I once read that our pace of life is too fast for the marrow of our bones. This, to some of us, is deep, aboriginal wisdom.
However, in our materialist society, including & perhaps worst of all in our institutes of higher learning, most are clueless about wisdom, spirituality etc.
At the same time, "The one who dies with the most toys wins," though initially meant as a joke, has become most peoples' unconscious guiding principle.
“Hindu definition of hell: more, faster.” Iain McGilchrist “Approach the Sacred: Offer Gratitude, Dwell in Humility, Speak Truth and Let the Mercy In.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMtnSpjcyA
Literary scholar, psychiatrist & author Iain McGilchrist and theologian & author Chris Green discuss the problems humanity faces today, foretold in Hermes Trismegistus' ancient poem:
“Nothing will be left to tell of your wisdombut old graven stones.
Men will be weary of life
and will cease seeing the universe
as worthy of reverent wonder.
Spirituality, the greatest of all blessings,
will be threatened with extinction
and believed a burden to be scorned.
The world will no longer be loved
as an incomparable work of Atun,
a glorious monument to his primal goodness,
an instrument of the divine will
to evoke veneration and praise in the beholder.
Egypt will be widowed.
Every sacred voice will be silenced.
Darkness will be preferred to light.
No eyes will raise to heaven.
The pure will be thought insane,
and the impure will be honored as wise.
The madmen will be believed brave,
and the wicked esteemed as good.
Knowledge of the immortal soul
will be laughed at and denied.
No reverent words worthy of heaven
will be heard or believed.” Hermes Trismegistus
Iain McGilchrist:
"I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls.
Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world.
But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere.
Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about.
Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. This is why I have written the last long book I will ever write: 'The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.'" Iain McGilchrist https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/
Chris Green:
“I think we have to face two facts for sure. One is, in the tens of thousands of years that human
beings have been on this planet, we’ve accumulated wisdom for living a certain way. And over the last two or three generations
in our ‘developed world’ we’ve broken with that wisdom. For good or bad, we’ve
discarded much of that wisdom. And we don’t have any wisdom to replace it. So
even if you think this is progress, even if you think this is where we should
go, you have to at least admit that we’re going forth into a future that we
think is going to be better, but we don’t have accumulated wisdom to work with.
And no matter what else you think, you have to reckon with that. What are you
going to do with parenting, marriage, work, prayer, politics, if you can’t rely
on accumulated wisdom? Where is that going to come from? You’ve got to reckon
with that.
The other is, and they’re related of course, is we’ve also broken with the
rhythms of Nature. So again, what we’ve accumulated over these generations
of human beings is a way of living in harmony with
Nature. We no longer do. So we’re out of rhythm
with Nature – quite literally – and
we’re breaking with received tradition. So what are we
going to do then?
Even if in your
wildest fantasies about human progress, you want to say, ‘We’re going to make a
better, more human future,’ how are you going to do it, if you’re
out of rhythm with Nature and you’ve broken
with received
tradition? I think all of us can get to those questions,
no matter what our politics.”
Iain McGilchrist:
“And I’d add, ‘Broken with God,’ and I’m sure you’d agree
with me. And just incidentally, the three things that the psychology literature
shows are most important for people are
1) the sense of fellow feeling with
other human beings with whom they share values. Now those values probably come from a tradition, from a culture. And
they can trust them because they know how they think and they can share their
meals, their houses. They can call on one another for help, and they respect
one another. That is number 1.
2) Closeness to Nature – not ‘the environment’ which is
some technical term for something that surrounds us. But Nature is inside us and we are in Nature,
and we come from it, and we go back to it.
3) And this is actually the most powerful
effect on physical as well as mental and spiritual
health, is the connection with something sacred or Divine in your life. If
you don’t have that, the evidence shows that we suffer in every respect.
So those things are, if you like, the wisdom. They were part of the tradition that knew this. Now people nowadays, misunderstand a culture and misunderstand a tradition.
To deal with culture first. We think
it’s okay that we just destroy a culture. The industrial revolution
started this, because it took people who had been living in a certain village
perhaps with their ancestors for a thousand years, and they knew that place,
and their ancestors were buried in the churchyard and all the rest. And they
took them into a city, and put them in inhuman circumstances in a factory, and
that helped them to lose their culture, unless
they clung to the church. So it did have the effect that a lot of these
people sort of thought that the church is the thing that can save us.
But their culture
is also very important. And we now think that it’s perfectly okay to have
something called ‘multiculture.’ Well there isn’t. What there is is kindness
and compassion between people in a community, but if you choose to live in a
certain community, you must become part of that community. You can’t just say, ‘Well,
we’re going to be an indigestible lump.’ If you want to be an indigestible lump,
then I’m sorry. My answer is don’t do that here. You have to do that somewhere
where you can be digestible. All these things I’m saying are things you’re not
allowed to say anymore. But I do think they’re right. And I’m not being
critical of other groups in our society. I think they contribute a lot and some
of them have great virtues of course. It’s not about good and bad. It’s about a culture needs to thrive, and it can only do so if it is cohesive. So that’s the first thing." ****
**** Chris Green (later) tried to clarify: “… this is what I hear in you, if we care about equality, then we have to think rightly about difference. If we care about the stranger, and we care about making room for those who have come to us in desperation, we have to think about stability in culture. I will sometimes say to my friends, my students, those I’m pastoring, that in order to actually show hospitality, you have to have a home. You have to have a place that’s yours, that has a certain rhythm, that has walls and doors, doors that lock. You have your way of living that you can then open up to those who are (newcomers). But hospitality is not possible if you have no doors, no windows, no walls, no locks. If you don’t have a life that’s yours, there’s nothing to invite people into.
So I think if we could think oppositionally a little bit, if we would just start to think like that, we would realize precisely because we think all human being are made in the image of God and should be given equal rights and goods, precisely because we care about that full equality, we have to be able to rightly name and honor difference, and so on down the line. If we can just shift the terms of the conversation. And if we can’t shift the terms of the conversation, we’re going to keep having rage battles in which we’re denouncing each other in meaner and meaner ways. But somehow we’ve got to shift the mode of our conversation. I think oppositional thinking is a way to do that.”
Iain McGilchrist continued: "People think, ‘Oh,
we can’t be dealing with culture – that’s the past.’
But hang on. We are the descendants of literally millions and millions of years
of history. We can’t just suddenly in three generations throw all that away.
The history is there in us in any case, even if we don’t think about the valuable
cultures that we have grown and brought into being over the last couple of
thousand years.
But the other one
is tradition. Tradition is a living, flowing, changing
thing. It is not a
moribund, ossified, never-to-be-changed anything. So a tradition is what
enables you to change. Without a tradition, you make big mistakes. You say, ‘Oh,
we’re going to break with everything in the past and we’re going to say it was
all wrong, and we’re going to destroy it.’ And then you’re going to be faced
with, ‘Where are you going to find it all?’ You think you’re going to re-invent
thousands of years of wisdom, your puny little self in Manchester in 2025? No,
you’re not. It’s a recipe for suicide to not
learn from the
distillation of the wisdom of the past.
Now that doesn’t mean that nothing can
change. It means the opposite. It means that things now have a steady ground on which they can
change. (((**** Echoes what Chris Green was pointing to re: the host needing to feel grounded, 'at home' before being able to host to newcomers, who always feel stressed / 'displaced' even when simply moving across the street.))) And if you look back over the last couple of thousand years of Western
history, as I have done and have written about, what you see is that societies
change very much in their ways of thinking, their priorities, and so forth. But
they didn’t have this let’s rip up tradition attitude, at least not mainly.
Until some
of the reformers had it I’m afraid, and that was a problem I think for a
while. And then, one of the children of the enlightenment has been (the notion)
that the past has no relevance,
because the only thing that matters is logic.
But I’m afraid logic will leave you barren when it comes to all the important
things like love, the awesome nature of the natural world, the beauty of art,
of music, of architecture, of myth, of narrative … These are the ways in which
the great truths can be conveyed.
Myth has
come to mean an untruth. But actually in its origin, it meant the big truths in
the classical Greek era ‘mythos’ was the only way in which the big truths could
be conveyed, because they can’t be construed in everyday language – the kind of
language that’s suited to making a dishwasher manual. Partly because of course things are necessarily dipolar. Myth brings
together opposites; confounds our everyday language. And therefore a story will bring this to life for you.
But ‘logos,’ from which we get logic, was
thought the petty kind of understanding, that a lawyer would use in court – ‘No
he owes you 30 shekels, and you owe him …’ whatever. Logos is fine for that. But
for understanding the big truths, we need something else.
It just reminds me that Neils Bohr, who after all
is considered the father of quantum physics said, ‘The opposite of a great
truth is another great truth.’ This is obviously not true at the trivial level. I often say, ‘I
either did have milk in my
coffee this morning or I didn’t.’
I’m not suggesting that there are two ways about it.
But when it comes to the really big issues that matter, that give meaning to life, purpose to it, direction to it, these are areas in which the thing and its opposite have to be negotiated. And the best way that this can be done is in poetry, narrative, myth and in ritual.”
Chris Green:
“And all of those are, in part, ways of creating the room where things can emerge."
Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Chris E W Green “Approach the Sacred: Offer Gratitude, Dwell in Humility, Speak Truth and Let the Mercy In.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMtnSpjcyA
“… people who have a deep conviction and belief in a transcendent reality are better able to disconnect from the idea that the body and its ails are ‘all there is.’
By connecting to a higher power – however one experiences this or chooses to define it – we bring forth our inner sense of innate wholeness. We are able to see ourselves as spiritually perfect, even when suffering ill health. This promotes our ability to reconnect with our implicate patterns of health.”
M.J. Abadie. “Healing, Mind, Body, Spirit.” Adams Media Corp, 1997.
The EXCELLENT FULL interview from which the above was quoted:
