Wisdom, Depth and Meaning

    Discernment is in short supply these days - leaving too many of us drowning in negativity, cynicism, meaninglessness, anxiety & depression, externalizing our unresolved, unprocessed inner conflicts onto other people, living creatures and the Cosmos.

"Despair is only for those 

who see the end beyond doubt. 

We do not."

J.R.R. Tolkien

    A radically different, infinitely healthier, wiser perspective is that of the mystics as well as an increasing number of intelligent AND wise scholars like Jeremy Lent ("The Web of Meaning" 2022), Iain McGilchrist ("The Matter with Things" 2021), etc who masterfully integrate science and traditional wisdom to help us feel at home in our Universe. 

    A wonderful living example of a highly-evolved mystic is James Finley, author of the exceptional biography, “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation” 2023 - which I highly recommend! 
    An excerpt from an excellent recent James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "One of the Holy Cross brothers, teaching at the high school I went to, talked about monasteries in religion class. He spoke of monasteries as places where people go to seek and to find and give themselves to God, who’s fully poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life. And they believe that their hidden life of fidelity to that search touches the whole world in ways we don’t understand.

    Thomas Merton in ‘The Sign of Jonas’ on the very first page wrote, ‘As for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God’s face.’ At age 14, I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me said, ‘Me too.’ That is the depth from which he spoke of his own longing for God, awakened that depth in me. And for the next four years, I read that book over and over. And later, I lived in the cloistered monastery for almost six years - it had a profound effect on me. 
    And then Merton, as a novice master, guided me in the search. And he led me into the classical texts of the mystics – St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, etc. I was so radicalized by this sense of communion, this deep experience of incarnate Infinity intimately realized, like the divinity of standing up & sitting down, and how reflective prayer becomes words of wordless silence and oneness, and so on. And Merton once said in one of his talks to the novices, that monastic life is carefully crafted to nurture and protect that oneness. But there are people in the world who are being led to it and they don’t understand what’s happening to them, and have no one to guide them. 
    So when I left the monastery, I found that that was true. I still wanted to live that way - my meditation practice and the mystics … So I started giving meditation retreats.

    I had a chance to study medieval philosophy under Daniel Walsh, who taught philosophy at Columbia, and was influential in Merton’s coming to the monastery. I was very affected by the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages. So when I was writing ‘Merton’s Palace of Nowhere’ on the true self, I said I don’t know how to communicate this to people out here, that we subsist in God like light subsists in flames – the Oneness. And Walsh wrote back. He said you can’t communicate it. But it will communicate itself through you if you’re convinced in what you say. And he said, if you are what you say. And you know it will communicate itself because there’ll be a response in the listener that knows, something very deep inside of them that matters very much is being awakened.

    I think that’s what I do. I try to speak from my heart about this oneness. I try to help people look for little moments where they had a glimpse of it, in the midst of nature, in the arms of the beloved, or reading a child a good night story, or lying in the dark listening to your breathing - how it washes over you like a taste of it, and how in that taste, you get the intuition that in these awakening moments, not that something more was given, but like a curtain opened and that you tasted momentarily the abyss-like divine nature of every moment of your life. 
    And so then ... What’s the way of life in which I can be liberated from what hinders me, from habitually abiding in the divinity of the immediacy of my life? And I get the feeling that people come to the retreat when they hear that it’s in silence and about the mystics, that they’re in some way been touched by that. Like how do I deepen that? Or how do I be faithful to that? How do I understand it? How do I live by it?
    For me where it started was because of the (childhood) trauma that was going on, a lot of the arguments with my father was about Catholicism (but) they fought about all kinds of things. So (my mother) would take us (6 children, I was the oldest) to mass on Sunday. And she would ask us to pray to God to give us the strength to get through the things that happen when daddy gets mad. 
    And so I was lying in my bed at night – I was maybe 4 – and I could hear my father screaming at my mother outside the door. And maybe earlier that day he had hit me. I knew tomorrow he wanted to do it again. And so I took my mother’s word and I prayed to God to give me the strength. I was lying there in the dark, and the experience I had was that God heard my prayer, came to me in the dark and in a moment I can’t remember merged with me. 
    So when I woke up the next morning, the trauma still went on. But when I came out into the living room, it was different, because if my father hit me, he thought he was hitting me, but he didn’t know he was hitting that other me, that other people could see. My father didn’t know that the real me was secretly carried by God into a secret place (my father) didn’t know about.

    Later, when I became a psychologist, I learned that I was dissociating, that I had borrowed the religious imagery of my mother to give meaning to dissociating. But that doesn’t mean that God didn’t merge with me in the dark. And so I had a lot of moments like that. I had a lot of these unitive moments. 
    So when I read Merton, I saw monasteries as places where you can actually go and live all the time, because I was like a flame flickering in the wind, it was very much in the heart of me. But I thought the monasteries were built so people can surrender themselves over to that.
    If we think of the word trauma, the root of the word means a wound or a source of suffering. So we might say that all of us are subject to traumas great & small that can and sometimes do occur in our life together. Small traumas are the slights and the insults, the abandonments, the accidents, the hurts. But the point is, the center holds. 
    Big trauma gets so intense you kind of disappear into the trauma – kind of a psychic death really. If you survive the incest or the beating, whatever, you’re so glad you survived, but not quite, because it got inside of you. And then a triggering event is anything in the present that resembles the original trauma, your autonomic nervous system, you’ll re-experience the trauma – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And so then as a clinician, that needs to be dealt with in its own right. That’s the therapy.  

    Sometimes we get this feeling that we’re skimming over the surface of the depths of our own life, and our own woundedness is carrying us along, as part of that. And we realize somewhere that we’re suffering from depth deprivation. 
    And we know of depth deprivation because we can single out certain moments when we tasted depth: in the midst of nature, in the middle of the dark, or in the arms of the beloved, telling a child a good night story, a pause between two lines of a poem that shimmered & shined. So you know it’s there.

    So then the question is, what are the ways where that depth dimension starts shining out of the therapy itself?
    Let’s say you call me for therapy, and I really don’t know what you want to talk about other than the little bit you told me on the phone. But I’ve done it so much, I already know what’s going to have to happen between us, if the healing you’re looking for is going to occur. And here’s what happens. 
    It’s like a liturgy or a ritual. We’ll both sit down. You’ll talk and I’ll listen. At a certain point, I’ll ask you a question and it’s a real question. I want to understand you better. And the question is such that you can’t respond without pausing for a moment to listen to yourself. And in that moment, you’re becoming more present to yourself in my presence. And it’s already started. 
    You don’t say it. You’re not ready yet, but it’s already begun. So little by little, this way of growth forms an alliance. 
    And in that trusting alliance, the person goes through their work. So one of my theses is that, when we risk sharing what hurts the most, in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can be re-parented in love. Sometimes you get the feeling you’re in the presence of someone who is more present to you than you are. And they see a value in you you’re not yet able to see. And you have faith in their faith in you. And little by little by little, it arcs over and becomes internalized and so on.

    But there’s another level to this. In that process, there is the opening up of what Jesus called ‘the pearl of great price.’ And what opens up within the person is a depth of presence that’s abyss-like. They might start laughing or they might tear-up. It’s deeper than simply freedom from symptoms. 
    And so sometimes at the end of therapy, people are grateful that they have less anxiety with panic or self-cutting, whatever it is. But often they’ll say something like this: ‘Something was given to me and I’m so grateful for it. I matter. I didn’t know that I mattered. I have a value that cannot be calculated. There’s a preciousness about me that came shining out through my woundedness, and no one can take that away from me.’ 
    And that’s the spiritual dimension. I think that starts to put words to that dimension.

    'Sometimes, when having to endure the worst, yet finding God in the darkest place, you are liberated from the tyranny of shame over your heart. Where anguish and ecstasy intersect, it becomes incandescent — it becomes oneness.' James Finley  

    Being a therapist was a good fit for me. I felt so grateful for it - to experience the unrelenting courage of the human spirit. Sometimes people would say something to me like, ‘I feel so safe in here.’ I’d say, but notice I’m not doing anything to you. And I think what it is, when you’re in my presence, you’re more present to yourself. And if you can be more present to yourself in my presence, you can literally be more present to yourself (also) when you’re not in my presence. And you keep sifting it out and sifting it out. I felt so honored by that process."

    “A mystical experience is experiencing God’s presence in your life.” James Finley

    "The question is, ‘what does that mean?’ I’ll give some examples from Thomas Merton and all the mystics. 
    This is from the last chapter of Merton’s ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’: ‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.’ So there he’s bearing witness to the already perfectly holy nature of what is – this dance. 
    And then Merton said a stunning thing. He said, ‘We don’t need to go very far to catch echoes of that game and of that dancing.’ And he gives very simple examples. He said, ‘You’re out walking alone in the midst of nature, and you turn to see a flock of birds descending, and as if out of the corner of your eye, you catch something in their descent that’s primordial, vast and true.’ 
    And then, to use faith language, although the person might not explicitly say it in faith language, you know that the presence of God is the infinity of their descent. And their descent is the incarnate immediacy of God. ((Self realizing that it's looking in the mirror)) And God is the infinity of your awareness of their descent. And your awareness of their descent is the concrete immediacy of God. And that’s the experience of God.’ ((Perhaps it's just a matter of remembering - remembering our True Nature, our Self, our ‘Original Face before our grandparents were born’ as we co-create the Cosmos))

    Another one is, there are moments between two people, in moments of loving union with each other, when they sense something within their love that’s beyond what words can say. It is a boundaryless quality. And in faith, you say, ‘God’s the infinity.' The infinite love of God is the infinity of their love. And the infinity of their love is incarnate in the midst of God. 
    You’re reading a child a good night story. You sense that in the presence of the child you’re in the presence of God. That’s why they’re so disarming. 
    And then what I’m saying also then, in love lost, as painful as it is, if you just sit with it very quietly, you can sense something of God’s sustaining presence guiding you through the loss. And when you come out the other side, you’re grateful to get your balance back, but you know, it’s so important to never forget what was learned in the dark – about fragility, the delicacy of life, grace."
    James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :

    "Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper, more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. 
    If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words, we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe

“Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, 
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, 
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.  
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; 
only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure & silent merge with formless truth.  
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; 
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.  
Whole, you enter the Whole.  
Your personal self returns to its radiant,  
intimate, deathless source.” 
Mundaka Upanishad

    "To have the radiant calm and unswayed balance of mind that we call equanimity is to be like the earth. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go." Sharon Salzberg

 

        "The clouds are thin, the wind is light, 
         the sun is nearly overhead. Past the flowers, 
         through the willows, down along the stream. 
         People don't see the joy in my heart. 
         They think I'm wasting time or acting like a child." Cheng Hong, Chinese poet

 

Beyond Time - photograph by David A. Lovas

 

Remaining Open and Curious

    "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination & understanding are filled with doubt & indecision." Bertrand Russell

    A simplistic, superficial, literal 'understanding' of even the most complex of mysteries is common. We dread uncertainty, rush to conclusions & hide in group-think for (false) security. Respected monk Thomas Merton said that even in monasteries, people of spiritual depth are very rare:
    “Once in a while you will find someone with whom you can talk about (spiritual experiences). But they are hard to find. And when you are fortunate enough to find such a person it will be a temporary arrangement. For you will spend most of your life without such a person, which will be your solitude in which you will learn from God how to depend on God to guide you into ever deeper communion with God.”
    James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

    ‘Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’ William James 

    “Don’t carry away a conclusion unless it has been arrived at through your own experience. Rather, if there hasn’t been direct experience, carry away the question.”
    Toni Packer. “The Silent Question. Meditating in the Stillness of Not-Knowing.” Shambhala, 2007.

    “Throughout much of Western history, until the fourth century AD when early, ‘primitive’ Christianity began to be systematically stamped out beneath the jackboots of the Roman Catholic Church, ‘beatific visions’ were the primary recruitment tool of the enormously ancient and influential ‘religion with no name’ that is the subject of The Immortality Key. This religion could shift and morph into multiple forms – The Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries are among the examples … and to these I would add the much older religion of the painted caves explored in Supernatural – but the common factor in every case was a psychedelic sacrament (sometimes food, sometimes drink, sometimes both) consumed by all participants.
    ‘Primitive’ Christianity started out around two thousand years ago as merely the latest form or incarnation of this archaic religion, and – at least in some cases – seems to have made use of bread & wine infused with psychedelic plants & fungi as its sacrament. At that time, because Christianity was persecuted under the Roman Empire until the reign of Constantine (AD 306-337) it was normal practice for its adherents to meet secretly in small groups to eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion, and afterward experience powerful & deeply meaningful beatific visions. And more often than not, these secret ceremonies of direct experiential communion with the divine were led by women with men playing a secondary role.

    Then, from the second half of the fourth century AD onward, came the rise of Roman Catholicism, dominated by men who took decisive steps to marginalize the role of women in the Church and to remove the psychedelic elements from the sacrament, reducing Holy Communion to the empty symbolic act, devoid of powerful experiential content, that hundreds of millions of Christians continue to perform.
    My friend, the visionary artist Alex Grey, whose work has been much influenced by Ayahuasca, describes the Old Testament story of the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as ‘the first psychedelic slapdown.’
    Pursuing that thought, Roman Catholicism’s persecution of ‘primitive’ Christians and the extirpation of their visionary Communion wine might be described as the second psychedelic slapdown.
    And then, in the twentieth century, just as we seemed to be freeing ourselves from the loveless iron grip of the Church and opening up to new spiritual possibilities, governments around the world waded in with the so-called ‘war on drugs’ – the third psychedelic slapdown.
    Over the centuries, therefore, enormous often deadly forces (with the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from experiencing direct contact with realms & realities other than the mundane. At the same time, however, even when it must have seemed that the ‘religion with no name’ had been deleted completely from the human record, there were always – if I may extend the metaphor – multiple ‘backup disks’ in the form of psychedelic plants & fungi growing all over the planet. There might be long gaps, lacunae of centuries even, but the moment would always come when certain curious individuals, either by accident or by design, would sample the plants and mushrooms that serve as the permanent Hall of Records of the religion with no name, thus setting in motion the experiences & subsequent processes of social organization that would ultimately allow it to be rescued in full force.
    It is not an accident that the Mazatec shamans of southern Mexico refer to the psilocybe mushrooms used in their ceremonies as ‘little teachers,’ and, in a sense, that is what all psychedelic plants & fungi are – literally the ancient teachers of mankind. Whether we engage with Ayahuasca, or with Psilocybe Mexicana, or with peyote, or with LSD (which is itself derived from the fungus ergot) we are dealing with the biological agents of the religion with no name and with their numinous capacity to reawaken our spiritual appetites and potential.”
    Graham Hancock's Foreword to: Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    “… in 2006, the (Johns) Hopkins team completed the first psilocybin (research) project since the 1970s, when research into the forbidden substance became largely impossible during the War on Drugs. Under tightly controlled conditions the psilocybin unleashed a profound, mystical experience that seemed to anchor the lasting emotional & psychological benefits recorded by the thirty-six volunteers. They had no life-threatening illness, and were otherwise free of the debilitating angst (morbid fear of death) that consumed (some previous research subjects with advanced cancer). But these early results were shockingly similar to the 2016 collaboration with NYU: one-third of the participants rated their experience ‘as the most spiritually significant of their lives,’ comparing it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds placed it among the top five. When friends, family, & coworkers were interviewed, they confirmed the remarkable transformations in the volunteers’ mood & behavior for months, even years, following their single dose.
    From that moment on, Dr. Roland Griffiths upended his career to focus almost exclusively on psilocybin, creating what is now called the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit. More than 360 volunteers and fifty peer-reviewed publications later, he’s ready to call a spade a spade. In his 2016 TED Talk, Griffiths said the drug-induced ecstasy he routinely witnesses in the laboratory is ‘virtually identical’ to that reported by natural-born prophets & visionaries throughout human history. The underlying experience itself, whether activated by psilocybin or some spontaneous internal flood of neurotransmitters**, must be ‘biologically normal.’ If we are essentially wired for mystical experience, it raises the intriguing prospect that, under the right mind-set & environment, any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant.
    Griffith’s colleague, Dr. William Richards, has been testing that hypothesis since the 1960s, when he codeveloped the very scale to measure these peak states of consciousness, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. … In his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards maps out the essential features of the perfect psilocybin journey: transcending time & space, accessing knowledge that is normally not available. Oftentimes there is a merging of the everyday personality with a larger, more fundamental whole. Words fail to capture the unsinkable conviction that the experiencer has somehow glimpsed the ultimate nature of reality, an insight that seems ‘blatantly obvious’ at the time, and is usually accompanied by intense feelings of joy, tranquility, exaltation, & awe.”
    Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    ** NOTE: Neurotransmitters mediate but are NOT the "ultimate cause" of mystical experiences any more than a TV set actually causes the Olympic Games, or anything else we watch on it.
    ALSO, shamans who for thousands of years have, & continue to facilitate such numinous experiences, actually do so far more often & widely with drumming & other non-pharmaceutical rituals than with plant medicines.
    AND, with the appropriate "set & setting" people for millennia have also achieved profound mystical experiences & insights by themselves through meditation & other spiritual practices and less often, even spontaneously. This strongly suggests that we are not only "wired for mystical experiences," but that "we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience."

    “When we are in contact with the ineffable, divine reality that is our source, we also know what state we shall return to. Without this knowledge we are indeed dead, even though we may show signs of physical life.”
    Stephan A. Hoeller. “Gnosticism. New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing.” Quest, 2002.

    In summary, direct mystical experiences may be essential prerequisites for us to open to deeper realities, which our 'usual' way of perceiving & thinking these days, can rarely access or comprehend.
    A wide variety of spiritual practices - from yogic breathing techniques, various meditation techniques, chanting, drumming, dancing, tai chi / qi gong, yoga, sweat lodge ceremonies, and plant medicines in appropriate set & settings, with appropriately-trained traditional shamans or health-care professionals - pave the way to profoundly life-altering, life-affirming direct mystical experiences and insights.

Personal Responsibility

    In her valuable 2024 book, “Invisible Loss. Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief,” Christina Rasmussen guides us to consider our "baseline story of self - how our life story sounds and feels to us ... our past and who we are ... how we have been surviving our everyday life." 

    Most of us immediately resist doing any such thing, perhaps grumbling 'I'm just fine, thank you very much!' We may actually fail to see, or simply not be ready to deal with our wounds. Whichever the case, the vast majority of us mistakenly assume that it's better to deal with 'all that deep stuff' later, much later, never. Of the 119 folks I sent email reminders of my posts, only 50 or so look at them, and when the topic is really deep, the number drops to around 20.

    One might assume / hope that if there's anyone brave enough to take, as Joseph Campbell called it, 'the hero's journey' and face & grow from encountering their own demons, it would be monks who devote their whole lives to deep contemplation & prayer in monasteries. But legendary monk Thomas Merton told fellow monk James Finley otherwise:
    “... what I clearly remember and took to heart was the quiet assurance with which (Thomas Merton) said: ‘Once in a while you will find someone (in the monastery) with whom you can talk about (spiritual experiences). But they are hard to find. And when you are fortunate enough to find such a person it will be a temporary arrangement. For you will spend most of your life without such a person, which will be your solitude in which you will learn from God how to depend on God to guide you into ever deeper communion with God.’”
    James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023. POWERFUL, VALUABLE - A REAL HERO'S JOURNEY

    When we ARE actually 'fine,' then usually we sleep soundly, have pleasant dreams, wake up happy & energized to greet each new day our family & co-workers, we're quick to forgive, and excited to have the privilege of creatively nurturing our family, friends, humanity & Nature.
    That's NOT you? So actually it's more like you're "doing your best to get through the day" ie just trying to survive? Well isn't it time to look into that, and aim for a far better quality of life?

    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" Krishnamurti 

    YES, OUR SOCIETY IS SICK - AND - each one of us must take our own, separate hero's journey!

    “It is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening.” Mark Epstein MD

    “We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti

    In this imho excellent interview, psychiatrist / researcher / author Iain McGilchrist provides a psychiatric evaluation of our present culture as a whole AND our personal responsibility to think & behave WISELY :

    “I would think this patient who comes to me was very anxious, unsatisfied, depressed in fact, overstimulated, over-involved with his or her own inner life and not enough with a more general vision of life. I would think there was a sort of problem, not necessarily an innate problem with narcissism, but that was part of the picture. And 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 onboard 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, as though there is no point in things. So I would see this anxious, depressed patient as over-dependent on the left hemisphere’s thinking, and I would see them as, in a simple sense, somewhat narcissistic.
    I think it’s crucial to emphasize that people don’t hear it when you first meet them and tell them, ‘Well 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 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. (Left hemisphere thinking is) black & white, cut & dried, either or, categorical, abstracted, theoretical, but not actually in that place where it’s 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, that 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 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 & 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 mine 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 nowadays 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 what people need is exactly what they get when they enter into therapy. They get an ‘Aha’ moment. And my problem as a very naïve young psychiatrist was being able to see the solution in outline, but not allowing them to get the ‘Aha’ moment in which 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. So it’s that kind of change.  

    In thinking about this, I’m rather tentative about 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, the Pharisees come to Jesus. You know the Pharisees were very concerned with rules & procedures and legalistic details. And they said to him, ‘Which of the laws is the most important law?’ So, it’s almost like asking, ‘Which is the one that I really must obey?’
    And Jesus said I think, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might. 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 tendency is to get things back to front, to think the rules, the procedures, the things we do, are the important things, but it is our disposition*** that matters, and from that comes, on that hangs, all the law and the prophets.
(*** our inherent qualities of mind, character, spirit - how we relate to everyone & everything)
    Now what I’ve struggled to get across and I keep on trying to find a better way of putting this, because people think, ‘On 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 problems we have now, are actually due to previous attempts to solve a different problem, and they’ve left us worse off 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 in the way in which something is done, because apparently, in the abstract, if you do the same thing or say the same thing, but with a different heart, a different intention, it changes it completely.”
    Iain McGilchrist “Why Contemplation & Wonder Are Essential for the Future of Humanity” - TGS 165 WONDER-FULL INTERVIEW:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F838KOrQrRg

 

Wisdom, Nature and the Brain

    In "Breakfast of Champions" Kurt Vonnegut writes: 
    “As for the story itself, it was entitled 'The Dancing Fool.' Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.” 

    Imagine that you are an experienced swimming coach, and you come across a drowning person screaming & flailing ineffectually in deep water. You can't jump in & pull him out, all you can do is try to persuade him to shift from screaming & flailing to effectively, relatively-effortlessly swim to shore. But the drowning person is furious because you're 'wasting his time' with 'irrelevant nonsense.'

    "Most human institutions, by the purely technical & professional manner in which they come to be administered (left hemisphere dominance), end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their (usually right hemisphere dominant) founders had in view." William James

    The above illustrate the certainty of our left hemisphere, which typically fails to understand & obey the broader perspective, greater wisdom & thus better judgment of the right hemisphere. 

    A relatively brief excerpt from a superb recent Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

Iain McGilchrist (IM)    “Of course, I'm not suggesting that physically the brain has changed enormously since 2000 years ago. It will have changed a bit, because it's always evolving, but it's not that I'm referring to. It's that we use the brain in different ways. We can choose to listen to one part of the brain more than another. And I think that what happens as a society becomes a powerful civilization, a number of things happen. One is that it overreaches itself either in terms of its territory or its military and economic power. And in doing that, it needs to be able to control or thinks it needs to be able to control an ever vaster panoply of elements in human life. And to do that, it needs to simplify, to roll out, as we say, a bureaucratic system and so forth.
    So as a civilization becomes too large & overreaches itself, it moves more & more towards a kind of left hemisphere thinking that helps it with the map, the theory, the diagram of life rather than the actual business of life.
    And I think the other thing that happens, well, there are many things that happen... about half a dozen that I refer to in the preface to ‘The Master and His Emissary,’ and take much further in ‘The Matter with Things.’ But one is something that the great philosopher A.N. Whitehead said that ‘A civilization thrives until it overanalyzed itself.’ And I think what's happening in our world is we don't really live connected so much to nature. We don't live connected to a spiritual tradition. We don't live connected to our history & culture. Our art has become too intellectualized. It's become too conceptual, not powerful, visceral and metaphoric in its nature as most great art is. And so we've been cut loose and we're all kind of at a loss and when we try to talk to one another across these spaces, we tend to talk in very theoretical terms, so people talk about a theory of politics, a theory of economics, and a theory of how people behave and so on.
    Usually this is inaccurate, over simple. And so it's that that gets us into this frame of mind because the left hemisphere's message is money for old root. It's incredibly simple: that 'we are just apes competing for territory, money & power.' That's the left hemisphere's knowledge because, let me put it this way, the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to make us powerful, to help us grab things. It controls the right hand, which for most of us is the one which we do the grabbing and the manipulating, and it helps us maintain power. But all the rest of the understanding of everything else that humans are capable of, the life, the spirit, the life of morality, of beauty, of goodness, of truth, all these things are somehow left out of this picture and become somehow marginalized or trivialized as they have done, I believe in our culture at the moment.
    And so why I wrote ‘The Matter with Things’ was because I could see that we all agree there is something that is the matter with things. Very few people think everything's going fine right now, but it's also a notice of the facts that we overvalue matter in the most simple sense. I actually say that materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter because matter is a very extraordinary thing. Matter is wonderful, but this kind of simple idea of matter is what we tend to overestimate the power of, the consciousness & the spirit, the mind is somehow a secondary secretion of matter which it cannot be, and that we've made a world up out of things, which is how the left hemisphere puts things together. Whereas I believe the importance in everything lies in relationship, not in what we call the things themselves that are related.”

     “I’m not sure that religion only comes from the right hemisphere, but I do think you’re right that the most important parts of religious experience & practice, the consensus is, seem to be underwritten by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is sort of necessary for systematizing it and turning it into a durable phenomenon such as Christianity, Islam or whatever it may be. But in doing so, it often over-legalizes, makes over-certain, over-fixed what should be less certain, more fluid, more awe-inspiring, in fact.

I think we’ve lost the capacity for three very important things: a sense of awe or wonder; a sense of our own humility, or the humility we should have; and compassion. And I think these are the things that most religions that are real religions, or true spiritual traditions have in common - that they induce & rekindle in us a sense of wonder. They make us feel appropriately humble about what we can do and what we can know, and they increase our sense of oneness with and compassion towards the rest of the created world.
    Now I think that is what’s going wrong. I think we’ve completely failed to understand that religion is not about a matter of propositional belief, but dispositional belief. Belief is a matter of a disposition of your consciousness towards the world in a certain way. It’s not about propositions or six impossible things that you have to believe before breakfast. That’s not what religion’s about.

And what I want to do in my work is take people from a standpoint where they will almost certainly be part of the culture that believes that only somebody rather simple or uneducated would think that there was a divine realm, to a position where they will see that only somebody who’s rather simple or uneducated would just want to rule that out. I’m not saying would become suddenly religious, but I think it’s extremely clear that people who either are fundamentalist religious or fundamentalist atheists are on the wrong track, and that they have more in common with one another, than they have with true believing people. In any case, I just think that business of the ever-evolving, deeper relationship, a loving relationship with the world in all its manifestations, is the secret of human wellbeing & happiness.

And you say that there is now a different religion, that of economic growth and so on. … I’m sure you’re broadly right, and it reminds me of something that GK Chesterton said, that ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ And that ‘anything’ for them is their own power, to become more & more rich, powerful, wealthy. And that leaves out of the count just about everything that sustains human happiness. And in the seeking for it, they will never find happiness. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful people are not the world’s happiest people."

Interviewer, Nate Hagens:     “As a former high-net-worth stockbroker on Wall Street, I totally concur with that assessment.”
    Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

    Reality may well be - OK, is almost certainly - infinitely more wonderful & complex than the bleak, simplistic black & white model to which our left hemispheres have reduced it to.
    “This is the kind of trick our minds sometimes play with history – the sort of extravagant romantic fantasy it can be such a temptation to fall for, of projecting our own imaginings and needs onto the realities of the world.”
    Peter Kingsley. “A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World.” The Golden Sufi Center, 2010.

 

“The rush & pressure of modern life are a form of violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” Thomas Merton

 

“My salvation is to hear & respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.” Thomas Merton

 

"Try to be mindful, & let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come & go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." Ajahn Chah