https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gN09qnHhPKA
Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye bye. You need space and you need time. Well you certainly need time. I’m not sure about space but you certainly need time and you need matter to produce things that are beautiful and endure. And so I see matter as not an opposition to consciousness but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness. Hello everyone. I had the opportunity today to meet in person with Dr. Ian McGillchrist. I’ve spoken with Dr. McGillchrist a couple of times, a couple of times in person and also on my podcast by Zoom and we’re here in Georgia today and we happen to be in the same place at the same time so we thought we’d sit down and conduct a lengthy investigation into the similarities in our thought and the differences and to see where we could get and that’s what we’re inviting you to partake in. I wanted to talk to Dr. McGillchrist because we share an interest in neuropsychology, particularly in hemispheric specialization. He’s very interested in the relationship between the manner in which the left hemisphere and its relatively reductive proclivity sees the world compared to the more expansive and holistic in some sense right hemisphere. I’m very interested in how that maps onto conceptualizations of the luciferian intellect which are pervasive in mythology. That’s one of the things we discuss. We discuss also the surprising relationship between attention and morality because Dr. McGillchrist believes as I do and I think this is more than a belief. I actually think it’s an established fact that attention is a valuing process and what that essentially means is that the way the world makes itself manifest to us is in accordance with our aim, our attention and our values. That we see the world through a structure of values and we attend to those things that we value and that is a realization and an empirical realization for that matter of immense import because it suggests that the world presents itself in accordance with your aims and that’s a very interesting and terrifying thing to understand. So we talk about all that and so welcome to the discussion. Dr. McGillchrist, you spent a lot of time thinking about hemispheric specialization and that’s an understatement and one of the things I find quite remarkable about the fact of hemispheric specialization is something like its implication for what understanding the reflection of the world and Richard Dawkins said something very interesting about biological organisms. He said they have to be a model of the environment in order to function in the environment. Well, there’s a duality of hemispheric specialization and that implies a kind of ontological duality essentially and so let’s start with what you make of that. I mean I’m curious about two things, what you make of that and also why the issue of hemispheric specialization gripped you so much. Yeah, well the first thing I’d say is about the word duality which suggests in the way we often use it a kind of severance and that’s not what I’m talking about. There are and people say oh you’re creating a duality but I’m not creating a duality. Nature has given us a duality. Making sense of what it is for and it’s about as so many things are about both division and union. It’s about connection and distinction. So it’s not an absolute thing and it’s also importantly mediated by the corpus callosum in human beings. The two hemispheres are connected by this body of fibers at the base of the brain of course called the corpus callosum and this is a mammalian invention. That’s fascinating in itself because all the neural networks we know that led up to the mammalian brain have this by hemispherical at least separated or distinguished network but there’s only this band of fibers when you get to mammals. So birds for example have no corpus callosum and so that’s intriguing in itself. It’s not like somehow the thing is getting um more separated. In fact it’s getting slightly less separate but here’s the kicker. Much of the purpose of the corpus callosum is to stop the other hemisphere interfering. Now that’s one of the things you ask why I got interested. When I learned that in medical school I thought that’s fascinating for a start. Also I then discovered that the corpus callosum is funnily enough not keeping up in size with the expansion of our brains. So it’s not true that somehow we’re trying to weld these things together more. We need just enough connection to pass essential information between the hemispheres and enough connection to enable them to inhibit the contralateral hemisphere. Yeah well it’s easy to fall prey to the delusion that more connection is better. Absolutely. No and this is actually a problem that we’re facing as we wire ourselves together on the net because the problem is that you can communicate what’s necessary when you’re all wired together but you can really communicate what isn’t necessary incredibly quickly as well. I know. Right so you have the problem of the signal being subsumed by the noise. Exactly. Right right. And I first came across this when I was working at Johns Hopkins in the early 90s doing neuroimaging on asymmetry in the brain and the head of the department, a great guy came in and said you know the thing is we need to be communicating more and having arrived there from England I felt that I was being flooded with unnecessary information. Right right. And I thought no actually we need to be communicating less which is an odd thing for me to say because one of my war cries if you like is that we’ve become hyper specialized. Everybody’s in a silo and we have no respect for and no actual candidates for seeing the overall picture but if we don’t see the overall picture it’s no good having brilliant specialists in a pit somewhere separate from other people. So we do need to draw things together but once again it’s not all or nothing it’s this question of how you filter it so that it makes sense and indeed on the word filter I take the view that the brain is in fact a filter. It doesn’t emit consciousness or nobody could ever suggest nobody’s got anywhere near suggesting how the brain can exist. I don’t think it exactly transmits it but I think it permits it and also therefore filters what it finds and that process of negation or filtering is part of creativity isn’t it? You know when Michelangelo made the statue of David he didn’t make an arm and then a leg and so on. He just had a block of stone and for several years all he did was throw away stone and then at the end of it there is his David. So and where I was reviewing your book again last night in preparation for this podcast and one of the things that I found I mean I’ve been trying to put together for myself a conceptualization of right versus left hemisphere function and I really like Delcon and Goldberg’s work. So do I. Yeah yeah yeah so that’s a commonality and he was very interested in the antithesis between novelty and routinization and that seems to be a theme that permeates your work as well is that the right like you’re and correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong but you’re looking at the right hemisphere at least in part as something that produces like a quick and dirty overall picture for example of a name of a new room when you walk into it you get a gestalt of it and then as you pay attention to the details the degree to which you pay attention to the details is proportionate to some degree to the degree that the left hemisphere is involved and that brings up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions too like the distinction between part and a whole. Yes. Because every part is made up of smaller parts so what what constitutes how do you understand the relationship between perception of the part and the whole and hemispheric function? Well you raise it a range of things there that differentiate them first the idea of what is new and what is familiar and then the idea of the part and the whole. I want to just chip in there on the word quick and dirty because one of the things that people imagine is that something like Kahneman’s type one thinking the sort of immediate thinking is more related to the right hemisphere and the more considered thinking is related to the left but that is not the case. When we jump to conclusions it is the left hemisphere that is quick and dirty it’s always wanting to get what it is. Now I need to know for certain is it this or is it that whereas the right hemisphere is allowing things to be open and saying well it could be that it could be something else. Now the problem is that when you want to grab a detail you can’t afford to be hesitant for too long you’ve got to kind of pounce on that mouse or pick up that seed or whatever it is and so the left hemisphere being essentially in service of our ability to grab things is does tend to simplify very very much compared with the right hemisphere. So I definitely appreciate the word Gestalt. The right hemisphere is the one that sees Gestalten that is to say holes which cannot be reduced to their parts without loss. I wish we had a proper word for that in English but perhaps the word is whole because holes are of this nature but as you say when you go down what we call a plot and I think that’s an artifact of the left hemisphere is a hole at another level. Yeah so there’s always that paradoxical interplay between unity and multiplicity at every level of perception. At every level of perception and that is another theme of mine the business of mediating unity and multiplicity because of course we need both and we need diversification but we also need to have it so that it doesn’t threaten the integration of the whole and I see the process of the cosmos actually has maybe been running on here but I mean why not as an endless unfolding of something that is in folded so the implicit becoming explicit but at another level that now seems explicit is implicit for something else it’s constantly unfolding. That’s like the blooming of the flower. It’s like the blooming of a flower in that as it opens out something new is coming about but it’s not and it’s a diversification in within but it’s not threatening the integrity of the whole. That’s why you have the symbolic association of the rose with the holy spirit and why you also have Buddha sitting in the lotus flower. It is that idea of the implicit unfolding. That is exactly right and I think flowers are the image with which we anchor this truth. Yeah right. So yes but it’s not so as to damage the integrity of the whole but in fact to fulfill it, to fulfill its potential. But the parts of the whole you wanted me to say something about. Well let me just say something about newness and familiarity and then about parts and whole. So it’s not a set I mean Goldberg is exactly right and that’s something I importantly learned from him but it’s not just in the way that a lot of people would think newness per se but it’s the ability to see the thing as it is without having conceptualized it, abstracted it from its context, disembodied it and put it into a category. That’s what the left hemisphere does almost immediately and when we’re young the great thing is we see commonalities. We see a child learning and it goes birdie because it’s got that concept and it’s not just a one-off. There are other birds and they go doggy. In fact it’s a cat but they got the idea there’s a four-legged thing you know but as we get older what is really important is get back to the individuality of the stimulus because we so quickly put it into a category and abstracted that we’ve lost its power. Yeah well you replace the perception with the category and there’s efficiency in that but there’s a loss of quality. There’s a huge loss and this is what Wordsworth was talking about when he remembered that as an eight or nine year old when he was rambling on these hills and with the waterfalls and the crags and so on the thing was magical, it was present but latterly he couldn’t help thinking oh yes it’s a picturesque landscape, it’s old water or whatever it is and it’s so hard for us now to get beyond what is effectively the map back to the real palpable living presence. So okay so let me run something by you. It’s a vision that I’ve been developing or that’s been developing within me about how we come to complex knowledge. So and it’s a vision of hierarchical mapping and I think it probably maps on the movement from the right hemisphere to the left. So you tell me what you think about this all right. So the first strata, so imagine a tree all right. I imagine the tree with the trunk of fire and I imagine the tree emerging from the head of God that was part of this vision by the way. We’ll leave that in the background for the time being. Okay so up the trunk there’s a disc and that disc is the realm of patterns in the world right and so what we perceive are patterns in the world and we perceive functional patterns as obstacles or tools it’s something like that but the patterns are in the world. So that’s the that’s the logos of of the cosmos you might say all right and then the second tier is the behavioral mapping of that. So of course if we’re walking across hills and dales the path of our navigation maps the trajectory of the landscape and as we interact with each other we modify our behavior to take the reality of other people into account and as we maneuver together in groups we adapt ourselves to the reality of the environment that we’re traversing and so the behavioral realm contains a compressed representation of the let’s say the underlying patterns of material reality. Yeah all right so that’s both adaptation and representation because we can act out things we understand right and that would be equivalent to procedural memory in the memory literature right like the knowledge of how to ride a bike for example or how to ski. I’ll come back to that. Okay okay what next strata it’s imagination see one of the things I was trying to crack is how dreams can contain more information than the dreamer understands right like a like a book book of fiction can be susceptible to analysis because the work of fiction contains more information even than the fiction author intended it’s partly because it contains representations of behavior okay so we established an imaginative realm and it captures some of the contours of the environment but also some of the contours of the behavioral world yeah and so in our dreams we have images of action and those images of action represent social morays and the world but then there’s a further level of abstraction that would be the linguistic level and what the linguistic level seems to me to do is to compress the imaginative level which is compressed the behavioral level which is in some ways compressed the material level and I’m wondering if that move from novelty to routinization parallels that right so it’s so we first grip things in this sort of Piagetian sense behaviorally then we can imagine that right so we’ve got I mean in dramatic using images per se and then we further compress that scene that also helps us understand what we mean when we say understand because if you can take a word and you can unfold it to an image and then you can decompress that to an alteration in behavior which is I think what you do if a word has significance then you’ve united all those levels of analysis but there’s also a concordance there that I think is indicative of something like the validity of an idea so okay so that’s a lot of information I understand that but I’m yeah I mean my initial reaction is it’s over schematic um because I think what’s really happening is that experience is taken in at a bodily level and and is immediately grasped by the right hemisphere which is better in touch with the unconscious than the left but then I think as you say we sort of we stand back from reality in order to create pattern to see the way in which things relate but I think this is more or less a function of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres that they enable us to stand back enough to get as it were the bird’s eye view of the landscape but the abstraction I’d like to separate that out because I think that’s what the left hemisphere really specializes in is abstracting and when you abstract you are left really with something like a skeleton you’re left with a diagram of theory a map that doesn’t have all the embodied knowledge but the the thing is that we imagine or a lot of people imagine they have this image in their mind the unconscious is a tank somewhere down there underneath but we’re living in this conscious realm and occasionally things pop up and so on but actually the bit of our cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent and it’s been estimated at 99.44 percent of our cognition is is we’re unaware of now of course the the specificity of that is only amusing to me but then it drives home the point that most of everything we know is is extraordinarily fertile in a way that our abstracted thinking can’t be because it’s always got to simplify it’s always got to state this in preference to that whereas in the unconscious realm nothing has to be sacrificed in that way because things are drawn together and I believe our intuitions are much richer than our reasoning on the basis of them so we need to reason on the basis of them we need to validate them or not perfectly correct but we shouldn’t too quickly um collapse our intuitions because our intuitions are able to hold a number of strands that to our expressive intellect seem to be contrary to one another but they’re not they fulfill one another importantly you know so I believe that the whole onslaught on intuition which we now find with high-paid psychologists going around businesses telling people not to trust their intuitions is a scam and it’s a very delusional one it’s it’s encouraging people to disattend to something incredibly important and of course the intuition can be wrong but so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place whether you’re feeling stressed or anxious or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility the halo app has something for you halo offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to god with halo you can embark on a journey of exploration diving into different themes and types of prayer and meditation from gratitude to forgiveness each session offers a unique experience sparking your curiosity and deepening your spiritual understanding choose different lengths of meditation to fit your schedule whether you have a few minutes or an hour this flexibility puts you in control of your own spiritual journey with its user-friendly interface and hundreds of guided meditations the halo app has quickly become a go-to resource for people seeking spiritual growth and healing you can download the app for free at halo.com slash jordan set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way halo is truly transformative and will help you connect with your faith on a deeper level so what are you waiting for download the halo app today at halo.com slash jordan that’s halo.com slash jordan halo.com slash jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 10 000 plus prayers and meditations so the other thing that that struck me when i was reviewing your book last night it was something like the you talked about the left hemisphere’s proclivity to fabricate and so is it is it something like do you suppose it’s something like the proclivity of the left to reduce things to algorithms to rule governed algorithms and then to try to extend the domain of those rules beyond i mean the the purpose of having a theory is so that you can use a simple set of principles to generate a variety of explanations right and so there’s obvious utility in that if the principles are correct but there’s very little difference between that and the delusion if the first principles are incorrect absolutely right and so yes and that’s really at the basis of a condition like paranoid schizophrenic absolutely because they’ll have a set of principles and they can endlessly spin off explanatory theories and they’re credible but they’re wrong they’re wrong yeah i mean seriously wrong which which illuminates perfectly the um you did my work for me there in in unpacking how reason can lead you to the wrong place because as chastatin said amadment is not somebody who’s lost his reason he’s lost everything but his reason so he has a voice and that’s especially true for a condition like paranoid schizophrenia it is it is absolutely and urgen mankowski the franco-polish psychiatrist and philosopher wrote about this very very beautifully about schizophrenia and effectively illuminating the difference between the left hemisphere and the right because i see schizophrenia as a condition in which the left hemisphere is an overdrive and the right in an attempt if you like to compensate for a hypo-functioning right hemisphere and so um yes the the business with hypo or malfunctioning the sorry hypo or malfunctioning both both okay yeah um but what you’re talking about i think is confabulation effectively where it’s more important and this is a good simple distinction if you like the the right hemisphere is more interested in truth to experience but the left hemisphere is that a further removed from experience is more interested in um internal consistency so if some new information comes in that isn’t consistent with what it thinks it knows it will initially reject it or try to substitute something else that fits and also this is a reasonable thing to do up to a point because you know you may get if you didn’t have that you would certainly a scientist will be swithering all over the place with new pieces of information so you need to have an anchor but you don’t want that anchor to be too confining or too too too strongly holding you to a place you need to be allowed to accept new information and it’s the right hemisphere that’s far far better at that so so i read some analysis of network function that described the dichotomy between the left and the right hemisphere as something like the paradox between consistency and comprehensiveness those are two right right so the left hemisphere is very much concerned with internal consistency right so well and it’s interesting to see that so that confabulation is over reasoning from a set of finite finite principles that are erroneous let’s say yes right and there’s very interesting overlap between that and something like ideological reduction and totalitarian certainty that certainly is right right right well so so let’s let’s let’s let’s take an example of that you tell me what you think about this okay so well i’ve been trying to get down to the bottom of of of the algorithms that drive the culture war that okay so so imagine this so a huge part of the thinking on the radical left is something like i think about it as a representation of the the story of cain and abel cain is a victim in his own eyes and he becomes very bitter and resentful about it and i think that’s actually the story that underlies marxism and so it’s an it’s a it’s an algorithmic story and the algorithm is something like there’s a dimension of comparison there’s on that dimension of comparison there’s those who have and those who do not have and so that’s a hyper simplification to begin with and then that the distinction between those that have and that don’t have is that those that have took from those that don’t have so it’s a victim victimizer narrative okay so now there’s real algorithmic advantages to that theory because to some degree there’s some truth in it because some people who have took it and every dimension of comparison where there’s a differentiation in let’s say ownership or privilege can be corrupted by power and so if you have that algorithm you can explain a lot with it and it has another advantage which which is which is what would you say is an additional benefit of the algorithm which is once you’ve decided that you can construe every social relationship as an oppressor oppressed story well you don’t have to think anymore because you can account for marriage and you can account for family and you can account for economics and history everything but there’s another advantage too which is that all you have to do is identify with those who are oppressed and your moral and so you can see a tremendous attraction in that and i’m wondering if that’s a reasonable variant of something like algorithmic oversimplification yes yes well i think what you’re pointing to is very much simplification which is one of the um i don’t really want to say virtues but it is one of the one of the usable strengths of the left hemisphere it radically simplifies and i think that what we’re seeing in our culture is a whole range of things happening just so many but they do align with the preferences of the left hemisphere over those of the right so experiences at an all-time low in terms of its value we disattend to experience unless it fits with our theory and even deny facts or cease to pay any attention to them if they would question the theory that we’re currently in hot and then i think there is the problem that we disattend to intuition we disattend to our bodies and our feelings about things and of course they also need regulation but everything needs regulation including the tendency to over regulate so we’re in a world in which we think we’ve got a theory and it’s very simple and as you say it means that if you buy into it you don’t have to think and there’s goodies and badies and you are moral because you you know which side to go on and and for heaven’s sake life is so complicated and in the third part of the matter of things can i talk about the structure of the matter of yes absolutely yeah yeah so this was the book that came out in november 21 my latest work and i’m sure my last long book and in it i wanted to use hemisphere theory to talk about what it is that we can trust what can we actually know to any degree to be true and of course i don’t think that there’s a single great truth out there but i also think that there are things that are just more true than others otherwise we if we didn’t all of us believe that there would be no reason for saying or doing everything would be chaos everything would be chaos so we all implicitly there has to be a hierarchy there has to be a hierarchy so i just wanted to to start from neuroscience to use that as a basis for philosophy in looking at what kind of things we can say about the world we’re in what a human being is and how it relates to it so the first part of the book is the neurology the the neuroscience and in that i i’m asking questions like why does the brain have the structure that it has and since we know that the right and the left hemispheres have different tendencies in their take on the world i mean very very clearly this is can be demonstrated in intact individuals by temporarily suppressing one hemisphere at a time it’s demonstrated every day by accidents of nature tumors injuries and so forth so we do know that there are there’s a vast body of evidence about hemisphere difference and it frustrates me that there are still people ignorant enough to say there’s no evidence i mean go do your homework i’ve been doing it for 30 years um and one of the things i want to do in the book was demonstrate the extent of what we know about this and i think there’s about 6 000 references to the literature but in that first part what i’m intent on demonstrating is that the the left hemisphere’s overwhelming um advantage is in grabbing getting simplifying and grasping and that’s why it controls the right hand which for most of us is the one with which we do the grabbing and grasping and does the kind of thinking where you say i’ve grasped it you know um whereas the right hemisphere is left basically with everything else because looking at it from a evolutionary point of view if you’re that bird trying to catch that seed before another bird you’ve got to have highly focused attention on the detail but you’d never survive if that was the only attention you had because you quickly become somebody else’s lunch while you’re getting your own so there has to be another part of the brain which is effectively the right hemisphere which is doing all the putting together of information about the world at large so the left hemisphere apprehends the right hemisphere comprehends and so i look at the various portals that i would say through which we get information about the world attention primarily which is so much more important than people think i mean it is nothing less than the way in which you you dispose your consciousness towards the world and therefore depends what you find there and determines what you become because you become like what it is you think you find there you develop habits of thought that limit you to seeing only certain aspects of reality through the way in which you attend so i call attention a moral act yeah because it both creates the world and creates you and then a perception which is not the same of course as attention but is built on what you attend to and some of the things that you don’t attend to and then judgment i.e. what we make of this in terms of our thoughts about what we’re attending to and perceiving emotional and social intelligence cognitive intelligence good old-fashioned iq and creativity the ability to be flexible in thinking about things to take a slightly different perspective and see what it is so in terms of getting information from the world around us what i demonstrate is that in every case the right hemisphere is superior to the left it is veridical where the left is not the left is unreliable and this is of course one of the hurdles i have to get over because people think the left hemisphere is at least down to earth and reliable even if it’s a little bit boring it’s not it’s highly emotional anger of all emotions lateralizes most strongly to the left hemisphere and it is the characteristic dismissal um self belief contempt anger uh the willful blindness willful blindness of course because that comes into this business we were talking about of a confabulation of turning when you don’t know something you make up something that fits in with your theory and you don’t you disattend to things that you don’t want to know so that’s really in in in a great hurry i’ve just covered 400 pages but really that is establishing at great length that the right hemisphere is a better guide to what’s going on than the left and and people say how do you know that because you’ve only got your left and right hemisphere to go on but the way i would put it is this if you followed what the left hemisphere tells you to be caught out by reality all the time whereas if you followed what the right hemisphere tells us you’d largely not find yourself caught out by the experience of living so it’s a better guide then i say okay the reason i want to do that is because in philosophy you can see patterns that are more congruent with the left hemisphere’s way of thinking and those that are more congruent with the right hemisphere’s way of thinking and up till now all we’ve been able to do is say well some philosophers say this and some philosophers say that take your pick but i don’t think that’s right i think we can discriminate between philosophical positions and say this has a better chance of being right because the picture of the world it gives correlates with the best synthesis of knowledge from right and left but a lot of and has a the advantage of bringing your advantage of bringing them together which the right hemisphere will do because not only is the right hemisphere more veridical but it’s also more open to what the left hemisphere has to say then the left hemisphere is open to what the right hemisphere says the right hemisphere is inclusive the left hemisphere is exclusive and so it believes in an either or world but it is as much of both and world and we need both of these types of thinking as i sometimes say we don’t need either either or or both and we need both either or and both and thinking and the right hemisphere is able to do this so i’ll do the second part yeah it was epistemology very very quickly so i say what are the sort of things in which people would place their confidence for finding some truth i think most people would say science i think most people would say reason i think some people would say intuition but increasingly few and some would say imagination although most people nowadays no longer understand what is meant by imagination they think it’s fancy but it’s right right so i look at the claims of each one of these to to have something to do with truth and truth itself is a concept that can be seen either from the left hemisphere or right hemisphere point of view what i mean by that is the left hemisphere is used to tracking something and getting it so it imagines truth is at the end of a path that has a sequence of steps and if you take these in the right order you will end up with truth whereas the right hemisphere sees that true actually comes from a root which means faithful it means being faithful to what you experience and there is a meaning of true as in being true to someone being true to an idea which is constantly seeking knowledge listening and responding to what reality is saying to you the resonance between the attending consciousness and whatever it is that is external to it or appears to be external to it and so what i end up by saying and here i’m covering another 400 pages is that there are good reasons for attending to each of these but each has limitations and each on its own is not a sufficient guide so we need not just one or two of these but preferably all four at least three of them in that there is the realms in which in which science simply can’t answer questions i mean that’s sort of criticism of science i find myself defending science all the all the time against people who want to turn it into a free for all you know that they want to they want to demonize science if it doesn’t fit with their narrative of what truth is and that is where science ends you know and there are lots of important questions and you and i would would immediately think of the realm of the spirit and and not even this the conventionally spiritual in the sense of what we associate with the religious life but even love i mean love is an example of something that cannot be measured cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory cannot be measured and cannot be manipulated and yet according to science it’s not real but excuse me love is probably the realest thing that we ever experience so overall i say we need all of these and then in the part three of the book it’s ontology what is that and i begin with the coincidence of opposites now when you consider that we’ve been talking about making things cohere and that we exclude things that don’t fit there is no chance of getting anywhere near the truth if you have a black and white picture of reality which doesn’t contain a little of its opposite and after all if you pursue a particular line far enough you end up with the very thing you feared that you were trying to flee from so you think freedom is good and it is you increase that freedom and you get anarchy anarchy and what happens what happens in anarchy well not only do a lot of people get hurt and killed but the response is tyranny so i mean it’s just one very obvious example in fact all opposites work like this that’s the serpent that eats its own serpent that eats its own tail so the first chapter is on the coincidence of opposites and how important this perception is and nowadays we don’t see this we think that if something is good just more and more of it is good and whatever is excluded by it must be bad but in fact it’s always a balance of things and we don’t attend to the dark side of the things that we think are good and we don’t we exclude from possibility that there might be good in some of the things that we’ve demonized so you know this whole idea of rationalizing everything down and say a vision of ideal is harmony um is is what i’m yes i well you see the word idealism worries me slightly um depending on of course what you mean sleep is a foundation for our mental and physical health in other words you’ve got to have a consistent nighttime routine to function at your best but if you’re struggling with sleep then you’ve got to check out beam beam isn’t your run-of-the-mill sleep aid it’s a concoction carefully crafted to help you rest without the grogginess that often 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were you were implying there at least to some degree that an an ideal state isn’t the reduction of everything to one like linear pathway absolutely like the balanced multiplicity of a variety of viewpoints and i was thinking about that in terms of musical harmony because i think music music portrays precisely that it does okay okay and that’s what i was trying to clarify and it’s it’s it’s heraclitus is tension that’s in the bow string or in the string of the lion and if there isn’t tension are you pulling in opposite directions left hemisphere thinks that’s a waste of energy two things pulling opposite just stop pulling but then the spring goes slack and no music and no arrow so we need that tension all the time between the opposites not alternating between them but holding them together and only the right hemisphere is able to do this because the left hemisphere is always trying to collapse into so i need to know now what is the truth is it this or is it that and no wise person can answer that question for the left hemisphere and then i go on to talk about the one and the many which is very very important and again heraclitus says it is wise listening not to me but to the logos to agree that all is one but because of the way the greek is structured it can also mean one is everything and that’s lovely and then the next chapter is on flow because i find that this is actually i never anticipated this this is a lovely thing for me about writing is that i discover in the process of writing things i didn’t know when i started right and one of them was the importance of flow the perception that everything flows is not trivial and instead we have lost this sense because we discretize everything into packets and think we put them together to make something because that’s the only way in which we make artifacts but the you know everything is modeled on the machine but if you think about it there is nothing in the entire cosmos that is at all like a machine except for the few machines we’ve made in the last few hundred years and one or two go back longer but nothing is mechanical in that sense it’s all to do with complex systems which don’t which are neither fully predictable although they’re not chaotic and are not achieving their end by adding another bit towards the machine the externalization of the left hemisphere absolutely okay fine and i would say ai is the final final frontier the final yeah yeah the final triumph of the left hemisphere it’s supposed to hopefully not the final one well that’s it i guess we’re going to find out we’re going to find out okay so and i think you know you know that actually the whole administrative mind which is now the only mind that has control is an expression of the left hemisphere’s simplified procedural way of thinking and it stultifies imagination it gets in the way of creativity it slows us down it’s hugely costly and it it vilifies all kinds of people who don’t fit into the into the the slots the categories that it’s developed anyway and then i go on and look at you know time have a chapter on that a chapter on space and matter a chapter on matter and consciousness the nature of consciousness and the nature of matter and then rather surprisingly on values on purpose that no no in science which scientists are now i mean they’ve long accepted it in private but they’re now coming out as it were insane it’s hard to write a scientific paper without a purpose yes and no one ever talks about that no no okay well there’s no purpose as well you had a purpose when you wrote the paper i’m trying to think who it was who said it’s amusing watching a science demonstrate purposefully that there is no yes right right right i i think it’s very very important and i think increasingly that values are the thing we should be thinking about i don’t think there things that we make up no comfort ourselves i don’t think we paint them on the walls of our cell to cheer us up without any contact with reality no i believe they are places in which we contact reality and i’d even go so far as to say but this would take us a while to unpack but might be worth going there is i believe that life why is the life at all you know it’s very costly and it kicks against entropy and and you know why did it arise if it’s in order to have things that last it’s not a very good project because as whitehead pointed out the secret of lasting is never to have been alive life brings with it precariousness expense of energy and so forth and indeed as it becomes suffering suffering as it complicates so i don’t know whether actinobacteria at the base of the ocean actually suffer they may do but they single examples of them can live to half a million years so being able after all this evolution to live 70 years is hardly a triumph for survival it’s about something else which is the ability to respond to a cosmos that is in itself beautiful good and true i mean to understand what one means by that would take us a while that’s where i was building that hierarchical tree by the way for exactly that’s for exactly that purpose that’s fine i mean the hierarchy i prefer is max shayla’s hierarchy of values well that i would definitely want to delve into that as well this because you talked about two things well a number of things that i want to bring up intention is moral act is something i definitely want to concentrate on have is there more that you want to add to the compression of the book well there’s always more i could of course but i’ve sketched it out really and the reason i wanted to do that was to say that right at the start of you know i’ve said so we’ve we’ve heard about what the brain can tell us about what to trust in philosophy we’ve looked at the philosophy and seen where it can lead us now use that information to examine the cosmos and what do we find that the at the very start of it we find the coincidence of opposites yin and yang and so on this is in every other culture than our own but actually it’s also in ours because heraclitus right at the start of it probably the greatest western philosopher of all time is is foundational for this idea you know when when the when the israelites cross the desert they’re led by a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud yes right right it’s the coincidence of opposites that’s lovely i thought of that oh yes it’s a major it’s a major league revelation now yeah yeah yeah yeah so so that’s printed so well and it’s a reflection of the underlying instinct because you might say well what is it that guides you when you’re utterly lost when you escape from tyranny let’s say and it’s the interplay there’s an interplay right so yeah and that is very much similar to the daoist idea of yin and yang yes right i think they’re the same idea actually i think so too yeah yeah yeah so and so that and that’s portrayed as the spirit of god himself that guides the israelites through the desert are you interested in the cover not only peripherally because i don’t know much about it so why did you ask well the only reason i say this i know you you know a great deal more i think about early um jewish history than i do but i started finding out through christian theologians about 10 years ago of key ideas in the cover and they they were like a you know blinding light they really were i thought good heavens this is so deep and true and of course ultimately it’s not it’s not irreconcilable with christianity but it has an emphasis on certain aspects including the balancing of opposites that is very well you see the other one of the other things that that seems quite clear in the old testament corpus in particular when the stories are characterizing god is that god is god is presented continually as the interplay between calling and conscience and that looks to me like something like the dynamism of positive and negative emotion because positive emotion especially the incentive reward element calls you forward and conscience looks to me something like the voice of negative emotion so you can imagine that there’s an instinctual force that pulls you forward right that that’s the manifestation of the burning bush by the way that’s what that represents right this thing that calls you and then speaks more deeply as you investigate it and then conscience is also highlighted multiple times in in the old testament especially with the prophet elijah right because elijah is the prophet who replaces the god that’s in the natural world essentially with the voice of conscience within right and so then there’s an interplay there constantly in the old testament between that what calls you forward and what keeps you on the straight narrow path yes so and it’s a it’s a play and in in kawala there is a structure in which there are two two sides as it were and one is chesed which is a creative constantly outgoing and if you like right hemisphere orientated but there’s not a very good actually parallel um but then there’s gavura which is this constraining element and we need them both and in fact it’s not a good parallel with right and left hemispheres because the one that you know people think the right hemisphere in popular culture has this reputation for being that let it all hang out sort of atmosphere but it’s not at all it’s not only much more in touch with deeper emotions rather than superficial social emotions but it is also the locus of emotional control comes from the right hemisphere not from the left so these parallels can be misleading right right right yeah but all dichotomies are not necessarily the same dichotomy they are not they are not very important okay so let’s so let me ask you oh so so you lay out the left as as um reductionist and algorithmic and often petulant and somewhat totalitarian and you also associate it with reach and grip and like well so so let me offer you something and you tell me what you think about this because what you are talking about with regards to the false of the left let’s say sound a lot to me like the mythology of luciferian intelligence so so let me give you an example you tell me what you think about this well the sin that the snake entices eve and adam into in the garden of eden is overreach right and there’s not a lot of difference between overreach and pride right and that rigidity of pride that intellectual rigidity of pride is something that seems quite typical of the left hemisphere pathologies that you describe in the book right and resentment yeah right okay and why and resentment why look why have you the snake why have you been told you can’t yes yes yes yes you can eat it one how does that map onto your understanding of the left hemisphere with regard to resentment in particular well i think it’s to do with hubris really yeah and that’s over that’s equivalent to overreach overreach yeah and it’s also um it’s something like the dunning-kruger effect you know the less you know the more you think you know yeah vice versa and because the left hemisphere knows colossally less than sorry the left hemisphere knows colossally left less than the right hemisphere it thinks it’s got it all and hence you see these people who think oh we’ve worked out the answer to everything we understand its structure and its meaning and if there’s a few things we haven’t yet we will do those few things are always the annoying stumbling blocks yeah but of course they’re they’re many more than a few but because of the constrained view they only see a few things that they don’t know they don’t see everything else outside the blinkers you know i i love and it’s still so true william james’s remark that our knowledge is a drop and our ignorance is an ocean i mean this is true and we’ve stopped seeing this and we’re far too arrogant a bit of humility would be a good thing but lucifer is the expression of pride of resentment or intellectual pride specific intellectual pride resentment overreach resenting this other power also that desire to usurp which i think is also something that you because the the the stories that you tell about people with right hemisphere damage point to the proclivity of the left to usurp and to deny right and and that that’s part of you can imagine that so you maybe it’s also curious i wonder how much of the inadequacies of the left hemisphere that you point to in your book are actually a consequence of its misuse rather than its intrinsic nature well that comes down to the whole point about it being a servant it’s a good servant but a very poor master right right i mean you know well that’s the intellect in a nutshell well that’s what i said also i said yeah so it is the intellect in a nutshell it is a useful servant but it should never be the end point it doesn’t have it’s the worst possible master that’s the lucifer story fundamentally right and then that seems to me to be exactly right yeah and actually at the end of the master in his amistry in the end of the final chapter i bring in paradise lost because it seems to me to be the story of what has happened with the overreach of this intellect and i think you know the luciferian intellect is is what what i’m really talking about that thinks it knows what it’s doing but because it knows so little is intent on destroying the good that there is well i think that’s a consequence of the failure of the project right because well you mentioned the resentment and well what happens the resentment emerges in part because the theories fail and part of the reason i think that the left hemisphere so to speak is antithetical towards the right is the right tends to announce the failure of the left with negative emotion and so that’s that’s very troublesome because who wants that and so it’s you can certainly understand why the resistance develops no it’s evidence of failure it’s evidence of failure that that invalidates your theory and so one route to rectifying that is to abandon your theory but then you have the exodus problem which is you abandon the tyranny of your theory and you’re lost in the desert of your doubt which isn’t exactly an improvement even though it might still be the way it works well yeah yeah but it’s a bit of a rough interregnum it’s a rough interest yes well that’s yes yes and you need faith the thing is that’s the thing that comes to the to the exodus or the is israelites in exodus is they under there’s a revelation that they require faith to traverse that land of chaos and the question then is what guides you in the realm of doubt what is there that guides you in the realm of doubt the the proclamation of the intellect would be something like well there can be nothing that guides you in the realm of doubt because you don’t know what you’re doing so if the intellect is the guide you’re lost yeah but in cultures other than our own we understand the importance of unknowing that there is an unknowing which is the opposite of ignorance ignorance is what you have before you know but unknowing is what you have after you’ve let knowledge lapse because of its inadequacy to tell you it’s archaic nature it’s archaic yeah so this is very common is really really important step towards wisdom and so it’s very helpful not to be certain but the left hemisphere cannot live with this the right hemisphere is perfectly okay with it with an uncertainty because it realizes that all the time it’s calibrating things and it’s it’s very much more aware of information from out there than the left hemisphere which is still working in its closed sort of cell so starting a business can be tough but thanks to shopify running your online storefront is easier than ever shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage shopify’s there to help you grow our marketing team uses shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36 better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms no matter how big you want to grow shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re in that’s shopify.com slash jbp So do you think do you think that that’s a shift of vision in some ways I mean you talk about hemispheric specialization for different forms of vision so imagine that your target vanishes and your theory collapses well you could be lost or you could switch to a different kind of attention yeah right and that that other retention is information gathering so you know the the Egyptians so in in the Egyptian cosmology the they have a god of the state Osiris yes right and so he’s like the characterization of of an administrative theory that’s a reasonable way of thinking about it and he becomes willfully blind and he’s overthrown by Seth who’s essentially Satan who’s essentially the Luciferian intellect that’s how that story works and Seth rules then rules the kingdom and the kingdom is destroyed in consequences so that’s the overthrow of the rightful king by the evil brother of the king yeah right very very common motif it is and universal yeah yeah it’s your very well and it’s because it’s because theories age and decay and they’re abetted in their age and decay by the willful blindness of their adherents right that’s a universal story merchea ali had documented that multiple multiple cultures right and so the the when when the state collapses uncertainty arises that’s isis in the Egyptian cosmology so she’s the goddess of the underworld so or the unconscious that’s another way of thinking about it and she makes herself pregnant with the remnants of Osiris after he collapses and she gives birth to Horus now Horus is the eye see this is the thing about the Egyptians is they didn’t worship the the intellect they associated the Luciferian intellect with this the force that destroys the blind state right they associated their redemptive god with the open eye and it seems to me that it’s something like the preference for information gathering attention you know because if you if your theory collapses you can pay attention but it’s a special kind of attention right it’s it’s the attention that’s predicated on humility because now you know you don’t know and maybe that’s associated with this unknowing that you described i think so so okay so elaborate on that idea of you know i don’t know enough about Egyptian mythology although it’s something i’ve read a little into that’s the eye at the top of the pyramid as well well that’s it you see and so i think it’s a very ambivalent image because one thing that happens and one day i want to write a book i’ve got all the material i’ve been gathering it for a lifetime of paintings and images by psychotic subjects and people with schizophrenia tend to paint disembodied eyes just an eye in the picture or something like that and i think this represents the tyranny of the the intellect that is over looking everything all the time and yeah right that’s like the eye of soran in the lord of the rings exactly although i’ve never read it but i know the idea what was i saying the eye the eye you said represents a tyranny the tyranny of the intellect which doesn’t allow anymore the darkness the fertile darkness in which something much greater than the intellect that is within us can work which is largely the unconscious mind and we have the idea that the unconscious mind is somehow inferior to the conscious mind but it’s not not only is it much bigger but it’s also capable of doing many many things like solving complex mathematical problems and coming to scientific insights in fact most of the stories of science and mathematics in in the the tales of those who made the discoveries are tales of a sudden insight into it so in our unconscious minds we resolve problems we compromise with things we fall in love we appreciate a painting we all these things they happen to us when we’re not necessarily studying them and they they they grow in us now when you put the eye of the of the intellect over everything it’s almost like that all seeing eye of the the panopticon you know this tyrannical idea of an institution in which everything can be seen from a central point yeah and this is very much associated with the enlightenment as is the pyramid with the eye i think i mean i i i’m not an american so i wouldn’t like to hold forth about what it means on your money but the thing is that both pyramids actually but much more disembodied eyes are the kind of things that that’s a dark eye as a substitute for the proper eye right because the totalitarian so yeah the question is not the eye of god but right right exactly exactly exactly and so and so it that that i see exactly what you mean with regards to the ambivalence because well the eye of sauron is a very good example of that because it’s definitely it’s the totalitarian eye on the top of the tower of babel essentially in the lord of the ring stories and it has to monitor everything because it can’t trust anything oh right that’s the world where we are substitute of the eye of the state for the eye of god yes absolutely and of course the difference is that the eye of state is out there in powerful structures but the eye of god is something in here in each of us in the sense that that man is in us and brahman is god as a whole but there is there is something of the divine in the human spirit so whatever you like to call it i believe and i also believe that ultimately whatever the ground of being is it is conscious so in a more ungodly culture we talk all the time about consciousness and of course that’s perfectly right and there’s a distinction there that is full of meaning but i believe that ultimately consciousness and the divine ground of being cannot be separated because i believe that what what led you to that conclusion well a lot of things really one is that i believe that everything is relational let me just yeah state that for a start yeah yeah um and that nothing is just a thing on its own it only is what it is because of all the things that uh its context and with which it is in relation and that’s something the right hemisphere understands that the left hemisphere takes things out of context abstracts them generalizes them and isolates them and loses their living uniqueness so let me just say so i believe that everything is relational and i believe that god the ground of being ends off whatever you like to call it is relational and i think the reason there is a creation is that this whatever it is needs something to love and it needs something to be related to well that’s definitely the insistence in the old testament i know because the the relationship the proper relationship between man and god in the old testament is covenantal yeah it’s a relationship exactly right right right but love is in any case a relationship and i would see the covenant as not a legalistic thing but as a a matter of faith that you know we undervalue fidelity in our culture that that if you have if you’re not a musical term yes if you truth if you trust in people if you believe in them as we say then faithfulness to them is involved in that i mean of course that faith may be betrayed and it may not work and so still your best bet still your best bet but we live in a world in which nothing can be trusted anymore and and therefore it all has to be specified centrally in some incredibly thin jijun abstract schema to which we’re all supposed to conform but in fact nothing living ever ever does conform to it so it’s a thoroughly going disaster but anyway so the fact that god is relational and the fact that our consciousness and i believe we are not the only beings by any means to have consciousness in fact i believe consciousness is throughout the cosmos in fact i believe the stuff of the cosmos is consciousness i mean the trouble is i’m saying so many things so fast here because we don’t have a lot of time but people say why why but i i mean i’m not alone in the world after all this has been the belief of many of the wisdom traditions of east and west is that consciousness is the stuff the universe is made of and matter is a manifestation of consciousness in a particular way it is if you like a phase of consciousness and i’m not using phase in the temporal term but in the sense that physicists say that water has phases ice water vapor in the air and so people may say well matter doesn’t look like and behave like consciousness but excuse me ice doesn’t look like and behave like water and certainly the tons of water in this room without which we couldn’t live and breathe don’t look at all like a river but water is what they all are and i believe that consciousness in order to create and that divine element that is at the source of the universe as a creative project wishes to unfold and create something ever more beautiful that am ever more complex that is within its potential to produce but it doesn’t actually know it in advance and that’s the play i love the fact that you say and i think you’re quoting the torah you know what does a being that’s omnipotent omnipresence and omniscient lack limitation yeah and so and i think that is why we mustn’t get or maybe we should go to the problem of evil but anyway so you asked me why do i see god like this because that’s jacob’s ladder that upward play i know well of course you know that the symbol of chanel mcgillchrist is that illustration by blake of the jacob’s ladder which is the only one i know that is not a linear ladder but it’s actually a spiral and spirals right image very big part in my ontology so both in in physics yeah well spirals return to the same place except transformed and transformed upward what they do is they combine a linear process with a circular approach a circular process is just static upward it’s just static a linear process is thin but a spiraling process that is constantly evolving is is the best of both if you like and although elliot said you know we arrive back at the place we started from and know it for the first time i say not quite we come back to a place very close to where we started from but one step higher on well that’s what the knowing is that’s what the knowing yeah yeah yeah so just to finish i’ll try to unconsciousness and why i think that that is the different nature of the cosmos is that in order to create you need things that people think are surprised by so they think distance no surely closeness um resistance no surely facility but actually in order to create you need both a degree of distance and togetherness as two heavenly orbs that circulate circle one another or a well-functioning couple have togetherness and distinction they don’t fall into a toxic fusion and so in order to do this there needs to be some distance but also manifest closeness and there needs to be something that will create opposition and something that will create a degree of permanence because after all if everything is already known and abstract somewhere then it’s just a ball of nothing that has no existence in space and time so you need this you need space and you need time well you certainly need time i’m not sure about space but you certainly need time and you need matter to produce things that are beautiful and endure and so i see matter as not an opposition to consciousness um but but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness and you can’t have matter without and you can’t have consciousness without the other let me ask you about um intention as a moral act you yeah because i’ve been trying to work through the what would you say the formal flaw of the empirical presumption and so the empirical presumption is something like we inform ourselves with the facts and we can orient ourselves with the facts and the problem with that as far as i can tell and i don’t believe this to be an opinion i think this is now established fact in and of itself is that there’s as many facts as there are phenomena and combinations of phenomena and so you can’t orient yourself by the facts because the facts are a an infinite chaos and so you have to prioritize the facts and this is where this is why i wanted to ask you about intention as a moral act and about intention as the basis for intent for for attention like what i say is attention is a bit is a moral act but i could say intention is a moral act as well sir let’s go with that let’s go with attention i like that better and and that is what i should have noted in the note right attention is a moral act right okay okay okay well and it’s it’s a moral act because i think there’s a technical reason for that it’s a moral act because a moral act is an act of valuing and an act of valuing is an act of prioritization and attention is an act of prioritization because you attend to the thing you’re attending to and not the infinity of other things you can attend to so with every act of attention there’s an underlying hierarchy of value and the thing that you’re attending to is at the moment at least is at the pinnacle of that right at least momentarily so that so this is i think what undoes the empirical endeavor because if attention is a moral act and attention is the precondition for the observation of facts then attention is a precondition for the fact and so that means the fact itself the facts themselves make themselves manifest within the higher within the confines of a hierarchy of value it has to be that way and the scientists do ignore that because they always act as far as i can tell as if the value that they’re pursuing is so self-evident that it has doesn’t have to be factored in so you don’t start your scientific paper looking at the molecular functions of cancer with a description of why we should eradicate cancer that’s a given but it’s the given that structures your attention to begin with and it’s part of a moral enterprise so i don’t see that there’s any separation of the i don’t see there’s any separation of the moral enterprise from it from attention itself and that seemed to be what you were talking about when you talked about attention as a moral act so i’d like you to elaborate on that tell me how you understand that yes i mean first of all and i wouldn’t say that we only attend to the things that are our goal at the time there is that is a way of attending but there is another kind of attention one can practice which is not an instrumental hierarchy but is attention to things in themselves in their own right and this takes practice and the much cliched concept and probably misunderstood concept of mindfulness at least does prioritize not constantly seeking to verbalize to judge but actually just to be present for the first time and you know that the word representation do you think that that’s an allowance for the implicit moral order to speak for itself rather than the imposition is it something like that i think that’s possibly i was going to come on to the moral bit but yeah sorry and so where were you um you were talking about the other kind of attention yes so there are different kinds of attention one can practice them and some of them are more generous than others and there’s a certain kind of attention which is the attention of a predator effect yeah which is a stare in which you’re fixing something because it’s you know what it is you want but of course that will enable you more likely than not to achieve that particular target but you don’t know about the 999 other things that it’s stopping you from doing and seeing right so the type of attention you pay governs what it is you find and what there’s a hell of a statement but it’s very important yeah that’s for sure yeah so the way in which we attend um changes what we find changes therefore what we look for in future because if that confirms the type of attention then we think well that type of attention works so i’ll generalize that type of attention so if you are the predatory psychopath then you think well that worked so let’s just carry on with that and you know the example i usually give because it just works so nicely for me is the mountain behind my house which is a lump of rock according to most people these days um but its name in norse teluske means the sloping rock and that tells you something what it means is that for the norsemen that came there a thousand years ago it was a sign of where they were and it was a sign to avoid danger because the bay where it is is very rocky so that was what that mountain was for them but the picks had been there for a thousand years before that and for them they built their houses in the shelter of it for them it was their shelter and the home of the gods and then in the 18th century people came there with their sketchbooks because there’s a beautiful many colored many textured form to paint and then in the 19th century geologists came there because it happens to be a spectacular example of columnar basalt formation and to a speculator therefore it’s dollars and to a physicist it’s 99.99 percent empty space and we don’t know what the other 0.01 percent is i just say that because which of these is the real mountain because we’re obsessed with what is real the answer is every single one of those is a real facet of the mountain that is brought out by the kind of attention that’s paid to it you go to it as a something you see that something and so we should all be questioning what we take to be the obvious all the time and that should be the feature of an education to to teach us to question because if not we don’t exercise morality we we reduce things to the simple way that are useful to us and that is to narrowly useful narrowly useful and that has detrimental effects on the value of what we’re looking at and on us because we become these cynical people who are only capable of seeing use everywhere and my god how impoverished narrow use how impoverished the soul of such a person must be in that sense sorry i mean i’m just you asked about the moral thing so i just think it is a moral it’s moral in probably two ways one is in the sense i’ve elaborated that it changed it literally changes what’s there we change the world i mean since we now think of it in terms of utility we build things that are good for utility but are ugly and actually rather inhuman and actually rather dangerous and not satisfying to the human soul that’s that unidimensional utility so we have a we have a crime-ridden population who have high levels of mental illness and of course it’s not all just due to the the surroundings the architecture and so on but that’s part of it because that also expresses an attitude which is present in the whole of the society but it’s it’s also a moral act in another way that we should as i say be be testing our perceptions against other possibilities we should have an open mind about things and the trouble is that the way we are taught is that no these are the truths and you must close down on them which is very much the left hemisphere’s way it finds truth by closing down but the right hemisphere finds truth by opening up it does exact opposite thing it opens to a possibility where the left hemisphere closes to a certainty and we’ve lost amongst many many other things that the right hemisphere offers us the sense of the spiritual true emotional depth the convivial nature of a society fellowship with nature and our closeness to a spiritual relationship all of it relational and instead we substitute stuff for me and the more i can get and the richer i can become the better i’ve succeeded in life so the it looks to me like the one of the things that the collection of stories that make up the old testament i’m sort of obsessed by that that’s okay moment by the way because i’ve been writing about it so so um is it it’s actually training in a form of attention so because it’s so for example when when christ is called upon to name the most fundamental commandment he actually points to a principle that’s underneath the commandments he says you should love god with all your heart and your soul and you should treat other people as if they’re you essentially and relational right it’s relational yeah well and well both of those are relation both of those are relation right both of those exactly and the the the emphasis there is something like the hypothesis that if you devote your attention to what is properly put in the highest place then the world lays itself out to you in a manner that’s as close to the approximation of paradises can be managed under the circumstances right and it is viewed as a relational element and so that that what so that the question of course emerges what is it that’s properly put in the highest place and and the old testament hypothesis is well it’s an ultimate unity that’s the monotheistic hypothesis and it’s a unity that can be characterized in a multitude of ways like the mountain that you described right so for example in the story of abraham god is presented as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure right and and but more than that it’s very it’s fast it’s a fascinating thing to see so that’s the first part which is very interesting equation right which is that because psychologically speaking that means the story is characterizing what’s put in the highest place by the ancient israelites as the same proclivity that draws the infant to develop towards the adult right and as the same instinct that requires the adult entices the adult to move out of his or her area of comfort and to continue to develop so it’s that spiraling motion up upward but then there’s more because and this all is offered in the first paragraph of the opening of the story of abraham so what god says to abraham is get out of your tent you’ve been there 75 years it’s time to leave your kin and your and your comfort and to go out into the terrible world and he says if you abide by that calling and you make the proper sacrifices along the way which is something like the abandonment of your archaic presuppositions as you move forward it’s something like that then and this is what’s on offer you’ll be a blessing to yourself your name will resound among other men you’ll establish a nation and you’ll be a blessing to everyone else and so there’s this it’s this ridiculously promising offer which is that if you attend to the calling of the spirit so orient your attention in the proper direction then you’ll move forward with the adventure of your life but that will unfold in a manner that produces this harmonious balance it won’t just be about you and it won’t just be about other people it’ll be about the establishment of the balance that enables you to develop continually in a way that makes you better and better for yourself but simultaneously offers that to everyone else and then that’s presented as isomorphic as the call of that spirit of development so that’s a now the reason i brought that up is because we talked about the relationship between attention and the moral act and if if you the the question is to some degree how do you get your attention in order and the answer to that is something like it’s not the instrumental utilization of what’s proximal for the purposes of narrow self-interest that’s a bad technique you’re aiming at something that’s much more akin to the harmonious balance that you talked about into this multiplicity of vision right this balanced multiplicity of vision and it seems to me that so and there’s other characterizations too that that i think are in in keeping with the hypothesizing that you’re laying forward so you talked about intuition so the god that makes itself manifest to noah is the god of intuition right because god speaks to noah as intuition so noah is presented as a wise man who’s oriented himself properly for his time and place and he gets an intuition that society has become so unstable that a catastrophe is ensuing and that’s a form of intuition and that’s presented as the same spirit that calls abraham to adventure it’s the same spirit that that punishes the totalitarian uncertainties of the builders of the tower of babel as well right you know they’re engineers say the builders of the tower of babel and their descendants of cain they’re they’re resentful technological worshipers who embody the spirit of the luciferian intellect right and they build a totalitarian state that’s what the tower of babel is right it’s a it’s a spiraling upward structure dedicated to the wrong pinnacle of attention it’s something like that so so there’s a playoff there seems to me to be a playoff in the fundamental writings of the west between the luciferian intellect that tempts people into this narrow instrumental self-serving utilization and the the spirit that orients attention properly and if you understand that attention is a moral act which is a hell of a thing to say right that’s that’s a very very deep statement and one of the things i tell my audience is and you tell me what you think about this said well the world reveals itself in accordance with your intent right and that’s a very terrifying thing to understand because if all you see in front of your obstacles the first thing you might ask is well are you sure you’re aiming in the right direction so what are you working okay let me see what else have i got and we talked about pride is overreach oh do you know if there’s any research pertaining to individual differences in the rigidity of the left hemisphere post-damage well yes there is um i mean a lot of its um um observation of patients if if you mean that when they have damage to the right hemisphere they become they become more obstinate well well i’m wondering if like are those who are inclined to be more luciferian and obstinate to begin with made much more that way with right hemisphere damage right because i’m wondering if some of the narrowness that you’re that the neurological literature is pointing to is not necessarily so much a reflection precisely of the function of the left but the but a reflection of the function of the left that’s already gone badly and only has itself then in the case of the absence of the right that’s the problem is that on its own it doesn’t understand what to do or where to go it is it is instructed if you like in that by paying attention to what the right hemisphere is able to tell it but if it was a left hemisphere that was habitually that habitually rendered itself opaque to the right is it a worse tyrant in the aftermath of brain damage i’m not sure that was the specific question as right right right that’s what i was wondering well that’s a very sophisticated question but it would be odd if it were not the case right because of course nobody is the left hemisphere person or the right hemisphere person simply there is always an interplay unless there is a hemispherectomy or damage to one hemisphere or the other right well and obviously each person’s left hemisphere is socialized and trained yes no and so you it could easily be it seems to me that a theme that runs through your work is something like also something like the increased pathologization of the left hemisphere by a certain kind of let’s say narrowly technical or instrumental training right and so something distorts its balance yeah and the religious enterprise at least in part is in it obviously an attempt to restore something like balance but it’s certainly something like the attempt to restore the proper the proper target of attention so yeah that’s right and i think i think i’d say and i’m probably not alone in thinking this that actually it’s no good at solving the problems that we know we face to do with degradation of the natural world and the damaging of the fragmentation of society and so on unless we return to a spiritual vision one which has a place for god in it and i keep coming back to Thornton Itzen’s words that if he had to account for the horrors of the hundred years last hundred years of Russian life whatever he had to say that it’s because men have forgotten god and i mean that sounds a simple answer but actually it’s a very deep one and it it rings true for me even though as i’ve explained i’m not sure that i’m a fully paid up member of a particular religion although i incline enormously to and i’m spoken to enormously deeply by the mythos of christianity it’s extraordinary the meaning of this story and the beauty of what it has created and how do you how do you align that with with your studies of the relationship between the hemispheres do you think what’s the relationship between those two things well it would be a simplification to say that the left hemisphere doesn’t contribute to what we call the spiritual but it does say to things that i think are not necessarily the best part of a spiritual life by codification for example it’s rendering of the spirit into dogma yes and i think it’s it’s envisioning of what we’re doing when we are partaking in a spiritual life as a way of of subtly securing power right that we’ll be we’ll be the chosen ones and we’ll we’ll be able to sort everything out because god is on our side now i and of course well you know more about this old testament story than i do but um i’m not certainly saying saying that any spirit of criticism for judaism i have profound respect for judaism but i’m just saying i think that the left hemisphere’s contributions to spirituality are not the ones we’re most interested in which are the ability to maintain a sense of opposites without closing down on something that we already know because god is always something that we never completely know if i mean if you completely knew god then that’s not god that you know even augustin said that right god is that which continually escapes the nets in which it’s put yes yes that’s right yes and he’s bluntly said if you understand god then it’s not god you understand so that’s something the left hemisphere is not happy with it’s not happy when it hasn’t got a full grasp of the situation because it’s dedicated to control i mean that’s what it’s there for there’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s in the service of something in the highest place yeah so i think the trouble is that only a profound attention to a call that is quite different from anything we’re used to paying attention to namely the beauty the goodness and the truth of a certain dedication of our lives to to something higher than ourselves without that i think we’re going to be lost i think those things that you just described that beauty goodness and truth there’s other virtues that you could put in that bin there’s something like the spirit of calling yes right so you could imagine and and this is maybe a way of reconciling in some ways the left and the right hemisphere view so when when moses encounters the burning bush something calls to him and it’s something that’s specific to him and when that happens in each individual’s life it’s something specific to them so whatever interests you is going to make itself manifest in accordance with your character right so it’s going to be particularized but you could imagine that there’s a spirit that underlies all calling and you can tell that because once i mean you can have a calling that occupies you for your whole life but you can also have a calling or micro callings that transmute right you something inspires you something produces incentive reward activation it pulls you forward to the destination and then the calling transmutes and then the calling transmutes again but you could imagine that there’s something behind the set of all possible callings that’s like the spirit of calling and that’s the thing that should be attended to right if you if you’re going to put something in the proper highest place it’s not going to be the specifics of anything that grips your attention it’s going to be something like the spirit of that which grips your attention as such and that’s a much more abstract conceptualization yes i mean i would say that it’s not so much that this calling is replaced by another but that calling like everything else flows and so it seamlessly changes it doesn’t wait for a change and then change stepwise it is constantly refining itself and other things are speaking to one that’s my experience and i think we’ve degraded many things in life by capitalizing them i think health care is one of the things i would point to that being a doctor or a nurse or whatever is is a kind of calling and it’s not and it you know it’s not a relational call it’s a relational calling and it is it is a calling to aid other human beings who are suffering and teaching is an is a calling it’s not just a job that you get a pay packet for and it’s not just to carry out procedures laid down by the government you need people who are both doctors and teachers and you know many other things too but those specifically speak to me and of course clergy that are not just fulfilling a role in a hierarchy but are in a way guided by something that is a great deal of knowledge but also something spiritual well tell me about that flow okay so let’s let’s investigate that for a minute that notion of flow i mean there’s there’s the chick sent mahali flow which is something like immersion in the moment right but the flow that you’re talking about maybe that’s not that no you’re talking about okay is is how would you conceptualize the relationship between your notion of flow and play never really thought about that one um i mean play incidentally needs to be to a large extent intuitive not simply the following of rules and it’s responsive to the demands of the moment in a dancing way it’s extremely responsive but i mean it’s more obvious in things like dance or in music but it’s also there in life it’s in everything that we do that if we are in in sync with or attentive to the flow that is called the dow or whatever then things things naturally do follow that i like your thing that when you meet obstacles everywhere you might ask yourself am i really on the right path right right right but um but i mean chick sent me high’s idea of um of flow is is is an important one which is about being present in the moment which is um which is part of the right hemisphere’s um way of attending and being um but the flow i’m talking about is that we really need to get back to seeing everything as in process i mean even the mountain behind my house is in process it’s actually a wave that’s frozen and it will carry on moving until it eventually it crushes my house but i think i’ll see it out but it’s that that i’m getting at because we you know it’s a very toxic idea that things are made up of compartmentalized ideas and getting away from that to seeing the way in which things are mechanical it’s a mechanistic exactly idea so you do see that in schizophrenic delusion too right yeah the delusion of mechanism that’s it oh the delusion of mechanism and the delusion that time is made out of instance like now now now now sometimes they describe it like this and they can’t put them together to find the flow anymore and their movements also become more machine-like they they they find it difficult to know how to act naturally right and so and i believe that is because over dominance of the left hand is for the expense of the right but there’s one way in which we can bring together the chick gentmihi notion of flow with the idea of flow and time because time seems to be passing by when you are standing on the border of the stream with a clipboard and a stopwatch and you can see things moving down it but when you are in the flow um the river is no longer moving because you’re moving at the exact same speed as the river and so as far as you’re concerned you are completely in the flow and if you like there is no time because this is one of the things people say is that when you get into certain mental states you don’t feel that there is time anymore there is of course time time is not abolished by the fact that you don’t notice it you don’t notice it because you’re in a in a less um self-conscious less self-conscious less well that’s kind of what i was pointing to in regards to play as well yes so it looks to me like possibly you you could conceptualize play as concordance with that flow yes it’s something like that and it’s very dynamic right because if you’re playing you have to be very attentive to what the moment is calling for absolutely and and you know a really good footballer for example can’t really tell you how they’ve managed to be in exactly the right place at the right time you know beckham is asked how did he do this he said i don’t know i’m a footballer yeah right and you know when when that pilot landed his plane on the hudson river who’s asked how he did it i don’t know i’m a pilot you know and and surgeons do this instantaneously they respond to something which if they had to think now what do i do here i look up rule number no they just do it and as much as possible as we get into that we build that realm of the intuition yeah and the work of um that’s part of that all seeing eye of the state yes yes we got it that’s right we have to document every move you make because otherwise you can’t be trusted that that’s it but you know in in in the the learning of uh the learning of a skill at the early stages having an algorithm to follow is actually beneficial right but when you get to the last couple of stages approaching expertise it becomes an impediment yes yes right something that needs to be sacrificed and so what we do in our society is make absolutely sure that we can never have excellent people anymore we can only have semi-moronic people who follow rule books we we we have ruling out excellence and imposing mediocrity because everything everything militates against excellence now that instrumental use of attention is for something like immediate grip that’s fair yeah okay so and you might say well what’s wrong with immediate grip and the and the answer is it doesn’t take everything into account no it doesn’t right right and you might be gripping you might be reaching out for the wrong thing or overreaching yes and also the gripping may not be exactly what’s needed so the the art of things like tai chi and so on and and the other jujitsu is like that well jujitsu and so on is about sometimes moving with something rather than to grasping or holding but actually learning how to how to move in an instinctual way that uses the flow rather than tries to oppose it so when you when you make people narrow down to ticking boxes and making sure they proceduralize what they’re doing you’re hoping that you will avoid disaster yes right but you enforce mediocrity you enforce mediocrity and you do not stop there being disasters absolutely not planned you get algorithmically predictable disasters yeah well one of the things is obviously psychiatrists work with people who are likely to to harm themselves or kill themselves and so everybody has to fill out a risk assessment form you see and there’s now evidence that shows that these risk assessment forms are perfectly useless and they have another disadvantage which is that if you sit down and ask people a rote set of questions you you project a mechanical approach which is not empathic and indeed the or you can also give them all sorts of ideas with your risk although i don’t think that’s that’s so bad but i think that the feeling that you’re not really attending to them because you’re feeling in your form is not in itself good and you know my especially if they’re feeling a little alienated for example exactly so my risk assessment instrument was an in fact untrained nurse who had 40 years of experience on the ward and she just said i don’t like the look of mrs senso and i just there’s something about her that i’m concerned about and if you were intelligent you took that seriously so what are you working on now well i’m working on myself i’m in the how’s that going i got very tired writing the matter with things the last three years particularly were completely manic and i somewhat burnt out so i’m gradually coming back to to a more more fulfilled life and fulfilling life what i’m working on is i have an idea of finally writing a shorter book which i think would reach more people it’s quite funny really that um i don’t know if you know this but the reason i wrote the matter with things was because i was asked to write a shorter version of the master in his embassy people said this is a great book the master in his embassy but you need to write something about half the length that will be more accessible and so i got a contract with penguin random house to do that and after i’ve been trying to do it a little while i thought i don’t like doing this this is not what i want to do at all what’s in it for me to say crudely things that i’d said more subtly at length and if the idea is that the crude version will become substituting in people’s minds for the better one that’s not good for me either sounds like a left hemisphere problem so i said to my editor i want to do something quite different which is unpack the philosophical implications for finding truth that come from the hemisphere theory and that’s of course what i tried to do in that book and he said that’s fine we trust our authors go away and do i said be longer he said that’s all right too and then i turned up with a manuscript that was four times the length of the contracted book and he didn’t throw a fit but he didn’t say anything for five months and then he said yeah we want to publish it it’s great but it’s got to be half the length and i said to the people about four or five of them perhaps half a dozen who’d read it at that stage the manuscript and said you’ve got to be brutally frank to me you know would it really be a lot better if it were half the length not one of them said it would be they said you’d lose so much because it’s so dense there’s so much in it and so i thought no rather than spend another year sort of chopping this and every morning will be misery i’m going to just publish it and so how’s it done it’s done very well and how do you account for that i think people are hungry for something that really speaks to them right right and so they wanted length and difficulty they do in a way you see i think that’s this is one of the there’s so many problems with the the so-called elite um mainly left-wing intellectuals is frankly they’re patronizing and they think that people are stupid yeah and you know i have a colleague who makes wonderful films and shallow stupid and shallow shallow yeah and i have a colleague who makes wonderful films david malone and i’ve been in two of them and he makes them independently and then the bbc go yeah okay well he’d been to the bbc earlier they said no no they won’t get it he makes the film then they want it yeah and every time it’s the same and they never seem to learn they of course they’re stuck in the set in that left-handed field where no the rules are we don’t and the thing that was quoted to me was apparently and it may have general truth that for every every thousand words over a certain level the sales will be predicted to be lower um but this hasn’t happened with this book i haven’t been able to keep up with the was constantly publishing it i mean i it’s published by perspic t book press i’m a i think a board member of perspic t but it’s a a very good charitable structure in london that wants to put forward ideas i believe in that are ecologically sound and spiritually sound and and a meaty intellectually and so i think you see people have been starved of it for so long because every time these films by david go out they get five star reviewers in the papers and people say why can’t we have more of this well he can tell you why because idiots run the kind of gatekeeping of these things we need people to relax about that stop trying to over control they literally have algorithm we had something on spirituality there we can’t have another one till you know whatever well i don’t know about that but in any case although my my work is for those who have eyes to see is guiding them towards seeing a broader picture which might be identified with with a more spiritual way of looking at it i don’t rub anybody’s nose in it i want to keep people with me and yeah well i think that’s part of what accounts for the popularity too right i think so yeah it’s an exploration right it is an insistence it’s not an insistence and you know that’s terribly important and i always you know i think when people say well what do i do with people who don’t understand what it is i’m saying i said relax you know because one thing that you learn as a as a doctor and especially as a psychiatrist and just by living is there are plenty of people that you can never you can never get to see certain things and that’s their problem actually i mean you’re not put on the world to get everyone to see things you do what you can and i’m doing just what i can and i’m thoroughly delighted by the the very warm response and the sales you know yeah it’s quite the miracle all right yeah yes actually yeah definitely it is the big book but people like the challenge of something that’s meaty not just a sound bite yeah well it’s also an accomplishment to work your way through it and yeah you know kirkgaard i read a great piece from kirkgaard years ago i used to teach it to my students all the time in the personality course and talked about his absolute lack of utility in terms of ever making anything easier and more efficient and he thought that instead he’d take the opposite tack and make things more difficult and challenging because there would come a time when everything had been made so easy that there would be a clamor for what was more difficult and challenging and i’ve been in constant discussion with uh with people i’ve talked to within the catholic church particularly with regard to that well why don’t we have any people coming well it’s because you’ve made everything far too welcoming and easy yes facile and the problem is this they go oh well they won’t really get it you know so we must do away with the latin mass we must do away with ritual we must do away with the core beliefs we have and say well basically anything goes and make it more like being at home in the sitting room but the reason you go to church is not to be at home in the sitting room you can do that by doing nothing but they want to be introduced to something very different of the transcendent absolutely and now you can only get this i believe in the orthodox church it’s the one christian church russian and greek that has not sort of sold out really but once you start having motorbikes and whatever in the church it’s it’s not you know in canterbury cathedral they put on a rave colored lights and people dancing and did they have a golden calf on the altar just curious just curious because that would have been perfectly appropriate it would have been yes yes and also extremely hilarious in a very very dark way well very good talking to you sir thank you for walking through your book and and a variety of associated ideas and including the ones i was inflicting on you no they’re very good and i love being with you i think it’s much better than being on the ends of things thousands of miles apart yeah well there’s a lot of things to keep track of in our conversations so if the channel narrows it makes it more difficult yeah yeah yeah yeah well it’s very good to talk to you yeah so yes thank you very much thank you very much and for everybody watching and listening today your attention at time is always much appreciated and i’m going to continue to talk to dr mcgill chris for half an hour on the daily wire side we’ll we’ll speak i think more autobiographically in that half an hour interview which is generally the theme and so you’re welcome to join us there and to throw some support the daily wire way they facilitate these conversations and make them available to everyone which is you know quite the act of generosity and they’ve been a pleasure to work with and and made all of these episodes more professional and and more compelling and to thank you very much to the film crew today for helping out and make sure this could proceed and thanks again and it was very good to talk to you as always