The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Wisdom Over Power: Why Contemplation & Wonder Are Essential for the Future of Humanity with Iain McGilchrist

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

(Conversation recorded on January 2nd, 2025)     When looking at our global challenges, it can be easier to focus on the external factors that could be different. Yet a critical part of creating impactful change is turning the scope of reflection inward towards how our patterns of thinking influence the way we contribute to our surroundings. Is it possible that a path toward a better future begins in our own heads?  Today Nate is joined by psychiatrist and neurologist Iain McGilchrist for a deep dive on the implications of western society's over-reliance on analysis and categorization on the quality and expectations of our leadership and governance systems. Iain emphasizes the need for a shift in perspective, advocating for wisdom over power and a deeper understanding of the impact of technology on our values and attention. How can spiritually healthy and aware individuals lead the way towards societal change rooted in wisdom? How can focusing on the well-being of our closest communities create ripple-effects of emergence for broader humanity? Finally, how can embracing wonder and humility throughout our lives – in the face of our scariest challenges – guide us towards a more interconnected and sentient humanity?    About Iain McGilchrist: Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.  Iain has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.  Iain is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009); and his book on neuroscience, epistemology, and ontology called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021).   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

And the very, very large thing that we need now is more power. What we need is more wisdom. And if we had sufficient wisdom, then more power would be useful. But if we have more power but not the wisdom required to know how to use it, we cannot help but destroy ourselves in the world. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Joining me today is neuroscientists and philosopher Dr. Ian McGilchrist for his second appearance on the Great Simplification. Every generation, in my opinion, we have a few philosophers that cut to the core of the cultural conversation of humanity at that time. I believe Ian is one of such philosophers and have been greatly impacted by his work. Ian is the Quantum Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. It has been a research fellow in neuroimaging at John Hopkins Hospital, as well as many other academic positions in the field of psychiatry and neuroliferation. He is the author of a number of books, but is best known for the master and his emissary, the divided brain and the making of the Western world, as well as his book on neuroscience,

epistemology, and ontology called The Matter with Things, Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of our world. And I'm still making it through the 1800 pages of that book. In the previous episode with Ian, we covered an overview of his work on the differences between the left and right hemisphere of the human brain, with the left taking on a more analytical, narrow problem-solving role and the right hemisphere being responsible for seeing the holistic, contextual, and relational view of the world. We also talked about how that theory connects with things like wisdom, psychedelics, and artificial intelligence. If you haven't given that a watch

or listen, I highly recommend that you watch that one first before the second conversation, It will be linked in the description of the episode. Today's episode is a more personal follow-up conversation on how Ian's research can influence how we live our everyday lives in search of a more balanced and wonder-filled life ahead of the great simplification, as well as having ripple effects of how we connect with our communities, societies, and the natural world.

This was a winding discussion of around two hours, covering a myriad of topics from how we use our attention to the importance of Zen. But the central themes of this episode are at the core of this platform, the Great Simplification. How can we expect a wiser and more holistic future, materially less throughput, if we're not implementing those practices in our lives as individuals? With that, please welcome my friend Ian McGilchrist. Sir Ian, welcome back.

to see you. I didn't know I'd been honored in this way, but thank you. Anyway, it's great to be back with you, Nate. Well, as an American, there's all kinds of British citizens that we hear the word sir, and it doesn't really mean much. But in the time since I talked to you first 18 months ago, and now I've read a lot more of your materials, though I haven't read them all because it's like 2,500 pages. And I've listened to your talks, and I've really, kind of recognize that your thinking is foundational to what our species faces. And so when I call you, Sir Ian, I mean it as an honorific. Very nice. So how are you? Oh, doing pretty well, thanks. Although it's hard to separate oneself from the condition of the world, isn't it, at the moment?

but there we go. Yeah. When people ask me how I'm doing, I usually say good or quite well, asterisk. Yeah, quite a bit. There's an asterisk these days. They usually is. So it was 18 months ago, you were on the show,

and you posted a wonderful introduction to your thinking, but we unpack quite a bit, the right and the left hemisphere, and why the right hemisphere, hemisphere is generally the center for holistic, contextual, intuitive thinking, while the left hemisphere is dominated by analysis, categorization, and kind of narrow-minded problem-solving. And of course, we needed both in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. But now the roles have switched, and the master, which should be the right hemisphere,

has become the emissary to the master in our current culture. which is the left brain kind of problem solving categorization. So today I wanted to just assume that people know that general context and take a deeper dive into the situation that humans and are 10 million other species in the biosphere face. So let me just dive right into it as a renowned psychiatrist and a brain scientist who spent pretty much your whole career studying the brains and, behaviors of homo sapiens, a species you and I are both card-carrying members of. You see modern civilization not so metaphorically on your couch.

What is your diagnosis? Well, there was several ways of thinking about that, I suppose. I would think that this patient who'd come to me was anxious, very anxious, unsatisfied, depressed in fact overstimulated over-stimulated over-involved with his or her own

inner life and not enough with a more general vision of life I would think that there was a sort of problem not necessarily an innate problem of narcissism but that that was part of the picture and that

at another level I would say that they were, as I believe we all are now, and this helps to explain why we're so unhappy, we're taking on board a vision of ourselves and of the world, which is so far amiss and so far short of the reality of who we are, that it is not surprising that we feel unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed, rudderless, and as there is no point in things. So I would see this anxious, depressed patient. I would see that person as overdependent on their left hemisphere's thinking. And I would see them as in a simple sense, somewhat narcissistic. And when you give that diagnosis, is that like taking 8 billion personality tests and getting the average? Or is that diagnosis you just described to a culture as a whole? Oh, very much the second of.

I mean, and I think it's very important, again, as in everything, to see a patient and, in this case, a whole society, holistically, rather than simply scoring them, going back once again to trying to measure things. And I mean, occasionally that can be very helpful. I'm not against it at all. It tends to be what psychologists rather than psychiatrists do. and it has placed. But I think that when you're dealing with somebody that's sick, you need to have a holistic human understanding of what it is going on for them and why they feel the way they feel.

So in our first interview, you said that as a psychiatrist, and you've been a practicing psychiatrist most of your adult life, you usually know very early on what the patient needs to do. But the important learning is that they eventually at some point had to understand what they had to do. So you telling them solution didn't matter until it was paired with their own recognition. Exactly. How does this individual therapy map on to the civilizational diagnosis you just gave? Well, gosh, I think it's a really crucial point.

And I think it's important to emphasize. is what you've said, which is that people don't hear it when you tell them when you first meet them, but what you need to do is more of this or less of that. And that's because they're not in a place to think like that, to see their problem in the form that you are seeing it. So it's not just that it's somehow wrong, but I'll buy it and go with it. It's like it's useless. So the analogy here is that people want me very often. And it's a very understandable reaction. I paint a picture of the modern world in so many respects

as a reflection of the triumph of left hemisphere thinking over far more subtle right hemisphere thinking. Black and white, cut and dried, either or, categorical, abstracted, theoretical, but not actually in that place where that is lived experience. And they want me to give them some answers. And that's very understandable because with left hemisphere thinking, one of the problems is that you see everything as a series of problems

that must have solutions. But I think that instead of thinking in this problem solution way, which has not worked, I'm not saying I don't think it's the best way to approach things, this individual problem, individual solution way. I'm saying it is not working, it has not worked, it never will work, because it purports, what it deals with, as the left hemisphere always does deal with, is an immediate, isolated question or problem. It's the one that helps us get stuff in a situation quickly. But what we are always dealing with with human society and a 40 or I looking at the complexity of the natural world and even more of the whole of the earth, we are looking at a complex system in which there isn't a simple cause and effect chain going on. There are many causes for every effect and they interact with one another.

and you won't get anywhere by simply applying a simple solution. And that's what people are longing for. If only I knew I could do this and everything will be all right. But I could waste your time and mind by saying do this. But it won't make everything all right. Because we need to think at a bigger, broader, deeper level. We need to think in terms of complexity. And I'm using that term in a technical sense that most people now.

days have heard about complex systems and not just complicated systems like there's quite a lot to them, it's that they act in a different way from a complicated mechanism like a jumbo jet aircraft engine. So they require a different kind of approach, a systemic approach in which one's looking more wisely for a shift of perspective. And I think that what people need is exactly what they get when they're, enter into therapy, they get an aha moment. And my problem, as a very naive young psychiatrist, was being able to see the solution in outline, but not allowing them to get the aha moment in which they, I see.

They see something different. And it may actually be the same set of circumstances, just seen from a quite different point of view. It's like that illustration of the duck rabbit. You keep looking at it and thinking it's a duck. But hey, it's actually a rabbit or whatever it might be. So it's that kind of change. And in thinking about this, if I may, Nate,

and I'm rather tentative in bringing such a thing into the discussion here because it might sound inappropriate or grand or something. But the distinction it occurred to me is very, much like the one described where in the Gospel of St. Matthew, where the Pharisees come to Jesus. And you know, the Pharisees were very concerned with rules and procedures and the legalistic detail. And they said to him, which of the laws is the most important law? So it's almost like saying, so which is the one that I really must obey? And Jesus said, and I can't remember the exact words, but I think it was, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind.

And the second commandment is like that. It is love thy neighbor as thyself. On this, he said, on this, hangs all the law and the prophets. In other words, our tenderness is to get things back to front, to think the rules, the procedures, the things we do, are the important things. But it is the disposition that matters. And from that comes, on that hangs all the law and the profits. Now, what I've struggled to get across, and I keep on trying to find a better way of putting this, because people think, oh, well, that's all very well, but I want something concrete to do now. What I'm trying to say is that simply doesn't work. And lots of the problems we have now are actually due to previous attempts to solve a different problem and they've left us worse off than we now than we were. So what we need to do is to change

the way in which we think. It's about the how, not about the what. And that incidentally is another hemispheric distinction. The left is interested in things, objects. The right is interested in the way in which something is done because if you do the same apparently in the abstract, the same thing or say the same thing, but with a different heart, a different intention, it changes it completely. Boy, I have so many responses to that. So what percentage of this as a neuroscientist or a psychiatrist, you mentioned people's belief or wanting assurance that everything is going be okay. What percent of the opening of awareness or aha is that they recognize that things are not okay and that it opens them up to a different way of thinking. Said differently,

the role of this podcast is to integrate the various foundational tenets of modern civilization, energy, money, environment, human behavior, ecology, all of it. And it's pretty clear. there are some serious things wrong. Does a recognition and a facing of that reality bring someone closer to that aha moment? Or is it the opposite that it's, I need to know that things are going to be okay. I'm not going to listen to this story. What are your thoughts on that? Well, of course, different people will respond in different ways. But I think that in general, realizing that there is definitely something wrong is a very good first step. And again, one comes back to the psychiatric patient.

No patient goes to see a psychiatrist because everything's absolutely fine. And in fact, one of the first things one wants to do with such a patient is say, well, let's look at some of the things you're doing that tend to lead to the wrong kind of outcome. So that's why my most recent book and probably the book in which I have said most of what I can ever say is entitled The Matter with Things because everybody understands that there is something that is the matter with things. And a subtext is the pun that it has something to do with our obsession with a kind of vision of matter, material things that I don't recognize. indeed with things rather than relationships and processes, which I believe is what the world is made of. So when we talk about things to do, we have to be careful that we're not talking about

something that is a left hemisphere, I can now relax and I don't need to do anymore. What we need is instead to try and shift as many people's understanding by nothing less than a moment of insight, an aha moment, so that what is required then comes naturally to them, as it does to the patient. The patient says, you know, I don't want to keep going back to this story, but it was an eye-opener for me when I started, you know, that I would say on the first occasion, mistakenly, I think it would be good if you did X, and they go, well, I don't know, and they'd go away and not do it. And then after, you know, six months, nine months a year of therapy and possibly

some medication, they come back and they say, you know, I suddenly realized what I need to do. It's X. And X was exactly what I said to them when we first met. The difference was that they hadn't had that readjustment of their whole mindset. And it's that readjustment of the mindset that has to happen, the things that one does after that won't be the same things one would have done even if they looked like it before that. So it's to do with how we do things, why we do things, in what spirit we do them, and in the spirit of, I think, you know, of cooperation, of compassion, of the sense of one anotherness. because if we don't have that sense, we're not going to survive.

None of us can survive alone. We, you know, we can, we need to either hang together or hang separately. I agree with that. So let me, let me read a book, a quote from your book. What then is attention? The best way I can put it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness

is the ultimate creative act. It renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act. It has consequences. Love, said the French philosopher Louis Lavalle, is a pure attention to the existence of the other that you wrote in the matter with things. So if our attention brings our experience of the world

into being and determines what I see, it also causes me to not see where my attention is not. Absolutely. So given that, given modern technology and social media and all of the attention hijacking technology, does that technology actually affect our values and our ethics in addition to just being technology that guides us through the day? Absolutely, it does. So our culture, both the typical nature of a capitalist culture and the now destabilizing impact of the introduction of AI

that we don't entirely understand the full range and consequences of. All of this is about acquiring power, or in the case of capitalism, money and money is power. Money is power to make choices. Now, it is all about power and the very, very last thing that we need now is more power. What we need is more wisdom. And if we had sufficient wisdom, then more power would be useful. But if we have more power but not the wisdom required to know how to use it. We cannot help but destroy ourselves in the world. So, I'm sorry, I may repeat myself here, but this probably takes, you know, some repeating. I'm interested in the philosophy of a German phenomenologist called Max Scheler in the early

part of the 20th century. And it doesn't matter too much going into his philosophy. except that it's, he was very much admired by Heidegger, and I think if he'd lived, would have taken the sort of philosophy of Heidegger's into a much more interesting emotionally and morally rich realm. Anyway, he suggested that there were tiers of values, and you can think of this as a pyramid, and I put it in both actually, in them, because I think it's so important in the master in his chemistry and in the matter of things. And at the very lowest level is the level of power and a pleasure. And again, already in the 18th century, Lessing, the German philosopher Lessing, said the utility question immediately prompts, well, utility for what? And that means you've got to have some other values. But if you're, we never answer that question. So we just think utility in itself is valuable, just having more power is good.

But the question is, what are we going to use that power for? And here we come to my insistence that what we need is wisdom, not power, that the values with which we exercise that power are of primary importance. And what are those other values? Well, he suggested that the next level up was what he called Labensveter, So which are values of life. And what did he mean by that? He meant things like nobleness, generosity, of spirit, magnanimity, bravery, and their opposites, cowardice, small-mindedness and so on.

But above those was a more important level of values, not that they're not important, but they're less important, than beauty, goodness and truth. and above those he called the geistigeverta which means the spiritual values or the intellectual values in German the word geist happens to mean both and then at the top that's highly give the holy now I mean the story we've been told is that in a very cynical way that these values worked the other way around that the holy was invented only so that a class of priests should be able to wield power over people that goodness beauty and truth were trying to inventing invented goals that aim to help people control the populace and make sure they behave properly. And the sort of values of self-sacrifice of magnanimity, generosity are the sort of things that in the game of evolution the suckers go for. And those who can exploit them for it are the winners, because in the end the only thing that matters is power, the bottom level of this pyramid. that I believe very, very strongly. It was every fibre of my being, from everything I have learned in life, that it does work the way that Shaila saw it.

And, you know, I didn't really realize until perhaps, I mean, of all my life I thought that the concept of the divine or the sacred or the holy was important. And I don't need to emphasize it for people who react badly to this kind of thing. But all I can tell you is that I think it is of the highest kind of significance. And one of the reasons that we're in a mess is because I think we have neglected our spiritual lives. And our spiritual lives, whatever you think of is meant by that, but our belief in something that is bigger and greater and more valuable than just us being here, but takes us up into it. It's not a diminution. It's not a way of putting down humanity.

In fact, it's the reductionists who put down humanity. We're just a competitive ape who's not very good at things compared with the machine. But no, the vision I'm suggesting is one in which we are honored to be able to take part. And we can talk about what a human being is and why there's life later if we want to. Because I think they're quite important. But your question was, so does the way our society works, does this stop us from seeing certain things? I think it was the key thing that you said. And I think it absolutely does, because obviously if attention changes the nature of what it is you attend to, so you see something different, then very obviously it can also block your vision of something and you may not even see it at all if you don't attend to it.

So, if I may just give in to the pressure from people to say one thing that they'd like to do. I can tell them one thing, which would be a very good start, but if we ask themselves, what is it that the way I habitually think about myself and the world is stopping me from seeing? What is it that our culture now is stopping us from seeing? And one way to think is what did other people in other times and places? He says by no means stupid people, quite probably at least as intelligent as ourselves. What were they seeing? And why do we no longer see it?

Oh, boy. I have so many questions now. The Rescorla Wagner learning function is kicking on in my brain because a lot of this now starts to dovetail with my work. And importantly, my work since we talked 18 months ago. So first of all, I'll point out that your German psychologist, it was power that caused that pyramid to invert. I mean, it was human social power somewhere that inverted that pyramid. Sorry, I think I'd just say Shayla was a philosopher, really, not a psychologist, but he was psychologically astute, yeah. So in the intervening 18 months since we've spoken last, I've converged on a story that the

stakes of our time are no less than power versus life. That's what's at stake. Absolutely. And power has, um, was limited by, uh, we didn't have surplus back, uh, pre agricultural revolution. Everyone ate about the same. There was a different status, but we didn't carry stuff around. There wasn't storable, lootable stacks of grain or gold or anything like that.

Then we found agricultural. surplus, then fossil carbon, then money, printable, and now created by digital penstrokes. And now AI is turbocharging the whole thing. And so in a world where power has the ability to make decisions and move atoms and bits around the world, there are small groups of humans that are going all in to get more power, the best AI and everything else. And that's pulling the rest of society and the biosphere towards a cliff. So here's some questions on that.

In a group of humans, if there is some surplus and there is a small percentage of people of the humans, you could say 10 out of 100 or even one out of 100, does, Does the preponderance of left hemisphere dominated thinking and behavior, is it kind of this inevitable positive feedback loop that happens that pulls the rest of that group of humans along with it? Does that make sense because it feels like that's what's happening? Because lots of people aren't dominated by power. They're just part of the dawnward causation of the economic superorganism going through their emotions, following the cultural zeitgeist.

What do you think about that, the insidiousness in the presence of all this economic surplus that left hemisphere thinking becomes a virus almost? Yes, I see why you say that. I'm not sure it's exactly what I would say. I think the problem, and I'm thinking back here to other societies, other civilizations, before our own that have, if you like, fallen off the same cliff.

And the common factors were, yes, material overreach or territorial overreach or both and a sort of decontextualization of each human life from the necessary togetherness of manageably sized social groups. So as a civilization got bigger and bigger, and people got further and further removed from those over whom they had control and thought in more theoretical and therefore typically left hemisphere terms

about what the solutions to things should be, things started to go wrong, and you can see, you can trace in the art of these civilizations. I'm thinking here primarily of the ones that I know best, which are the Greek and the Roman, you can see everything signaling left hemisphere takeover here. And I'm not sure that it's sort of contagion from one person to the next exactly, although I can't rule out that that obviously plays a part. But I think it's to do with the overall vision of a society, of its leaders, of what it is that they're doing. And that has this impact. on us. And what we desperately need is to be able to secure a number of like-minded people who see the world differently and have a vision which speaks to people in such a way that they go, my God, yes, I see what it is, I've been missing. So I really think the first question that anyone should ask is, what is it that's missing from my life? What is it that? that I know other people have had, and in other times and places, cultures have had, but I don't seem, we don't seem to have this.

That is the clue. So, yeah, I mean, we could take that anyway. Here's where I'd like to take it. I just had a profound thought, which as a teacher and a psychiatrist, you might smack down immediately. So we are a product of evolutionary forces. There's something called multi-level selection. E.O. Wilson, David Sloe. Wilson talked about cooperation and competition, both being hardwired in us, depending on our ancestral conditions that selfish individuals out-competed

cooperative individuals within a group, but cooperative groups out-competed selfish groups. and therefore we are all descended from both of those. You might also argue that the left brain and the right brain offered similar multi-level selection situations in our evolutionary past. What about if power and life at a cultural level is now the next signpost and threshold, but we've never lived on a full planet

where we're impacting the biosphere And now the evolutionary selection is really between power and life, life continuing in any reasonable form the way that it has evolved since the last mass extinction. And so I wonder if there's a multi-level selection occurring this century applied to our species and maybe, you know, within, individually within. And, you know, sub question of that is there any way. that those people who are right hemisphere balanced could become leaders because it seems like the left hemisphere categorization and goal seeking and power accumulation by definition get selected as leaders. What are your thoughts on all that?

Ooh. Hmm. That's a big bite. Yes. Yes. Well, the first thing to say is that, and I think, this is in what you were saying is that species that have thrived and prospered have been those that have learned to cooperate. They have been able to compete and I think competition at a certain level in a certain degree is healthy. I don't think it's a negative. But on the other hand, it must be compliant with cooperation. And the two together make us able to thrive.

And so when, and these are very distinctly related to the left and right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere is generally thinking in terms of me. And the right hemisphere is thinking, not that I don't matter, but in a less egoistic way that what I am is determined by where I've come from, from nature, from society, that I made what I am by the people I know, that I owe to them, and that we are together in this. You know, that's an enormously lovely and comforting thought, and it's perfectly realistic. In a high-functioning society, there is competition, but there is also enormous creativity,

because people are coming together to do things. That makes a lot of sense to me. I forgive me because throughout this conversation, I periodically forget that the camera is rolling and we're doing a podcast. I feel like I'm in office hours, my professor. And I'm like just, I'm thinking, oh, my God, what about that? So let me ask you this. So in my work, I propose kind of three separate timelines that humanity faces.

And one is right now where we're trying to kick the camp. can with various biophysical macroeconomic can kicking methods like debt and maybe some new technology that rearranges the deck chairs in a slightly different way. And then we have what I call the bend versus break moment when the financial house of cards is a wily coyote sort of moment. I think that's in the next 10 years or so. And then we've got the resolution or the post peak carbon pulse more sustainable when when the financial overshoot is kind of gone and we're, you know, the great simplification.

So with respect to your work, while you were just speaking, it made me think that your work is not incredibly relevant to right now because there are no solutions to what's coming. It's kind of inevitable to what's coming. But it's very relevant to informing and educating and inspiring society and a greater number of human beings to ask what's missing. What's the matter with things? So that during this bend does not break moment, we're asking better questions. We've changed our values. And then even more importantly than that is whatever culture comes.

afterwards, the mitochondria of some new civilization or new human culture is informed by this holistic reminding us of our past and awe and sacredness and kind of a spiritual sense, which even if people are unaware of your work, I think a lot of just the common person knows that something is wrong and something is missing and they don't quite understand it. So what is your opinion on these three timelines and the importance of left brain, right brain, integration and balance during those timelines? It reminds me of something that I have said when people have asked me, so, you know, really we do need to know, we need to have some guidance about what to do. And this also reflects the three timelines. that you have mentioned in a way.

But the first thing to say is that I don't agree that what I'm saying is not relevant now. I think it's highly and most relevant now because if we don't start changing the way in which we think, there won't be that future. Your timelines won't be there. Well, they will be there, but we won't. So we have to be preparing the future. And the thing is we are so mesmerized in our left hemisphere way by the immediate that we don't think broadly and deeply and over a long enough time span about what we're doing. Because we are making the future.

And so we are responsible for the world that more than we, others will come to have. if we're lucky. So I think it's terribly important, but I think there are three ways, if I may reflect back to you, it's not exactly your three timelines, but I think there's something very germane here and close to what you're saying.

I think there are three ways in which people can respond to this. And I'm going to take them in the order of increasing importance, but they will sound to me in the order of decreasing importance. So, and that's because of the way. we think. So they're all important, every single one of them. And let's start with the one that most people will think of, which is, you know, grand corporate intergovernmental initiatives and adjoining those and being part of them, because after all, if this is a global problem, it must be tackled globally. And there's truth in that. But there's also, as always, the

is a hidden other side to it. And in fact, I mean, it's no secret that a lot of what has been done by these organizations has done very little to move forward the real inspiring goals that they were designed to achieve, but has instead either intentionally or unintentionally resulted in the extreme enrichment of certain groups in. involved in these power-wielding organizations. So that's the one that everybody thinks is important, and in some ways it might be, but I'm not convinced at the moment it is.

The next is I liked your image of the mitochondria. I think of it as like seeding little colonies in a nutrient medium that are going to spread. And here I'm thinking of the practice of initiating the practice now, not waiting until it's too late, of ways of thinking about education, ways of thinking about social engagement with one another and fulfilling our needs in terms of agriculture and someone that are small foci that in the the future, when the crunch comes, when the breaking point happens, they will be our chance both to survive and to seed something for the future that will be less monumentally hubristic and destructive than the way we now think. So, I mean, here I think of, I think he was called Abraham Heschel, wasn't he, the, the rabbi that, I think I quote him two or three times in my work.

and he said a lot of very wise things, but one of them is, in the past, our civilization might have perished for want of power, but now it perishes for want of wonder. And he was really saying that getting a little humility and a sense of how wondrous life is, because without it, life isn't worth living. I mean, he might as well stop. without those things, we are doomed. So these things that sound in a way kind of airy-fairy and not gritty because they're not what sort of bankers and politicians talk about are actually the real deal. They are the real things that are important.

I loved your notion of power against life because I do believe that we are not living life fully. I think we're living now in a simulacrum of life. We're not actually living life. And I found this extraordinary quotation in the 19th century from a novelist, Swiss, I think novelist called

Coonberger, who said, life no longer lived. I was extraordinary. It really kind of went like in my heart and I've never removed the dagger. And I think he's so right. Anyway,

to come to the third point, the third sounds initially how is that going to help but it is actually in my view the thing that must happen the only one of the three that must happen and luckily it is something that doesn't require a great deal of power or a great deal of money or a great deal of time it just requires

a desire for the world for life for nature to thrive and for our lives to be different from the ones that we have now. And that is to begin, if I may put it this way, in the space within the inner temple. Now, that can start not even tomorrow. That can start today. Because what I'm saying is we need to begin a process of examination of what our values truly are, of what we are leaving behind,

what we are doing to help here. And people think in this very spatial, typically left atmosphere away, about how small they are and how big the world is and how much bigger the cosmos is and the world is just a small thing in it. That doesn't matter at all

because what's going on this earth is extremely important. It can't be more important, actually. I think there are enormous things that are at stake here to do with the values of life and spiritual life. And we don't know how big the changes we make can be said to be. I sometimes say if you truly experience love, and in some ways, of course, love is not just erotic love, but is also the basis of the moral and spiritual life in almost every tradition. If you do experience love, how big is that love?

And actually what you experience is the only thing you will ever experience. The only thing that you will ever experience is what goes on inside you. I mean, I don't mean that the whole world is made up by us, and that's a whole other story, and I definitely argue against that right from the start. But nonetheless, your experience. is only your experience. It is of other things, but your experience is your experience. And how you experience it makes the world and your life and everything you find in it what it is. So there cannot be anything more important for you. Now, you might say, well, yeah, but isn't that being selfish?

Because it's just about me. Shouldn't I be bothering myself on behalf of other people? And yes, there are ways, of course, of doing that in a more explicit way. But we don't know what the outcome of thinking and talking in a new way can be. Margaret Mead, I think the great anthropologist said that it's not just that some movements begin from a small seed. Every movement, however big, begins from a small seed. It has to. That's how movements begin, just that a oak grows from an acorn.

We need to be part. Don't be discouraged by the idea that you're too small or what you can do is not important. What you can do is extremely important if it is, if you like, centered in, directed towards the purpose of enlarging what is good, beautiful, and true in the world. Let me summarize some of the points you made in our first conversation and apply them to what you just said and to my own work. Let me unpack this a little bit. So I think you've watched some of my Friday musings. They're called Franklies.

And I have a therapist, a cranial sacral therapist. I know nothing about. But after she works with me, I have a much greater balance between my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. And I just feel more grounded. And she said that she watched some of my Franklies, like a smattering of them. And that she loved the content. The concepts were very interesting and relevant.

She could tell that I was kind and positive. But on some of them, she could tell that my nervous system, my fight or flight was activated and that I was predominantly in my sympathetic nervous system and that that could be transmitted on camera to others. So a lot of the things that she's helping me with are things that you recommended in our first podcast, which is to slow down, to listen. in the quiet and also to not worry about being productive all the time, but to have fallow periods. Yes.

And that sometimes the greatest bursts of productivity came after a period of not doing much at all. So you also said in our first conversation that you are a student of and adherent of Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Zen. And so here's my question. At a time when things are chaotic in the world and about to become more chaotic, if there are people who slow down become more fallow in order to be healthier and eventually more productive, to be more quiet, to moving towards their right hemisphere, is that enough to kind of combat the left brain power hungry dominance of the economic superorganism.

In other words, is ascribing to being Zen in these times, relegating to becoming a witness of what's happening? Or can it one human change to 10 to 100 to a thousand to a million actually change the initial conditions of the future? What are your thoughts on all that? Well, first of all, I think that last thing is true, but I'd also say that I don't think that having a Zen cast of mind means that you never do anything. Help me understand that. I think one of the things is that to be always productive is very unproductive. To be always busy is a kind of laziness.

To act too quickly and too much is to lose the prize. and it's often won by a simple single stroke, which needs to find its moment. So I think that Zen is not a way of abdicating responsibility for the world. I don't know if you know at all the work of a man called Rod Dreher. No, he has a blog, which I think is very interesting. But he wrote a book called The Benedict Option, and he's just published a book called Living in Wonder

and in fact I've been asked to interview him at the Oxford Literary Festival in a few months' time and the reason I mention it is that in his book the Benedict option he was misunderstood to mean that actually what we need to do is run away and form little groups in the hills and I'm not saying that either

when I talk about these small nuclei, these mitochondria, as you put it, that it's a running away. It's a tough option, and it's an engaged option, but it is one that is sufficiently removed from the pressures of quite unnecessary forces that buffets us in everyday modern urban Western life. it's removed enough for something good to come out of that. And I often think that if there weren't, I mean, if it came to this, if there weren't monastic communities, I very much respect them. And you may know that in my younger life I anticipate I might become a member of such a community. I haven't and I'm sure it was right that I didn't. But I think that if there weren't such places,

I would feel that the world was an immeasurably poorer place and that would be nowhere as it were, where any kind of stability stabilizing was housed. I guess that's at the root of my question. Is these nucleotides or mitochondria or small groups of humans living generally the directional way that you're describing, slower, quieter? It is all of that, the slower and quieter and all those things. and I didn't want to repeat all the things I said last time, which probably were much more practical than what I'm saying now.

But I think that I'm not saying that these, you know, I always come down to this figure 3%. I'm not sure who it was who said it, that if you can change the way or seeing the world of 3% of people, you have the basis of a movement that will, you know, really carry the day. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not sure. Oh, right, maybe, maybe. I think it was before, it might be wrong, but in any case, it's not that people would be simply keeping themselves themselves.

I'm saying that when we have a point of view that we think is important, we act on it and we all have different strengths. We speak about it, we do it. We try and promulgate it in whatever way we, we, we, we, we try and promulgate it. in whatever way we best can. But also, I think it's not just utilitarian in that way, that it actually does change the way people think. So we don't know quite how contagious a way of thinking can be, and we don't know quite how that contagion spreads. But again, to talk of somebody that,

whether you are an adherent of Christianity or not, that you have to, I think, admire Jesus Christ, He was a poor man who was effectively cheated at a criminal and died the death of a slave. And yet, and he didn't have social media, and he didn't give public lectures, but somehow whatever it was that he was saying was so important, so important that people were prepared to sacrifice their lives, to see that it was transmitted. So there is something that happens

when ideas that are very, very important, have their moment, and people see them and feel their mind changed. And that is the key thing. It's this, I don't want to get away from the idea of an aha moment because I think without the aha moment, it's too easy to carry on with business as usual, thinking, oh, I've now, in a very left hemisphere way,

I've now got all the right hemisphere principles and I'm doing fine. I think there actually has to be a bump in the journey, really, and that sometimes, as in faith, I think losing faith for a while is a very important stagepost on a deepening of faith. And I think that understanding certain ideas, you go through phases where at times, you know, you espouse certain things, you then let go with them. and then only later you can see what was important in them or what was not important in. So we're changing all the time, and that's good. So in terms of knowledge, I mean, again, to be a bit zen about this, there is a big distinction between ignorance and not knowing.

So if you ask me what's the answer to this question, I mean, I might be entirely ignorant. You might ask me what's the coefficient of expansion of brass. So I don't know the answer off the top of my head. But you might ask me, what is the meaning of life? And my not knowing, I think, is somewhat wiser than by coming up with a simple formulation. See, there's a kind of ignorance that is this side of knowing and a kind of unknowing that is that side of knowing. And it's where a lot of very important teachers and thinkers. have ended up. I mean, among them, Montaigne, Cusage, you know. And it is also, again, a common

saying of those who have followed the spiritual path. So let's go to some of the questions that caused me to rip up my outline of questions that I sent you. I don't move it up. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no. You emailed me and you said that asking you. the right questions is more important than any answer you might give. So let's start there. Why is asking those questions more important? I don't have an answer. No, sorry. By the way, all the questions I sent you are questions to which I don't have a ready answer. Well, why is asking those questions more important than finding practical solutions?

Because again, there are, is he not all questions are born equal? And not all solutions. are. So some questions are questions about what are we going to have for breakfast. And there needs to be a solution to that question, or at least an answer to it. And it's not difficult to find. We don't fret over it. But there are far, far more important things. Like what should my life be directed towards? What is my life for? What is nature? and what is our relationship to it? What is the cosmos and what is our relationship to it? In fact, those particular questions are the questions that I most find myself puzzling over,

and I'm not disappointed that I haven't come up. The answer, like, you know, the famous 43 or whatever it was, that in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one came up. And that is a perfect, a beautiful, ironic comment on the nature of such questions. But they are the important questions. And the reason we need to ask them is, first of all, we don't know if we can answer them, but by going deeper or not, but by going deeper into the examination of them, we may get closer to truth.

You may notice, if you've looked at my book, The Matter of Things, that I call them first volume, the paths to truth, so how can we know that anything is true at all, or truer. And then I say in the second volume, so what then is true? And I never use the word true in the sense that is often used in contemporary Anglophone, Western philosophy, as a kind of point that theoretically you can arrive at, where there is a thing out there and you know the steps of the past forget to it and the reward will be you will possess truth. Instead, I believe that that truth can never be possessed. But that doesn't mean that you don't strive towards it.

And in striving towards it. Truth is asymptotic. Truth is asymptotic. It would be a very good way of putting it. In other words, you can approach it as near as you like, you will never arrive at it. and what I like is that the Greek word for truth, Alethea, means an unconcealing. So what we are doing is not putting together a truth, as if Michelangelo made a statue out of an arm, a leg, a torso, and a head and put them together. But one is unconcealing something, as Michelangelo did, for several years simply throwing stone away, and there at the end of it was David.

So what we are doing in the path of truth is getting out of the way the clutter that gets between us and a true path. And that is always a path. It's always something that every day requires our attention. There's a rabbinical saying which I like, you are not required to complete the task, but you are not permitted to refrain from the attempt. So does the relationship between science or modern science and truth map on to left brain dominance versus right brain integration? Are those related? They are related, but not in the very simple way that some people might immediately assume. That would be me.

So please explain how they're related. Truth is very complex and things that are true cannot always be. encompassed in language, however hard we try. We can get somewhere trying. We can suggest something, often through poetry, through metaphor, through indirect means, through myths, through narratives. I mean, one of the mistakes is to think that myths are lies, myths are truths, but the kind of truth that cannot be expressed in the kind of language with which you write a chemistry textbook. So I always find this one a difficult one because I so much admire science and reason that I have devoted the last 35 years or whatever it is to pursuing them. And

they're hard and they're very important. But it falls to someone like me who is worried actually that they are under attack now in the world we live in and who therefore feels fiercely defensive of. Also to point out that they never attempted, they never claim to be able to answer all our questions. And by assuming that they can, one is actually travestying them and diminishing them from their true importance.

So science starts from every kind of process of investigation must start from certain axiomatic positions. And those axioms are not questioned. That's the point of axioms. You have to have something you don't question. As Wittgenstein says, if you want the door to move, there must be hinges that are not moving

in order to enable you to move. So in science, for example, it is claimed that no values will be taken into account. In fact, values are taken into account all the time, but let's leave that aside in the practice of science. But in the theory of science, then values don't come into it, nor does any kind of purpose get to be acknowledged. Now, as I think Whitehead said, it's amusing watching scientists busily working away with a purpose at demonstrating that they have no purpose. But you can't get away from values and purpose, in fact. And they are of, I think, ultimate importance.

But science can't tell you about them. And as Stephen Gould says, science doesn't fail to tell us about God. It just can't tell us about God one way or the other. It has nothing to say about it. And that's not a criticism of science. That's just the nature of science being a very well-suited tool for certain purposes. But there are very important things that can't satisfy the criteria for acceptance by science. they must be demonstrable and measurable.

And in that sense, anything that is wholly experiential, such as love, cannot be demonstrated at will in a lab, cannot be measured in a lab. And people make the very basic mistake that measuring levels of oxytocin or dopamine or something in the brain, you're measuring love. But that's not what you're doing at all. You're looking at some markers that mark many things, and sometimes might be marking this, and saying, well, I can measure those, but you haven't measured love.

You can't find love in oxytocin. You can't find love anywhere in dopamine. They are somewhere else altogether, and in thinking that you are measuring them in the lab, you're doing something else. Now, when I said this on a podcast of Alex O'Connor, who I think has an order. audience, it seems, sort of unreformed reductionist materialists. There were sort of comments, oh, he's pleading for the God of the Gap. I'm not pleading for the God of the Gap. I'm just saying there are certain things that are definitely real.

I can tell you love is real, and many other people will tell you love is real. You say to me, say, what is this thing that's love? If it's real, show me it, demonstrate it to me. Describe it. I cannot do any of those things, but it's still very real. And I'm not saying, therefore, there must be a God. But I am saying when it comes to the sacred and the divine, the same sort of things apply. I can't explain to you what it is if you haven't experienced it.

I can't capture it in language or even in normal cognition. I mean, you can up to a point, but to the degree that you do that, you're actually traversing what it is you're attempting to approach. So I hope that I've made enough, I can say a lot more, but I mean, the point I'm making is that truth is of many kinds and it isn't just the kind that can be demonstrated in science, nor are things that reason cannot reach, irrational. You know, music is not irrational. It's terribly real. It's very moving and important.

And my life would be very impoverished without it. It's not irrational. It just isn't encompassed by reason. It is suprational. Now, lots of things that we value, just about everything that makes life worth living, is super irrational. Friendship, love, sex, worship, awe, wonder, beauty, nature,

painting, architecture, myths, ritual, you name it, all these things that are so rich in meaning and so important. But they don't have that fully encapsulated in language or reason. So given what you just said, and earlier you said that truth is asymptotic, is it true then that everyone has their own truth irrespective of science? No, that is a ridiculous idea. Okay. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, if somebody says my truth about this person is.

that he or she is whatever. I'm, and you say there's somebody different. I don't say that people can't see a person in different ways or even see an experience in different ways, that's right. But the idea that you can just make up truth is appalling. And if there was any credence given to this, we would be incapable of either speaking or acting. because there'd be no point in saying anything because it would be neither true nor less true than anything else that could be said. And there'd be no point in acting towards a certain goal because there'd be no truth in the idea that this goal is important.

So the idea that truth can be made up is one of the most pernicious things that has happened in academe in the last, I suppose, it's since the 60s, since just before. I hit Oxford, and it's been very damaging. So are things like E equals MC squared and a barrel of oil has 5.7 million British thermal units? Are those science or truth? Well, they're scientific truths, I suppose. I mean, science deals in truths, and those are truths of a scientific kind. And, you know, science has its truths. it's no good

I mean now it's under a double assault from sloppy postmodernism like sort of oh well you know two and two might be four but you know I might think it was 17 and why can't I be right well because you're stupid you're wrong

numbers have the qualities they have and saying that in a different base of arithmetic the answer will be fine is to completely cheap because it's a saying you're going to do arithmetic a different way and the answer five means something different. So, no, there are things that are clearly true. But there are also things that are more complicated and about which there are different

strands of truth and I don't claim that I've seen all the truth. I mean, my easiest way of thinking about this is with music. That's why I begin the matter with things with a fairly long disquisition on, well, it's 20 pages, but this is not that long. You can read it in an hour. About what I think reality is, what I think truth is. And I don't think it's all made up by me,

but on the other hand, I don't think that I play no part in it at all. And it is an encounter. It's an encounter between the life that is in me and the life that is in whatever it is out there, between the part of consciousness that is interior to myself, and the field of consciousness, which I believe is the ground of everything, that is not included in my temporary consciousness. There is a coming together of things.

It's not that there just is stuff out there and we receive it in the way that a photographic plate does, nor is it made up by us in here. But if you take a piece of music, there are different performances of it, and some will be truer to the music and some less. And on the whole, when people say this is a profound and true performance of this music, most people who know what they're talking about will tend to agree. There will be largely agreement that it is a brilliant, a heroic, a beautiful understanding of it. And you can't just make it up.

It's like, you know, I give the example, I used to be a literary critic. You know, and people see different things in works of literature. But I can take a different stance on Hamlet from other people. But, you know, one thing I can't say is that it's a critique of peasant life in Azerbaijan in the 11th century. It just isn't, mate. You know, and if you say so, you're wrong. So, I mean, the fact that there isn't one crisp clear truth doesn't mean there isn't truth. It's bloody is.

And the question is how close to it can you get? So I know you do a lot of podcasts, and I think you're writing a short book or something like that. But do you have conversations like this outside of doing podcast? Do you have a men's group on the Isle of Sky where you get together and think about these gnarly and important questions? You know, I don't. No, no, I don't. but some of these things I you know I cheer over in conversation with friends from time to time

but no it's interesting isn't it I suppose I have a lot of interior dialogue and I also think that very often the pressure to answer a question once again is damaging and it may be within the long run you do have an answer to the question, but the immediate answer will not be the best answer. And I think I've said this before, forgive me if I have, but one of the things I'm now most grateful for in my life

is the fallow periods when I thought I'm not doing anything. Because it was during those periods that I was actually creating the things that later I took on dictation as well. So as a neuroscientist, Can you explain why that happened? What's going on in the brain that fallow led to productivity or creativity? Well, to be a little bit reductive, what is necessary is to keep possibilities open. And here I need, you know, I say politics. It's not reductive really when you read the full story at the hemisphere. that can sound it in sound bites when I say things like this.

But in brief, the left hemisphere is always trying to close things down to a certainty because it needs to act and it needs to act quickly and it wants a definite outcome and it knows what that is and it's going for it. That, unfortunately, writ large, has become our modus operandi in everything in the modern West. And it's one of the reasons why we're so comprehensively screwed up. The right hemisphere, which literally sees more, attends better, perceives better, makes better judgments about what it is it's perceived, is more intelligent, cognitively, emotionally, and socially, and is more creative in the way it uses what is going on in its awareness. The right hemisphere is trying to do the opposite to the left hemisphere, it's trying to say, but it might not be this. This is why Ramachandran calls the right hem is for the devil's advocate.

It might be saying, but hang on a moment. Before you close it all down into what you think you so cleverly know, think it could be something different. This is rather like my question that I've been banging away at during this interview with you about people asking themselves the question. So what am I missing here? So fallowness gives you iterations of the left and right interacting with each other over time. Narrowness of focus means that you won't see things except under the spotlight, as you were.

You know, it's like the story of the man who's found looking for his wallet, and he's looking under the light, and he can't find it. And somebody says, where do you drop it? And he said, well, over there. And why are you looking here? Because that's where the light is. And, you know, that is the way we are now, is that we, the left hemisphere has a spotlight. And that's the bit that we're very aware of.

And we're frantically looking and we can't find it. Well, the answer is look outside of where the spotlighted. Now, to do this, you definitely need to switch off that eager grasping off. Yeah, I got it. I've got a name for it. I've got a category for it. I know how that fits in my system. All those things are not very smart, intellectually speaking,

and they will lead to the wrong answers. What you need to do is to be more agnostic. and I mean just literally in terms of the structure of the left and right hemisphere, the left hemisphere has many more tightly self-involved nodes, and the right hemisphere has much better trans-hemispheric across the whole hemisphere connections, white matter connections. It tends to think broadly. It tends to make connections that are broad.

It tends to see the bigger picture. The left heaven has lost all this already because it's so sat on having an answer now. Come on, tell me. What is? I don't even care whether it's right or wrong. I'm just going to go for it. And it's narrowing down the pitch in moral terms, in spatial terms, in temporal terms, in terms of meaning. So let me ask a follow up to that, and then I'll try to tie it together.

So in the email you sent preparing for this, you chest. not the right word, but you cautioned me that all the people that interview you say, what is the formula? What is the formulaic answer, the steps? And you're more interested in questions like, why is there anything? Why is their life? Why is their human life? Who are we anyways? What is the point of life? Those sorts of questions. So when you sit and contemplate on the Isle of Sky in the stillness and you have conversations, in your mind about those things. Like, how does that go?

Are you having a dialogue while you're cutting the hedges or doing chores? Or what is going on inside the mind of Ian McGilchrist as you ponder these unanswerable but vitally important questions? Well, you know, it's a total mystery to me. How can I answer this? Sometimes, of course, when I'm cutting bread or doing some simple thing, yes, my mind is on something else. Sometimes it's on the very business of cutting the bread. I can't really generalize about it. But I think that one of the things that happens is one sleeps on problems.

So one thinks about something, one reads about it, one thinks I'm not entirely satisfied with that. What's the answer to that? and then, you know, one of the times when the left hemisphere is not so dominant is when one's asleep, and the right hemisphere is able to make connections and speak in visual metaphors, and even sometimes actually in verbal metaphors, but in any case in metaphors. And not all of that is meaningful. Some of it is absolutely not. But sometimes it can lead you to something you wouldn't.

neglecting. And you may not even know that it has led you to that. You don't have to go, oh, I see. In my dream, I learned that. But the fact is that while you were dreaming, you're thinking about this subtly changed. And the fact of you having dreamt about it also means that there's a greater chance that you will have a conscious awareness of whatever it was. But lots of what's interesting goes on in an area where one is absolutely not aware of it. So directionally, what you're suggesting is a lot of what we're missing is a spiritual experience and a recognition and aha moment. And that that is a gateway towards thinking and ultimately acting differently. And if we get 3% of society that follow that progression, then maybe there's some emergence that changes to the mighter

of a new, new culture. Is the hypnagogic state or dreams a gateway to a spiritual recognition or a recognition, at least that something is missing? And I hate to be so depressing with this thought, but the last six months or so, because of the weight of the world, I have intense dreams. I take melatonin and magnesium and theanine and ashwaganda sometimes before I go to sleep. And I have amazing dreams and some of my best franklies are ideas that I had when I was dreaming. But I wake up and I see the emails and I see what's going on in the world and I feel sad.

And sometimes my dreams are much better than the real world. I'm telling you that as a psychiatrist. But what are your thoughts on all that, Ian? I'm spiraling down a rabbit hole. Well, my thoughts about it are that very obviously important truths do come to people in dreams. In fact, the answer to some scientific conundrums have come to people in their dreams. For example, the structure of the table of the elements came in a dream. to Medelaev.

And quite possibly the structure of the aromatic ring, which is the basis of carbon and structures and therefore of life, is said to have come to Kekekele in a dream. So these things happen, and things that were important to me have happened in dreams that I found had meaning. So I know it happens. It's hardly a secret.

I don't think it happens in the strictly decodable way that Freud sometimes suggested that it probably could. But whether it does or not, I think the spiritual element is slightly different from this creative imaginative element. It's not separate from it. It needs it. But it is the key in a way. You can be creative and imaginative. and be on to some really bad and false things. And I think that, you know,

it is dangerous talking about the spiritual these days, but what the hell? I've been a few years to go anyway. And it's quite clear to me that's very important. And I think of two things that Solvitin itself, and, you know, again, I think of him as a colossal soul and mind. and, you know, when he was asked, how is it that these terrible things happened in the 20th century, he said, the only answer that makes sense to me is because men have forgotten God.

And he said that twice. And I think I know what he means, because it's not because of, because we believed in capitalism or because we believed in this or that or the other. Again, it comes down to those bullet points are not really going to help because the only thing that really matters is the disposition of your soul. And so that is the point. And the other thing that Toltenitzin said, I think is really important is that we shouldn't just demonize other people and think that we can just be good. The line between good and evil, and I believe in the reality of both good and evil, runs through the middle. of every human heart.

That I believe. And could you alter Solchhenitsyn's quote and say it's because man has forgotten the sacred and would it have the same meaning then? I don't think it would be quite so powerful, actually, since you ask. But I think, I don't want to exclude from conversation about a very, very important topic. Highly perceptive, good, intelligent, spiritually rich, surely much more so than I. am people who just don't like the word God. And I'm not entirely sold on it myself. I mean, I spent quite a long time trying to avoid using it in the final major chapter of the matter of

things. And when I do introduce it, I say, and what a load of baggage, of unhelpful package, comes with that word. I just like people, if they don't react well to that word for all kinds of reasons that may be to do with personal history and all sorts of other things, just to try and think, well, maybe I don't have to attach the meaning that is unhelpful to me to it. I can try and empty my mind of presupportitions about it and allow it to begin to take on meaning through experience. Again, not forced by willful action or verbal pyrotechnics,

but actually by the business of living and attending. I mean, that's all we can do, actually, in the end. But we could stop attacking life and stop attacking nature. And I think those are two things we're doing now. And again, you know, something I didn't say, but should have said, is that when you need to know what to do, the very first thing, and I'm sure I said this last time, is to find out what you're doing that's not good and stop doing that. So let me put a pin in that, because on our first conversation, I mentioned a quote by Victor Frankel, which you recognize between stimulus and response, there's a space. And it's in that space is our power to choose our response. and in that response lies our growth and freedom.

So as a busy person talking about myself to a psychiatrist, you, there's a long list of things that I would like to do that I think are important, but in the moment I end up choosing the unhealthy choice. So what are things to do in the moment between stimulus and response that would increase the odds of me and our listeners, making a better choice during that space, is the first step recognizing that there is that space? I think it is, yes.

And interesting people who don't think they have choices, who think we have a philosophy, which I think is unfortunate, that they're fully determined, are less moral in their actions and less happy in themselves. and I don't recommend discarding the belief just to make you happy. I recommend discarding the belief because it's obviously false in my view. There's nothing in the universe that is fully predictable in that way.

There is always room for choice. And it's a perfectly reasonable point that lots of things do influence us, our ancestry in various ways and our personal experience. They help to make us who we are. Nobody could possibly deny that. But it's when you say we have no room to make choices that I fully disagree. And I'm on the side here of the rather wise Victor Frankel. So I think knowing that you have a choice is important,

knowing what choice and being explicit with yourself, what choice you would like to make. But let me say, hands up, I find this difficult. I'm very bad at lots of things. I don't want to sit here saying things and appearing to be pleased that I've got it worked out. I haven't. I'm a kind of... I feel the same way.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't know what the answer is, but there are helpful things, you know, like, and perhaps even writing and signing something that says, I will, for the next week, I will, when I get this to this point, I will not. choose this, I will choose the other thing. The writing formalizes it into a social contract, which social contracts in our evolutionary past were kind of important. Yes. So it's formalizing the intent. Exactly.

And it's like a sort of, it's now out there. It's not just nebulously in my mind. It's like, you said this. It links you in the past with you now. I actually tell my friends. I plan to exercise every day or do whatever because there's a little bit of, you know, bit of responsibility than me just saying it in my mind. I stopped doing that when I realized that I wasn't going to do it.

It was just embarrassing. That too. I've had that trajectory. Let me ask you this. Given your lifelong scholarship on the brains and behaviors of homo sapiens, putting aside for the moment the dire straits that we face, can you imagine humans alive? 500 years from now, 1,000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, which would be equidistant from when we left the stability of 290,000 years on the Pleistocene in our formative years.

What sort of social structures, given all your knowledge of our brains and behaviors, would be most conducive to surviving and thriving for the long term, our species? What do you have to say about that? one of the products of thinking about these things is realizing that you can't predict them. But having said that, let me do a foolish thing and make an attempt. I think that for all the apparent advantages of large block societies, we have to, as usual, find the sweet point between being individual, and being totally unified.

So atomism is not a successful way for society to flourish, but neither is two great forces of dirhysm and convention. So you need to have probably something in the region of small groups, and here Danbar has made this point, that small social groups around 130 or something of the kind seem to be maximally effective. And I can imagine that. I mean, it matters very much whether you know people. And there are small communities in which, broadly speaking, you do know everybody,

and you know their reputation. And if they act, that will not be secret. And therefore, people have an enormous incentive to act well, for a start, but also to trust one another because they need. one another and to share their lives. Now, if we were able to do that, that would be a very good start. Other things that I think would be required would be if we are still on this earth, and I don't give much for our chances anywhere else, closeness to the earth. You see, we didn't have to do anything. It's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, I didn't do a bloody

thing to produce the absolutely wonderful richness of everything that's going on out there. It's a pure gift, you know, and it's the middle of winter and I have a bird table out there. And just seeing the birds, you know, is so beautiful, seeing the very first hellebores beginning bravely to open their buds in the middle of the darkness of winter. It's extraordinary the whole thing Throughout the whole cycle It's a gift that has zero value In our economic system

It's absolutely extraordinary That is the case But you are so right And it's that kind of thing That you know I'm talking about When I said we need to re-engage With our social life

Our rootedness in nature And in the cosmos Not just because it's good for us Because it is And the masses of evidence that without those connections, we don't thrive. But because it's also good for them. I mean, I believe we give back as we relate.

You know, the relations work both ways. An encounter is an encounter for both parties. And at the moment, our encounters with nature and with the cosmos are horribly diminished. And that makes us think that we are horribly diminished. And we then stop using the faculties that we may have. after a while you don't have the faculties anymore because you didn't exercise them and we don't know what it is we're capable of I mean that is another very very important point I mean we totally underestimate what we could do and we need to start thinking acting as if I mean I think it was in the master of emistry I said on the matter of God one of the things you can do is to begin by acting as if there were a God you're not saying there is you're just saying, okay, what's it like to act as if there is one? Because I think unless you do that as if exercise,

you won't actually find out anything about what you're really wanting to discover. If you sit coldly waiting for the thing to declare itself to you, you can wait until you're in the tomb. So we need to open ourselves to the beauty that is a gift. We need to be able to increase the beauty that is in the world. I think each one of us can in very little ways. We don't have to be Leonardo to do that. And also to simply eschew lies.

I mean, just to not any longer voice, things that we all inside know are lies, but we all say them anyway because we feel we'll be attacked if we then say them. So don't say the lies. That's very important. You know, another thing, Solzionitz's great speech, you know, is a Nobel speech, whilst one word of truth outweighs the whole world, which is a Russian proverb. So to add to what is good, to respond to what is good, to live with and enjoy what is good, to add to what is beautiful, to live with what is beautiful, to respond to what is beautiful,

and to do the same with what is true. These are the reasons for being here, in my view. So let me integrate what you just said with an idea that's been rolling around my head the last two days. And I think later today I may record a frankly on it. There was a famous book around 25 years ago by William Reese Mogg. And I forgot the other author called The Sovereign Individual that has had a big influence on a lot of Silicon Valley tech bros type of people, which is that cybernetics and cryptocurrencies and all these things would become so prolific that power would be able to be transcended and cross. nation-state borders and individual humans would be able to amass huge amounts of power that would cross borders and transcend governments.

No, no, it's a good thing. No, but I think in the battle, and I don't like using the word battle for obvious reasons, but in the situation we face between power and life, I think we also have a responsibility, some of us, the 3% that you mentioned earlier, to become sovereign individual's wide boundary style, which is to have the intellectual framework of systems ecology, but above that to have the physiology of what you mentioned, the stillness and listening and slowing down

and the parasympathic nervous system, and the psychology of all this, and the spiritual aspect of it, and the ecological and the cultural and that we need humans to, I mean, you didn't use these words, but to wake up and become better, different than we have been, yes, in a Zen sort of way, but also in an activist sort of way. And the difference between the sovereign individual in the sense of the book, and what I have in mind is that there's lots of these people that meet each other and start to,

to act differently and behave differently, and they're living the right brain, left brain integration that you've been such a champion of, and they find each other, and then something else happens, and that's something we can't predict yet. Is something like that what we're discussing? You see, the trouble with an expression like the sovereignty of the individual is that it's compatible with a number of wholly different kind of perspectives. Well, I was just using the name of the book. I'm not saying, I'm not saying, I But since you've introduced it, it requires comment in a way because when I was saying that we have choices, that is one expression of the sovereignty of the individual. But I would reject the idea that we are sovereign in the sense of ultimately we owe things only to ourselves.

We don't. We owe things massively to society and to others. And I think this is something that's being lost. I think that now there are enormously rich. I mean, really, seemingly rich people in the world, far richer than many of the industrial magnates of the 19th century. But a lot of those industrial magnates did absolutely fabulous things with their wealth. And I know that some people now do, but some of them just seem to want to exert power and control. So given what we face, the concept of the sovereign individual is an oxymoron.

See, the trouble is its language again. And what does one mean here? I am an individual in one sense, and I don't think I should lose myself, but I should lose my ego. The self, the individual is a complex one. And, you know, Jung made the distinction between the ego, which is what you need when you're struggling to establish yourself as a separate individual from your mother, the child. You have tantrums. No, I want it. And that, if it goes on into adulthood, you want to get rid of.

But you're not a better person for losing yourself. And why would you have been brought into existence to abolish yourself? No, you need to nourish yourself. And so what a self means is very important. And it must have this interconnected quality. It is part of a system once again. It is not just an individual. It's like those points in the net of Indra

that I'm sure I've spoken to you about, this idea in the Vedantic tradition of a net. that the God Indra covers the universe with. And at every point in the net, there hangs a jewel. And in each jewel, all the other jewels in the net are imaged. So that relationship between connected and separate, not fused, but nonetheless working together, is what we need.

We need individuality, but we need also desperately need a degree of selflessness in the way we think. But that is not always well interpreted. It's not self-destructive self-abasement and attacking yourself. That's histrionic and actually very unhelpful. And to a psychiatrist, the person who's always just attacking themselves, and not helping themselves or anyone else. They need to actually stop and think,

now what can I actually reasonably expect to myself and do? Here's a question I've asked other guests. I didn't anticipate to ask you, but since you are so meticulous and authentic when I say a statement that the clarity of the words, how much of our disconnect between the left and the right hemisphere dominance in our culture is due to English being the lingua franca and the way that the English language is constructed relative to some indigenous languages that have lots of verbs instead of nouns? Have you thought about that?

I have thought about it, of course. and I don't know about that. I think I'm pretty much divided on it. I remember when I learned at school, I wasn't learning Chinese, but the Chinese language depended much more on verbs than ours did and much less on nouns. And I thought that was rather interesting. And it is quite relevant to the right-left hemisphere divide.

except that it's nothing simple like that the ideographic language of Chinese is in the right hemisphere. It isn't, I'm afraid. Anyway, no way to go there because that's a whole other thing. But the English language has certain qualities that make it very rich. It's a mongrel language and therefore draws from many roots. And we have sometimes the same word, apparently, but drawn from. different roots and they mean different things. But I also am aware in learning other languages and I'm not very good at any of them, but I am very fond, particularly of German, that I'm

constantly coming up against words in German for which we have no exact equivalent. And so I'm not sure it's the indigenous tribes. I don't know enough of, I mean, and also all the languages are so different anyway, but, and probably you can't carry on a kind of civilization. with a language which is, I mean, one of the things that I remember describing is the business of tonal language in which you can communicate over a long distance by simply using tones. You'd actually need words. And that works very well in the Amazon Basin and so on, but it probably isn't the way we would have carried on in a settled agricultural society. So I don't know. Some languages are good, some purposes and not for others.

I find it frustrating that English doesn't have some concepts that there are in other languages, and particularly I feel that one of the problems for philosophy is so basic, is that we have only one word for no, I mean, K-N-O-W. And in every other language I'm aware of, they distinguish sharply between, knowing a fact, like Paris is the capital of France, and knowing Paris, because you live there for several years. I mean, it's a completely different meanings. But in the English language, we just have this one word.

So I'm constantly having to say, when I'm talking about this, I'm using no in the Kenan Connetre sense, not in the Vicent-South sense or whatever. I want to be respectful of your time and your evening. Just out of curiosity, it is around dinner time in the Isle of Sky. to the west of Scotland, what might you be having for dinner tonight, Ian? Do you know I'm having some leftover chicken? Okay.

Nothing terribly exciting. Excellent. But I think it will be curried and probably very delicious. So I hadn't really decided. I started this interview with a prepared question and I will end it with a prepared question and everything in the middle was kind of on, the fly. What, if anything, gives you hope that humanity could shift our ways of thinking in time

to avoid systemic collapse? A number of things, really. The first is that anybody's guesses about where the future of humanity lies are just that guesses. And it's very difficult to predict the future. and there have been times in the past when one might very well have thought you know that we were killing ourselves and are we going to die of plagues and there would be no more humanity

and so it's not the first time we've been here and secondly I think that when the shit hits the fans so speak and people do get serious about action and unfortunately we're so comfortable at the moment that we don't realize how close we are to the brink.

And I think that our comfort, I mean, I'm no one to speak here. I lead a comfortable existence, of course. But I think the comfort can blind you to various things, to the proximity of danger, but also can make you less grateful for what is good, less struck with wonder at it

and just more sort of slobish and complacent in one's out. But I think that when things really get tough then people do start you know doing things together and the fact that people

are talking about these issues far more than they were 10 years ago, they're collaborating and beginning to make these small mitochondrial senses half a dozen of which I'm very honored to be connected with and do very little for but I'm grateful for the connection I love the way that young people

are now generally much more open to talk of the sacred and the divine than they used to be it no longer seems smart to be dismissive of it I think they realized there's something very badly missing and it's always very hard to articulate

but there they are. I love the way that they come up to me after I've given a lecture as I particularly remember the lecture to I did in America and the lecture I gave in Cambridge and afterwards a crowd of young people came up and wanted to talk to me about it

and felt that there was something important there. That's good as far as I'm concerned, because the future is what young people will do. I mean, what I can do is, by the end of the air, but it's what they will do that will govern everything. I like to think I can offer some insights, but there will. So I do think that, and also I just am hopeful because I can't believe, I mean, humanity may very well be very much diminished in number and in power, and that may be a very, very good thing for humanity. And I don't think, though, that humanity will be completely wiped out.

And I think that whoever survives will, by definition, have the attitude that will enable them to be able to carry things forward in a more, oh dear, that word sustainable, which sounds so bureaucratic. but what I mean is a way that can actually be sustained by us on our poor suffering planet. One of the difficulties is the language, isn't it? But there we go. Is there any question that I could have asked you that you would have liked me to ask? Well, yes, possibly. Although I have talked about it once or twice on other podcasts, but then good heavens, I can't expect people to see more than a tiny handful of them.

But it's my growing conviction of the directedness of the cosmos. So I read Jude Caravan, who as you probably know is a physicist, who's written philosophically about physics, astrophysics. And one of the things that comes through very clearly is that long before there was life, there was a sort of meaningful direction to the way the universe was going. It was creating more complex, more beautiful structures, and it was exploring potential. And I think this idea of potential is something I really want to get across, that whatever you may think about this cosmos, whenever it started as this simple ball of a few elements, it had the potential.

It must have had the potential, because we've seen that potential fulfilled, to grow in complexity and order and beauty and eventually to create life and eventually to create vast Matthew Passion. I mean, this is the point. If you believe that matter is simple dust of no consequence

and absolutely without meaning or consciousness or direction, then it's quite extraordinary stuff because after it's been milling around, bumping into itself for a few billion years, it happens to write Bath Matthew Passion, which is one of the most sort of you know, consciousness

altering experiences you can have. So what I think there was directed us in the cosmos, and that gives me hope that the direction won't just be cut off. And then on top of that, far more interestingly really,

is the business of life. I suppose that when I was young, but not for the last 30 years, but in the first part of my life, I probably thought of life as being very separate from inanimacy because of how very obviously different it is. But I've moved from a position where there's a hard border to one where there isn't really. And I'm not really talking about the nitty-gritty of RNA and a of a lot. all that. And just, that comes into it. But what I'm thinking is that the qualities of life are actually there in a very, very, very minimal form in the universe that we like to call inanimate. So it does structure itself. It does respond. It isn't just passive. It starts to do things.

It expands in places and so on. So it's building, it's creating. And with life, This process is simply a billion-fold more powerful. And instead of taking literally millions of years for a reaction to take place, it can now take place, you know, in a fraction of the second. And again, I'm not just talking about chemical reactions, so that is also true. But what I'm really talking about here is our responsiveness to the cosmos. We come out of the cosmos, but we're not the cosmos.

cosmos. We're both in it and we're distinct. We're one with it and we're not. And it's the ability in that situation where there's separateness but not by any means, total disjunction, that there can be relation. And I believe the cosmos is essentially relational, that everything is relational, that relations exist before the relata, before the things that are related. And the reason that there is a cosmos is that the ground of being, whatever that means, and it's impossible to capture it in thought or language, but whatever it is that underwrit this whole thing happening, has the nature, a creative nature. It is essentially creative, and it is essentially relational, which is why in most cultures that I know of, in their spiritual tradition, it is thought of as love.

And love is nothing if it is not relational. And therefore, there is something that comes into being in relation with that ground of being, and that is the cosmos that we are part of. And in that cosmos, there is a dance going on between the ground of being and the stuff that we call cosmos. And at a certain point, life kicks in here, and life enables responsiveness to accelerate unimaginably. both in time and in degree. And what that means is that suddenly we are able to respond to values, purpose and direction, and that we see these, and I'm very clear about this, that these are not things that we have made up. These are things that we didn't invent to chair ourselves up.

They are things that we either discover or don't discover. And in discovering them, our role is to respond to them, to be grateful for them, to experience awe and to wish them well and to bring more of them about in the little way that we can. Because, you know, again, little as we are, we don't know how big that is. So I didn't understand all that, but something about it rang true to me, which was the exact same reaction I had two years ago when I came across your work. So I will chew on what you just said. But if I could summarize it as we're headed for a precipice in our current civilization, but despite that chaos and disruption, that there is some arc or thread of an expansion

of consciousness and creativity in life that's emergent, that your scholarship has latched on to there's something there that's important and that we can't fully describe it. I mean, in some ways, this podcast is called The Great Simplification. A subtitle may be the inexorable expansion of Nate's right brain access because I'm, I really, in working with you and reading your stuff, I was pretty left brain dominant when I started, you know, this inquiry 10 years ago, 15 years ago into this. So I feel what you're saying. I don't fully understand it. but it motivates me.

I'd be very happy if you to now or on another occasion to say, you know what? I don't understand is, right, because I do think that I can, I mean, you may not agree with what I say, but I think I can account for all that I've just said. I believe you. What I just want to say,

no, before we sign off, I just want to say one thing. You just said that, as you used to be rather left brain and now you think of yourself as more right brain. Well, I'm on a path, I think. You're on a path, good. But the point is this, that in doing so, you are enacting this shift that is what I refer to.

And the lovely thing that I hear from people is that in reading my work, they do get a-ha moments. And they do say, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. You have to see everything in that light. And that is pretty good, as far as I'm concerned. So I just wanted to say that before we sign on. You are a beautiful human being and a scholar and exemplar of humanity. And I have to just thank you for all of your work that you've parsed and condensed for others. And it's 2,500 pages of parsing.

But there's a lot of nuance, as you've pointed out. So thank you. And please come back in another year maybe with Patrick Ophels or some other combination because there's a lot there. That can't be easily summarized in two hours. Well, that's lovely. I draw a veil over the delusional in what you just said, and just thank you for the kindness of it. To be continued, my friend.

Thank you so much. Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit the Great Simplification. for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Higgins, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by

Misty Stinnett, Leslie Battlutz, Brady Hyen and Lizzie Siriani.