Asymmetrical Reconciliation with Iain McGilchrist

Exploring the Asymmetry of the Mind & the Poetry of Existence with Iain McGilchrist: "Delve into the intricate relationship between flow and resistance in the universe, and the essential human engagement with beauty, goodness, and truth. Iain McGilchrist discusses the significance of asymmetry with Andrea, as well as the limitations of dichotomous thinking, and the richness found in embracing the complexity of life. The dialogue covers themes from Dr. McGilchrist's research and books, focusing on the importance of intuition, imagination, and our interconnectedness with nature and each other. The discussion also touches on the transformative power of poetry and art, the impact of modern digital distractions on our ability to connect deeply with the world, and the philosophical reflections on life, death, and the constant state of becoming that defines our existence. A truly moving conversation."

#McGilchrist #asymmetry #mind #love #poetry #coincidence

Iain's Year of Poetry:    • Daily Poetry Readings  

A Spell for Creation by Kathleen Raine:    • Daily Poetry Readings #1: A Spell for...  

Ah, Many, Many are the Dead by Kathleen Raine:    • Daily Poetry Readings #365: Ah, Many,...  

The podcast with Scott Kaufman that Iain mentions: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/

00:00 Exploring the Metaphor of Flow and Whirlpools 01:36 A Deep Dive into Asymmetry and the Human Brain 11:33 The Journey from Literature to Neuroscience 20:08 Embracing Complexity: From Biology to Philosophy 28:47 Finding Balance: Nature, Relationships, and Spirituality 37:09 Exploring the Essence of Poetry and Philosophy 40:32 The Journey from Literature to Medicine 41:05 Discovering the Asymmetry of the Brain 44:33 The Power of Attention and Hemispheric Differences 46:48 Cultivating a Different Kind of Attention 49:34 The Importance of Intuition and Imagination 51:41 Navigating Social Media and the Digital Age 01:00:49 Embracing the Flow of Life and Death 01:07:32 Concluding Reflections on Life, Art, and Connection Channel McGilchrist: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/ Where to buy The Matter with Things: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/buy-no... #iainmcgilchrist #andreahiott #loveandphilosophy

Transcript:

Asymmetrical Reconciliation with Iain McGilchrist: The ladder is a spiral. The poetry of life.

Iain: [00:00:00] this image of a whirlpool in the water because it is part of flow. I see this as an image of everything that exists, that there is a seamless flow, but it's not an undifferentiated flow. So it has. differences within itself. In fact, the images in the flow come from a degree of resistance. A simple obstruction releases some new form that is incredibly beautiful. Now, I think that A whirlpool is formed by some kind of restriction to the flow, or opposition to the flow, which creates a new flow, which for a while is there, very much there. You can photograph it, you can measure it, and it has power to move things.

So it is itself absolutely real. But it's not in the water because it is the water. And for the while that is the water just there. And I think we're like that. We're all like this. A whirlpool for a while. And that when it ceases to [00:01:00] exist, it's not ceased to exist at all.

It's changed its energy. The water is still there. The water is always going. But it's turned into a different form and just as important to form and just as wonderful a form and by the way, while it was there, it also had an effect so that the disturbances in the water have effects on the shape of the river eventually. And the fact that it involves this element of resistance is very good because I believe that matter is the aspect of consciousness that provides for a while, an element of resistance that enables things to come into being for us.

 Hi Ian, thank you so much for doing this, for being here.

Iain: Oh, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much for asking me along.

Andrea: So one of my research interests is beyond dichotomy, and in the last book, the Matter with Things, a great deal of the last portion of the book has to do with asymmetry and the [00:02:00] coincidence of opposites.

And what I think of as reconciliation and these themes that for me are very much linked to this idea beyond dichotomy. So I just wonder, if you could talk a little bit about that word asymmetry, for example, and what that means to you.

Iain: Yes, it might seems rather odd that somebody who has devoted 30 years to looking at a dichotomy made by nature between the two hemispheres.

One of my themes is that the problem with the way we think now is we think in dichotomous terms, where we need to be able to see that there are usually things that are hidden by something we value very greatly. In other words, everything has its dark side, and even the dark things have a good side.

In other words, there is coincidence of opposites. Um, asymmetry in particular, is important, partly because, one of the questions about brains is why are they asymmetrical? And it's not just a human brain that's asymmetrical, it's every brain [00:03:00] that we've ever looked at, even going back to something earlier than brains, the neural network of the most ancient still living creature, Nematostella vectensis, which has a neural net, which is asymmetric.

So there's something very interesting about that. Um, and What, what I've found is it's an important principle to do with the relationship between the hemispheres, first and foremost, in that they both do something we need. But that doesn't mean that they're equally important, certainly in terms of leading us towards a kind of truth.

One of them is not so much concerned with truth, really, it's more concerned with grabbing and getting and manipulating. Whereas the other one is more concerned with seeing the overall picture and trying to understand it. So that's the left hemisphere that, as I say, apprehends, grasps onto something and the right hemisphere that comprehends, that gathers together and makes sense of the whole.

So that asymmetry is important. And [00:04:00] then it struck me that everywhere in, in art and in nature, asymmetry has its profound place. And one of the things about asymmetry is that it also Symmetry, in other words, something can only be asymmetrical if there's a suggestion that it could have been symmetrical.

Um, as I sometimes say, the contents of the glove box in my car are not asymmetrical, they're just a mess. Whereas, all living forms actually, including faces, are naturally asymmetrical. And when they're not symmetrical, they can be engineered differently. Um, to be entirely symmetrical, they are inhuman and uncanny, and people don't like them at all.

Andrea: Yeah, it's very interesting that we're kind of repelled by perfect symmetry in a way, but it seems that we assume things are symmetrical. We talk about the symmetry of the body, and the word symmetry is used a lot more. It seems kind of nuanced to try to understand this idea that It's not just that [00:05:00] the two parts are, um, somehow similar just because they work together as a whole.

Um, I've often in my work tried to understand this, and I think you present it really well in your writing, but it's something you can't say directly. It, um, that the idea that there is asymmetry, and there are two parts, and there are opposites, and at the same time there are not. That it's somehow you learn how to hold both of these.

Iain: Well, a lot of it is about holding two apparent opposites together, and I would also say that at a meta level, there is an asymmetry of asymmetry and symmetry. So, they're an asymmetrical coupling and they're very important in generating everything that we know, actually, not just in, in the living world, but also in, in the physical world.

Um, as I understand it, the two are certainly very important. Um, ways in which that applies to the cosmos as a whole. I mean, the first is that, um, I'm told that if it hadn't been for an [00:06:00] asymmetry between the amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe at the start, there would be nothing. So it's asymmetry that gave birth to everything.

And then Pierre Curie, who with Marie Curie, discovered radium. And it was very important. Physicist, at the end of the 19th century, said that it's not important that there may be symmetries in the universe. What is terribly important is that there must be asymmetries. So, it is a very profound thing, this asymmetry.

And The idea of the asymmetry of symmetry and asymmetry, we like symmetry in places, but we need it also to be partnered, and it suggests already asymmetry, and asymmetry already suggests symmetry. And there are others. I mean, one very important one for me is union and division. So, for example, Goethe said that the work of nature is always uniting what is divided and dividing what is united.

We need both of these tendencies. And in some ways, this relates directly to the hemispheres, because the right hemisphere is all the time able [00:07:00] to unite things that are fragmented, whereas the left hemisphere is all the time striving to break them up to find out what they contain. And we need both of these, but ultimately, we need division and union to be unified, not to be divided.

So, at the meta level, one of them always trumps the other, and it's the right hemisphere's one that always trumps, which is how it should be, because the right hemisphere always trumps. I mean, to cut a very long story short, is, sees more, perceives more, attends better to the world, makes, um, more realistic judgments about the world, and is frankly more intelligent, not just in emotional and social terms, but also in cognitive terms, than the left hemisphere, which may surprise some people.

So, in fact, it's very important that the left hemisphere does its work under the aegis of the right hemisphere, hence the asymmetry. already in the title of my first book, Master and His Emissary. And the emissary is, obviously, should be a functionary who serves the master, but this [00:08:00] functionary, knowing so little, thinks it knows everything and therefore wants to be the master.

Andrea: Yes, there's this quote that you use by Pasteur that, I think it's like, the universe is pretty much dependent on asymmetry or everything about the universe is asymmetrical. Absolutely. Yeah. And I love that idea. And um, as you were talking, I was thinking almost as if the space is itself is the unity, which is this right brain

without that, it doesn't matter that you can see the parts and the representations anymore. Um, but I find this, it's it's hard to visualize. I find often in philosophy and neuroscience and all these other fields I've worked in, we think of things linearly. So there's a beginning and an end.

There's a There's an opposite and it's opposite. There's two always. Instead of understanding this process of constant kind of becoming or afheben or, or something like that. But one thing I really love that you mention in your book, and I hope you can talk about just a minute, is Blake's idea of, or his drawing.

I've [00:09:00] often thought that instead of loops, which is what we always talk about in neuroscience, it's not a loop. Um, it's, or even T. S. Eliot coming back to where we started knowing it for the first time, that feels like a circle, but a cycle is not necessarily a circle or a perfect return. And, um, as you point out, Blake is one who shows this kind of spiral ladder, um, to heaven.

I'll let you, you describe it because you do it better, but to me it does seem a way of getting our idea, an idea of why there is asymmetry and why we want the unity to be the dynamic space holding it as it continually changes and moves.

Iain: Yes, I mean, the idea of becoming is absolutely central to my philosophy.

That we tend to, as an inheritance really from Plato and Aristotle, we tend to have developed an idea of something that is sort of, uh, what is perfect is being. But I think what is always happening is a [00:10:00] becoming. And that makes a huge difference to how you think. It takes us back to pre Socratic philosophy, particularly of course to Heraclitus, who said that everything flows, that everything is in process in that way.

So, um, that that's right. And Blake, yes, I've taken the image he made of Jacob's ladder as the symbol for the, channel, channel McGilchrist, that is my website. Because the only instance I know of the ladder, Jacob's ladder, between earth and heaven, which is not just a linear ladder, but is circling in this way.

And as you say, that combines two kinds of movement. If you view a spiral down its core, it looks like a circle. If you view it along its lateral, aspect. You see something that appears to be a sine wave, and this sine wave is moving in a certain direction, and the other thing looks like the particle. So there's a sort of, even in physics terms, [00:11:00] the particle and the sine wave have that same structure if you think of them as a spiral.

And everything, this is something I remember talking about when I was about 15. I was on a holiday in Austria and slightly losing people at the time, but saying, we think of trajectories as being, um, direct linear processes, but they're not, and they're not exactly circular because that would be stasis, but instead we've got this motion, which is spiral.

Andrea: Yeah, it's wonderful. I think it's a little hard for people to understand that you can have this kind of movement and it's not linear. But you said you, when you were 15, and I I do kind of want to think about you at 15. And if you were already thinking about this, that's very interesting to me. Did you, was it literature that sort of awakened, um, this idea of looking at two different sides of things, so to speak, as a whole?

Iain: I'm not sure it was actually, no. Because, um, I suppose, It was more just, um, [00:12:00] an intuition really.

I had various intuitions that have stayed with me all my life, and have turned out to be important, but at the time I had no idea. It's only in retrospect I can see that these were things that concerned me in my teens. And one was this business of the shape of, um, that progress is not a linear thing, but that it goes in, cycles that continually move on.

 But also, um, there were other things like the, very important for me that the parts the sum of the parts is not the same as the whole. And my, some of my clever schoolmates used to say, Oh, yeah, well, what's this? something magical that gets added in then, and I thought, well, it's all very well used talking like that, but I know that I'm right.

Iain: That the whole is not the same to some of the parts. I mean, now I could explain in what sense that is true, but at the time I couldn't. Another thing is that I thought, um, the world is responsive to us. It's not just a [00:13:00] passive thing that we register, but it is whatever it is out there, including, and especially the natural world is.

Something that actually speaks to us, that reverberates with us, that, and I've elaborated that much, much later into a philosophy that everything is relational. Everything comes into being through a two way relationship or reverberation between our consciousness and whatever it is, um, disposed towards.

So those were the sort of things that were on my mind, and I came from a scientific family and had always been, as a child, um, encouraged by my father and my grandfather to sort of, um, think about science, and I found it fascinating, I found it very exciting. And so, when it came time to specialize at school, I thought, I've got to do science, and then, the science I did was so exciting. mind bogglingly boring. It was all about sort of measuring things that were very obvious and proving the, a foregone conclusion. It's very strange the way

Andrea: science is taught in school. Almost. [00:14:00] Isn't it? Yeah.

Iain: Um, and I guess it could have been taught differently, but I mean, there we were.

So I thought, well, I'm not wasting more time with this. I'm interested in the philosophical questions. Of course, those philosophical questions could have been answered in the context of science, but I was much, much more interested then in, in literature and philosophy as ways of exploring ideas. And, um, what I intended to do when I'd finished school was to, um, if possible, go to Oxford and study philosophy and theology.

You had to sit the entrance exam in a school subject and neither philosophy nor theology were school subjects. So I took the entrance exam in English literature. Not because I just loved literature and when I got to Oxford, they said, Oh, you can't possibly do philosophy and theology. It's not an honours degree.

You need to do something that's an honours degree. Believe it or not, in Oxford in 1971, philosophy and theology wasn't an honours degree. I think it quite soon [00:15:00] became an honours degree, but they said, you've got a sort of, I don't know, a talent for looking at and talking about literature. Why don't you come and do that?

So, um, I did and I loved it. And then I got this fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford, which is pretty much unique in, in the academic world. It's, there's nothing like it in anywhere else, certainly in this country. Um, effectively you sit a three day exam and they either select And, um, I was lucky enough to get this thing.

And the prize was that you got seven years in which you could live in the college. All your needs, physical, daily needs were looked after. And you had time to pursue whatever it was you found interesting. And so I did pursue, um, Philosophy again, the mind body problem in particular, because it seemed to me that there was a problem with the way we were studying literature.

I eventually, this is what I did when I was there, I wrote a book called Against [00:16:00] Criticism, which was published by Faber in about 1982, I think. Um, and Really what I was trying to explain is why we disembodied things when we started to analyze them. We took something out of context, we made it abstract, and we made it banal, and we made it very general in nature, whereas actually it was unique and special and contextually the live and affected us not just as a brain, but as a whole embodied being, the work of art, a poem, um, and so that meant I spent a lot of time fruitlessly on the mind body problem, as it was called. Um, it's only really a problem if you can see that the mind and the body are entirely separate, but there we go. Um, and At the time, Oliver Sacks published Awakenings, and I was really swept up in enthusiasm for such a wonderful work.

And to be honest, I didn't think anything he ever did after that was quite as good. It was his masterpiece. And there were various things about it, but one was that he [00:17:00] was looking at the ways in which when something goes wrong, as it were, in somebody's brain, it changes their whole way of being in the world.

And I thought this is fascinating. And also another thing about it was that he used vivid individual cases in order to let you see a reality. It wasn't again, abstracted from the individual case, but instead the general was there, but was seen through the individual in the particular, not by turning your back on the individual in particular.

And this again resonated with me about what I've been trying to describe that was wrong with the way we approach literature. And I thought, well, the only way to do this, I'd like to be something like Oliver Sacks. And I thought, well, I've got to study medicine. So, um, after 28 when I was 10 years older than you.

In Britain, people start medical school at the age of 18. I went right back to being the lowliest of the low, the first year medical student and and worked my way up to becoming a consultant at the [00:18:00] Bethlehem and Maudsley Hospital in London.

Andrea: Well, I kind of understand that. I went back for neuroscience a bit later, but If you sat for this test and only two or zero were given this, what sounds like an amazing opportunity, my goodness, to all souls.

 But it sounds like you were very used to being at the top of your class, or successful smart, um, you already had all these ideas when you were a kid that people sometimes work their whole life to get. Who knows how that happens?

Andrea: Um, was it hard for you? a

Iain: pain in the ass, basically. I

Andrea: mean Well, that's sometimes part of it, when you know more than those around you, until you learn how to deal with it. But, I mean, was it, that's exactly, was it hard to go back and be, um, yeah, in school again? The one who has to learn?

Iain: No, because I love learning. I mean, I love learning more than anything, and I've spent my life learning. new things in different areas. Um, and for good or ill, [00:19:00] but, um, no, it wasn't difficult at all. In fact, it was much easier for me because, um, interestingly, status has never been important to me. So the fact that I was this humble creature was actually very good.

And I enjoyed the fact that I was starting a new adventure. And for me, I found everything I learned. Um, rich. So for the poor young, um, colleagues of mine who'd come fresh out of school having got good grades in, in biology and chemistry and so on and being selected for medical school, um, it was just a massive fact learning.

And of course, there is an incredible amount of factual learning in a medical training. And you just think you've got on top of one lot, and it's a new week, and now you've got to get on top of a whole other lot, and it just goes on relentlessly like that. I remember thinking it's slightly like somebody enters the room and throws a bucket of cold water over you, and you, at the end of the week, you've just about got dry, and then they [00:20:00] open the door and throw another bucket of cold water over you.

Terrible. That's a great way

Andrea: to describe it, but very uncomfortable. It

Iain: was a bit of a thing. Um, but I loved it because of its beauty. So, I mean, anatomy is so beautiful looking at the way these adaptive shapes have Generated. I found everything about the human body wondrous. I mean, and I think one should never lose one sense of awe.

The fact that we've lost our sense of awe and think we know it all is probably the most calamitous thing that has happened to humanity. And it's threatening to kill us, this idea that, oh, we get it all. We don't get a tenth, a hundredth, a billionth part of it.

Andrea: That makes sense to you, putting yourself in the position of the student.

That's almost what we all need to do in a way. But also it reminds me of how you write about attention and just that then you can turn your attention in a really concentrated way to life. I mean, you could do it [00:21:00] with nature, but you can also do it with nature of looking at the body. There's so much richness and wonder if we attend to it all around us, almost overwhelming amount, but you feel like we've lost that a bit, huh?

Iain: I do, and I'm not just talking about anatomy, of course, I'm talking about all the areas, microbiology, physiology, it's all extraordinary. And it's talked about in a very matter of fact way as though it's mechanical. And one wonderful thing that has happened quite recently in biology, and I would say not more than the last 15 years, is that having lagged about a century behind physics, which around 1910, that Newton's mechanical universe simply wasn't what we were living in.

And what's amusing is that just before that, people were saying, well, there's no more work for physics to do. We've understood it all. And then suddenly the rug was pulled under.

Andrea: Many disciplines, right? We've got it all. We all understand everything.

Iain: We've got it all. [00:22:00] AI now. We thought we'd got, biologists went on so far behind physicists constantly talking about mechanism, mechanistic nature.

Oh, mechanism. I'm so tired of that word. There's nothing in nature that's remotely mechanical. Organisms are not like machines. And, I. I think, the opposite of life is not death. Death is part of the process of life. And, no doubt, we'll, whatever was us, will go on into another living process.

I mean, that's the way life works. But, the opposite of life is mechanism.

Andrea: Oh, that's good. Yeah. And I mean, to be fair to all the people who use the term, as you've pointed out also in your work, and it is important to, that we look at things in a mechanistic way at times to understand them, but to confuse that with, That what's actually there, the process, the life, the body, um, it's just sad in a way.

It's just very sad.

Iain: I mean, it's a [00:23:00] mistake of this kind, looking around the world where I am, I can't see evidence that the world is curved, that the world is a sphere, I think it's flat. And if I'm going to build a garage, I really don't need to take the curvature of the earth into account. And so it's very practical, but it's untrue.

The world is amazingly. a curved surface. Now, I mean, the same thing is true about a complex system, and I make a distinction, which is a common one, and I'm sure you're familiar with it, between a complicated system and a complex system. A complicated system is just one that can be understood from bottom upwards.

For example, a jet engine is a complicated system, but a single celled organism, a bacteria, is a complex system, which has So much going on in it and parts that feed back on themselves. So it has recursive loops within it that it is intrinsically non predictable. That's the important [00:24:00] thing. And complex systems start very early on with something like the, um, the three, the double pendulum.

a pendulum on the bottom of a pendulum. That's all you need to create a system that's fundamentally unpredictable. So they're everywhere around us. I sometimes say the only, nothing in the whole universe is like a machine, except. The few lumps of metal we've created in the last few hundred years, but you're quite right that if you look down in a complex system You can find little places where there are arrays that do lead in a linear fashion just for in a tiny Bit now when you want to intervene You can intervene in that Particular cascade and you pretty much know or you think you know what will happen as a result of It's a mistake to go from that to saying that the whole thing is a machine.

It just isn't.

Andrea: Right. Which is sort of what we've done. We've confused the representations with the process. But I mean, there's, gosh, there's so much here I would like [00:25:00] to talk about, but there's something I did want to ask you about and you're describing it a bit there. Is this nestedness or scales of attention and perception?

Um, and how that sort of relates to this, because as you said, we can zoom in and it looks like a line in the same way that you can look out your window and it looks like the earth is flat. Um, and that's good at that level but there's always another level. The complex system helps us understand that, and not only linearly, not like up and down, but sort of in all directions we can move into these fractal nested scales of, of attentiveness.

Um, is that something also that you, yeah, that you've, I know you've thought about it, but how would you relate that to this?

Iain: Well, in a couple of ways, um, I mean, first to build a bridge to it, you mentioned representation and presence, and this is a very important distinction between the two hemispheres. So the right hemisphere, as it were, is open to experience.

The left hemisphere almost immediately, I mean, so fast [00:26:00] that we're not aware we're doing it, turns it into a representation of experience, and the word representation literally means present again, when. Actually, it's no longer present. So there's nothing wrong with this. Once again, it's very important to have a map, a diagram and so on, but you shouldn't live in the map or the diagram.

You need to live with the complexity of reality. Or only see the map,

Andrea: Only see the map. Yeah. Or only see the map. Um, leave your

Iain: theory or your diagram, which is just a very, Skeletal kind of, well, less than that. It's just a kind of almost vestigial figment that is supposed to represent the complexity, the beauty, the fullness of reality.

And I suppose that one way of thinking about the part and the whole, is that the word part is a useful one, and it's useful to, Because it describes what the left hemisphere does, which is to take things apart. And then it thinks that things are made by putting parts together, because that's how [00:27:00] it makes anything work.

But, in reality, nothing in the organic world is put together from parts. It instead comes into being as a whole and differentiates within itself. So that the part is a figment. Of the right hemisphere's imagination. It is something that it has created, but the, what is called apart is a hole at another level.

And that hole may have what appear to be parts. And at that level they are parts, but when you go down to their level, they're holes again. Yeah. So it is a nested this is not an original idea, but this is a, I think Kler talked about a, an a nested arch in which holes. Nested within one another.

And that is the structure, I think of reality. And we both have to live somewhere in, that is our lot, to be placed somewhere in, in this complicated, complexly [00:28:00] nested reality. But we nonetheless belong to both here and now, and to the whole of creation.

Andrea: And that is a kind of wonder of attention that we can know that we are in the midst of all of this, um, which I will get to in a minute, but a couple of things came up as you were talking is, in your books, it often comes up that, I mean, as you said, we've gotten a bit lost, obviously, like we have some real urgencies in the world now, and a lot of them are very much related to that we only see the map or even that we've perhaps lost our sensuality of being in the world, our phenomenological connection that's there, but that we somehow just see the map and we see the mechanics and even though those aren't bad, something has happened.

So when you're talking about this you often say that kind of the three things, tell me if I get this wrong, but the three things that really make us feel joy or that we really want and if we really look at it, um, are being part of a [00:29:00] group or relating with a group of others, being part of all in a way, um, being in relation with the natural world with this living nature, um, and also some sort of a higher power.

So, um, those are really powerful things. And I guess to get us started into it, I was wondering when you were talking about going into school again and how that was a easy cut, you were poised. And like a lot of people think this is a really stressful, um, if you're living that linear world and, Looking at the parts you're trying to count money.

You're trying to count accomplishments. It can be a very stressful time So I just wonder Was it a matter of these three things in your life or one of these three things? Had you did you have some connection to our power or nature or I mean What was it that gave you that poise or was it again? You just had this as a kid and who knows why?

Iain: Yes, I don't know really because I only discovered relatively late in life [00:30:00] that these three things, I mean, I sensed they were important, but I didn't know the research background that shows that these are the three biggest um, factors impinging on health, both. Mental and spiritual health and physical health that belonging, um, sharing your life with others that you can trust rather than necessarily being in a group because you could be part of a motorcycle gang.

And I don't think that might

Andrea: be fun for

Iain: a while, but that's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about sharing a life, um, with others who one can trust. I think that's the important point. And then sharing. One's sense of being with nature, realizing that we are nature, not that it is the environment as though it's some alien thing that surrounds us, but that it is something out of which we were born and back into which we return.

And the business of having, it's our gift. [00:31:00] Some spiritual realm, I think, has shared, um, whatever that is with us. And that is, so it's a sharing really on each of these three levels. And, um, I lived very closely with others. First of all, at school, I was at a boarding school, that it was a very benign school and I was incredibly happy there and full of the joy of learning.

And I lived amongst a very nice group of. It was boys in those days, of course, um, and I sort of rather expected that, in the world at large, I find that it was composed of people who were as kind, as, as thoughtful as, as they were, and it didn't turn out to be the case. But then I went to Oxford, and I lived in college, and I lived in another college, and I lived with a family, and then I had a family, and so on.

So I've always shared my life. In that way, until very recently, I find myself circumstances of slightly isolated, but it doesn't matter. I keep in touch very much with people that I care about

Andrea: because the other [00:32:00] ones,

Iain: the thing about nature. I mean, I always felt this, I always, from as far back as I can remember, felt this wanting to be there in nature, wanting to go walk on a cliff, take a book and sit for a book of poems.

So. Usually sort of, um, Wordsworth or something of this kind and go and sit and just read and then reflect and take in what was around me. I mean, I've always felt very strongly that nature speaks to me. Um, I wasn't brought up in the country. I was brought up in a suburb of Hull, which is about the least romantic thing that can happen.

Um, and, um, The spiritual thing, again, you see, I had it from, yeah, from the word go as soon as I was introduced to it. My parents were, had nothing really to say about religion one way or the other. They were sort of not interested and never certainly took me to church. But it was when at school I discovered that it was a much deeper [00:33:00] thing.

I hadn't really realized what the culture of Christianity was, this extraordinarily beautiful myth. Um, and I use the word myth without, I have to say this every time, without any, um, meaning that it's wrong, just that it is a powerful story that may well be true, but there we are. Um, the music particularly spoke to me, and the poetry the poets, particularly of the 17th century, Dunn and Herbert.

people. Um, so all of that spoke to me and then just the business of hearing, hearing the Bible, hearing singing Psalms. I didn't really, I didn't kind of get fixated on so what does this actually mean? How can there be a man, a boy and a bird? It doesn't make any sense to me. I just went. This is, I'm just going to suspend my disbelief and of course, it's much later in life that you understand what these things mean and approaching them academically is not the way to do it.

I mean, you can't sort [00:34:00] of, it's not a propositional matter. It's a dispositional matter. So you have to dispose yourself towards the world in a certain way. And then these things start to make more sense.

Andrea: Yeah, because I guess, I mean, this asymmetry that we were talking about in a way it's already all the stuff that we've been talking about is present in nature, in your connection to a higher power, in relations with other people, um, in the way that you described.

Although I have to say, some motorcycle groups probably have it too. Having worked in transportation, sometimes that's the way people find their way too, so. But anyway. I think you're

Iain: right.

Andrea: Yeah, so I just need to say that. But, um. in, it's there, all of this is already there. You don't need the left brain to dissect it and think about it.

But then something does come of that too. So I guess what am I trying to get at exactly is, I'm thinking about when you started studying literature, to go back to that, that you, it sounds like, of course I'm, this might be wrong, just correct me, but it sounds like you already had this sense of [00:35:00] actually everything that you put into words, which needed this kind of left brain too, um, in these books.

You were starting that at 14 or 15 in a way, with the feeling of it or the, you were already sort of holding the opposites or the contradictions that later you would have to discover and reconcile in a way. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but for me that feels like my experience with poetry.

Because poetry does this in such a great way, you don't, and music too, because they can express it without saying it. It expresses it without saying it, while also still, if you want, using representations of course, so I wonder if you, if that makes some sense to you too, that.

It

Iain: makes enormous sense. Yes. And, one of the things I think so, so very strongly is that certain things need to remain in the realm of the implicit. People who are very dominated by a left hemispheric [00:36:00] way of thinking, you think, well, if you can't make it explicit, it's not real. But. There are many things that can't be made explicit without great loss.

I mean, the one that's so obvious is that if you've ever had the experience of truly being in love, you can say, well, I'm in love, but you can't convey what this is like or what it means. So the only way you can do is by musical poetry, I think, yes. Um, or perhaps by painting, but I think it's principally those two anyway, for me.

And in, in poetry, what one is really doing is using language to subvert language. One's using language against itself, which is, sounds paradox. But what it's doing is it's shaking your belief that you understand the sentence in a linear fashion and allowing, The shaking to awaken things in you that are between the words, between the lines.

It's all that stuff that is [00:37:00] spoken but not spoken that is powerful. And of course, music is only relations. It is only implicit. It cannot be stated in words. And so it is this business of the coming together of The gaps between notes that make melody, that make harmony, that make the rhythm of the piece.

These relationships are what it is about. And I have always felt that very strongly, and I think that poetry expresses it so wonderfully. And you mentioned Blake. He, of course, was probably more than any other poet that I know of. Constantly thinking in terms of things in their opposites to the marriage of heaven and hell.

, the songs of innocence and experience and it, these , these, um, things that are not completely binary but are different aspects of one whole being

Andrea: Yeah. I love Blake and [00:38:00] I love the Romantics. I think maybe we share that. I know you, you quote them a lot, the Germans and also the.

And also from England, like, and Hegel too. I think I don't, I'm not a Hegelian, but I was first drawn to Hegel because I feel like this Offhaven or this, the way he writes is a bit of an expression of that. It never really quite makes sense, but you kind of get it in a sense of poetry or music or something.

And, um, I guess I'm thinking like if you're studying literature. Because you kind of, it was the philosophy, the theology, and then the literature. Were you having to decompose all this stuff into parts? Is that, I know your first book kind of goes into this, too. Was it, is that one reason, too, that was hard?

Was it trying, was it becoming too left brain or something?

Iain: Well, I don't think it did really become left brain, but I thought there's a lot of business that went on in the academic world around Literature was rather left, as I would now say, left hemisphere dominated. Yeah, in your conception

Andrea: of it, not in the everyday conception of it, [00:39:00] but.

Iain: No. We should say. In the sense of trying to home, home in on a meaning that it can be grasped and is clear and translatable out of context into, everyday language. But of course, the whole business of the poem is to get away from the confines of everything. Yeah, that's

Andrea: what I mean. It's in a way kind of

Iain: Take one beyond.

Tension. So yes, that's why I rate against criticism. And it was interesting, I had a, um, a discussion recently with a man called Scott Kaufmann who runs It's a very good psychology, um, podcast and, um, to my amazement he'd been reading, um, not just my more recent books, um, but went right back to against criticism, which I haven't actually looked at myself for a very long time.

I mean, I started writing it when I was 22 and I consider it sort of juvenilia really, but he was pointing out, which is absolutely right, that many of the themes in that book were ones that have remained with me throughout my working [00:40:00] life, trying to explore how and why these things take the shape and form that they do.

Andrea: That's wonderful that he pointed that out. And I think as we get older we start to see that, right? That's kind of why I was thinking when you were 15, and a lot of this is already there. And I do think in a way it relates to love and to these three things that we were talking about before of, there, there being a kind of meaning in life that you do kind of have this path.

And this way, um, and that you're trying to express something and of course it would be in all the work that you've done from the beginning in some way once you can kind of look back at it. But I wonder in, once you went into medicine or, and also therapy, if you were able to feel more or did that just give you a way to study this?

Um, I mean, I'm putting everything in terms of the asymmetry now, but I just wonder what about that. Was better or, um, more opening or freeing or what eventually led you to be able to write about it in the way that you did? Was it just all the study or did [00:41:00] it give you some kind of new frame for how to really communicate about it?

Iain: Well, I sometimes say that I went into medicine, um, to get a deeper understanding of the mind body relationship. And I think that's absolutely true. But I think another reason was that. Um, without sounding corny, um, but it was a calling. I mean, when I was younger, I intended to be ordained and probably go into a monastery.

And I realized, um, by the time I'd grown up just a little, um, that this probably wasn't the path for me. Um, but I think becoming a doctor was a way of doing that. Or it may just be an aberrant gene since my dad was a doctor and his dad was a doctor.

Andrea: What a way of doing that of, because to me that sounds like, I mean, I also wanted to go into like be a nun or something just so I could study and write and be, I don't know, in the love.

But so you saw medicine as that way.

Iain: I saw medicine as in some sense answering [00:42:00] that. But the reason that I started to write was because Was it specifically because of the hemispheres? Because this struck me as the most important unsolved question in the study of the human being, not just the human body.

Um, and, I don't know how much to go into, but the long and short of it is. That I heard somebody talking one day, giving a lecture on the right hemisphere and psychiatric disorders. My colleague John Cutting, who published a book with OUP with that title.

And, um, the fascinating thing was that he talked about, I'd never heard anything much about what the right hemisphere did in medical school. You only heard about what the left hemisphere did. And all a bit of a mystery, what went on in the right hemisphere. Here be dragons, um, and he was explaining that actually it's much, much harder.

to help somebody who's had a right hemisphere stroke than somebody who's had a left hemisphere stroke. And this is very well known. Why should that be? Because after a left [00:43:00] hemisphere stroke, the majority of the time they've got difficulties moving their right hand and difficulty with language.

You think that's surely the most difficult thing to rehabilitate, but actually it isn't because their right hemisphere is still intact and they therefore understand the world. Whereas, as I've tried to explain, although I've had to gloss over it, um, the left hemisphere doesn't really achieve an understanding of the world.

It just achieves the amassing of information that could be useful. And so when people have a right hemisphere stroke, they no longer understand what's going on or what anything means. And three things he said particularly struck me. One was that the right hemisphere understands implicit meaning where the left hemisphere doesn't.

And then that would mean it wouldn't understand poetry. Couldn't understand humor, irony, tone of voice, all these things, um, that the right hemisphere saw things in context, including the context of the body, and the left hemisphere saw things abstracted from context, and that would be one of the things [00:44:00] I think, yes, but when you take the meaning of a poem.

The third thing was the left hemisphere only saw general types. And I thought that's so important. And it's very important in art that real art is unique and it can't be substituted by something that looks a bit like it. So all of those just spoke to me. And then that started me off. I've collaborated with John who's very generous in helping me up.

And, did some neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins on asymmetry in the brain. And I've just gone on researching it ever since.

Andrea: So can we say that the two parts of the brain are like two kinds of attention? I mean, I want to talk about attention a little bit. Sure. Because that's a very important part too.

Iain: Yes, I mean, there are a lot of differences that have been described, and almost all of them are wrong. And they're of the kind, the left hemisphere does this, and the right hemisphere does that. The sort of machine question. But the brain is not a machine. The brain is something that mediates experience to in our consciousness.[00:45:00]

And What is attested and has been known for quite a long time to neurologists, but I don't think the import of this has been noticed and wasn't even noticed by me when I first realized that it was the case, is that the left and right hemispheres attend quite differently. So the left hemisphere pays a very kind of narrow targeted attention to something it wants to get and grab and use.

And the left, sorry, the right hemisphere is at the same time, keeping an eye open for everything else that's going on. So while the predator is focused on prey or the bird is focused on that seed, it's left hemisphere is at work getting and grabbing stuff. But the more comprehensively viewing right hemisphere is looking out for predators.

offspring from mates and so on. So these two kinds of attention are very important and they're not an answer to the question. What does the two hemispheres do? Because we discovered [00:46:00] quite, quite early on in the process, certainly by the eighties or nineties, it became obvious that both hemispheres are usually involved in doing everything.

So the old story that the left hemisphere does this, the right hemisphere does that, was wrong. It was more about the way in which the attention. That they brought to the task and attention makes such a difference to what you see. If you attend to something in a detached, clinical, um, utilitarian way, you see only, um, mechanical, dead, lifeless stuff that can be used.

If you look at it with a different kind of attention in which you're open to seeing things that you might not have expected, you find a rich, complex, beautiful world there. So these are two quite different ways of approaching things.

Andrea: Yes, and just to try to think about how we can I wonder how you see how we can start to maybe, um, heal or find, I don't know is there a way in which we can cultivate a different kind of, of attention, um, [00:47:00] Once we're aware of what's going on within our own bodies and so on for like, to go back to the asymmetry, but also to what we were talking about of just being out of touch with sensuality and the world and others and the higher power and that even we're not supposed to talk about all of these things.

Um, I really like, what I really like about your book is that it's probably the most scientific, giving or offering of left and right brain related, um, literature and research that we have. So it's really scientific. And you talk about science, you talk about reason, but you also without being embarrassed or, trying to I mean, you talk about imagination and intuition and how important these are.

So you're kind of healing this. Um, and those, I guess, I don't know. I'm trying to understand how those of us who've gotten to, um, Our attention is only focused maybe on the details or the science or getting ahead or even technology these days. How do we, do you see that we could open up [00:48:00] more through intuition and imagination and find a balance or an equilibrium again?

Iain: I think we can, yes. And interestingly, getting ahead is typical of the left hemisphere's competitive approach to getting there first, grabbing the stuff. Whereas the right hemisphere is the seat of social understanding, empathy, feeling and connection with other people, and is therefore about cooperation.

And interestingly, in the history of evolution, Cooperation has been more important than competition. Competition certainly plays an important part, no doubt about it, but that's only part of the story. In fact, those species that have really thrived have learned how to use cooperation as well as competition in a kind of collaborative effort.

And that's where we need to, we need first, I mean, that gives us a clue. We should stop being at loggerheads with people and defining ourselves over and against as competitors or embattled groups that dislike one another and do this very. Emotionally immature thing of outsourcing all the things we [00:49:00] don't like on that group.

It's all because of them And one of the first signs of emotional and spiritual maturity is accepting that you play a role in the situation you find yourself in and taking responsibility for it. People think psychiatrists, um, teach you to blame your parents, but they don't. They teach you to recognize your parents for doing the best they probably could, as you will do in turn, and that you need to own what you yourself experience and do something about it.

You can't go back and change your parents. There's that, but I think also, we've been taught to disrespect intuition. There's a whole army of overpaid psychologists going around businesses teaching people not to pay attention to their intuition. I'd like to see the whole lot of them, um, sacked, because they're doing such a disservice to humanity.

In fact, although intuition can And they love examples, which I call, um, cognitive illusions, really, where your intuition tells [00:50:00] you one thing, the reality can be shown to be different. But these are like optical illusions. I can show you optical illusions. You can hardly credit, but once you've seen them, you don't go, well, in that case, I'm never going to use my eyesight again.

Of course not. Your eyesight is normally. Very helpful. And the reason that it's wrong on some occasions is because it brings extremely helpful principles to bear that just happen in this one rather cleverly set up instance, um, be, um, be different. And the same thing is true of intuitions that most of the time our intuitions are very valuable and imagination again is misunderstood.

People think that, um, imagination is fantasy. And I make the distinction that was. Made by Wordsworth and Coleridge, between imagination and fantasy, which are really opposites. Fantasy is dressing up reality, hiding it, and taking away from it. Imagination is the disciplined attempt to see into the life of whatever it is you're [00:51:00] looking at.

And it's only actually by using imagination that you can, for the first time, really see what it is. That is, before you. So there's so much to say about that, but I mean, in brief, that's it. So I think those things are all very important. Yep. Sorry.

Andrea: No, I was just that's so rich. And I really love this distinction that you make between fantasy and imagination.

I feel like in a way, um, you're just trying to get people to pay attention in a way to, or show us how to attend to the world as it is and ourselves as we are without judgment or something like this, because this opens up a lot. Um, of realms. I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking about younger people now who you just have your attention.

I mean, as you've said, and it would be a whole other conversation. Attention is sort of a commodity now because it is obviously so rich and important. So you have devices that take your attention and then you want to get as many likes or follows or whatever. And all of those metrics can be really addictive.

And, um, it's very hard. I think once you [00:52:00] go start getting those habits into your body you get really far away from the relating in nature or the relating to a higher power. Maybe you feel like you're part of a community and in some way you are, but there's a different kind of connection.

Do you see that as kind of, at the root of this, like, could people, I feel like if people could just be aware that. That's not the only way, and you can attend differently. It can change everything very quickly, can't it? I mean

Iain: It certainly can, yes. And, I think what you've just been describing is the sort of positive feedback loop, that once you get into this way of behaving, it's very hard to break out of it, because it is addictive.

It gives you quick little reinforcements, I've got a like, or whatever it may be. But you've really got to put that aside, and I think, One thing we haven't talked about, but it's really critical about the way we are now is, and it's a natural consequence of being dominated by left hemisphere thinking, is narcissism.

[00:53:00] It's the thing that what matters is me against other people. But what actually matters is you in service to other people. So the idea of stopping being so hung up on pride and selfish concerns. I mean, I know it's easy to say that, and I'm not saying that I'm a paragon in this respect at all, but it's something that actually comes easier with experience and with life is that you learn A hard way that, you don't really matter that much.

And what does matter is all the things you can give to partake of and be enriched by. But you won't be enriched by them if you're in your little invulnerable coat of armor trying to win something. I mean, you will waste your life and you've only got the one. So

it's true about attention too.

You see, To a very great extent, the reality you experience and that, that is what your life is governed by how you attend. And if your attention is constantly being grabbed piecemeal by, [00:54:00] um, companies that want you to buy their product, Um, at the end of your life, do you want to say, well, my experience of the world, my, Capacity for attending being there and going deeply into what is around me and seeing the beauty and complexity of it Was taken away from you because I was every five seconds answering a call from something that popped up on a screen No, you need to banish these things.

You really do you need to use social media as little as possible now I am a bit of a hypocrite because But because In order to get my message out, I have to be on social media. And the way I get around that is that I have a lovely PA who doesn't mind being on social media, who's so well centered that she can survive it.

And that frees me up to spend time on the things that I think are important.

Andrea: I almost think it would be an answer if we could all do social media for one another. I mean, because there is a nice, the technology is wonderful and be staying connected like, this, that we can talk so far away and [00:55:00] there's nothing wrong with that.

It's just, as you were saying we've gotten sorry, do we need to go? Has it already?

Iain: No, not at all. That's, sorry, that's, um, an 18th century grandfather clock.

Andrea: It's

Iain: not, it's not a beeper telling me to do something.

Andrea: I was like, whoa, what's going on? No, but as you were talking, this is important that I don't think in a way we're cheating the young people by not letting them know they have a chance to, because, okay, if you're in the social media world as a young person, it doesn't feel very good in your body.

And if you just took a moment and if you could just do that, get like that nestedness we were talking about, or that spiral, if you could kind of come back to where you are and attend to it a little differently, you would feel in your body, something's wrong here, and I don't have to be doing this, and there's another way, um, but that seems so, that's so, such a small thing, and it can change everything, if you're in that habit, and you're in that inertia, you don't even see it as a possibility.[00:56:00]

Iain: No, that's right, but it's a hard thing, isn't it to say, because so much of the world now is there and there's this fear of missing out, um, I think we're too unfamiliar with the idea of one's inner resources. So much of our resources come to us through a medium, through a screen, through something that will feed us in that way, that we perhaps are less trained than people who grew up when I did, were to think.

Quietly to read, to reflect to write in one's own way and to do this in a sort of meditative way. Instead, it's all about how much can I get ingested. And, one of the things I learned in my life is that the periods when I thought I was not achieving anything were terribly important.

I didn't realize it at the time, but actually without them, none of the things that have come since could have [00:57:00] come. So we live in a world in which people are made to feel that they've got to be useful every minute and be doing stuff, but actually not doing. And by the way, not knowing are very important.

elements as most of the great wisdom traditions of the world, particularly perhaps of the East, tell us that not knowing and not doing are not, um, ignorance and idleness. There is a not knowing that comes the other side of, um, knowing when knowing has been left behind and there is a not doing which comes the other side of activity and it's certainly not idleness but a proper, um, active attention to the world without feeling that you need to be Making a judgment and acting on it all the time so that when you do act, things do get done.

You have to trust in a sense. You have to trust your body. It's funny. We live in a world where people talk about listening to your body, but I'm not sure how many people actually really do [00:58:00] have got time to listen to the body. They're listening to adverts. If we listen to our body and we listen to our intuition, my God, how much would be different because our intuitions tell us that life is more complex than the simple very simple theoretical constructs that are banded around all the time.

Well, see, one of the things is that when you make an explicit statement, You can really only say one thing at a time, but in intuition and in, for example, a poem, there may be all kinds of strands of meaning being invoked in your mind. There may be 10 or 12 of them and they're simultaneously present and they're enriching one another.

But when you, it's like the collapse of the wave function. Once you make it explicit, it's all got to become this one little thing. And the trouble is that one little thing is never enough. So I want to keep people in mind of the fact that there are other points of view from the one they've just articulated and that It's stupid, frankly, [00:59:00] it's ignorant and it's irrational to suppose that you are always right.

Why not think that the things you so frequently say are wrong may have some virtue in them, at least open yourself to the idea that there might be some, and then explore what that might be. It's the hidden aspect of what we think is good, that it's not. It is often, um, comes up and bites us.

And it's the hidden aspect of things we eschew as bad that we lose. And then we think whatever happened to X? Oh, we threw it away when we threw away that. So it's seeing these connections again, and not all pairings are symmetrical. In fact, almost no pairings ever are symmetrical, but we live in a world in which everything has to be equal, but everything is not equal.

I mean, as the great Thoreau said, no two blades of grass are equal. Why should they be? That's not to say that in law we shouldn't be treated equally, of course, but to think that reality consists of carbon copies of things is not the case, there are always differences and it's the differences that make life worth living.[01:00:00]

Andrea: Yes, well said. I think that's also the asymmetry too, that it's not that everything needs to be equal like as the same or looking the same or that what I need and what you need are the same and so we should, um. It's part of like opening that space too where, also I think as you were talking I was thinking it has to do with how we define ourself so we're not so closed and thinking that the self is just the brain of course but you know it's the body but it's the body in context.

It is these relationships that we have, the communion with nature, with each other, with nature, that it's actually exciting to be wrong because That's a portal. You talk about portals. It's like a portal opening into another way of being. And like, it's very exciting, actually.

Iain: Absolutely. Yeah. And what I can genuinely say is that in researching and writing the master and the matter, um, I.

I discovered things that [01:01:00] made me need to, um, sophisticate the way I was thinking about things. So I was constantly thinking, aha, I had expected this would be like that, but now I can see it's like this, but that's accommodated in. a new whole, a new gestalt when I've changed my perception. And that's really important.

I mean, we always should be aware that we are most of the time wrong. Um, one way of talking about science is the history of human error, because of course, science progresses and a greater truth is found. supplants a lesser truth, but this is because it's a very negative way to talk about science, which is a wonderful thing But the point is that not if you think

Andrea: of it as the ladder You have to

Iain: think of the process it's a process and there's no prizes for getting stuck on the ladder I mean the great thing is to keep moving and seeing you see one of the things that surprises me in the third part of the measure of things in which I deal with ontology or Metaphysics, however you put it.

Um, I was [01:02:00] prepared to talk about time and space and other things. I wasn't so prepared to talk about flow initially when I started. And then I realized that actually the business of motion and particularly certain kinds of flow is infinitely complex. every bit as important as time or space. And indeed time or space cannot be understood without an understanding of flow.

So for me, it was, um, wonderful to, to always, it's wonderful to have one's position shaken a little so that it has to,

Andrea: Yeah, it opens another sensory way of being in the world, a portal, as you, again, I think that's a really important part. It's great you brought up flow because that does end up feeling like a, your work too.

I mean, I don't know how to describe it exactly, but there's a sense of that, right? Like that discussion that you have in the book, it's kind of, it makes sense. It starts to make sense. Um, There's a kind of practice, almost, that, that begins to, that you begin to feel, and that I [01:03:00] imagine you had to engage in just to be able to write this book, and that's a lifetime process, and it's rich, and it's sensual, and it's, um, alive and dynamic, and, um, I mean, we have to wrap up a bit now, but it also makes me think of, again, to go back to kind of literature or poetry, the way we share art and create art to open up similar portals, right?

Like, that's really the meaning or the love. This is about love in a way, um, Um, is kind of meeting or communing in those places, um, or even when you're sitting along communing with someone who wrote something a long time ago, as people will with this book and years to come, like, who knows, a way in the future it's a portal and it's a way of sharing and becoming something and connecting.

Um, so I don't know yeah, how about you think about that?

Iain: Yeah, I think that we all need to be in a way portals or windows to something and respond to it. Also, I think the reason we're [01:04:00] You know, I often reflect on why I have life at all. It's a very energy expensive process. It's makes fragility and it involves suffering.

What is it about? It's certainly not about survival because the more complex we've become, um, the more we've given away the business of living long lives, compared with bacteria and compared with trees and things we're short lived. But, um, I think it's in order to. respond to something which is in the cosmos, and I believe aspects of that ground of being, whatever it is, are the values that we call goodness, beauty, and truth.

And perhaps, well, above all, the sacred. So these are things that are there and we either fail to recognize them or respond to them or recognize them, respond to them and help them to grow. And I think that's our task. We have a bit of a duty, but also an honor, which is that we're given this [01:05:00] capacity to respond to and make more of things that are beautiful, good and true.

And I think if we can do that is wonderful. And poetry is one way in which we discover the beautiful and the true. It speaks to us and we know that it has these qualities. So I've always been very much in love with poetry and one of the reasons I, another reason why I left the academic study of literature is I didn't want to spend my time operating on my friends.

I wanted to have them as friends and listen and read and you know that when COVID lockdown came, I started reading poems every day and putting them up on the internet for 365 days. That was wonderful. I really enjoyed it because I, it forced me to go back and meet my friends again.

Andrea: And it's a wonderful way of sharing and marking the time.

Um, it's something to look forward to and I'm glad you mentioned that because just to end that you started that poetry series with a poem by Kathleen Raine. I think it's called The Spell of Creation and it really is almost like, I'll link to it so everyone can listen to you [01:06:00] read it, but it's a kind of a fractal.

Or, it's all this together, right? She's talking about, um.

Iain: It is. It's wonderful.

Andrea: It's wonderful. It's just, I'll just let people read it. But, um, I think she even talks in that one about the green garden buds. Is that one? It's just, everything about it shows you how to attend to the world, but without Um, taking it apart, let's say.

Iain: Yes, yeah. And that was the first one. And seeing things in and through one another. Which is terribly important. I have this all important, I believe, concept of semi transparency, which means not that you just look through things and don't see them because you're focused entirely on what's beyond, but you see them well enough, but you also see through them to what's beyond them.

So you're holding together. Yeah. Yeah. The individual and the bigger picture that they belong to. I love that. And it is in fact an example of nested holes. It's an impossibly important poem, a spell for creation, that's right.

Andrea: Yeah, and then you end [01:07:00] with, um, the many many are the dead.

And it's also Kathleen Rayne. So we start with creation and it's very much about, it feels like bursting of life and, looking into how everything is nested. And then we end with I think she's older when she writes that one, right? And it's kind of looking at her own, yeah, her own life. She's in this little house, which is no smaller than the world.

It's so beautiful. I mean, there's so many opposites. It's very Blake like in that way or, um, Wordsworth or I don't know. It's patterns it's all the stuff we've been talking about. So I guess just to end, I want to think of those two poems, why you chose those two poems. And if you If there's something about life and death that you've come to think of differently in all this literature and this flow of your own life that, that connects to that, because it's a very beautiful way to bookmark that year.

Iain: Yes. Well, Kathleen Raine, um, was very fond of Blake. And I think there's not an accident that there are resonances with Blake. Um, she [01:08:00] was one of the really absolutely first class poets of the last hundred years, no question. And, um, I wanted to start with that spell of creation, a spell for creation, because it is a blessing.

It is a blessing on everything around us and the idea that we can see through what is in front of us or something beyond and behind it and the sort of the fire and the eye and all these things coming together. It's just a terrific poem to start a series with. And I wanted to, as it were, to have come full circle.

And so, yes, I deliberately ended with that one in which she's approaching death. And seeing death not as an enemy, but as some part of this wondrous picture and flow. And I think one way you can think of, um, a human life is as a kind of piece of music, as at any rate, at the simplest as a melody.

Although there are parts that can [01:09:00] be retrospectively found, once you've written it down and you've looked at it on the score, you can see that there are, um, there are notes that are apparently separate. In fact, in the piece of music, no note is separate, and it only means what it means because of the hole that it is in and what comes before and what comes afterward.

So it is, in fact, a seamless flow. And this idea is very important, I have in the last 10 years, I suppose, particularly, um, like you I was very interested in Hegel for a long time, from relatively young. And I refer to Hegel rather a lot in the Master and His Emitry. But, um, between then and writing The Matter of Things, I really got more into Schelling, who's much less well known, but who is a terrifically interesting philosopher.

and who prefigures so much that is known now to [01:10:00] modern physics and phenomenological philosophy. So he's a remarkable figure because after all he's writing in the early part of the 19th century. So, um, I, or even in part the late 80s, so he's a remarkable person for me and I Love this image of a whirlpool in the water because it is part of flow.

And I see this as an image of everything that exists, that there is a seamless flow, but it's not an undifferentiated flow. So it has. differences within itself. In fact, the images in the flow come from a degree of resistance. There are a lot of illustrations in the chapter on flow, which are taken from very simple disturbances, simply putting a rod in and just seeing the amazing patterns, not [01:11:00] chaotic, but patterns that come out of it.

So a simple obstruction releases some new form that is incredibly beautiful. Now, I think that A whirlpool is formed by some kind of restriction to the flow, or opposition to the flow, which creates a new flow, which for a while is there, very much there. You can photograph it, you can measure it, and it has power to move things.

So it is itself absolutely real. But it's not in the water because it is the water. And for the while that is the water just there. And I think we're like that. We're all like this. And that's the thing that exists, has this nature as a whirlpool for a while. And that when it ceases to exist, it's not ceased to exist at all.

It's changed its energy. It is, the water is still there. The water is always going. But it's turned into a different form and just as important to form and just as wonderful a form and by the way, while it was there, it also had an effect so [01:12:00] that the disturbances in the water have effects on the shape of the river eventually.

So, and the waves in the sea, which is another in which they can have effects. They can move boulders. They can erode a cliff. They can do many things, but they're not. sort of added on thing. They are the way the water is at the time. And the fact that it involves this element of resistance is very good because I believe that matter is the aspect of consciousness that provides for a while, an element of resistance that enables things to come into being for us.

So there's a lot, there's a lot there that I could and perhaps should unpack, but perhaps not now. So. Yeah, we've been

Andrea: talking a while, but I think that's a beautiful way to to. Go, because there's so much in that and yeah, and it's, and it goes with all the themes that we've been talking about, the left brain, the, these different ways of needing the resistance, but also the unity, the parts, the whole, and also the way that you use that image a lot in your, in the writing.

And it really shows a lot [01:13:00] of the things that we've been talking about in terms of how you are changing the overall flow. as part of it while you're here. Um, whatever you can't avoid that really. You're, that's happening. So yeah, I just want to thank you for everything you're giving and have given.

I really appreciate you.

Iain: Thank you very much, Andrea. Thank you. And it's been lovely talking. Thank you very much. ​