"Houston, we've had a problem"

    I once read that our pace of life is too fast for the marrow of our bones. It sounds like 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 wisdom 
but 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

    

The EXCELLENT FULL interview from which the above was quoted: