This is a must-watch interview between JBP and McGilchrist. See if you can spot the very subtle vectoring going on in the realm of Old Testament apologia. I also think McGilchrist would do well to balance his fascination with Kabblah a little.
Quick summary of points I found interesting:
- The way “Duality” is used commonly implies separation; McGilchrist means something more inclusive in his use of the term.
- More connection and communication not necessarily a good thing!
- Brain as a filter: permits and filters information.
- LH is ‘quick and dirty’ in its assessments, not the more comprehensive RH.
- Unity and multiplicity as a coincidence of opposites.
- Multiplicity ‘unfolding’ within unity; the image of the Rose and its association with the Spiritual Universe.
- Images present much more information than the artist can convey.
- Typical conscious awareness about 0.5% of our consciousness.
- Importance of intuition.
- LH apprehends, RH comprehends.
- Our attention is a moral act that creates both the world and ourselves.
- “Truth” can be seen from both a LH or RH perspective.
- True comes from a root word meaning “being faithful”; LH wants to “find truth”, RH wants to “stay true”.
- Ontology has as a basis the coincidence of opposites.
- Music portrays the tension between unity and multiplicity in rhythm, melody, harmony, polyphony.
- Importance of the concept of "flow" - the perception that everything flows as a process.
- We know of nothing in the Cosmos that is at all like a machine, except for the machines that people have made in the last few hundred years.
- Bureaucratic mind a symptom of LH thinking.
- Locus of emotional control comes from the RH.
- Luciferian intellect a symbol of pride, overreach, hubris, resentment, Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Unknowing as an important step towards wisdom, opposite of ignorance: ‘emptying your cup’.
- Schizophrenic preference for painting disembodied eyes - Luciferian, panoptical oversight, “Eye of Sauron”, “All-Seeing Eye”.
- Eye of God is within each human being; mythologically and theologically represented by Horus, Atman.
- Fidelity - music term that also means faithfulness.
- Matter as a manifestation of a different phase of consciousness.
- William Blake's painting Jacob’s Ladder - picture of a spiralling ladder is unusual in art history.
- Distance and togetherness needed for a lasting relationship.
- Time, space and matter needed to create beautiful things that will endure.
- Empiricism is flawed because attention is a moral act and a precondition for the facts themselves.
- Attention of all-encompassing awareness can be practised.
- “The type of attention you pay governs what it is that you find.”
- We should question what we think is obvious all the time.
- LH finds ‘truth’ by closing down, RH finds truth by opening up.
- The principle of calling and growth and balanced multiplicity of vision as the pinnacle of the hierarchical of values.
- Tower as Babel as a spiralling upwards structure aimed at the wrong pinnacle of attention.
- Ecological problems of the world cannot be addressed without returning to a spiritual vision of life.
- IM finds Christianity appealing due to the beauty of the works it has produced.
- "God cannot be completely known"; RH view of the Universe.
- Beauty, goodness and truth, and the “Spirit of Calling” as a pinnacle of attention.
- Genuine play is intuitive, flows naturally.
- Seeing the world as in flow, as a process.
- Not noticing time in the flow state, even while time is still there.
- Heuristics as an impediment to the development of experts.
- Tai Chi an excellent practice for instinctual movement and flow.
- Risk assessment forms useless in psychiatry. IM used an untrained nurse with 40 years of practical experience as his risk assessor.
- Success of The Matter with Things; people hungry for difficult and ‘meaty’ topics.
- IM thinks the Eastern Orthodox church is the only remaining form of mainstream Christianity that hasn’t ‘sold out’.
And believe it or not, IM says he's never read Lord of the Rings!!!
I hope someone he knows recommends that to him!