https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RHJ8ykxubTo
My biggest question then after these few little escapades on the Middle Ages is, what do you see as the way forward? Because on the one hand, we have an analysis of the problem and maybe an abstract prognosis of what it is that should happen, let’s say that we should rediscover this. But in practice, how do you see the way forward for us? That’s a very good question. And in a way you suppose there, which some of your listeners or viewers may not know, that the Martianism mystery ends with my attempt to portray what the world would look like if we only listen to the sort of things our left hemisphere can tell us. And very few people have failed to spot that it’s a picture of where we are now. And why that’s important is that, as I show in the new book, The Matter with Things, the right hemisphere sees a much more veridical picture of the world, takes in a vastly richer picture than the map, the sort of skeletal theory of things which is available to the left hemisphere. I’ve just been reading Mathias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I think is very good. And one of the things he says, which is exactly what I always feel is important, is there are not a few fixes. There are not a couple of things that we ought to practice and make sure we do these. Often when I’ve given a talk, people want to know, so what are the sort of four things I need to do? And there really aren’t four things, as it were. We need a complete shift in consciousness. That is the point. And in my terms, this means being aware of all that the right hemisphere can see, that the left hemisphere rules out. But to be more specific, in the last part, the third part of The Matter with Things, I paint a picture of a cosmos as it would come to us if we could attend both with the right and the left hemispheres, one in which the coincidence of opposites is central, in which this tension between the one and the many is not to be resolved, but actually is valuable only because we can hold that tension. So often it’s not collapsing into one or other pole, which is the modern tendency when we see two things that we think are opposed, but actually holding them both in tension together. And to understand that, I’d prefer sometimes to Heracles’ idea of the taut string of a lyre that gives the note or the taut string of a bow that allows the arrow to fly. If you let that tension between two things pulling apart go, the string would just collapse and there would be no arrow and there would be no music. So we need those things together. And then I changed the way in which we think, I hope, about the so-called building blocks, I mean, about things like time and space and matter and consciousness, but also putting at the front of things what a lot of people would think rather surprising as choices for constituents of the cosmos, values, purpose and a sense of the sacred. And I think the loss of these, because we’ve swallowed this very simplistic mechanistic ideology, which I’m afraid only leads, as Desmet suggests in his book, to a state of anxiety, fear, loss of the sense of meaning and cohesion, which causes people to flock towards totalitarian solutions, control and so forth. So what we need is to regain some sense of the values that I believe are there in the cosmos, the sense of it having a drive, which I think undeniably it does, unless you’re brainwashed into believing you can’t see such a thing. And this all-important sense of the sacred. So if you wanted a single phrase, it would be to resacralise our values, to certainly think of our values as core parts of any reality that we have and examine what it is we’re valuing. And I draw here, as I do in the Master and his Emissary, on an image which I find particularly helpful, which is the pyramid of values suggested, the hierarchy of values suggested by the German phenomenological philosopher Max Schaehler, who I think is very profound. And he describes these different tiers of value with at the very bottom, those of utility and pleasure, and at the top, the sense of the sacred. And it seems to me that we live in a world in which we’ve totally inverted these things. And all that matters is utility and pleasure. And that all these other things, which don’t just include the sense of the sacred, but just under the sense of sacred is the idea of beauty, truth and goodness. My goodness, I’m going to say, what has happened to truth in these times? What has happened to goodness? What has happened to beauty? And below that, but still above utility and pleasure, values such as courage, magnanimity, generosity, fidelity, these things, it seems to me, are also part of the bonfire of things that we think we can do without, but actually are part of why life is worth living at all. Yeah. So I don’t know in your thinking about this, if you thought a bit about Dante, one of the because one of the elements that I tried to bring about is, first of all, the element of imitation and then the element of celebration. And so one of the things about humans is that we don’t celebrate values. We celebrate people. We celebrate places. We celebrate events. We celebrate memories. We celebrate things that participate in our life. And so the reason why I bring up Dante is that what Dante seems to do is that he seems to join this hierarchy of virtues with a ontological hierarchy of saints and angels. And so it’s not just about celebrating the virtue, but it is about finding imitation. And so being pulled up by Beatrice, being pulled up by by by Sabernado Clairvaux. And it’s by and it’s through these celebratory imitations that we actually are pulled into participation. And there’s something, you know, there’s something about the Platonic way of formulating it, which I think is makes it difficult for humans to to do that. And that’s why I mean, I guess that’s as you know, I’m very much a Christian. And I think that in the in the Christian participation, they were able to take what was best of the Platonic good and these this hierarchy of virtues, but then join them to actual imitation and celebration and participation. And so the the so that I guess I my big question is, do you think that the the way back to this is religious or do you propose rather a religious or a religious way to for us to reembrace these these ways of being? Well, I think that fundamentally we do need a religious cast of mind. I I have to be careful because which is why I wrote a very long book showing people what I’m not saying, because there is an immediate reflex in many people’s minds now to shut down as soon as one mentions religion. And in this country, which is a godless country compared with America and no doubt Canada, if you ask people, do they belong to a religion? About 13 percent of them say that they do. So 87 percent are not. But if you ask people, do you think there’s more to this life and to this world than is accounted for in the reductionist materialist picture, 95 percent of them say yes. So people are missing something extremely powerful. And what is wonderful in what you said, and I completely endorse and have written about in a number of places, is this idea of being attracted forwards to something that we wish to imitate. It’s in complete contrast to the mechanistic universe in which we are the playthings of causality, in which things from behind, as it were, push us forward. And I contrast this with the idea of an ideal of something that appeals to us, that draws us forwards. We may feel a huge gap between us and whatever that ideal might be. I mean, in the Middle Ages, the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, the sense of an ideal. Of course, one’s not asked to be those ideals because that’s not possible, but to feel the pull and never to disparage that pull and to live in the full meaning of that gravitational force on one’s life. So I think that’s a brilliant idea. If you had advice to give to the people that are listening in terms of what you feel that they should be attending to or doing, because the project of having a radical change of consciousness is a pretty big project. And I think that it can seem so big that for people reading or for people listening, they’ll feel like, well, what am I going to do then? Because the world, it seems like, especially in the last few years, things have gotten much worse with COVID and the reaction to COVID. And, you know, the totalitarian spirit has felt itself very, let’s say, pressing down into us. And also, we’ve also felt a willingness to embrace it out of a fear of anxiety, of danger and anxiety of uncertainty. And so what do you suggest for people that they could do in their lives? Yes, well, what I’m going to say is probably not terribly satisfactory. But I do rather hold with Desmet that, I mean, I’m very glad to hear him say specifically what I also believe, that it’s no good thinking of one or two things we can do. We need to move to a different vision of who we are and what the cosmos is, which will enable us to rediscover the integrity of experience, to rediscover the sense of value, purpose, direction, which is not something I believe that we paint on to the universe, something inside our head, we wallpaper it in a pleasant way in order to make ourselves feel better about being in this terrific prison of the skull. I don’t believe that at all. I believe that we are, in fact, when we’re experiencing, we are in touch with something that is entirely real. We only see part of it, of course, a very small part, but the part that we do see is nonetheless real, even if it’s not the all. And that these things need, can be rediscovered, but not piecemeal. I mean, the nearest I can get piecemeal is we’ll try mindfulness meditation for half an hour every day, but that’s not a very satisfactory answer either. So I’m going to give them the most unsatisfactory answer, but quite honestly, the best answer. Sorry to say this, but it might be worth reading the matter with things if you can bear to, because the whole point of that undertaking was precisely to take somebody who couldn’t see anything here beyond the reductionist materialist paradigm and take them by logical steps that they can acknowledge to a place where instead of thinking only somebody with a lack of education or very simple minded would believe in the sacred and the divine nowadays. I want them to arrive there and think that only somebody who’s rather simple minded or not very well educated would jump to the conclusion that there’s nothing in this sacred that one really needs to try and approach it. And of course, one will never know it unless one puts oneself in the way of doing so, which means opening oneself to it. So it’s no good waiting for it to come and knock on your door. You have to not sort of you have to do what I call active receptivity. So you have to attend in a manner that will allow something to come into being in the space that you have opened by your receptive attention. I believe this is how artists are able to conceive their works of art. And I believe it’s how we get to understand the existence of the sacred. I think it’s what is meant by prayer, probably, that this attention, this open attention in which one’s not talking to or about God, but actually listening. I think this is a very important thing. Attention is at the core of it. I know you yourself think attention is very important. I call attention a moral act because the kind of attention we pay changes the world. It changes what is there to find, and it also changes us in the process of attending. And I think here of two French philosophers of the last century, one very well known, Simon Veil, who said that attention is the you know, to pay attention is the greatest act of generosity. And that it mediates our ability to understand what comes to us through prayer. And Louis Lavelle saying that love is a pure attention to the existence of the other. I think this is brilliant and important. And so paying that attention is necessary. How to do that? What I’m hoping is that after reading what I have to say, people will feel that experience. And I’m emboldened to say this by the fact simply that people keep writing to me and saying, since reading your work, I can’t not see the world in a certain way. It’s changed my sense of my life. It’s changed my relationships. It’s changed my work. And now I see everything through this different lens. So somebody says, well, can you hand me the lens? I say, yes, it’s out there. Yeah. And I think that I think that what you’re saying is the idea of attention is a very simple and perfect way to help people understand. Because like you said, you can explain it to for a certain amount of time. But then everybody knows what it means to pay attention to at least to a certain extent. But if you start to practice it and you can see the difference, especially if you have a family, if you have kids, you pay attention to your kids, like real attention. Yes. That it’s transformational. And then people say you need to spend time with the kids. You can pay attention to your child for 15 minutes and they will go on their way and play alone. They’ll be happy because they will have gotten that connection that they’re looking for. It’s a kind of magic. It bestows something on whatever one is attending to. It brings it to life. And the trouble is that one’s attention is valuable to capitalism. Everybody wants a grab of your attention to buy their thing. But this is to to reduce one of the greatest things that exists to some to desecrate it, to trade it through the mud and say, no, it’s just about listening to what I’ve got to say what you’ve got to say this jingle this this message from your machine. The way to achieve it is to switch all that off and empty your life out. I mean, I’m not saying certainly that I’ve got anything to model. I’m not very good at any of this, but I do actually live in a place where I can’t get a mobile signal at all. You can’t get a television signal or you could, I suppose, with a satellite, but I don’t. And so I have an enormous amount of peace outside. There is a very beautiful world in which things are speaking to me. If I allow them to speak and don’t over explain or talk to them, but just open to their being. So there is some kind of commerce that is vivifying that comes about through one’s attention to the world. And as you say, it is it is a generative act. You