"Houston, we've had a problem"

    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 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 

 

    “… 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:

 

Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death

    The excerpts below, are from an imho EXCELLENT 88-minute discussion: "WHAT IS LIFE?" between Tim Freke & Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY 
    To get value out of this, savour slowly, with all your senses open. Enjoy!

    Tim Freke (TF):     “You & I are both human beings on this bittersweet journey of being alive, and we both got older. What is it? How have you come to terms with that mystery? How do you see it as you make that journey?”

    Iain McGilchrist (IM): “I think intrinsically it’s that mystery one never comes to the bottom of. As William James said, ‘We can never close our accounts with reality.’ And I think just being aware of that is both very valuable, and as you say, somewhat rare. We take the most mysterious things for granted, such as the nature of time and consciousness, and that we’re alive at all, or that there is anything at all rather than nothing. So these things are eternally intriguing, but that’s part of their value.
    I mean if we could say, ‘Oh I know exactly what it is,’ well first of all, you’d be a fool, but secondly, you would have lost something of what it is that makes life have meaning. The odd thing is that if we could narrow down the meaning of these things in a simple way, to what we normally mean by, ‘Oh that means that,’ then it would have no meaning. Its meaning depends on its meaninglessness at one level, much as the idea of purpose would be vitiated* if it was clear that there was a purpose in the sense of a utility - you know we do this, because of that. (* vitiate – spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of)

TF     “One of the things that I’ve explored a lot is the coexistence of opposites … and one of the opposites that plays itself out for me all the time, is the way in which I feel that I can live with an appreciation of the mystery – the numinous nature of existence, AND a story I’m telling, which I’m constantly trying to define. One of the reasons I want to have these conversations is that it refines my story, my understanding. … generally we don’t realize we’re embedded in a story, that there is a cultural story which we take for granted. And that part of the function of doubt & mystery is to come out of that story, and actually see, to actually be conscious in this moment - this breathtaking mystery, we don’t know what it is, and then we have the best story we can find to navigate it, and deeper stories open up deeper experiences.”

IM     “I’d like to pick up the word ‘story’ because of course nowadays, it can be used to mean a lie - ‘telling stories’ as children say. And the word story, and the word fable, and the word myth, which are now all used to mean things that are fundamentally unlikely to be true, started off as words that designated a perfectly truthful approach to reality. When philosophers and scientists normally talk about a narrative or a story, the background to that is often that we make it up in order to comfort ourselves, because we need some sort of meaning, so we invent it. And there again, that word has changed. Invention used to mean discovering something, finding it, whereas now it means making it up.
    So I believe there is, very importantly, a way of dealing with these imponderables that you mentioned, which is not head-on. The more you try to analyze it directly, the more you come away with a handful of dust. You need to approach it in a more oblique way, implicitly. And this is where art, music, poetry & religion take their value – from being able to embody things that normally we can’t talk about directly. If the tendency then is to dismiss them, because they can’t be talked about directly, or because this involves a narrative or a mythos or something, is to misunderstand another way of grasping reality.” 

TF      “One of the things that strikes me about that is that there seems to be the intellectual mainstream, which within its own domain is vocal & dominant, which then percolates through. When it says, ‘Oh you tell a story about it, or you make up meaning,’ seems to imply that the imagination is somehow unreal, that it’s a bolt-on extra. There’s reality, which is physics and biology – kind of, and then there’s this bolt-on extra, which is the whole realm of the imagination. Whereas it seems to me that the imagination is the most emergent level of reality. It’s the whole journey of evolution over these 13.8 billion years has led to imagination. It’s gone from hydrogen to ideas. It’s gone from matter to something not made of matter, and that realm of ideas where we’re creating stories is not a bolt-on extra. It’s actually another level. It’s not the most real exactly, but the most emergent, the latest level of reality. It’s all been leading to this.” 

IM     “I haven’t thought of imagination as something that’s a product of evolution, partly because I imagined that imagination is foundational, that it is an important part of creative consciousness, and that actually everything that exists partakes of it.”

TF      “You had mentioned purpose, and one of the key things for me which makes me want to understand this is not just what is it, but what shall I do with it?
    I’m alive. I know that I’m going to die. Life is full of joy and suffering. Does it have a purpose? Who would know anyway? And yet, it feels like we live from those purposes.
    A lot of my method, I guess, is to look at the moment, because that’s what I’ve got. And to see what’s in it. And one of the things which came from that, ‘Oh, each moment’s the realization of a new potentiality. Every moment’s new and every moment contains everything that’s ever happened before. It’s implicit within it.
    Me arriving here is implicit of our communication, the whole of the Big Bang, everything. The past is present & hasn’t gone anywhere is a very powerful idea I associate with Rupert Sheldrake. This process has been one of evolution realizing potentiality. So that the purpose of existence ... is intrinsic to the very nature of what it is, which is the continual realization of potentiality. And because of the accumulation of everything that’s happened in the past, there’s a tendency towards more & more emergent realization, so that now we can have conversation because soul has emerged, psyche has emerged, which wasn’t happening when there was just hydrogen. But that was a precursor for this. So that there seems then a very deep purpose with which we are intrinsic parts which is to continue that realization of ever deeper, more emergent potentials. And actually, I think we’re doing it right now in having this conversation, because the new potentials now are being realized in the imagination. They’re not particularly biological or physical anymore. They’re happening on this imaginary or cultural soul level.” 

IM     “Well, I want to pick up two ideas that you just raised. One is to do with meaning and the other to do with purpose, and they have something of the same structure to them.
    There’s a certain way of thinking about what meaning is. For example, I can tell you what the meaning of the instructions for how to operate a new piece of machinery I’ve got. What that means is very easy to do.
    But quite what King Lear means is another matter.
    Even more problematic is, I can say, ‘My wife means the world to me.’ And people say, ‘What does she mean then?’ And there isn’t a way you could possibly work with that. Nor does it work with great music. It seems to me that some of the most wonderful experiences, pregnant with meaning can be derived from listening to Bach – there’s no conceivable way they can be reduced to a meaning in what I would consider the left hemisphere sense, which is, ‘Come on, what’s the meaning in sentences we can analyze & understand?’ But there is another kind of meaning which we experience with the whole of our being and is more implicit and can’t be articulated because by articulating it, we reduce it, we cut bits off artificially from it, and reduce its meaning by giving it an explicit meaning.
    Now the same thing happens with purpose. When we say something has a purpose, we normally mean, ‘I can see that doing this causes that,’ and that’s an outcome that I wanted. That’s a kind of purpose, a kind of utilitarian purpose. It would seem to me that when we discover that we have no purpose, it’s that kind of purpose we discover. There is no utilitarian purpose in that sense. It’s not all designed by some engineer God to produce a certain result.
    What happens instead is that guaranteed by the fact that it is not produced to an instrumental purpose, in order to serve something outside of ourselves because the engineer is serving his own purposes. Our lives are not engineered. This universe is not engineered in that sense, but it seems to me full of purpose. And that purpose is I think, and this is where we agree, the fulfillment of potential. It’s simply in what is there potentially, becoming being. And once it’s become being, the process moves on. And that’s where you say everything that’s happened is already still there, is that something is left behind by this process but it’s also changed by the continual becoming. So even though in retrospect, it looked like this, now with further retrospect, it looks different. So the whole of everything is changing, and I would see the present moment as a something that is traveling through a medium of potential and actualizing as it goes, leaving this actual path behind it. And it’s not determined from behind by a series of steps but actually drawn towards fulfillment of purpose."

TF     “Yes, beautiful, there’s so much in there. ... so the moment right now seems to be the meeting of the past and the possible, always. And the possible is what you mean by the creative or the cosmic imagination, that kind of sense that there’s something which is giving birth to something new – doing it now, and now, and now. … It’s that journey of realization potential which seems to be fundamentally what a life is, as part of this greater journey, that ‘I am doing that.’
    John Keats said ‘the world is a vale of soul-making.’ I love that. That’s a very essential message for me. It feels like I’m making my soul, because I’m made of my past. I’m made of everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever been. This is now who I am and I’m making myself. Or I’m being made as well. It’s not just me doing it.”

IM     “I think that remark of Keats is both beautiful and quite deep. It’s suggesting that the soul is not a being, an entity, a thing, but is instead an aspect of a process which we help to nourish or can stifle. So in our lives we can grow ourselves or we can stunt ourselves. It’s those choices that make our life what it is. So I think it’s a very good remark.
    This is where we get into the realm where language is extremely difficult, but the present is where the past and potential meet. I think it’s very difficult not to almost spatialize when talking about time, so we see two things that meet but of course they’re not two things that meet. The present is an infinitesimal moment that travels through this business, actualizing as it goes. … The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood. We think of things in binary sort of ways, that is, there is nothing, but there is no thing there. This emptiness – the word 'sunyata' - is derived from a root that means a seed that is potential to grow, and it’s an emptiness as that of a womb that is a potential for something to grow in. And so quite often what we need to be doing is the idea of negation, which in the Western tradition just looks like the absence of something important. But negation is the stopping doing things that get between us & something that is there for us to discover. Often what we need to do in order to be creative is not to make something happen, but to create a space, in which what is already potentially there is invited to grow, to flourish & fulfill itself.”

TF      “My strange life has led me to be interested in what traditionally gets called spiritual awakening or waking up in consciousness to this presence which is completely spacious, emptiness. And I want to invite you to do two things: to mention just the essence of left vs right hemisphere dominance, and the thing I’m particularly interested in is how that or does that have anything to do with awakening or spiritual experience, because one of the things I notice is that a lot of people come to me and say 'Look I understand this all intellectually, but I don’t experience it.' 

    And one of my jobs is to help them experience it, and that’s probably what I do most. And I wonder, is that to do with being trapped in a left brain conceptual understanding and needing to free up into a more right brain understanding? For me the gnosis that arises, the deep knowing, the most central thing, which is before words. And I try then to put it into words and what I end up saying sounds very naïve & a bit child-like, ‘It’s all good really, despite everything. I know it’s awful, but it’s also good. It really is.’ It’s very childish intuitions, but they’re the deepest things I know. And I wonder is that also to do with the left brain and right brain thing, or is that something separate?”

IM      “Everyday language arose to enable us to utilize the world effectively, and we have to use special kind of language to deal with things that are not everyday realities for us because, unless we’re careful by expressing them in language we reduce them to familiar things, whereas the whole point about them is we’re trying to convey something that is unfamiliar. As Nietzsche said, ‘Words make the uncommon common,’ and what you’re talking about are things that are generally-speaking, unusual but nonetheless very deep in meaning. We wouldn’t expect them to translate easily into everyday words, so I think that everyday language is a problem for certain kinds of understanding, because it tells us that we’ve got it. It says, ‘I understand that.’ ‘I grasped it.’ Whereas, in fact what it needs to do is to abdicate that power because it’s actually a destructive process. It’s getting between us and understanding something that only by removing language we can contact, and for me as a psychiatrist, one of the things has been an understanding that people who are particularly articulate often need special help with realizing things of a deep emotional kind. This can be done by using implicit therapies rather than explicit therapies. A lot of therapy takes place in language, but there are therapies that don’t involve that, that involve either metaphors of bodily movement – of enacting things, or of painting or sculpting.
    And often city lawyers would be very reluctant to go and do these therapies, and I’d need to persuade that it didn’t matter that they had no artistic skill. But the trouble is they were so good at articulating things in everyday terms that that got between them & something which, only when they were able to adopt a more implicit approach a more oblique approach, came to life."

    I personally found it worthwhile to transcribe the entire conversation. In my next blog, I plan to continue where we just left off. Enjoy!

 Well worth deeply listening to the full 88-minute discussion:

 

How Reality is "Understood"

     "Many times I have heard a Westerner ask a Tibetan Rinpoche, 'are the deities real or are they archetypes?' Every time the master has answered that the yidams, the protectors and the deities are as real as we are. Just as we exist so too do they exist. (Lama Palden Drolma 2002, pp2-3)
     And as Westerners begin to explore Buddhist teachings concerning emptiness (Shunyata) ... these ontological questions concerning ‘what’ or ‘who’ exists, become ever more complex and ambiguous, opening up to any number of interpretations.
     In John Snelling’s bestselling introduction to Buddhist teachings *** ... one encounters a classic example of the psychologisation of the various heavens and hells of Buddhist cosmology as encountered in the depictions of the wheel of life (the six realms of existence). There is little doubt that almost all ancient and most modern (Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan) Buddhists accepted, and would continue to accept and believe in the actual existence of hell realms, populated by those who didn’t appreciate the Karmic consequences of their actions and intentions in former lives. Yet Snelling, like many Westerners, finds the ‘reality’ of hell realms difficult to accept, according to either faith or reason, and so begins a hermeneutic process of metaphorisation, individualisation and psychologisation ..." 

       *** Snelling J. The Buddhist Handbook: A Complete Guide to Buddhist Teaching and Practice. Rider Books, London, 1993.

       Cohen E. From the Bodhi tree, to the analyst’s couch, then into the MRI scanner: the psychologisation of Buddhism. Annual Review of Critical Psychology 2010; 8: 97–119. http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/arcp8/arcp8cohen.pdf

 

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