The Sophia Lectures with Dr Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Division and Union

[Music] Time is not a succession of moments. It's a continuum. We artificially reflect on it, thinking of it as a line, and think we can find a point in the line. And therefore, we think it must be made up of points. But actually, a line isn't made up of points either. A point has no extension, so you can have an infinite number of points, but you'll still not have a line. Extension is something special. Extension comes into the universe as a special conception. Time is extension in a certain modality. It is not pieces put together or takeable [Music] apart.

You're all very welcome to tonight's first Sophia lecture of the 2024 Sophia lecture series. It's my privilege, briefly, I promise, to introduce you tonight to Rolston College, to the Sophia lectures, and most importantly, to our distinguished Sophia lecturer, Dr. Ian McGilchrist.

Rolston College is a revival and a reinvention of the university. It seeks, simply speaking, to emulate the greatest universities of history. It seeks to bring about a veritable revolution in higher education, both as a place for and a beacon of the wholehearted pursuit of truth, the freedom of inquiry on which that depends, the appreciation of beauty, and of the friendship or fellowship that enables us to seek these things together.

We are living, I don't think it's any secret here, in a world that is fractured and alienated, both from each other and from history, from, you might say, from the memory of what human beings have been and what they have learned over the course of our species and indeed of our civilization's history. It is our aim at Rolston College to rediscover the forms of life and culture that enable human beings to flourish. Not a return to the past, but a rediscovery of the perennial truths and paradigms that enable human beings to realize each their unique potential.

These fundamental purposes are precisely the purposes of the Sophia lecture series, an annual lecture series that invites the brightest and boldest thinkers of our age to try to help us make sense of our contemporary world by engaging the perennial questions of philosophy.

If ever someone were to be characterized as a Renaissance man, that could fairly be said of Ian McGilchrist. Who, after his preparatory schooling, went to Winchester College at the age of 12 in Winchester, England. Some of you may know as the home of Jane Austen. Where he read widely in ancient and modern languages and literature, in math and science. In all of these, he took his high school exit exams at the age of 12. He then went to read English at New College, Oxford, and after that was elected to that most prestigious of all academic fellowships and examination fellow at All Souls College. Seven years he was at All Souls, and after that, he published a book on English literature entitled *Against Criticism*, in which, broadly speaking, he argues that literary works must be approached in their individuality, and he explored how these works mediate between the conscious and unconscious, between the particular and the general. And you can see already how these themes that have been with Dr. McGilchrist for his whole life were emerging there.

That led him, as his interest expanded beyond literature into neuroscience, to explore the relationship between the body and the brain. Accordingly, he took up the study of medicine and trained in particular in psychiatry. He was a research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University, and then as a consulting psychiatrist and clinical director at Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London. During this period, he practiced psychiatry for about 25 years. He published during that period extensively, especially in this field of psychiatry and in schizophrenia.

Then, towards the end of that period, he published *The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World*. He retired from the practice of medicine to focus on the writing that we have all come to know and love. Most recently, his two-volume *The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World*. In these works, as I think many of you know, Dr. McGilchrist argues that the types of thinking associated with the left side of the brain have taken on an outsized importance, resulting in the dehumanization of our culture, whose mechanistic functioning has led to destruction and despair. He insists that our very survival depends upon learning how to think fully, deeply, and humanly again.

Dr. McGilchrist has been for many years a friend of Rolston College, a member of its Board of Visitors. Some of you will know the podcast I had the privilege of recording with Dr. McGilchrist in his study, just a few meters away from Talisker Bay. You can hear the grandfather clock in the background as we discuss Time and Eternity. He is here for two weeks. Our students have the immense privilege of being able to pepper him with questions. You too will have a chance to ask questions during the Q&A that will follow his lecture.

In these three lectures, Dr. McGilchrist will draw on neuropsychology and physics, as well as humanity's philosophy and poetry, music, painting, and myth. I can think of no one better to help us re-shape the fragments of ourselves and of our culture and of our civilization, so as to reveal the whole, all in each of us and in our relations, each to each. Please join me in giving a warm welcome for the first of his talks on Wholeness, Imagination, and the Cosmos, Dr. Ian [Applause] McGilchrist.

[Music] Thank you very much for those uh kind and generous, indeed over-kind and over-generous words. It's a great pleasure and an honor for me to be giving this second series of Sophia lectures. Apropos of your introduction, which of course I didn't know ahead of time, I think the theme starts from the point that we're at a turning point in history. I believe that so much of recent history and a lot of stuff that still comes to our notice day by day can lead us to a sense of blankness, a sense of despair about what is being broken up and destroyed. And as you say, in recent history, there's been a great deal of fragmentation, isolation, aloneliness, the loss of a coherent culture, and so forth. I think our imaginations have become impoverished. And I think the cosmos, that word which was first used by Pythagoras to describe the orderly and beautiful universe, has been sold to us as the random movements of purposeless and pointless matter, chaotically moving without direction, pieces colliding with one another, and all of this to no end.

So I wish over the next three days to put before you an alternative vision, which I think people are particularly hungry for now. In some ways, the worse it gets, the better it gets, because when things get really bad, people wake up and go, "Look at what we've lost. We really need to rediscover these things." As you were saying, Stephen, it's not a matter of going back, but of looking back at what we've lost and going forward. After all, the Renaissance, which is probably the high point of recent Western civilization, is exactly that: a rebirth, which started in looking at things that we had forgotten and hoping to wake us up to them again.

I want to start talking about wholes and parts. But it may seem odd that the title of this series is Wholeness, Imagination, and Cosmos, when wholeness perhaps speaks for itself. How can it be broken down further to make it clearer? Breaking it down is just what can't be done to it without it becoming something else. Imagination is the faculty that enables us to see connections between what seem on the surface, perhaps, radically disparate entities, to see beyond superficial separation to wholeness. And the cosmos is the name that Pythagoras used, evoking its beauty, to describe the perfect order of the whole that is the sum of all things that we now commonly call the universe.

It may thus seem strange that the three titles of my talks, Division and Union, Symmetry and Asymmetry, and Finitude and the Infinite, appear to refer not to wholeness, not to unities, but what seem to be oppositions. How are they to be combined? Well, it seems like a good question, but there's a hidden assumption in it, which is that they need combining at all. And that's not because they cannot be combined, but quite the opposite. They do not need combining because they never were separate. Let me explain.

Going back to my school days, I remember having the very distinct impression, one that however I couldn't explain, that the whole was not the sum of the parts. My clever school chums scoffed at me. "So what exactly is this mysterious something that needs to be added back in then?" And of course, I couldn't answer this question. But that was because I, like them, was thinking that the missing element must be some kind of thing. And I, like them, assumed that in the process of analysis, nothing could be lost as long as one kept one's eyes on the pieces. I didn't see the "betweenness," the fact that each piece only was what it was in the context of every other piece. Once that context was invisibly removed, the whole ceased to exist. It wasn't that something extra needed to be added in, but that something at its very core had been illicitly taken away.

The perfect analogy also happens, in one sense, to come from Pythagoras: the nature of music. Music means much to those of us who love and understand it. So, what is music, actually? Well, it's simply a composition of notes. "Ah," says my interlocutor, "now we're getting somewhere. And what is a note?" "A note is any single tone," I reply. "So tell me, what does a note mean?" "Absolutely nothing." Yet, put 30,000 of them together, and it may make a piece of music that is capable of changing your life forever.

And while talking of music, let us think about its main constituents. If we want to analyze it, I suppose we would say they are melody, harmony, and rhythm, principally. And each of these has important qualities that I will recur to at various times in these lectures. But one of the things I would say is that harmony depends on the being more than one. In the absence of more than one, you have just unison, which can be beautiful. But the capacity for expression that comes through harmony is incredible, and that is something that is added over and above and comes from difference. Melody, too, requires excursions that make sense within the context of the whole, so that it's not an agglomeration of notes or a string of notes, as we sometimes think of it. It is, in fact, a seamless whole that has its own living movement, and it only means something, as it were, when it gets to its end. Nature, actually, said here's a paradox: a melody is not complete until it is finished, but it is not the end getting to that last note that is the purpose of the piece of music. It is the whole.

And rhythm is interesting, too. I'll come back to this, but with as we heard with this wonderful guitar solo, at times the tempo changes, it quickens, it slows down, and so forth. And you may not even be aware of this, and quite often you should not be explicitly aware of it, but it is working away. If you listen to a piece of music played by a computerized instrument, you realize how this missing impulse of life changes, and when you haven't got it, you change the nature of the music. Something called rubato, the slight movement in which you delay and take up again, the word comes from robbing, so one part is robbed to give to something else. And this robbing emotion is part of life.

Differentiation on its own leads to discord. Union on its own to unison. The combination of differentiation and union, i.e., different strands but ones that can be brought together, brings harmony. We need not division only, nor union only, but their union, not division, at a higher level.

Now, there's a difference between, and our language doesn't help here, between, I want just draw your attention to some differentiations between fragmentation and differentiation. I will talk very briefly about hemisphere theory. I don't want to do what my colleague Jonathan Rowson calls "McGilchrist 101," because if you want that, you can find it all over the internet. But I do feel I've got to say something about it. Fragmentation is effectively what the left hemisphere does. It breaks things down to find out what its constituents are, so that it can have a better idea of what it's dealing with. I've already indicated that there may be problems with that, but it is also a very worthwhile exercise. And that is different from differentiation. Differentiation is a kind of living process whereby strands that were never before conceived appear out of what you had thought was a single, simple whole. And the right hemisphere is better equipped to understand this, and it understands, therefore, uniqueness.

Now, it's not a conflict, although some people think it is, that the right hemisphere is both better at uniqueness and better at seeing the whole. The uniqueness and the whole go together. In fact, anything that is unique has to be appreciated as a whole, the whole of that person, which includes their voice, their face, their gait, their interests, their everything. And there's also a difference between the general and the whole. So in generalizing, which the left hand is very good at, it takes something and says, "Oh, it's an example of that. I'll put it in a box of all those things that are a bit like it." And in that process, something very special and important has been lost. But nonetheless, some structure has been gained to our knowledge. But once again, wholeness is not about just aggregating things into boxes. Almost the opposite, it's about seeing how things that you perhaps didn't see were connected are deeply and profoundly connected.

So we too often think that things exist separately and then ask how they are to be combined. All lies in the interconnectedness of wholes. The part and the whole are never opposed, since what we call a part is not something like a machine component. It's a whole at a different level, and therefore depends on adopting a different perspective. For example, the heart. The heart seems to be part of the whole. We can separate it in our minds. We can actually separate it using a scalpel, for the results are not usually good for the person that's being scalped, but, but there we are, we can do this. But in fact, the heart is itself a miniature cosmos. It is a whole that has all kinds of interesting parts in it that go to make it function in the way it does, miraculously, for the whole of our lives, for most of us. And that's an extraordinary fact, which you can replicate onwards billions of times in the body. The things that we think of as simple and single and unitary, a single solitary cell, now seems to be able to behave intelligently. When I say "now seems to," we're learning more, we find that it can behave intelligently. Originally, it can work as a whole. It can choose to cooperate or not with other cells. It's a remarkable business that these things that look like the parts are in fact, at another level, wholes.

Now, there's something else to say about a whole, which is that it's already subsuming tensions between the parts and the whole. So again, the development of the heart, the process of differentiation within union. Nothing is lost, but something is enriched. The embryo seems very simple and single, and then the heart differentiates itself. It's not sort of put in, it's not added, it doesn't suddenly grow. It actually is a part of the embryo that differentiates into a heart. And you can watch this extraordinary process in embryology, one of the most imaginatively fascinating areas of my training in medicine, which I came to rather late in life, as Stephen was saying. But there we see that the parts and the whole are not separate in the way that we often think they are.

To turn one's back on the parts, the workings of the left hemisphere, and accept only the whole, the work of the right hemisphere, is not to get back to wholeness, because the whole is never an annihilation, but rather a subsumption of the parts. The true whole exists precisely in the relationship, the tension between parts and an apparent whole. And here, the image that works for me is the unfolding of a bud. The integrity of the bud is unfolded, literally, the implicit, the infolded, is made explicit, unfolded. But that unfolding leads on, in fact, to further unfolding in the plant world. And so the whole drift of the cosmos, it seems to me, is differentiating from singleness into variety, amazing multiplicity, but without that threatening the integrity of the whole, but instead completing and complementing and fulfilling the nature of the whole. In other words, the potential that is stored in it is being unlocked. And this is the ongoing process of life, and indeed of the business, I believe, of the universe.

What makes us think that even opposites, especially opposites, they're separate? As Heraclitus noted, cold cannot exist without heat, nor dryness without water, nor day without night. They draw their meaning from one another. They are joined at the hip. Can there be a meaning to the infinite, literally that which has no bounds, if there is no finite, no boundedness? Infinity shows it through, not in spite of, finitude. Can there be asymmetry if there is not symmetry? The contents of my glove box are not asymmetrical, they're just a mess. Asymmetry already implies a contrast with a potential symmetry in the situation. I'll talk more about these relationships in subsequent talks, but for today, the question is this: Can there be union without division, and do they depend on one another?

Well, first of all, I'd like to talk about the nature of nature. Goethe thought not only that division and union were necessarily part of one whole, but that nature existed through their relationship. And this is a quote from Goethe: "Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the very life of nature. This is the eternal systole and diastole, the upbeat and the downbeat of the heart, the eternal coalescence and separation, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live and where our existence is woven." A wonderful word in that context. This seems to me a profound insight, and I would take it further and suggest that not only is it true of nature, in the sense of the living world, but of the cosmos in general, whether we think of the animate or the inanimate world.

And here I want to make a diversion on animacy and inan-imacy. To my surprise, having most of my life believed that this was a very important boundary, and it is an important boundary, but probably an absolute one, I have come to a different conclusion. And it's not because I think that what we normally take for living, animate, can actually be reduced to the inanimate, but the exact opposite: that what we think of as inanimate has many of the features of life, but just at a very, very, very much lower level. It reacts and responds to things and changes its form in the way that an organism does, but it does so over billions of years instead of over half a second. It is much less responsive, but it is still responsive. It does change and evolve. It does produce complexity and beauty, but it just doesn't do it in the way that life does.

Well, may well ask, well, why is life actually? And the philosopher A. N. Whitehead said it can't be this battle for survival, you know, because the art of existing for a long time is never to have lived at all. The mountains around where I live have done very well. They don't need to preserve their integrity too much, but there they are. They're still living billions of years later, if you'd like to put it that way. So what is this? And life itself hasn't moved in that direction. So some of the simplest living organisms are actually bacteria that can be found at the bottom of the oceans, and single examples of these may be half a million years old. So compared with our average 70 years, they've done very much better in the battle of life, if that is really the metaphor we should be using. It's not one I actually subscribe to, but it's the one we've learned to believe. And a tree can last for a thousand years. But as I say, you know, a poor human generally doesn't last a thousand years. Sometimes I feel I have, but so it's not truly a hard boundary. And it's not true that there is anything like a machine in the cosmos, apart from a few machines we made, mainly in the last couple of hundred years. But going back a thousand years or more, the fact that we take the machine model as the way to understand everything is a gross error that comes from our proximity to machines and our self-admiration that we've made this clever mechanism that can do all these things. Isn't that wonderful? Yes, but it's not a substitution for all that comes with imagination and life.

Robert Rosen was a very interesting mathematician and biologist who wrote a book called *Life Itself*. And it's quite a complicated book. He wrote another one called *Essays on Life Itself*, which, I'm afraid, I find a great deal more comprehensible. And the essential point he's making is that when you get complexity, which you do in both the inanimate world and the animate world, something happens which could not have been predicted at a lower level. So we now talk about emergence. But the word "emergence," by the way, is a bit of one of those sort of conjuring words, you know, sort of, "Oh, look, something has emerged," like a rabbit popping out of a hat. It's not really like that. It's that something that we didn't know was potential, a field that was potential, has been actualized, and it now shows us something quite different. So, for example, if you take an evil, poisonous, green, bad-smelling gas like chlorine and put it together with a softish gray metal, sodium, you get crystals of beautiful white table salt. This is an extraordinary fact. And much further than that, complex systems do not obey mechanical principles. They cannot be set up predictably in the way that a machine can. So animacy and inanimacy are important, but they shouldn't be kept entirely apart from one another.

And then I think I want to say something about the nervous system. Surprise, surprise. The nervous system is an embodiment of this idea, and it reflects the world it's designed to understand. Whether the world looks like the way it does because our minds are so constructed, or whether our minds are so constructed because the world they're having to understand has that structure, I can't say. And I remember making that point when I was on a panel with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a very distinguished theologian. And he said to me, "Does it have to be either?" Which was just such a touché moment, because that's exactly what I would have said. But there we are. The nervous system, its structure, cannot be irrelevant to our thinking. And it is an example of being divided yet united.

So here you see from Vesalius, very great man, doing this picture of a dissection with the brain. The poor chap that's having this done to it doesn't look at all gruntled by the experience. But then you wouldn't, would you, if the top of your head had been taken off and half your brain pulled aside? But what this just illustrates is that the brain, for those of you who are not familiar with looking at the brain, is somewhat like a walnut. So it's in two sort of hemispheres, actually, and they are connected at the base by the corpus callosum, which you see in the middle of the picture. And what's interesting about the corpus callosum is that it exemplifies division and union. Obviously, it is a unifying force, but it connects the two hemispheres. But probably the majority of its effect is to inhibit the contralateral hemisphere, which is interesting. It was one of the things actually in medical school when I discovered this, there was a sort of "aha" moment that made me think I really need to research about hemispheres more.

What we've been talking about, the left hemisphere is really in the service of division, the right hemisphere in the service of union, although also of individuation. And the left in categorization. And they need to be separate but undivided. Two brothers. So I say to brothers because I discovered in writing *The Matter with Things* an amazing allegory, a myth. It's actually a myth of the Onondaga people. And I wish I had time to talk about it, but I don't. But it is a tale of the creation which involved two figures, two brothers. One of whom was more imaginative, understood where he'd come from, knew what he was doing. And another one that had forgotten where he'd come from, and thought he was jealous of his brother, he wanted the power that his brother had. And these two were somehow necessary to the bringing about of the world. It is a much more beautiful story than I'm making it, very briefly, here. Both necessary, their powers were both necessary, but they needed to have a kind of distance, but not too great a distance. If they were too close, it would stop the good brother, as it were, from doing what he could do. Interestingly, his name is "He Who Grasps the Sky with Both Hands," whereas the other brother is called Flint, and his gifts from his father are speech and the arrow, which are extraordinarily enough, a very good representation of the workings of the left hemisphere.

So here are people intuiting, as people since time began have done, that there was something inside them that has this structure of difference and togetherness, without using MRI scanners, at least as far as I'm aware. There were very few in Central America 100 years ago. So, in fact, the interesting thing about the corpus callosum is that most creatures don't have one at all. So birds don't have it, for example. Reptiles don't have it. The first creatures that do are mammals. And I can't go into the story of it, which is in fact an incredibly interesting story about how it evolved and then changed its nature. But any case, my point is that these two centers of consciousness and awareness can work separately, but need to work to some degree together, as long as they don't tread on one another's toes in doing so.

This is just to illustrate the corpus callosum. On the right, there you see a human brain, and the corpus callosum is the obviously white, arc-shaped tissue in the middle there, right at the base of the brain. Only 2% of neurons actually cross from one hemisphere to the other through that tract. And on the left, you see the brain of a dog. Where the brain is very much smaller, but the size of the corpus callosum is not that much smaller. So, in fact, over evolution, more recently, the corpus callosum has been getting smaller, not bigger, because the separation is preserved by having just enough contact to inhibit the other hemisphere. This explains, by the way, why when people had, you know, there was great excitement when they did the first split-brain operations, as they called callosotomy, back in the 1950s and 60s in California at Caltech, for people who had intractable epilepsy, whose lives were reduced to being almost wholly unconscious because they were constantly fitting. This was a life-saving procedure. But of course, afterwards, people were excited to see what people would be like. And though there are some very interesting, fascinating from a philosophical point of view, consequences immediately after the operation in which the two hands seem to have different wills. So a woman might go to the cupboard and bring out the flame-colored dress, and the left hand takes it, puts it back in the cupboard, and pulls out the black dress, whatever it might be. So you get that. But over time, funnily enough, these people function very normally. You could go on holiday with somebody who had this split brain, and you wouldn't know the difference.

But then there are synapses. You probably know that nerves communicate with one another by abutting ends at something called the synapse. And this always puzzled me. After all, it would be much more efficient if an electrical impulse didn't have to go and then stop and find the right chemical release. The chemical moves across the gap, sits on the end of the other nerve, and then stimulates that nerve. I mean, of course, it happens very, very quickly. But nonetheless, you think, for maximal efficiency, you wouldn't do away with this system, you'd just have a continuum. And there was a disagreement between two very great neuropathologists, Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, about this matter. And in the end, Golgi was right, but they both showed, I include in my book examples of their drawings, of the old factory ball, in which one of them shows these synapses, but the other shows another way in which things are both separate and connected, dividing and uniting, and in this process being more efficient.

Now, this is where I am going to, very briefly, do McGilchrist 101. So I'm not going to talk about why it all happened. Why the brain? Well, I can say this very quickly. It's really from a point of view of survival. There is a need for two things that are on the face of it incompatible. One is, you need to grab stuff, to get stuff, to exist, to eat, to make a nest, to find a, to make a tool, whatever, for utilitarian purposes. You need some very fine attention to something you can pick up precisely, grab, manipulate very well. But if actually the only attention you pay, then you will become prey to something else. While you're getting your lunch, you become somebody else's. So there needs to be two senses of consciousness, subtending two entirely opposite kinds of attention. One very narrow indeed, probably about 3 degrees out of 360, very precisely focused on a detail. And at the same time, something that is wide open, sustained, vigilant for whatever there is. So the left hemisphere, it knows what it's looking for because it's something it needs. But the right hemisphere is going, "But whatever else is there? I have no preconceptions about that."

So here we go. So there are various differences, and I'll just go through these quickly. So on the left side, in each of the pairs I'm putting up, will be what the left hemisphere seeks, and the right hemisphere on the right shows what it can appreciate. So what is known is the territory of the left hemisphere. What is new, the territory of the right hemisphere. And we, in fact, know this: that when new experience of any kind, a new sound, a new thought, a new color, a new whatever it is, is first perceived, it is perceived by the right hemisphere, and then almost immediately taken up by the left hemisphere to go, "Oh yes, I know it's one of those." Or maybe it isn't actually. And "maybe it isn't actually" is the task of the right hemisphere, which Ramachandran calls "the devil's advocate." It's the one that's going, "Stop jumping to conclusions, left hemisphere. This may actually be something else that you haven't taken into account, and it may be terribly important."

Another is the left hemisphere prefers certainty. You can see that if it's trying to grab things quickly, it doesn't want to have a debate. And in a debate about what's going on here, that is the realm of the right hemisphere. So one way of looking at it is the left hemisphere closes down to certainty, the right hemisphere opens up to possibility.

So this duck-rabbit, famous to us from the work of Wittgenstein, but taken from an 1890s children's comic, is to the right hemisphere a duck-rabbit. The left hemisphere is not happy with this at all. It's like, "Come on, make up your mind. Is it a duck or is it a rabbit?" But there is no answer to that question. The left hemisphere wants things that are fixed and tends to take the things that it finds as if they were immobilized, static, unchanging, while it grasps. Whereas the right hemisphere sees that everything, without exception, flows.

And here's what happens to the flow of vision when there is damage to parts of the right hemisphere, towards the posterior part of the right hemisphere's cortex. You get a condition called akinetopsia, in which the movement is broken up into juddering movements, like stop-go animation. The left hemisphere is seeing the parts, and the right hemisphere the whole. I've talked about that.

So when you see this picture, probably many of you know this. Who has seen this before? Oh, only a few. Okay. Well, anyway, can you see what there is in this picture? This is a dog. That's its head. It's a Dalmatian dog. There is its nose, there is its ear, there is the arc of its back, there are its front legs and its hind legs, and it's sniffing the ground where two paths cross in the shade of a tree. Now, there is no way in which you can start from one of those blobs of black and say, "Oh, that's part of a dog." "Well, that's part of a path." Impossible. You have to see it as a whole. This is called Gestalt perception. Gestalt being a German word which means something we ought to have a word for, which is a whole that cannot be taken apart without substantial loss. And this is what happens to people with right occipital damage, posterior occipital damage, at any rate, showing on the left, a man, in the middle, a bicycle, and on the right, a house. And you can see the parts. Take the middle one. It knows that somehow there are wheels and there are pedals, but it doesn't seem to know the relationship between the wheels and the pedals. Pedals are way down below the wheels. And a person is reduced to a blob with sticks.

The left hemisphere focuses on what is explicit and easily known and obvious, made aware to us. And the right hemisphere is interested in the implicit, what is in fact the result of a kind of unfolding, but has to remain at a level below our conscious awareness, because when our targeted attention of conscious awareness hits it, it turns it into something else. So, for example, the poems that Hardy wrote in 1912-13 in the wake of the death of his dearly beloved wife. They are staggeringly moving. They are also quite unique. He had a very idiosyncratic style. And if they'd not been written, nobody could have invented them. The most extreme example of this in English literature has got to be Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose style is so unique, so eccentric. So what are these poems? They're so moving. What, tell me, what do they say? Well, they say that when somebody you love dies, it's very tough. Well, hello, yes. I mean, this is a kind of stuff you can hear now in the pub every evening. So it's like explaining jokes. All the really important things, and they are the really important things, so love, sex, religion, music, art, poetry, ritual, metaphors of every kind, all these things lose when they have to be explicitly laid out for somebody to understand. And this is the difference between the right hemisphere, that understands all those things that I mentioned so much better than the left. The left is taking things out of context, and context changes everything. The idea of analysis is you can get down to the parts and then see what they are. But the thing is that the part only is what it is in the context that it's in. It's the context that makes it what it is. So when you've separated it from its context, you've no clue what it is. It's like you like what I've just described. But you know, what is a person? They are, we're not atomistic or isolated. We are generated by, we come from and come out of a civilization, a society, out of a social group, out of the people that live with us and who give to us and we give back to them.

The left hemisphere is more interested in the general, the right in the unique. I've talked about that. So here's from a paper by Vörar and colleagues. He's a great researcher on lateralization in the brain. He shows that with the right hemisphere, this chick is able to distinguish between the chicks. But the left hemisphere of the same creature is looking for, "Yes, those are social partners. I've got that. But really, I'm looking for a worm." The inanimate is best appreciated by the left hemisphere, and the animate by the right. So much so that when people have the right hemisphere damaged or suppressed, they may see things that are very obviously alive, like their partner, as a thing, a zombie, a machine. And the other way around, if the left hemisphere is experimentally suppressed, or in left hemisphere damaged people, may start to see the world as animate. They may see the sun as a living being. And who's to say that they're wrong?

The left hemisphere is unrealistically optimistic. The right hemisphere is much more realistic. So when we see the world falling apart, our left hemisphere goes, "Oh, don't worry, we can fix it. We're very clever. We know all the answers." And if we don't have some of them, we don't quite got, we'll have them in 10 years' time. And when people have right hemisphere strokes, so that their left side may be paralyzed, they will deny that there was anything wrong with the left side. And if you ask them to move their paralyzed left arm, they will say, "There, I just moved it." "You said, but I don't think you did. Did any of you see that?" "No, we didn't." "Sorry, could you do that again?" "No, no." So if you bring the arm round in front of them and say, "Move that," they say, "Oh, that's not my arm. That belongs to you, doctor, or maybe to that patient over there." So this is the level of denial that comes from a left hemisphere-dominated view of the world.

So the phenomenology of the world produced by the left hemisphere is like this: it is a representation of reality. It's not the presence of reality with all its complexity, but it is a representation, in the way that two-dimensional schemata of something on a screen or a map relates to the world that is mapped. It's made of isolated things, things moreover that are familiar, predetermined, and fixed. In fact, bits, fragments that are decontextualized, disembodied, meaningless, abstract, generic in nature, infinitely reproducible, quantifiable. This is the world we kid ourselves that we confront. And if we're realists, this is how things really are. But of course, this is a fantasy. It has nothing to do with the nature of reality, which is completely the opposite of all these things. It's a world that is mechanical and inanimate, and it's one in which the future is a fantasy because it's all under our control. Remember, the left hemisphere's role is to manipulate, to be able to move things for its own benefit, and it exerts power.

And you may say it's strange that the right hemisphere is so much better at everything. But it isn't better at everything. The left hemisphere is much better at grabbing. And so important is that for survival that the whole business of the left hand is taken up with that. Pretty much everything else of any interest is going on in the right hemisphere, where the phenomenology is that nothing is entirely certain or predictable, ultimately interconnected, not fixed but flowing, that what exists are wholes, the parts are an artifact, the meaning of everything is implicit, it's a world of uniqueness where quality is more important than quantity, it's an essentially animate world, and the future is a product of realism, not denial.

Right, so much for the hemisphere theory for the moment. And you have to realize that I did that in just over 10 minutes, and it's something I've written about at the length of several thousand pages, alas. But there you are. If you want to know more, it's in the books. So I'm now going to talk about the nature of reality, nothing less.

One of the popular things that used to be said when I was young was, when people were, you know, really getting profound, "Oh, all is one, man. All is one." You know. And I used to say, "Yes, and all is many." Now, what, you know? But it is actually important that the one and the many are kept together. And in Chinese culture, in Indian culture, in Greek culture, and many others, of course, this one and many dipole is taken to be at the root of being. And Heraclitus, on one and the many, had this to say. Now, I know you guys here are all terribly anxious if an hour goes by and nobody's spoken to you in Greek. But so this is one of the charms of being in Rolston. But he said, "Allai." So I have Oxford pronunciation of Greek, which is different from the one you've learned, probably. But what this means, of course, is not listening to me, but listening to the logos. It is wise to agree that one is all, or such as the beauty of the grammar that it can be read as all is one. And each of these, the division and the union, are important at a higher level, though they are united, not divided. So there's division and union, but at the meta-level, they need to be united. So in a way, union trumps division, but needs that division to be there. This is because for there to be anything other than a singleness that is altogether beyond words or conception, and one which would indeed necessarily deny the very possibility of a speaker or conceiver to think or to articulate a talk, there must be precisely some articulation within the unity, a sprig of diversity within union, of distinction within sameness. And it is, I believe, the business of the unfolding of the cosmos to make this grow and flourish. An eternal creative unfolding of generality into uniqueness is what we mean by there being anything at all.

And here I just wanted to put this up to make a simple point, although there are many points to make here. But one is that each of these snowflakes is entirely different. No two snowflakes have the same structure. But interestingly, each arm of the snowflake obeys the same pattern that each other arm of the six arms of the snowflake obeys. So there is some overall uniting form field of some kind that is creating this structure, and it is unique structure. They seem to me to be a beautiful example of beauty and complexity that give rise to things that are unified and unique, and yet have interesting parts that make them the whole that they are.

So part of this depends on the unity of oneness and multiplicity. I argue that relations are the only true fundamental reality. Relations are the only true fundamental reality. That relations are primary, therefore, to the related, the things that are related. Now, that might sound very odd. How can you have relations until you've got things that can be related? But this is again because we're thinking of things back to front. We notice certain things that we separate out, and then we have the problem, "Well, how do they get connected?" But actually, the things emerge from the net of interconnections. And things can't be prior to relationships, because anyone only becomes what it is because of the relationships within which it exists. Things are secondary elements in a web of interconnectedness, those things which happen to stand out and grab our attention. A web is division within union, distinction within interconnectedness. And this is really just an example of the ultimate importance of context, that everything needs to be thought of as contextual. I sometimes say, and I don't think it's any exaggeration, that context is everything in understanding something. That we ignore very much nowadays, and to many people's peril, because something that is a short sound bite is taken entirely out of context, where it meant probably something completely different than what it appears to mean, taken out of that context, and it's widely ground the world in milliseconds, and self-righteous people have a ball. And anyway, it's not a good idea.

And in the web of connectedness, I like the image which is a Vedantic image of the god Indra, who had a net that covered the whole of the universe. And this net is in fact pure interconnectedness, a filament crossing another filament and so on. But at every crossing point, there is suspended a jewel. And in each jewel, all the other jewels in the net are also imaged. It's a wonderful again expression of unity and division, of particularity and togetherness. And all these things, what I'm trying to convey is that the combination of division with union is fundamental to the being anything at all. This is why I'm talking here about the nature of reality. It is the very nature of creation to diversify what seems single and to unite what seems to be diverse. We're not good at the distinction between making a distinction and implying severance or isolation. So we think that if we've made a distinction, it must be a separation.

But it doesn't have to be at all. In fact, it very rarely is a separation. A good example of this is a magnet. A magnet requires an opposition; there needs to be two poles. And it's no good saying about a magnet, "I don't know, I love the North Pole but somehow I don't like that South Pole. I'm going to cut it off." Because all you'll have is a shorter magnet, but you've got your South Pole back again. So these two things exist there together necessarily, in a Heraclitean way, giving rise to one another. And, um, this is, uh, there's no place, as it were, which is a hard and fast division. But as you get towards the center, you move through a zone, that you come out the other side of. A very small zone, of course, admittedly. But there is a distinction without there being a severance.

This is the image that we have, that we take things apart as though they were machines. I've talked about that. Now, what about existence and creativity? Creativity depends on some rather surprising elements, such as distance, resistance, and time. The frontal lobes are the most recently evolved part of the brain, and they are one of the things that distinguishes the great apes, including ourselves, from most other animals. They occupy an enormously greater part of the brain in humans than in most animals. Interestingly, in the great apes, the frontal lobes are about 35% of the volume of the brain, and in humans, it's 38%. But the big difference is there's more white matter in human brains. And white matter is the super-connective structures that allow things to make those important connections that give rise to our ability to understand. So the frontal lobes are very important for what? For negating something that's already going on. The frontal lobe's job is to inhibit. And they're largely to inhibit the posterior cortex, which is, if you like, more ancient and more unmixed. So in most animals, they don't have the faculty to stand back. If an animal is aggressive, they are aggressive too. They don't have the faculty to stand back and go, "Now, what's up with this guy? Perhaps I can make friends with him and maybe make an alliance. That'll be better for both of us." For that, you need a sort of degree of distance. And that distance is also like the distance a bird has in seeing a landscape. When you're at ground level, you see the bit that's local to you. But it enables you to see more broadly what's going on. And it's that faculty for seeing broadly and bringing together the threads that is so essential to creativity. That's one of the things we've lost in our culture.

Then there is the coincidence of opposites. Well, I won't say too much about this coincidence of opposites, because I've given a long lecture for Rollon already on this, which you can watch afterwards on the internet. But I just want to mention a couple of things from it. "A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist. Existence lies in opposition." These are the words of the great American mathematician and philosopher of the last century, C.S. Peirce. And then Niels Bohr, who of course, you know, often thought of as one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. "It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth." So obviously, everyday truths like, "Did I have milk in my coffee this morning or did I not?" The opposite is not an important truth. It's wrong. But when you get the really big questions, the bigger the question, the more there is a neglected positive. Unless we look for it, we miss that this is actually a balance of things. And we live in a world in which answers are so simple: "This is good, and more of it is going to be much more good." And actually, often when you find, if you push things far enough, you end up in exactly the place you wanted to get away from. So freedom is great, but anarchy brings tyranny. This is not just life, but everything. So there is this important tension between opposites. And, um, here I just want to mention this wonderful saying of Heraclitus. That he says, "They do not understand." I mean, this is typical of Heraclitus. You know, they don't understand that there is a harmony in which the thing and its opposite come together and that they agree. So the opposites agree. And he gives the example of this string of a lyre, the musical instrument. And it is pulled tense in two opposite directions. And a left hand goes, "Hang on, there's a waste of energy here. We don't need to pull it in opposite directions. Just stop pulling." If you stop pulling, the string goes slack. No music. So the music comes from the tension. It's the same in a bow. And here's a picture of an archer, Greek statue. And here the bow relies on the tension to let fly the arrow. Again, there's a wonderful, incidentally, saying of Heraclitus: "The name of the bow is life, but its work is death." And that's because in Greek, bios and bios are life and an arrow. Hegel believed that otherness was actually prior to sameness. Sameness being merely an unusual subset of opposition in which the opposites happen to be wholly reconciled. It's an interesting way of thinking, isn't it? Sameness is indeed sterile and cannot give rise to anything. To this extent, he must be right. For creativity, there must be complementarity, a degree of resistance within oneness. Life exists at this coming together of order with disorder. Some degree of disorder is important for life, as well as order obviously being important for it. And indeed, almost everything that comes into existence requires this tension between chaos and order. And this is largely predictable. What will be the outcome? But not wholly predictable. Never wholly predictable.

In quantum physics, we learned 100 years ago that there are certain things that you can know certainly about a particle's position, for example. But if you know that precisely, you can't know its momentum precisely. Not because we haven't got a machine that can measure it, but because intrinsically, it cannot be precisely known. So sometimes people think this is a very trivial point, because surely it's okay. Well, I mean, all right, but that's true for physicists whizzing around particles in laboratories. But for most of us, you know, come on. There are sequences that are highly predictable in life. But there's a paper by two physicists who sent it to me, and I've quoted in my book, that they bring this up to the everyday level. It's not just a quantum aspect of reality, it's an everyday aspect of reality that things are fundamentally not predictable. They give the example, which is sort of typical 18th-century Lassan example, of balls colliding. So billiard balls, you know, you can, at a certain point, you can predict what's going to happen. If you hit this billiard ball, you can map what's going to happen and so on. But after a certain number of collisions, you don't know what's going to happen next. Not again because you're not clever enough, but because it simply is not known. It is not possibly predictable. And I thought, well, how many, how many collisions would that be? Perhaps a billion? Perhaps only a million? The answer is eight. Take that one home. Anyway, we don't want in the left hemisphere either this or that. We want both this and that. But we also need, in some circumstances, either this or that. We need either/or in order to differentiate. But we need both in order to reunite. And so at a higher level, we need both either/or and both/and, not either/or or both/and. And an image of this is life. Creatures that have survived have not been these heroes of terrorism, destroying all the other possible creatures that might get in their way. They have been good collaborators. This is the secret of evolution, that it favors those who both compete and cooperate. And the combination of competition and cooperation is collaboration. And this has been described by one philosopher of biology as one of the central characteristics of life.

Single organisms versus systems. Single organisms sound competitive. But systems are not. Compassion systems may, yes, ultimately need to find their place amongst other systems. But they also collaborate with those systems. And there is a wonderful book, which I never tire of mentioning when I'm lecturing, called Interdependence by Criti Sharma, who's I think a fairly young American biologist. I do recommend her book to you. It's extraordinarily good. And what she shows is that the relationship between organisms and one another, or between them and their environment, is reciprocal in a very special way. It's not that one does this to that, and then that does this to the other one. But they both do both all the time. And you can't really separate out who is doing what to the other. So they are, in fact, in a process of co-creation. An idea that those of you who know Buddhist philosophy may have come across. But it's actually a very important idea. And Christopher Hallpike, an anthropologist, talking of humans, says, "Studies of actual human behavior, and he's right, especially that of children, show that whatever evolutionary theory may say, while we must obviously act for our own preservation and well-being, we also have highly developed capacities for sympathy, cooperation, and group loyalty." And those of you who have children will have observed this. How children naturally, unless there's something very wrong with their upbringing or with their makeup, will tend to try and look after others and give to others and share. And it's not true that they're entirely selfish. They, after all, come out of a diet which is a dyad of love between the mother and the infant, which is how, for the first at least nine months, and probably longer, of their lives, they share everything with that other. And only after a while they discover that it is another. But it's also another that is safe and loving. And so this relationship becomes enriched by, instead of being a fusion, a union, it becomes a dyad. And that dyad has greater power.

Necessary resistance is a concept that I have phrased in this way, which is that for things to come about, there needs to be an element of resistance. All creativity depends on a degree of resistance. It is, after all, what shapes what is to come. If you like to think of it like that, when Michelangelo made a statue, he didn't make an arm and make a leg and make a torso and make a head and stick them together. He had a block of stone. And all he did for several years was throw stone away. That was all he did. In other words, the stone was an impediment. And he could find the thing that was in there. Of course, it was both a gift and an impediment. But this degree of opposition is part of our daily life. What is friction? Friction is what stops motion. I'm sure you all remember that. But friction is also what starts motion. If there wasn't friction, we wouldn't be able to move, because you need something to push against. And children need something to push against. And everything that grows needs something to push against. And this is the nature of creation. And what this tells us is that matter, which is, I believe, the way in which the conscious universe creates, has a role which is consonant with the purposes of that consciousness. That in order to create, it can create without the needing to be matter. But for the differentiation I've been talking about to happen, and for to have any kind of persistence, even over a short period, there needs to be something like matter. And the two outstanding qualities of matter they present to us are resistance. I.E., I can put my hand wherever I like here, but I can't put my hand wherever I like here, because there's matter, and it gets in the way. It stops my motion. It stops me being able to fulfill every desire. And that limitation is highly creative. And then this time. What can I say about this? In a very short time, I will, I won't go into great depth on this. I wrote a whole long chapter on time in "The Matter with Things." But the single point I want you to take home is that time is not a succession of moments. It's a continuum. We artificially reflect on it, thinking of it as a line, and think we can find a point in the line, and therefore we think it must be made up of points. But actually, a line isn't made up of points either. A point has no extension. So you can have an infinite number of points, but you'll still not have a line, because none of them has any extension. Extension is something special. Extension comes into the universe as a special conception. And time is extension in a certain modality. It is not pieces put together or takeable apart. And that has profound consequences. But I'll just leave you with that one. It's a stream, not a concatenation. Everything, I believe, is a stream. Again, to quote Heraclitus, "Everything flows." And I mean everything. And this is again rather like a melody. A melody, in retrospect, you can, or on the score, you can point to a note. But it isn't made by putting notes together. It is made by a continuous process in which some of what has gone before is present in each moment, and some of what is to come is anticipated in each moment. And the important person for this is A.I. Bohn, a philosopher who had enormous following and prestige in the early 20th century, was then in an era of scientific reductivism, sidelined, misquoted, and mistreated, but is now coming back very much into philosophy as a very important figure. His writing on time is probably the most important contribution. But physics also, in general, is continuous, but has distinctions within it. The universe is neither wholly discretized, though discretized enough to generate individuals, nor wholly continuous, though continuous enough to be ultimately unified. And the discreteness arises secondarily out of the continuity. And here I just have to say that David Tong, the professor of physics at Cambridge, has written eloquently about this. He says, "There is no evidence of discretization in the cosmos. It is all continuity." And you may say, "What about the Planck length?" But there is an answer to that as well. Read my book. Wave and particle are, of course, two modes of being of the same field phenomenon. This is Louis de Broglie, another important figure in the history of physics in the 20th century. And he believed that, and I think this is an accepted view, that the particle is a collapse of the wave into a point at a certain moment in space and time. And he thought that once again, the wave is more fundamental. So once again, the unifying, the continuous, the integrated is more important than the discretized, the distinct, and the analytically conceived. But we need both. But we just need them to be under the aegis, under the auspices of the unifying element, which in the brain is the right hemisphere, which is literally more intelligent than the left hemisphere. It is much better at perceiving, better at attending, better at making judgments on what it's seen that makes sense. It is more emotionally and socially intelligent. It is also more cognitively intelligent. IQ depends amazingly enough more on the right hemisphere than on the left. And it has much better ability to use imagination.

And I now want to talk about the nature and role of human imagination. And there'll be more on this in the third lecture of the series. Intuition, as well as imagination, are things that a machine can't do. And imagination is not the same as fantasy. It's almost the opposite of fantasy. So fantasy takes you away from reality. That is the point of it. That's what we mean by fantasy. It's just a fantasy. But imagination is your only chance of actually getting to grips with and entering into reality. Without imagination, you can't overstep conceptual categories and all the paraphernalia of thought and reach that intuitive understanding of connection. It's the nature of all art to establish a regularity and then depart from it crucially, nonetheless, without imperiling the overall integrity of the work. Order and disorder are needed. Sameness and difference. And beauty is also the coincidence of one and many. As a wonderful dialogue by Hopkins, a Platonic dialogue, he calls it, about beauty, in which he demonstrates that beauty is enough sameness to suggest integrity, but with enough departure from sameness to make it different and unique. And that these two elements are vital. Interesting, the word identity. You know, we're all on about identity these days. My identity, terribly important. And, you know, identity comes from a Latin root, idem, and entm, which means the same. And that's because you are the same from moment to moment. You are the same you. So sameness and difference can be viewed from different points of view. You need to be same, but you need to be different. In a thriving society, as in a healthy organism, as in anything beautiful, there is a proper relationship between the principles of differentiation and unity. And it's our faculty of imagination that enables us to find the point of harmony in life and art.

If all that I've said is so, then the ground of being itself, the divinity, however we conceive it, must be relational before anything else. And that immediately makes me think of the idea of the Trinity, which exemplifies unity and division, three persons and one God, famously. And I didn't understand this as a boy at school, this idea of the man, the boy, and the bird. I mean, it just seemed very strange to me. What on earth, who do they think I am? I'm not going to swallow that one. But there was a simple Franciscan monk who explained it to me in this way. He said, "Think of a book." I often do. And you know, where is the book? Is it in the head of the person who wrote the book? Yeah. Is it this copy of the book on the table? Yeah. Is it what happens when somebody opens it and reads it and they digest it? Yeah. It's all three of those, but they're all the same book. I like that. I just pass it on. Because, and this is also a pre-Christian idea, this is an ancient idea that you find in many cultures around the world. This is terrifically important. And, you know, the medieval Sufi poet Rumi, Persian poet, he says, "Truly it is the water that pours and the one who drinks. All three become one." When your talisman is shattered, when your conscious grasp of things has to unfold. And he says that oneness, you can't know by reasoning. But there is another sense, more foundational, than which God is relation. Since it's not only in the Christian tradition that the divine can be thought of as the essence of relation, namely love. Love is nothing if it is not relational. It's pure relation. It must somehow exist as one with, yet distinct from, its object. There are perils of fusion. A good relationship is not one in which two people are so close to one another that they're fused. These relationships usually don't last. They're obviously not good relationships. When the two fly apart too far, but there is a proper distance. It's like two heavenly bodies circling one another. Too close, and they crash into one another, and the whole thing's over. Too far, and they fly apart. But there is a necessary distance again. And indeed, it's not only true of love that it is necessarily directed to another, but it must be directed towards something at least separate enough, independent enough, to make a free response to the offer of love, which involves the freedom to refuse. And hence the whole story of Paradise Lost.

Some reflections on a moment on Lucifer. Lucifer, you know, was the brightest and best of the angels. The name means the lightbearer. And it's interesting that the most hubristic movement in the history of the West was called the Enlightenment. It's also what David Bohm, the great physicist and philosopher, called the Endarkenment. Because although it gave rise to many brilliant insights, it also helped us not to see certain very important things. And it's interesting that people like Dawkins and Dennett and so on call themselves, call themselves, I mean, with no implication that they might be clever, and they call themselves bright compared with people like you and me who believe all kinds of fantastic things. And it was pointed out to me very recently, after a lecture I did a couple of weeks ago in Oxford, by a priest who's also a physicist. The names of the three holy archangels in scripture all relate to God. Raphael, meaning the healing of God. Michael, meaning "Who is like God?" And Gabriel, meaning the strength of God. Only Lucifer, like the left hemisphere, tries to carry the light alone. In the Lurianic Kabbalah, so the Kabbalah, or the Kabbalah, is the body of mystical thought in Judaism, which I've only come to know relatively late in life, and it's been an utter revelation. The Lurianic Kabbalah is in the form in which it was put together by Isaac Luria in the 17th century. And in this Kabbalah, there is a creation myth that I find both moving and infinitely inspiring. In the beginning, there was Ein Sof, that's the ground of being. And for it to be in order to love, Ein Sof needed to create. What was his first act? To stretch forth his hand and make something happen, summon something into being? No. It was to withdraw. To withdraw so as to make a space in which there could be something other than himself. This is the first phase of creation, called Tzimtzum. Then, in the space that had been created, there were placed 12 vessels to receive whatever it was that was to come into being. A single spark came forth from Ein Sof and shattered almost all the vessels. This was the second phase, known as Shevirat HaKelim, the shattering of the vessels. And then came the third phase, Tikkun, which means repair, in which it is the particular duty of humanity to remake the vessels from the shards, which now contain sparks of the divine light, making the vessels more beautiful than they were before they had been broken. There are a number of things to take away from this story: that the ground of being requires relationship, that the process of creation begins with apparent diminution, but that lessening enabled augmentation, that it was followed by an apparent loss, but this loss led to a gain, that what is broken into parts can come to make ultimately a more beautiful whole, and the division was in the service of a greater whole. I'm irresistibly reminded of the Japanese art form Kintsugi, in which a broken ceramic is repaired using lines of gold, which results in a work that is more beautiful than the original intact piece.

The sublime is misunderstood nowadays. We think, "Why should we abase ourselves before God? Why should we find mountains majestic and the oceans in their infinite expanse so impressive?" We know it all. We've mapped it all. We've got it all on computers. But of course, it's not about abasing yourself at all. Entering into wonder, entering into awe, is the way in which we live. And when we don't have wonder and awe, we are not alive. And we both share in the object of our wonder, and there is a recognition that we are also much less than it. But nonetheless, by some kind of bond, we are allowed, we have the gift to share in this greatness. That is the awe-inspiring, the sublime. And we're both united, in other words, to something greater than ourselves in which we share, and simultaneously aware of the separation in which we feel our smallness. The union of division and union. And finally, I want to quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel, a naturalized American rabbi. "As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe, but a will to wonder." Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. And that's something that we've said separately by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by Goethe. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension, a lovely phrase, something like the Oriental idea of unknowing that comes after knowledge. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder, or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.

What happens when we die? Finally, may I just put forward some ideas about this? Because, guess what, none of us is going to get out of this life alive. And it's kind of an important question. And I believe that the ideas of difference and union, and the ideas of flow, are central to what I'm talking about. So I see each existing being, including ourselves, as like a whirlpool in a stream, or possibly like a wave in the sea. They're not in the river or in the sea in the sense that a ball might be floating there. They are the river. They are the sea for the time that the water is there. And when the water moves on, the water has not ceased to exist. And it has memories or an impression from whatever it has been. We know this is actually true of water as well, incidentally. That is not what I'm basing it on. So that idea, yes, that though we appear to be divided, we are in fact unified. That what we have given through our individuality in life is not lost, but is taken up at a higher level into a new union. And to coin a phrase, Atman is Brahman. Atman being God in us, and Brahman being the greater God, the one and the sacred home. I'm going to leave it there. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Dr. Molis, for that wonderful and challenging beginning to your set of three lectures. The others will be a lot easier. I don't think any of us is hoping to get easier. Certainly, I don't think any of our students is. I am pleased to say that Dr. Molis, we have some time for questions. Ian, it is an amazing honor to be here. I drove eight hours to come to this session because you were in the States. And so I do work in organizations and I have for 50 years. And the greatest challenge that I find is the linear aspect of organizations, whether it be education, whether it be technology, medicine, etc. What I find is humans in those systems, and I find very little oxygen. And the way I frame it is linear systems that are well planned and well organized. And you talk about it in terms of how we've lost spontaneity. Those organizations don't have magic. There's not the possibility of magic. But there is the possibility of magic from my experience when, for example, we transformed the murder capital of America, Washington D.C., which was bankrupt in 1999, to the Paris of America by doing it by engaging 3,000 residents every year, bringing them together, using dialogue at tables, using technology so they could help decide the future. And things like "put taxation without representation" came out of that first meeting. Creating the "Paris of America" came out of that meeting. So we're in a world that has these capabilities for magic and enchantment, but we're really dominated by this left-brain linear thinking. Again, my apologies for the context, but as you said, context is everything. What would you say is the most important simple thing that needs to be done so that we can shift from our linear, from our linear thinking, left-brain thinking, to right-brain thinking? I very, not for the first time, I'm probably going to be very disappointing. I don't think there's a simple answer. But the thing I do think is that we need to let go. We need to stop needing to control everything. We need to have a proper sense of limitations. We need to respect nature and life, which means the whole living world out of which we come and to which we return. We need to begin thinking in a much more compassionate way, which gives room for imagination and awe to play their part. At the moment, everything is so tightly controlled. And tight control always leads to mediocrity. Always. Never leads to anything creative. You need to ease up. It's this sweet point between a degree of order and a degree of unplannedness and disorder. And a really good manager is somebody, in my view, who has the lightest possible hand on the tiller. And I think that is a message that's terribly hard to get across in a culture that's terrified of litigation. Actually, one practical thing that could happen would be to make it very, very, very, very, very, very much harder to sue anybody in America. I mean, it would, of course, there are people who have needs and of course, there are responsibilities. I'm not making fun of that. But on the other hand, the terror, and it's now happening in Britain, well, we would be sued. So life is shrinking all the time because life means freedom, and freedom is dangerous, and living is dangerous, and living might end up in death, who knows? God, you know. So you've got the wrong attitude to why we're here and what we're doing. I don't think any of us has the foggiest idea anymore. Well, some of us do. But and that's what's good, actually, is that lots of people are so fed up with the picture of the world that you're describing, and that I'm also, you know, mapping out, that it's time for a change. And people are kind of keen to have that change and then know how to do it. And I think the first thing is to see what is wrong. So as a psychiatrist, I know that the first way to help somebody is not to tell them what to do. As an error that I made when I was a young psychiatrist, I could tell, and I was right, you know, within an hour or an hour and a half, hearing somebody talking, basically what they needed to do. And I was stupid enough to tell them. And of course, they didn't do it because they didn't see what I was talking about. Because if they had seen that already, they wouldn't have needed to come to me. So the first thing to do is to lead people to a place where they can see for themselves. And then they won't need to be told what to do. It's really a matter of not having rules or procedures, which of course is the very culture that we're both despairing of, but of inhabiting a certain cast of mind, a certain disposition of our souls towards the world. You know, that is consciousness is a disposition towards the world. And how we do it, which in shorthand is how we attend the world, is, as I say, a moral act because it changes the world and it changes us. So that's what we need to be focusing on. But thank you for someone who's interested in exploring some of those people you've quoted and brought together, where is a good place to start? There are so many different sources that you draw from, and yeah, it's a bit hard to know where to begin. Probably the places, at least one of them, where I myself began, which was with William James in my teens. And William James has been a long-term trusted intellectual companion all the way through. His insights are second to none. And I also, much more lately, came across Bohm. Only Bohm, that I mentioned, and it was a revelation to me. I came across, I knew about him, but I'd been told that his big thing was there's a difference between time measured by the clock and subjective time. And it was put to me like, well, when you're in the dentist waiting room, time seems to go slowly. And I thought, well, yes, well, there are no Nobel prizes for that. And indeed, he did win a Nobel Prize. But what he's talking about is something infinitely more profound, which I only had a chance to hint at, which is the difference between the nature of time as an unfolding medium and as something quite separate from our analytic mind's idea of something made up of something. And quite to the contrary to the idea that, you know, in an ultimately good world, there would be no time, and one day we'll transcend time. I believe, in consonance with some ancient Chinese sages, that no, nothing can exist without time. God cannot exist without time. He might be able to exist outside of time, but there cannot be a creation or anything to enjoy life with him unless there is time. Nothing has any meaning without time. But Bohm, anyway, is a very, very important person. Who else? I mean, those are the ones that spring immediately to mind as people who are always at my side. But the mystics as well, you know. One of my favorite philosophers, who is in fact a follower of Bohm, is Emanuel Levinas. And he once described his his project, his philosophical project, as the deformalization of time. What I'm wondering about is this drive to formalize, and whether that is a pipe dream, and whether we are pushing in that direction when Kurt Gödel has shown us that formalization is not the path to completeness. To what extent can we understand this return to relationality as a drive to deformalization? And of course, formalization doesn't mean no form. It means a kind of instrumental arrangement of things in a linear system, typical of the left hemisphere, in order to enable it to be better manipulated. But of course, forms are something other than we dreamt of them. And we're now beginning to realize in biology that forms that we hardly understand, that we don't know whether they're electromagnetic fields or what they are, must be providing much of the information that makes life possible, because it certainly isn't in the genome. You know, I mean, the decoding of the genome was a great human feat, but at the end of it, it was a bit like, I guess you've all seen Fawlty Towers, and you probably all seen, I think it's episode five of the first series, where Manuel, who the cook is in love with, is troubled because the cook has got drunk and they've got a guest evening. And so Basil, who's the hotel owner, goes off down into town to his friend Andre, who's going to cook him a duck, because that's the centerpiece. And you see that actually, through a mistake in the kitchen, the covered dishes are swapped, and he goes home with a blur, not with a duck. And he comes into the dining room at last, you know, with his, I think he's actually sort of doing sharpening the knife on the steel, and he's pushing this trolley, and he's getting now the duck. He takes the lid off, he goes scrabbles in this blur, and then he goes, "Ducks off." And the decoding of the genome is a bit like this, you know. There's going to be the marvelous thing, we're going to know the secrets of everything. At the end of it, there's bugger all there. You know. And so this is really interesting because it's not an argument against inheritance, because inheritance is empirically obvious and very well scientifically demonstrated. But it can't be just through the genes. So what I'm, what I'm really saying there is, I love your idea. Yes, it's about deformalization. Revolution. And the Enlightenment, we've gone to a more and more materialistic view of the world until everything is dead matter. Now it's beginning to swing back the other way. And the idea of consciousness is coming back into scientific discussion, including people like Donald Hoffman at the University of California, Davis, and that type of thing. While I was listening to you tonight, I was getting the idea that consciousness and creation, or consciousness and matter, sort of come into being or emerge together. But then later in your talk, you mentioned consciousness creating, which indicates that that was the prior, a priority. Yes. And so if that's the case, and consciousness is the initial creator and existed before relationships, where do the relationships come in? Yes. Thank you. Well, first of all, I don't think consciousness and matter are entirely separate. In fact, I believe they are manifestations in different forms of the same phenomenon. So matter is a phase of consciousness, in my belief. And I don't mean a phase in time, but I mean a phase in the way chemists use the phrase. So water has different phases. In one, it's transparent and moves and flows. In another, it's solid and opaque and hard and cold. And in another, it is tons of it are in this room, and if there weren't, we couldn't be here, and I can't see it at all. So people say, well, matter doesn't look like consciousness. But then, which is the real water? They are different phases. And I think that matter is a way in which consciousness manifests in order to create. So consciousness, if you like, I would say, is the senior partner. But only because when we talk about water, we tend to say, you know, that the flowing stuff is the senior partner, as it were. The others are variations. But really, there is no senior partner. I mean, it is that is what there is. That is the ground of being. It is conscious. And it has certain primitive aspects, in the sense that they can't be further analyzed to anything else, that they are ontologically primitive. Then they are things like goodness and beauty and truth, in my belief. Materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter because they think it's just stuff. But that's not even logical. Because if it's just stuff that has nothing about it that is like conscious, how is it that after millions of years, this stuff evolves to create, you know, some massive fashion? That's a pretty remarkable stuff. And so there's no answer to say, well, this is just matter. That's a failure of imagination. Whatever matter is, is something remarkable that it has in it the potential for everything else. Because matter and consciousness are not ultimately divided. They're just different ways of looking at something that is the same. On that note, I'm going to stop for this evening. And I welcome you all to return tomorrow night. Join me in thanking Dr. Molis for a wonderful beginning to this series. Thank you.