The other perspective
Iain McGilchrist - The Matter With Things
Reading Iain McGilchrist’s section on the Sacred in his book The Matter With Things has been an important lesson for me, and a sort of relief, because, although I wasn’t able to perform academically well enough to follow my inclinations, his account made it clear to me that I was onto something that has a deep cultural importance to our civilisation, and not just a boy with attention deficit. It has only been later in life that I was able to “catch up” as it were, via a series of diversions, taking the long way around, you might say.
The whole two volumes of The Matter With Things, as well as his numerous other books, have been a delight to read, connecting with my relatively short medical career in nursing with the humanities that had interested me at school, but due to two school changes was not able to pursue. His hypothesis about the hemispheres has definitely confirmed my own experience and provided an explanation that assists understanding the undulations of history, and the behaviour of human beings since the beginning of civilisation. It also aligned with the various symptoms of brain lesions, depending on their location, which I experienced in nursing, and which in his studies showed how each hemisphere works.
The point that came across in the aforementioned section on the Sacred is that in the present, as in various periods of history, humankind has habitually restricted its abilities to pay attention. Indeed, paying attention was another area in which I had delved when taking a course on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which was another confirmation that the way we pay attention is indeed reliant upon our habits. I also learned to appreciate the source of this meditation, which comes from the Buddhist Vipassana meditation, but which is also practiced and taught by non-Buddhists, as in my case. Becoming aware of the endless monologue in our minds, learning to let it pass and instead attending to vigilance, gives a new perspective on life.
In my experience, religion is seldom connected with paying attention, and, as McGilchrist says of himself, conventional religion need not be the initial spark that awakens the awareness of the Other. He found it in music, in nature, and in poetry, which laid the foundation for finally finding how personalities in religion had discovered the Sacred in a similar way. Indeed, as an Oxford Don, he initially studied and taught the humanities, before moving on to become a psychiatrist. As can be imagined, this career has given him a broad perspective on our culture which I find curiously lacking elsewhere, but which has always been a point of interest for me.
Discovering that the hemispheres had varying focal points, which he demonstrated in the first video that brought my attention to him, he realised that every living creature with a brain needs to do two things concurrently, namely, to look for food and watch out that it doesn’t become food for another species. This means that we have the investigative focus and the wider vigilance, which is on the lookout. On further inquiry, it occurred to him that our general perception is also twofold, with a concentration on facts, and alternatively, an experience of an ambiguous but at times overwhelming encounter with what is often called a majestic natural world.
This is, quite obviously, the experience of our ancestors, not yet living in a cluttered environment, that is full of buildings, lights, sounds and media. The night sky was, according to what records people have left behind, seen with a great deal of accuracy, impossible for city dwellers to see. The natural environment, with its diversity of plants and animals, was full of life, and humankind’s struggle for existence was understood as a participation in a great drama. Our capacity for stepping back to enquire intensely, as well as that of introspection seems to have come at a later stage, perhaps when the immediacy of danger was overcome and the security of having physiological needs met was available.
The lack of attention is often criticised today, whether in schools, or in apprenticeships or university. We generally know many people who seem to live superficial lives, with no consideration of what they are doing, who drift through life as the “on automatic,” hardly participating. This may be down to the fact that we have prioritised the “spotlight vision,” which is definitely an aspect of our lives, but permanently focussing on detail is extremely tiring for some people, and they avoid it. If it had less of a stigma, and was less regarded as pointless, because it can’t be used in employment, such people might be interested in some area of humanities, but just as in my experience, when I began dancing about as a teenager, and even spoke about becoming a dancer, it raised eyebrows, it seems to be the experience of many.
Sir Ken Robinson, a British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education and arts bodies, raised this issue in his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, and later The Element: how finding your passion changes everything. John Cleese, the famous comedian of Monty Python, said of his books: "Ken Robinson writes brilliantly about the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and especially in our educational systems.” These people have raised points that Iain McGilchrist has raised in his books coming from a different perspective, namely that our habitual neglect of right-hemispheric perceptions, robs us of our creative abilities.
It has implications in many aspects of life: The complications of decision making are often reduced to “either…or” alternatives, rather than developing a methodology that reacts to different circumstances. I experienced this when teaching my staff to plan care for our multimorbid patients. But other professions complain of the same restrictions in ability and seems to have to do with lack of imagination. Considering that we see that the entertainment industry is churning out remakes and numeric titles, indicating that the same story is being told with a slightly different twist, it may be no surprise. Equally, the deeming of classical literature as “problematic” or “disturbing” for students unwilling to encounter different philosophies and worldviews, and the rewriting of established literature deemed not politically correct, or not inclusive enough, is a sign of an inability to cope with examples of imagination unfamiliar to them.
In religion we see the literalist interpretation preferred by adherents and critics alike, and an inability to work with ambiguity, metaphor, allegory, and fable incorporated into a literature that is pointing to the ineffable – a concept that seems in itself impossible for a modern frame of mind. The assumption that language can describe every experience known to mankind suggests that first of all people fail to see the limitations of language, and secondly suggests that the experiences are limited in themselves, perhaps due to sheltered lives. My continual confrontation with death in nursing showed me how limited my experiences had been up until then.
Iain McGilchrist, not being a conventionally religious person and having no affiliation to a certain tradition, looks at the religiosity of humankind with a broad perspective, incorporating the shared aspects of religious experience of many traditions. He discovers how people like Meister Eckhard, the famous Christian mystic, describes the human mind in much the same way as he has discovered the workings of the brain. Such discoveries suggest that his enquiry has delved into areas that religious figures have discovered long before the scientific era.
This seems to illustrate the point quite well.
and somewhere in the middle between weak dualism and weak panentheism, the two shall meet. The last part was my personal takeaway in seeing the diagrams… Seriously a good video and Palamas was mentioned numerous times.
