. important to get to know a realm that is conceived of as beyond the one we inhabit. And that may well be real. I believe it is real. But I think the mistake is to think that we would get to find it by turning our backs on the realm that we find ourselves in.

Instead, I think one sees deeply through the realm that one is in. So we don't find the infinite by turning our backs on the finite, but by looking more deeply into the finite. And we in other words treat the world as having what I call translucency. And it's not quite the same as transparency, at least not in the way I use it. So transparency would just be that I was able to see through a landscape or see through, you and see something else beyond. But very importantly, I also see you and the landscape as well as what is beyond. And it's rather like looking at a painting and your eye can stop on the surface of the painting

or it can go through the painting, not in such a way that you don't see the painting. In fact, you see the painting more really than ever, but you are thereby granted access to something that in one sense lies through and beyond that painting. Does that make any sense? Yeah. Yeah, it makes me think of how, why is there a felt experience that music and poetry seem to get us at

what something truly is in its essence other than prose or typical language? Right, yes. And it also just, yeah, it makes me think of the ability to pay attention and become aware of the context in which something arises, what makes this room useful is really the empty space in between all of the things, right?

Yes, yeah. And so it's like the awareness of the nuances, the space for the silence in between the notes of a song that make it what it is. Yes. Yes, I wrote a book back in my 20s, called Against Criticism, which was my way of dealing with the problems

I'd encounter in teaching literary criticism, partly because of the way in which we took this unique artifact from the past that somebody had left for us because they believed it communicated somebody. And it was unique, it was embodied, it was implicit, And we took it out of its embodiedness, made its implicit quality explicit, and destroyed its uniqueness. And we worked in the exact opposite direction in which the work of art was supposedly taking us. And at the end of that book, I have a chapter called Speaking Silence, which is about the fact that often the words we use when faced with something spiritual.

profoundly get between us and our understanding of it and that it's the silence in encountering it not an not a pure absence and much as the the whole idea of emptiness as it's translated is that Shun Yata I think is translated from Sanskrit is is not emptiness as commonly understood in the West now as something entirely negative, but the fruitful space within that is like the womb, a place whose emptiness makes possible the forthcoming of an endless potential. So it is a richness that is in that silence. And the silence is not saying nothing. The silence is where you can, if you are pretend to pick up important things.

So you must have this attentive posture, which George Steiner talks about in one of his essays on for Angelico's paintings of the Annunciation, to where the angel comes to Mary, says you will bear a child and so forth. And he describes this inclination of her head in which she is listening. And it's an open or active passivity.

She's not actively going towards something or grasping something, but she is remaining receptive, but actively receptive. And it's that active receptive. that I think that we need to, and I try to when I can, to cultivate so that I am listening, but I'm not talking into that space, but I'm listening for things. And if one does listen, things come, not complete. I mean, they may do to some people. People say they hear a voice, and that's wonderful, and God speaks to them, and so on.

This doesn't happen to me. But I do know that creative things can have this quality so that there is something there that has a shape to begin with, has certain qualities, and by rushing in you will destroy it and saying you've got it before you really have. But a sort of subtle diplomatic being aware, being available, but not trying to grasp it too quickly. allows it to come into being. There's sort of dialogue between the left hemisphere saying, oh, I got it and the right hemisphere saying, hang on you've been a, I don't think you have got it. Stay, listen, and then allowing it to come.

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Hope you enjoy. Back to the show. What would you say is then the sacred? And we've been alluding to throughout this conversation, the various barriers to a felt experience of the sacred in our day-to-day life. But I'm curious how you define, which I understand is inherently paradoxical in doing so, the sacred. Yes.

And then, yeah, then I'll go from there. Well, as you would imagine, it's very difficult to say. As a result, writing the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, which is the last substantive chapter of the matter with things, took me longer than any other piece of its length that I've ever written. It is 111 pages long, so it's kind of a short book. But the reason that it was so difficult and it took me time is because I had to both say and unsay

because I didn't want people to run away with clear ideas of what it was, I'd said, and substitute those for what I was trying to get them to understand. and I was gesturing towards and trying to help come into being in however little a way. So it was much easier to say what it's not, because I think a lot of things are mistaken for the sacred. And indeed in religions, I think there can be both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere playing their roles in ways that are quite typical. So there are religions, and most religions have branches in which

a great deal is set on a written text, which is infallible, because it's written by God, and the truth is all 100% clear because it's written down there, and that's it. Now, that is a left hemisphere fantasy, which makes it feel very, very safe and comfortable, and because it's constantly longing for certainty and safety,

then that's a very prominent part. It also answers all the questions that are so different, by saying, I'm right, you're wrong. If you believe anything else, you're damned, and all that kind of things. We get this growing in religions. It's a kind of anti-religion that takes over religions historically at various parts. But in those religions, there are also traditions that respect very much that which cannot be pinned down in language,

that the important things about the divine are what cannot be set. So, for example, at the beginning of the Tao de Jing, the great text of Taoism, it says the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao. And you might think, well, that's just Chinese. But, no, St. Augustine, pretty heavy, heavy-duty priest, saint of the Christian church, said, see comprehends no nests a Deus if you have understood it's not God you understand in other words he's saying from the outset you will never understand God God defies all understanding but doesn't mean by that that defies all all approach

if you try to grasp is what he's saying with the left hemisphere I grasped it the right hand I've grasped it. The left hemisphere controls grasping. Then you will never succeed. But if you are open to something that will come to you out of its own goodness, out of its own charity, then you may receive it. I begin the chapter in question with a quote from

the anonymous writer of the cloud of unknowing. and I can't now think what it is exactly, but it's by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never. And so, paradoxically, an awful lot of the history of religions do contain a great deal of thinking. And I'm not against that, actually.

I think that as long as the thinking doesn't think it's finally pinned things down, it can be useful. It can help clear, away areas where it's not important. But what that sacred is, is something that I think, let's put it this way, that we all, unless we've deliberately tried to, you know, say, oh, it's rubbish or it's nonsense, it doesn't mean anything.

We've probably all got some sense of what is meant by the sacred. They may have experiences that seem to them sacred. They may or may not be related to a holy place or to a church. church, but they may nonetheless have that quality of sacredness. They may be of the natural world. They may be of an encounter with another person. They may be through art, through particularly for me, music. I think there's music that is very beautiful, of course, and very intellectually satisfying.

But there is also music that really asks to be called sacred. and I wouldn't apply it to other music that I find equally beautiful. I would say it's wonderful. There are songs by Schubert and Schumann, which are exceptionally beautiful and moving. I wouldn't call them sacred in the normal sense. But there is a lot of music, particularly welling out of the whole of the 16th century in Europe,

that I would call, you know, just quintessential. sacred. A lot of it was set for sacred purposes, but when you hear it, when you encounter it, it raises feelings in you, which are not just feelings, not just thoughts, but are something that involves your emotional and intellectual being, but also your soul. You are called to by something that carries conviction. And indeed, I come from a family that had no religious convictions and I didn't get taken to church or anything like that. But in my teens, I was lucky enough to encounter, this particularly this extraordinary stream of unbelievably moving and beautiful church music and music from other non-European traditions that were sacred. And the architecture and the art and the poetry of both poets and many books of the biots.

and I thought there's something here. You know, I wasn't brought up to this. At the time I was mainly studying science, but I thought, I know it's not good enough to pass this by. It's calling to me. And I decided I was going to become a monk, actually. I was going to go to Oxford

and preferably do philosophy and theology and then probably go into an enclosed order, or maybe, or maybe get ordained and part the streets of Manchester. I don't know. But in any case, this didn't happen. But all my life, these things have been with me, so vivid. And I can't say what it is.

I've certainly experienced it in the astonishing beauty of lonely and beautiful landscapes. And you find this in all cultures, that there's a fifth century, monk who lived in a desert waste and who describes the beauty of it as speciosis, which means us all having a charming beauty. So it's a strange thing. I'm not sure I can really do more than say if people are interested, try reading my best shot at explaining what I'm talking about.

You won't be encouraged by my ramblings now, but I have tried to explain what it is and what it isn't. And I thought it was the most important thing that I could give to people. And interestingly, since writing that, I have had many, many, many, many, many, many, many. Communications from people, it has been a fantastic gift that they have, writing to me saying how much my work has meant to them. But in particular, people who say I never understood what people meant by a religion or the talk of spirituality.

But after reading this, I think I understand. People saying, I lost my religious faith, but in reading this, I have come back to it. Monks and priests, Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, have written to me and said, what you have said is so important. important to in our tradition and rings many bells me.

And the most touching thing for me was that the man who was the person who prepared me for confirmation classes, which meant that you were prepared to be confirmed into the church as an adult and received communion and so forth. And I wasn't too sure about it all, but I was interested enough to go along with it. And I did. but anyway he read he must he was been he died last year and he was 95

and he wrote to me therefore in his early 90s and he sent such a moving thing he said you know what you've been able to say here is what I have struggled all my life to say I mean can you imagine what that made me feel and he sent some wonderful poems actually Blakeian poems which anyway so I was able to write back and say

That is very touching and beautiful. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what society would look like if education from young age culturally was more right brain-centric. Well, in terms of what we can do to help the chances of this civilization surviving, education has got through one of the key elements in it. I think education has got worse during the last 40, 50 years. I haven't been involved in it except at the level of teaching younger doctors and things like that. So my experience of certainly school teaching is from my young days when it was exceptionally

good. And I'm going therefore mainly on what I hear reported, but I feel that it's like everything. It's become over-administrated, over-evaluated at all levels, constant checking and ticking and and so on. And what this tends to encourage is that the idea of an education is putting information into children. It couldn't be further from that. It's about not putting in things at all, certainly not putting in information. I mean, that may happen. I mean, that may be a byproduct of education, and it's an important one. Somebody who left school with no information would obviously be in a rather poor way. I understand that. But it could. can't remotely constitute in itself an education.

An education is about drawing something out, not putting something in. It's about drawing out something that is already latent, innate in the person that is being educated. And that is done by, as always, a mixture between, or should I say, steering a very important path between two opposite problems. One is the problem of too much structure, too much emphasis on the quote, right answer,

and too much regulation and not enough independence for the child. but equally avoiding the opposite one in which they just please themselves, anything goes, let it all hang out. Neither of these is a sensible or indeed a decent or compassionate way to treat a living being. One is just abandoning them and the other is destroying them by over-regulation. So what I believe should happen is that there should be, first of all, I think that teachers should be more independent from government edict. And when I was growing up, our own school system in England was contrasted, of course,

favorably by us with the system in France, where on the morning of the 3rd of March, 1962, every child in France would be on the same page of the same book. And this was said to be a reflection of the dirgist character of French culture, whereas there was much more freedom to what we did. So I think having that freedom is good, and trusting teachers is good. And I would say get the best teachers you can. There's no other criteria than how good they seem to be when you interview them and so on. That is why you employ them.

Give them a good deal of leeway and keep an eye on what their pupils are turning out like. And if there's a problem, you should be allowed to sack them without too much trouble. at the moment, once you get to be whatever it is, it's almost impossible to sack you however bad you are. And I understand that's protective for the teacher. But it was also stultifying for everybody if you're saddled with somebody who's doing a very bad job and they can't be got rid of.

So, I mean, really, that's only a passing note. But what I'm trying to say is it's probably the necessary safeguard if you're going to give them a great deal of independence. So I would gather a group of teachers who are different from one another, phenomenal, excited by what they were teaching, and allow them to go ahead. And yes, you would test them and so on and children and see how they're getting on. And unless there's any particular problem, and that's a really well-running school. But what I understand is that it's all about, no, they must know this particular thing and they must There were 12 things you must say about Jane Austen,

or if Jane Austen's even allowed in the curriculum anymore nowadays, it's all very sad. People are being dragged away from the history of their own culture, without which they can't really understand what they're looking at in the culture around them. As Neil Postman, who I'm very late in the day, I'm reading his book, Technopoly, about what's happened to our culture. And really, he's saying things that I've been saying for a very long time, but he did say them before me.

Unless we have a grounding in our own culture and its history, and unless we understand the works of literature like Shakespeare and poetry and drama, unless we understand and music becomes part of our education, acting is part of our education, it's not an education. And another part of it should be free thinking. So at my school, I was taught, okay, come on, tell us something you really are very important,

you think is very important in your questions about it. So I would talk about it for five minutes. And then they say, yep, that's fine. Now, imagine you're somebody who has exactly the opposite belief. Now argue their point of view for five minutes, and we'll score you on how good you are at that. Now, if more of children couldn't leave school without doing that, there'd be less of the simplistic, this view is right, that view is wrong, rather than saying that most views can be taken to extremes in which they become wrong, but there is common ground between many sensible wise thinkers.

So we need to get away from, you see, the left hemisphere is black and white in its thinking. It's either this or it's that. It has no time for subtlety, for nuance, for a bit of this and a bit of that, for the coming together of opposites. It thinks, no, it's this. And if so much of this was good, then more and more and more of it would be better. So a right hemispheres educational system would produce people who were, first of all, yes, capable of doing the so-called STEM subjects, that is important. But they're not in themselves an education.

They do need the humanities because guess what? They're going to be human beings, we hope, and live their lives among human beings and the keys in the word. So do a bit of that as well, rather a lot of that. yes, do creative work, yes, learn to think flexibly, and learn how to mediate between people and listen to them. So it wouldn't take very long. It needn't be a big part of education, but it could be a week, you know, in perhaps one of the later years at school,

in which you all spent time learning how to mediate between two groups of people with completely opposing ideas. If people were chained in that, gosh, that would create a happier society. And the other one that I think of but isn't familiar to most people unless they've been through it themselves is really a form of couples therapy. And it's applicable across the board, not just the couples. So in couples therapy, there are two people who want to either part on better terms or get their life together back on track. And to do that, they need to understand what the other person, wants and

sees and hopesful. So you have the two people and you ask one of them to talk about what they conceive as being the main problem that they're facing. And then they'll say something and the other person will say oh but that's always when you

and they say no no hang on you'll have your chance in a minute but we want to hear more from this person and so that person has their say and then the first thing that happens is you turn to the other person and say, what did you just hear said? And it's incredibly revealing

because they say what they thought they heard said. And the other person says, that's fantastic because I never meant that at all. I meant this. And then the other person gets, oh, well, that's useful to know. You know, so much misunderstanding happens because people get into shouting matches in which they never hear anything

that doesn't confirm what it is that's already going around in their heads. So that's what I'd say on that one. Yeah, it seems like if education was truly the way it was, the word was designed at Dukau, I believe, Greek or Latin origins to evoke from within.

Not to stuff things down, not just what to think. It's Latin meaning to draw something out or lead something force, yeah. So not just what to think, but how to think, when to think, why to think. And it

kind of broadens the conversation. So what you mentioned earlier around the four different ways of knowing of science and reason, of course, important, empirical ways of examining reality and yet the underutilized faculties of intuition and imagination.

And I would just love for you to spend some time, if you will, sharing your thoughts on what these modalities of of ways of knowing, provide that the others don't, the importance of them, and yeah, the thoughts you have around the importance and power of intuition and imagination. Well, about intuition, I think the first point I'd make

is that people like Dan Kahneman, whose work I respect, can develop very closely, clever scenarios which are set in such a way that you may well make a mistake if you answer them intuitively. And so then people do and they, and then Kahneman, I'm not using, but you know, people like them, clever cognitive scientists come along and say, ah, but you're mistaken you see because, and then you feel a bit of a fool. But the way I look at that is that the reason that you can be caught out is that 99.9% of the time, you're interested in doing a very good job for you.

And it is always possible to set up a special set of circumstances so designed to lead you into making the wrong choice. That doesn't show that it's a generally fallacious procedure. and the analogy I use is that of optical illusions. There is one optical illusion that is so staggering that it is impossible to believe when you look at it. The so-called checkerboard illusion, I don't know if you know it, but I include it in my book because it is so amazing.

And two squares that look, obviously different shades, are in fact exactly the same shade. But I've never known anyone who, after seeing this and having had it pointed out to them that they got it wrong, said, well, that does it for me. I'm never going to use my eyes again. Because, of course, almost all the time, your eyes are doing a very, very good job. So I work through a whole areas in which our intuitions are good. and they of course one thing that happens now and is entirely understandable is people worry about prejudice

and I make a distinction between prejudice which is inevitable and bias which is swinging your judgment in an unfair way and so prejudices there's been a lot of work on prejudices And you won't like this, but you can go back to the science. Prejudice are extraordinarily robust. Most prejudices are common across peoples around the world and are generally borne out by the data that we have that is objective. bias is the use of that information in a way that is damaging and unfair to an individual. And the really good news about that is that it is also one of the most robust findings in social psychology that faced with, say, a person who belongs to a group against

whom you have a prejudice. You are enormously skilled at setting that prejudice aside if the evidence is this person is not like that prejudice would suggest. So that's the deal with a really thorny run and no doubt people will argue all kinds of ways

but I have treated it as fairly as I can with the information And it is really a case that while you can't do away with prejudices, people are extraordinarily good on the whole at doing away with them. And whether you're good at or not in disregarding a prejudice when making a decision has nothing to do with your educational level. So scientists and highly educated people are. are just as biased as less educated people.

Their bias is just maybe different, but they have them. And so the concept of prejudice and bias is an interesting area. For example, nobody who's intelligent can avoid having prejudices. If you are walking down a street at night and you see a good, gang of loud, leather-jacketed men swinging bicycle chains and shouting.

Your prejudice that these people are quite likely to attack you is perfectly correct. And you see them as more dangerous than a group of ballerinas walking down the street. I mean, they might suddenly turn on you, but it's much less likely. So in general, our prejudices are the absolutely inevitable consequence of leading a life and not blindfolding yourself for what you know. It's what you do with that information and whether you use it in bias, in judgment, and so on. And this also is importantly not either a left or right thing, so there are people who are biased on both ends who make judgments about people on the basis

that they belong to a certain group and they don't wait to see whether they're actually more reasonable than they would have anticipated or whatever else it is. So that's not the most important and likable thing. I just need to deal with it because, of course, everyone will say,

but intuitions are subject to prejudice. But one of the things about intuitions is that they are capable of gathering together as many as 12 to 15 strands of thought. and for this reason there was a jurist, a legal expert, who is the head of one of the German Max Planck Institutes whose advice to business leaders is to allow their people to use their intuitions as much as possible.

And you may or may not know this, but most important steps forward in science and in mathematics, were not made by endless scribbling, but by a moment of insight. And I know of about 40 of these and quote many of them in the book. And George Gaylord Simpson,

who was the leading light in the establishment of the mainstream way in which science now looks at evolutionary biology himself said that most scientists don't produce their results as a result of the scientific method. You know, we're taught at school you do this, you do that, and a certain amount of that obviously comes into it

and perhaps many years of slogging goes into it. But you don't actually reach your answer that way. You reach your answer through intuition. And if you rule intuition out, you will never be an imaginative, creative or interesting scientists. That's science and maths. Never mind art and poetry and music and so on, where, again, whatever it seems to come to us, not through a conscious level of

an effort, indeed, stops one from it happening. So one has to stop the effort and allow the thing to speak to you. And again, I have descriptions from poets, from novelists, from composers, and so forth. So intuition is a very fine and a very accurate thing. accurate, can that possibly be right? Yes. Because take a couple of examples. Race horses are all very fast, and when they're racing, they normally are able to win, the winner will win by sometimes a fraction of a second.

And I have the accounts of a man who contacted me after reading the master in his industry and said, you know, I'm a fairly left-hand. I was a type of guy. I grew up in, and was, I think you grew up in France, but he worked in America where he got a doctorate in horse equine physiology, and he developed a hundred and twenty point score for how to estimate the potential speed of a particular horse. And then he went to France and bred horses and so on.

And he now makes his living in England by being a tipster. He goes to the course before a great race, and he says, for at maximum five minutes, I see the horses being led around the ring or being slowly walked by their jockeys around the ring. And on the basis of that, I have to make a decision as to which horse is going to ring, win. And he found that to begin with,

his left hemisphere kept getting in the way. So he'd make a judgment, and then he'd go, but I've put high odds on that one winning. But why? No, it'll be the other one. And so he'd put the other one and send that in. And of course, the first horse that he shied off, one.

And this happened so often that the people that he was advising, the betting people in the betting office said, for heaven's sake, don't write it down and then change your mind, just put it straight into your phone and send it. And as long as he just did that, he won most of the time and became one of the most successful, you know, with a six-figure income out of just this guessing. But how can I guess this?

How can I guess this, that this particular horse can be perhaps a tenth of a second faster than the other one? And another thing he found was that when he went to the grace course, if he took his son with him and his son knew a lot about it and was interested in it and wanted to follow his dad, he would explain to his son why it was he made a decision. And as soon as he'd done that, it was no good anymore. So eventually they said to him, please don't take your son.

And the other thing he discovered was that if you had a short nap before meeting the horses, He would go along and he'd stay in the car, he'd have a 10 minute nap, he'd then go and do this. As long as he followed this, his instinct, his intuitive sense gave him a huge advantage. And another thing from sport that I examined was the man who is the physician to the TT races in the Isle of Man wrote to me. Now the TT races in the Isle of Man has been described as the most dangerous. sport in the world in which the Isle of Man is a rocky island off Britain.

And it runs an annual race around the island, not on a race course, but on the roads that go up over mountains and so forth. And while they're running these courses, there's no other traffic on the road. So that's it. But there are potholes. There are tight bends. there are all kinds of things you wouldn't encounter on a smooth race course. And he looked after these people and he was fascinated

because there's a big place where they would pass a stand and go down a steep hill, turn to the right, have to do a wiggle around a bend, go over a bridge and so on. And he would say to them, if you're not in exactly the right place as you pass the stand at the top of this right, you won't be able to negotiate the bend at the bottom. How do you envisage that? And this guy said,

oh, when I'm at the stand at the top, I'm not bothering about the bend at the bottom. I'm thinking of what is half a mile away, which is this going over a bridge. And if I actually were thinking about the bend, I'd come off. So there's some, and he has many stories about them, how their attention is extraordinarily vivid to the whole field so that he can detect somebody in a field to the side lighting up a cigarette.

He can smell it, he can take in the whole scene, but his eyes are completely unfocused. He said, when you watch these people, it's like they're just staring into the middle distance, but they're doing stuff at the immediate level, which is life-threatening. And indeed, they have to take a certain bend that has a stone wall in it so tight that their leathers brush the stone, otherwise they won't be able to carry on. All this is going on, and it's all done entirely intuitively. And when you've stopped to think about it, you mess up, and you can multiply this across as many sports as you like. But of course, to me, it's not just, I mean, that gives massive interest, but it's just that intuition is a great gift that we have,

and we need to pay attention to it. And I have this quote from, that the rational mind is a precious servant and the intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in a world which acknowledges the servant but has forgotten the gift. So that's about a few thoughts on intuition. Imagination is a wholly different matter. Imagination is the capacity to see connections, to see forms and shapes. that are not obvious. And as I say, to see into,

words with you used to call seeing into the light of things, by which he meant this ability I described earlier of being able to see something through and beyond, whatever he was, not neglecting what he was seeing, but actually seeing it more real than it ever was. And by doing that, seeing what it really intimated to him of a realm beyond. As a child, he was constantly,

aware of this, if you like, transcendental sense of the world. He describes himself as a seven-year-old or a ten-year-old as completely enrapped, bewitched by the waterfalls, by clambering on the rocks, by the woods and forests and the sound of the cataract and all these things. And as an adult, he sort of recognizes them. knows they're there. He sort of can see they're beautiful in the left hemisphere, where example of, but he can no longer get back to feeling that, whatever it was, that he sensed as a child. And what's really amusing to me about that one is that,

you know, obviously, who I mean by Richard Dawkins. And he has this view that children have no sense of the transcendental or of the spiritual. or of the divine and that they wouldn't have any time with this absolute nonsense if it wasn't indoctrinated into them by their families and their early schooling.

And this has been researched and what actually it seems is that preschool children naturally think in such terms, they hear things and see things that other people don't hear and see and their parents tell

I don't tell lies, you can't really here, so you can't really see so and so on. And they're discouraged when they get to school for talking in spiritualized terms because they learn that it's not smart to do so, that really by the time you're in seven or eight, you really ought to be talking in mechanistic terms about everything. So what Dawkins believes is happening is the precise opposite of what actually happens. And this is important too when you come to think of, people, some peoples of indigenous origins and indigenous tribes that I have met, who are capable of hearing things, knowing things, seeing things at a distance,

and even being able to see things in the future. And, you know, who are we to say that they can't? When they say they can hear the voices of the elders advising them things, how do I know that they're not? What does that make you think of the nature of consciousness then? Because the limits of consciousness. The nature of consciousness. Because there are, yeah, like you said, innumerable examples across cultures all around the globe that have access to information that they in sort have no business in knowing or having access to.

And you could look at the Dogan tribe that has maps of the serious stars and proper proportions to so many things. different examples. And I'm just curious your thoughts on a larger scale of the possibility of consciousness being more fundamental than emergent and information being communicated and not just the top-down sense. Yes. Information is a word we should come back to. But anyway, let's dive into the consciousness question instead.

But I would like to come back. back to information. We can do it, I promise. Okay, okay. So the relationship between the brain and consciousness can only be of one of three kinds logically. Either the brain can secrete consciousness or emit consciousness in the way that the kidney produces urine. Or it can transmit consciousness in the way that a radio receiver transmits a program from

somewhere else, doesn't generate. but it passes it on. Or it can, and this is my favorite relation, it can permit it, by which I mean it's closer to transmit, but it's not really transmitting something. By its permission or negation, it is allowing something to come into being.

So it is like a sculpting element. It is like a valve that constricts, restrains and alters the course of what passes through it. So we can either emit for which there is no evidence at all. There has never been the slightest explanation of how that could happen. Unless consciousness is already in matter to some extent, in which case that is not the question. I agree that there is matter and consciousness are always together.

So the only possibilities are those, and I suggest that what it is is that it permits consciousness. What I mean by that is that, and the best I can come up with is the way in which water flows and water lands on a landscape entirely at random and it then drains across the landscape and it flows down certain channels. and those channels reliably end up getting the water and they flow reliably eventually into the sea. And the banks of the river that form the channels,

the undulations in the landscape, certainly don't make the water, the water comes to them. They don't exactly make the river. They are part of the river for the time that they're constraining its banks. So the river couldn't exist without those banks, but the river couldn't exist without the water that came to it. Now, that's really my simple idea, simplified idea, about the relationship between the brain and consciousness. That consciousness as a whole is pre-existent to my consciousness. it comes into being for me as my consciousness

because of my particular brain constraining the consciousness that is everywhere in certain ways and it becomes my consciousness. Now if by an accident or a disease or something, the landscape of my brain changes and these channels as you have become disrupted, then of course my consciousness will become disrupted in ways that are.

relatively predictable. So that is it. And I think that matter is the more difficult one than consciousness. Unbelievably, there are, I believe, professors still holding down chairs at respectable universities who claim that there can be no consciousness, or consciousness doesn't exist. And that it is, quote, an illusion. Dan Dennett was one of the people. who said this before he himself became an illusion. But the problem is that, you know, if it's an illusion, it's got to be an illusion in consciousness and something. You can't have just an illusion without consciousness.

It's utterly incoherent, but never mind. Let's pass over all that. Consciousness being the one thing that is self-evident. It is one thing that is absolutely undeniable and self-evident. So there it is. And what is matter? Well, nobody has ever seen matter. All we've ever seen is things manifesting themselves in our consciousness

that we call material. We fix the term material to them. And what do we mean by that? We mean that they have certain qualities, which I think can be pretty much summed up as persistence and resistance. So, you know, something that is immaterial, It can disappear from my mind. It can come back again a year later,

but it has no persistence. And an immaterial thing also brings no resistance to bear. A thought again, I can go with it or leave it or whatever. I can put my hand through it, but I can't put my hand through the table. And those two things, permanence and resistance, turn out to be incredibly important. for creation. For something to create, it has to have a degree of continuity of existence.

Otherwise, there is nothing being created except random comings and goings of nothing. And resistance enables it to come into being. If there weren't resistance, there could be no permanence, and there could be no thing separate from the unity, globular nature of the all. for there to be the many as well as the all. And it seems to me that that is the one thing we can say fairly clearly about the story of the cosmos is that it started from this relatively undifferentiated mass and then has become differentiated in unimaginably rich ways,

complexified, made beautiful, and that is the evolving of the many. And in doing so, it is not disrupting the wholeness of the whole. We had this earlier when we talked about a flower, that when the flower unfolds, it hasn't, as it were, disrupted the flower. It has fulfilled the potential of the flower. It still remains the flower and can close in again and open again and so forth.

This is what, this coming together and coming apart, is the intrinsic nature of the cosmos. So matter presents us with material that is persistent and resistant. And all matter partakes of consciousness in that particular way. Now, I believe that you shouldn't separate matter and consciousness, but instead talk about them as phases

of the same underlying entity. So there is never a need to say, well, how can we bring these two things together? and let's see even if they both existed from time immemorial, how can we nonetheless reconcile them? I say they can be easily reconciled because matter is just another phase of consciousness. And I'm not using phase in the sense of a temporal phase,

but in the phase of a physical sense that physicists and chemists talk about the different phases. And the obvious one to refer to here is water. if you think of water, you tend to think of something that is translucent and flows easily and can run over your hand and can support you and so on, that's fine.

But water can also present as something that is opaque, rigid, immovable unless a great force pushes it, and it's so solid it can split your head open. In other words, ice. And it can also, present and is present in this room as literally tons of water you cannot see in the form of water

vapor. Now, which of these is water? Well, we're inclined to say the liquid stream, but in fact, they are all water. They're just different ways in which water manifests. My view is that matter is a phase of consciousness in that same sense. That very much so actually aligns with the eastern. yogic sciences and what they say and how they delineate the different forms of density that consciousness would take shape in as we as human beings have different layers of self

that you could say take different shapes and different forms of density so okay then do you want to come to it's the information now Yeah, the reason I was to come to information is because, well, first of all, you used it there. And secondly, you talked about knowledge. And especially when we were talking about education, it seems to me rather crucial to talk about information, knowledge, and understanding as different things. Would you say understanding is conciliant with wisdom, information knowledge, wisdom? I say wisdom is something yet again, but I'll be happy to include it as another. Fourth.

A fourth. I think one should. And I think wisdom is a more spiritually rich state. And I think it's a gift that comes only out of, a great deal of understanding and a great deal of knowledge of the experiential kind. So what is information? Well, it is effectively data. I mean, originally, there is in the idea of a form, which is fascinating,

because in physics a long time ago, certainly at least 115 years ago. And in biology in the last 15 years only, people are beginning to see that you cannot talk about, well, in biology you cannot talk about processes without invoking fields that enable certain forms to be followed. Because there isn't enough information in the genome now that we've decoded it that could possibly direct four-dimensional formal processes. In fact, there's so little information in the genome that it's been described as one of the most inert, rather than being this Dawkins-like tyrant that directs us, the lumbering robots, almost nothing is directed by the genome. It's kind of like a larder to which the cell can go when it needs certain ingredients, but often the ingredients aren't there and therefore have to be found another way.

So form fields are very interesting, but information has come to mean lists of facts and, in other words, points of data. And these are things that on their own mean nothing. And this again in Technoply, Neil Postman's book, was now 25 years old or more even, perhaps 35. He was saying the problem nowadays is that people have lost all the things that gave meaning to life, which were the connections, historical, social, and so on, which enable them to read what certain things meant. But if you take people away from their history, and by the way, one of the ways of really destroying a culture, if you are an oppressor, a tyrant who takes over and wants to destroy a culture, is to destroy their history, take them away from their history.

This is happening now in Western Europe, at any rate, I can't speak for America, but it is. And another way is to fragment their values and say there are no sources of value, which used to be partly the knowledge that was passed down in families, and by churches and by other bodies. Now, I'm not saying that anybody here is infallible, but without certain guides that are pretty reliable as to how people got to know something, we are at a loss.

And information makes things not only know better but worse. So his theory is, I think it's pretty much a revelation, is that we started from a position where we thought more information obviously was good because it helped us understand more and to banish superstitions. And then with the printing press, there became more and more information

that was disseminated much faster, and that seemed to be good for a while. And then along came much faster transmissions of information using photography, telegraphy, and so on. And that now we have a situation in which there is so much information that it is disinformation for almost everybody.

Nobody knows, well, he doesn't say this, but by now we can clearly see nobody knows what to trust in the way of information. Because information itself can't answer the question whether it has a meaning, even if it's trustworthy, even if it is true that whatever information comes to me that a certain thing is,

to most intents and purposes, that is a true fact. Information itself, no amount of it, not more of it, can help me understand understand the meaning of that information. So where does the meaning come from? The meaning comes from the network in which that information is embedded. And I don't just mean a lot of other facts. I mean other things that come to us intuitively, imaginatively,

and through a lifetime of being able to think reasonably and carefully. And I say reasonably rather than just rationally because there are certain things that are totally irrational, the conclusions that you can reach that are totally irrational through mere rationality. I make a distinction between rationality

which can often lead you astray and reason which doesn't lead you astray. Reason is what a wise judge would have after a lifetime of dealing with people thinking about things and absorbing information from experience. So reason and these other things will nurture one into a lot of

with a culture and along with the connections between different areas of knowledge will help one realize the information as meaning. Now, the next thing is knowing, and knowing has two very importantly different meanings, which again, I say again, because other languages have differences between rationalizing and reason, but we don't. I use those. But numbing, as you know, in most languages, there are two words for this. So in French, for example, there's savrolet and no fact. I know that France is the capital, Paris is the capital of France, but there is also connezz, meaning I know Paris because I spent a couple of years.

there. And that's a much more diffuse, rich round. And I say, I know, Parry. Oh, you know it then? Well, what is it? No, I can't tell you that in a few sentences, but I can certainly tell you it's the capital of France. That's just Savois. And there's the same difference in German, Kenan and Viscan. So, Kenan is the knowledge by experience. Visant is knowing the facts. And I don't speak Spanish, but there probably is in Spanish and so forth. Sanskrit, Vidya and Yan are two ways in describing knowledge that could be transmissible through a book versus the gnosis of the experience of the knowing. That's very important.

And that probably is an even deeper one, actually, because there are kinds of knowing that can be known through a book, but would be more of the Conertsard kind after you've read the book. So I think that's an even subtler distinction. And I gave a talk once where I was told that Swedish has three words. I can't remember what the third one entailed. But anyway, the point I'm making is that there are different ways in which you can know. And one of them is relatively superficial and a computer could easily take it on board

because it's more dependent on facts. And the other is dependent only on experience. The experience of a embodied being who is capable of emotion, capable of suffering, capable of love, capable of acknowledging the briefness of life and so on, which helps you understand what being in Paris for a while means in its business-sweet nature. And neither of those is the same as understanding. First of all, why is it called understanding? And there's a kind of meaning of under, there's a gone out of English, but it's preserved in German.

So German has the word unter, and it can of course mean below. But it can also mean among, unterfreinen, when one is among friends, one can say. So, understanding, understanding is being able to stand amidst and among a whole array of things. And it's not as simple business of knowing in any sense. sense. It's something about, ah, I see this gestal, this whole thing that makes sense, and that understanding gets richer from more experience, from more knowledge, from more everything, and is in a way the goal of a life well lived, if it is to understand the really important things, which I would say are the truth, the good and the beautiful. And wisdom is to see the way of

negotiating those one's ability to bring those things into being in inner life to do them with love, to do them with compassion, to do them with humility, but to respond to those ultimate values of goodness, truth, and beauty, all of which I've seen in my lifetime trashed and degraded, know. So wisdom being the integration and synthesis, perhaps, of those other modes of knowing. Yes. And whereas I think understanding might be more something you might expect in somebody. And what is your understanding?

And they could explain and there may be bits of it that you might think unusual. But I think wisdom can be completely. bouleversant as the French, it can be completely turn things topsy-turvy. So I think Zen is an example of this where part of his wisdom

might be, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. And you think, really? Is that wise? So I think in order to get to wisdom, you sometimes have to take a position which which shocks or inverts in order to release another level of understanding

in which true wisdom can. Because I think wisdom will often be the case like Neal Spores where, you know, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth, yes. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the words, know thyself. to know the self and what the extent of the self is. I know we've been exploring around a lot of different aspects of consciousness, value meaning, attention, what it means to be human. What is the self in your eyes?

Yeah. I'll just mention before I forget it. I raised an article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies called Selving and Union. And the word selving, becoming a self. I take from Gerard Manley Hopkins, from one of his poems. And in it, I was really being asked to consider, so what is the self that, for example, in many religious traditions you are advised to rid yourself or free yourself of? And I think there are, again,

different ways of understanding the self, not surprisingly, for the self. For the, you know, for for everything, there will be differences at least between the way the left and the right hemisphere think of the self. And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the left hemisphere's self is something like Jung's idea of the ego, and his idea of the ego was something that was very valuable in the early stages of the development of any human being because it enabled that being to have a coherent self.

When a child is newly born, it is not aware that it is in any sense separate from the mother. And for several months, it may not have any understanding of itself as a separate being. The mother and one of the children, the child is, the mother and a child are fused. then as things progress, the child suddenly realizes that there are differences between the mother and the child and include differences in desires, difference in expressed wishes.

And they have to learn how to know that they are themselves and not just as they were swallowed up in the mother, but also that by being separate from the mother, they're not abandoned by the mother. that in fact there can now be a still richer union that comes from the fact that there are two. And those phases, you know, are the starts of the idea that one consolidates in toddlerhood and in childhood to an extent that you are separate from other people. But he also emphasizes that there is a self that grows, not so much when one's very young, but begins to grow as one attained some sort of maturity

as a self that is constituted by the presence of others, much as indeed that very first ego was constituted by the presence of the mother, that oneself is also constituted by the net of people to whom you belong, who are your family, your people, your kin, and that you owe something to them and that indeed you put yourself eventually second to the flourishing of those that you love. And that is the development of a pure or purer or more mature self.

When the Buddha was hungry, it wasn't somebody else that was hungry, it was the Buddha that was hungry and he knew he was hungry. And when the Buddha died, it was the Buddha that died. It wasn't somebody else that died. There was a self. There was a Buddha. But the Buddha's selfhood had become so extended, if you like, that it was something like Indra's match.

It was ramified across all that exists. is perhaps one way of putting at it. Most of us won't achieve that, but if we achieve a kind of self that is other-centered, then I think that is not a bad aim because from a psychiatrist's point of view, people who have no sound self of themselves

are very damaged and unhappy people who cause a great deal of grief to themselves and to others to principal examples of people who don't have a secure sense of self are people with schizophrenia and people with people with

multiple personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and who tend to act impulsively, extremely damagingly because they don't really have a secure sense of who they are. So a lot of psychiatric work for such people is enabling them to get a secure sense of who they are.

And in the case of schizophrenia, obviously there's much else that has to be dealt with in the cognitive and emotional realm. So that's my thought on the self. But what were you saying before that? what was it the other part of your question? I mean, the sense of self, what the self is, the extent of self. I'm also happy to share just, I'm taking back to the beginning of this conversation when you said that we start in ignorance, we come to knowing and then make your way to unknowing again.

And when it comes to the sense of self, the necessary individuation process that one must go through to have a secure sense of self. Otherwise, the many different derails and schizos from that point are made possible. Going from the healthy integration and individuation process of an ego and a sense of a separate self to then putting that experience of that small self, if you will, and the content of our experience and a larger context of awareness where a sense of self, extends beyond the temporal meat suit of our body is a journey that I'm obviously very interested in, and as since you are as well. And so, yeah, I'm just curious about your thought process on the

extension of the self. Yeah, well, I mean, there's some sense in which parallel to the idea of knowing, of sort of ignorance, knowing and unknowing, there is a sort of the ego, the self, and then a sort of dissipation of that sense of the self, at least as the ground of everything that one does. I don't know of it because I haven't attained to that. But one reads the account, of people who perhaps do experience that.

It's very difficult to say because, you see, the thing is, we come now to the nature of love. And to love somebody, there have to be two selves. Those selves, heaven forbid, should be isolated egos. But they also need to be reaching out to one another. and to reach out to another is to have a base from which to do so, to build a bridge. A bridge cannot have only one stanchion. It needs to have two.

And a relationship, a good relationship, and love seems to me the archetype of a relationship. And in most spiritual traditions, as I know of, the ground of being, however conceived, is a fount of love. Twoness as well as oneness comes into it. And even perhaps threaness, of course, because the love that's created is something that is not purely dependent on the two that are there. So you get a movement that Hegel would have been familiar with,

that a thing and its opposite form a relationship in which neither are nulls, the opposite element in the other. They hold the two in tension, and out of that tension comes for something new. Here again, I would think of Heraclitus' image of the bow that has to be pulled in two directions, not just one.

It has to be pulled apart, which sounds like a waste of effort. But actually, that is what allows the bow to have the power to send forth an arrow. It's that which allows the strong. rings of the liar, the power to produce a note without that tension between the two. There wouldn't be the third thing, the music. Now, in a way, two people can be thought of as the two opposites that are tied together

and they're pulling apart, but they're also holding together in order that the music can come. Perhaps also the arrow can come. And arrows can be the arrows of Cupid and they can be the arrows of other. the things too, but such as the nature of human relation. And so I would see it like that, and I'm really been interested very much in thinking about the Trinity, which is odd, because when I started off being interested in religion, I thought, well, there's a lot of wonderful ideas in Christianity.

Some of the things you're asked to believe are frankly, highly improbable, if not impossible. And I'm hoping to get by not having to sign up. As I've gone on in my very simple way pursuing these things, I think I can understand the meaning of some things that seem to be improbable or paradoxical or whatever. And one of them is the Trinity. There was some light shone on it for me by a monk who I'm a Franciscan monk who I met while I was at school. I was in a not in a religious, well, not in a religious foundation at school. And he said, well, think of it like this. It's like a book.

What is the book? Is the book whatever it was in the mind of the one who wrote the book? or is it the result of that, which is this object here on the table in front of me, that I can open and read? Or is it what happens when I read it and it goes into me and becomes part of me? I thought that was quite good as a way of dealing with the idea of something which exists in different realms of matter and consciousness. But in a way, all three of them partake of one another. And in looking further at the Trinity, I discovered that the Trinity is, and probably you know this very well, an ancient idea. It is pre-Christian.

And the Christian faith took it up in this special way of thinking about the relationship between different parts of something that is never divided into parts. It is one whole, and yet it is also tripartite. And when you get to this level, you are dealing with that kind of paradox. But that paradox doesn't destroy anything for me. I think both parts of it need to be there. I love a story. Perhaps we need to end fairly soon. But I love a story which I must tell you of a Russian.

bishop who went, he had a number of monasteries and hermitages and so on in his, I don't know, diocese or whatever, under his oversight. And he heard that there was a small group of three very holy men who lived on a rock somewhere and that they hadn't been visited for 30 years or something. I thought, well, I must go and visit them and see whether they're all right and see what it is they're doing and thinking and so on. So he arrived there and they were duly impressed to be met by the bishop. And the bishop said to them, said to what do you do? And they said, well, we work and we pray.

What do you pray? and they said, Tori on us, three of us, which means there are three of you, there are three of us, have mercy on us. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You must pray like this, and he taught them the Lord's prayer

and, no doubt, the creed and various things. And then, feeling that he'd set things right, the bishop felt it was time to leave. And so he said his farewells and pushed off the boat and was sailing away. And then in the boat, the crew were amazed to see the monks running towards them across the water. And they ran towards the boat.

And were they were calling out, and they were calling out. And the bishop said, what happened? And they said, we forgot. the prayers I think it's beautiful I both that story and what you were mentioning to to beforehand about this within the realm of duality and the Trinity it makes me one personally grateful for the contrast of experience that is always available to us so not just seeking out the joyful beautiful moments but embracing the very much the the antithesis to that and very much so what you mentioned with

hegel's dialectic with the synthesis of two seeming opposites or opponents it makes me think and again through the Vedic lens like the one becomes two for the joy of becoming one again yes like the illusion of separation allows the experience of one another. Yes. And through that, there is the joyful rejoicing and the experience and the contrast. And so it, to me, brings in gratitude and grace into the picture what seems like just opposition and suffering. And I think that's really important.

It so much is. And thank you for mentioning that because. I think there's a sense in which a life in which the world's no suffering would be one without meaning. And William Blake thought that even in heaven there must be suffering. Because if so, if there were no suffering, there could not be joy. The two, as it were, need one another like the two poles of a magnet. And I thought, well, that's an interesting idea. Of course, she was very sound on the coming together of opposites of innocence and experience and so on.

Good and evil and all the rest. But I came back to an insight of Victor Frankel's. And for those of your listeners who may not know, Victor Frankl was a very important psychotherapist who, who himself, it was a psychiatrist and philosopher, who was, as well as his family, interned by the Nazis,

and his family were killed. He himself survived. And goodness knows what he experienced and suffered is beyond imagination. And when he was asked, what gave meaning to life, He said three things. One is the feeling of being together with others, sharing life with others, sharing one's meals with others, sharing one's love with others, sharing one's worship with others.

The second was feeling that you had managed to do something in your life that made you feel had been worthy, that you had done something. worthy and fulfilling. And the third was to have suffered. I thought that was extraordinary, coming from him, especially. And he said that without suffering, there is really no meaning, no understanding. I think one of the things that's happened in my lifetime is that we have lived in a very, very peaceful period. born in the 1950s and you know touching wood I have so far anyway lived in a world in

which my life has not been narrowly touched by by by war I do not know what is coming it may be something terrible but we've had a very peaceful time and on the whole we've become somewhat lazy so we thought of bad things don't happen very much we don't need to guard ourselves against them and we can just enjoy ourselves. And to begin with this was rather nice, but it has ended in a sense of a kind of pointless hedonism. Well, you know, I can get pleasure from doing that. But what's the point in that? The so-called hedonic treadmill that you need to do something more enjoyable, but you don't get even the enjoyment. And it's such a demeaning idea that we're here just to have fun. And Wittgenstein himself,

I've no idea why we're here, but I'm pretty certain it's not to just have had a fun. So, yeah, I think that is, you know, suffering can just make people very better. It's true, and I've seen that. But most people that I like and I value have really suffered. They've been through some pretty devastating things that may have brought them near to death. And I think that is right, and I'm sure it helped him be a better psychiatrist.

In my own smaller way, I have experienced such things that pretty much have killed me, and I hope they've made me a better psychiatrist and better able actually to enjoy life and feel the meaning of it, having not been completely destroyed by it, which is the other thing. But that's right, you see, that you can't have the one in a way without the other.

You can't have just the North Pole without the South Pole. And seeing that, living with it, acknowledging it, brings you to a position where you can say in the title of one of Victor Frankel's books, which I very much recommend, by the way, saying yes to life in spite of everything. And I like that. both for saying yes to life, but also in spite of everything, not because it's so marvelous,

but because actually a lot of it is not marvelous. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And it just makes me feel so much gratitude and resonant for your work, which is, of course, much larger than the exploring of the two hemispheres, but larger, like cosmologically on the human developmental journey, this experience of life, the union of two opposing forces at large.

Yes. Both on the emotional scale, on the psychological scale, on all scales. Yes. And that's what I see so much of your work is doing, is bringing into unicity seemingly separate areas. Thank you for that.

And I'm glad you feel that. I think I recognize that also as part of the aim of what I've done with my life. actually is to draw things together that are not often brought together in order to illuminate one another. If you had a last message, which I know is a big ask, for humanity, what would that message be? Ooh. Well, apart from say he asked life in spite of everything.

I think I was trumped there already by Franco. I think it would be never to despair. I call myself a hopeful pessimist. In other words, I see things going wrong all around me, but I remain hopeful. And that's partly because I believe we don't know attend to what's actually happening, partly because I think human beings are a wonderful

a wonderful species. We've focused all the time on the things we've done wrong and there have been many of them, but we should be more grateful for and aware of, not in a vain way, but in a humble way for what we can achieve at our best, which is extraordinary and it's attested to by so many historical examples.

And that gives one hope. So don't despair. And don't say it's all so much bigger than anything I can do. I often hear, you know, everything seems to be going wrong. But what can I do? The world is such a huge place and I'm so small. And this world is so tiny in respect to the cosmos. What does it even matter?

I think that is the left hemisphere speaking. Because what the left hemisphere is saying, is things are important because of their size, measurement. What we want is more, more, quantity, not quality. And so stop thinking in terms of quantity. Quality can be important in a very small quantity. How big, for example, are the things that are completely immeasurable? How big is my love for the person in my life I love more than any?

thing. I may say, my love is bigger than the heavens, it's deeper than the seas or whatever. The left is, okay, how deep is that? No, that's not what I mean. It's like, oh, what does this person mean to you? No, I can't explain what you mean. This is the left hemisphere doing its kind of, let's get it all charted and measured, and now I'll say whether it's worth doing. No, there are things you can do on a big level. You can join Greenpeace and you can join organizations that hope to help people in indigenous tribes carry on their way of life and so forth. And that's fine and good. They may or may not be successful.

At an intermediary level, you can start modeling things like small groups of people who do aim to live together, preferably without being embroiled in technology, living their lives close to the ground, making and eating their food together, no doubt one hopes having some kind of spiritual life that they can share together and modeling something that may help us if things collapse and I do think they may well collapse. And if they do, the most helpful thing will be to have small centres of people rather like the monasteries in the Middle Ages that kept going despite everything. But the third and last is there is an area which sounds so small that it can't be worth anything, but it is worth everything, which is in you. What is in you is so big that the

left hemisphere can't even measure it. And what, it's the only bit that you're asked to take responsibility for it. You're not asked to solve all the problems of the world. Nobody is. That's completely ridiculous. So let that one go. Instead, make sure you've at least dealt with your own self. And that can start tonight. It can start now. It doesn't have to be something that's labored on for years.

And it really is the most important thing you'll ever do because you've been given you to look after, you to grow. As John Keats said, amazing man. died at 26 in the letter to his brother, this world is a veil of soul making. Your soul is not something that's sort of given to you. Oh, okay, that's nice. I've got one of those. That's my eternal life, is it?

But no, the soul is something you encounter in you and you grow in you or you fail to grow in you. And that matters enormously to you and for you. And you matter enormously. But it is also part of the saving of the world. Thank you so much. I will take home so much of what you said, which isn't hard because we're in my home. And it happened to your first live.

I'm honored to share a space and conversation with you today. So much of what we talked about is what makes me come most alive in life. And I just appreciate the awareness of complexity, attention to nuance, and the depth of understanding you bring to all these different seemingly disparate topics. that come together to inform and unite a greater understanding of the whole. And so I just really appreciate you. Thank you for your time. Very kind, man, Andre, and thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much. We'll leave links down the description where people can find you, your work, your writings. Is there any other last words you have where people can find you or anything? And the best place to go is probably channel McGilchrist.com, which is fairly straightforward, as long as you spell McGilchrist right, but even if you don't, Google will probably find me. You'll find it. You'll find them. Yeah.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Okay. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses, across? across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series

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