Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death, Iain McGilchrist talks to Tim Freke (Part 1)

Tim Freke (TF):     “You & I are both human beings on this bittersweet journey of being alive, and we both got older. What is it? How have you come to terms with that mystery? How do you see it as you make that journey?”

    Iain McGilchrist (IM): “I think intrinsically it’s that mystery one never comes to the bottom of. As William James said, ‘We can never close our accounts with reality.’ And I think just being aware of that is both very valuable, and as you say, somewhat rare. We take the most mysterious things for granted, such as the nature of time and consciousness, and that we’re alive at all, or that there is anything at all rather than nothing. So these things are eternally intriguing, but that’s part of their value. I mean if we could say, ‘Oh I know exactly what it is,’ well first of all, you’d be a fool, but secondly, you would have lost something of what it is that makes life have meaning. The odd thing is that if we could narrow down the meaning of these things in a simple way, to what we normally mean by, ‘Oh that means that,’ then it would have no meaning. Its meaning depends on its meaninglessness at one level, much as the idea of purpose would be vitiated* if it was clear that there was a purpose in the sense of a utility – you know we do this, because of that. (* vitiate – spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of)

TF     “One of the things that I’ve explored a lot is the coexistence of opposites … and one of the opposites that plays itself out for me all the time, is the way in which I feel that I can live with an appreciation of the mystery – the numinous nature of existence, AND a story I’m telling, which I’m constantly trying to define. One of the reasons I want to have these conversations is that it refines my story, my understanding. … generally we don’t realize we’re embedded in a story, that there is a cultural story which we take for granted. And that part of the function of doubt & mystery is to come out of that story, and actually see, to actually be conscious in this moment – this breathtaking mystery, we don’t know what it is, and then we have the best story we can find to navigate it, and deeper stories open up deeper experiences.”

IM     “I’d like to pick up the word ‘story’ because of course nowadays, it can be used to mean a lie – ‘telling stories’ as children say. And the word story, and the word fable, and the word myth, which are now all used to mean things that are fundamentally unlikely to be true, started off as words that designated a perfectly truthful approach to reality. When philosophers and scientists normally talk about a narrative or a story, the background to that is often that we make it up in order to comfort ourselves, because we need some sort of meaning, so we invent it. And there again, that word has changed. Invention used to mean discovering something, finding it, whereas now it means making it up. So I believe there is, very importantly, a way of dealing with these imponderables that you mentioned, which is not head-on. The more you try to analyze it directly, the more you come away with a handful of dust. You need to approach it in a more oblique way, implicitly. And this is where art, music, poetry & religion take their value – from being able to embody things that normally we can’t talk about directly. If the tendency then is to dismiss them, because they can’t be talked about directly, or because this involves a narrative or a mythos or something, is to misunderstand another way of grasping reality.” 

TF      “One of the things that strikes me about that is that there seems to be the intellectual mainstream, which within its own domain is vocal & dominant, which then percolates through. When it says, ‘Oh you tell a story about it, or you make up meaning,’ seems to imply that the imagination is somehow unreal, that it’s a bolt-on extra. There’s reality, which is physics and biology – kind of, and then there’s this bolt-on extra, which is the whole realm of the imagination. Whereas it seems to me that the imagination is the most emergent level of reality. It’s the whole journey of evolution over these 13.8 billion years has led to imagination. It’s gone from hydrogen to ideas. It’s gone from matter to something not made of matter, and that realm of ideas where we’re creating stories is not a bolt-on extra. It’s actually another level. It’s not the most real exactly, but the most emergent, the latest level of reality. It’s all been leading to this.” 

IM     “I haven’t thought of imagination as something that’s a product of evolution, partly because I imagined that imagination is foundational, that it is an important part of creative consciousness, and that actually everything that exists partakes of it.”

TF      “You had mentioned purpose, and one of the key things for me which makes me want to understand this is not just what is it, but what shall I do with it?
    I’m alive. I know that I’m going to die. Life is full of joy and suffering. Does it have a purpose? Who would know anyway? And yet, it feels like we live from those purposes.
    A lot of my method, I guess, is to look at the moment, because that’s what I’ve got. And to see what’s in it. And one of the things which came from that, ‘Oh, each moment’s the realization of a new potentiality. Every moment’s new and every moment contains everything that’s ever happened before. It’s implicit within it. Me arriving here is implicit of our communication, the whole of the Big Bang, everything. The past is present & hasn’t gone anywhere is a very powerful idea I associate with Rupert Sheldrake. This process has been one of evolution realizing potentiality. So that the purpose of existence … is intrinsic to the very nature of what it is, which is the continual realization of potentiality. And because of the accumulation of everything that’s happened in the past, there’s a tendency towards more & more emergent realization, so that now we can have conversation because soul has emerged, psyche has emerged, which wasn’t happening when there was just hydrogen. But that was a precursor for this. So that there seems then a very deep purpose with which we are intrinsic parts which is to continue that realization of ever deeper, more emergent potentials. And actually, I think we’re doing it right now in having this conversation, because the new potentials now are being realized in the imagination. They’re not particularly biological or physical anymore. They’re happening on this imaginary or cultural soul level.” 

IM     “Well, I want to pick up two ideas that you just raised. One is to do with meaning and the other to do with purpose, and they have something of the same structure to them.
    There’s a certain way of thinking about what meaning is. For example, I can tell you what the meaning of the instructions for how to operate a new piece of machinery I’ve got. What that means is very easy to do.
    But quite what King Lear means is another matter. Even more problematic is, I can say, ‘My wife means the world to me.’ And people say, ‘What does she mean then?’ And there isn’t a way you could possibly work with that. Nor does it work with great music. It seems to me that some of the most wonderful experiences, pregnant with meaning can be derived from listening to Bach – there’s no conceivable way they can be reduced to a meaning in what I would consider the left hemisphere sense, which is, ‘Come on, what’s the meaning in sentences we can analyze & understand?’ But there is another kind of meaning which we experience with the whole of our being and is more implicit and can’t be articulated because by articulating it, we reduce it, we cut bits off artificially from it, and reduce its meaning by giving it an explicit meaning. Now the same thing happens with purpose. When we say something has a purpose, we normally mean, ‘I can see that doing this causes that,’ and that’s an outcome that I wanted. That’s a kind of purpose, a kind of utilitarian purpose. It would seem to me that when we discover that we have no purpose, it’s that kind of purpose we discover. There is no utilitarian purpose in that sense. It’s not all designed by some engineer God to produce a certain result.
    What happens instead is that guaranteed by the fact that it is not produced to an instrumental purpose, in order to serve something outside of ourselves because the engineer is serving his own purposes. Our lives are not engineered. This universe is not engineered in that sense, but it seems to me full of purpose. And that purpose is I think, and this is where we agree, the fulfillment of potential. It’s simply in what is there potentially, becoming being. And once it’s become being, the process moves on. And that’s where you say everything that’s happened is already still there, is that something is left behind by this process but it’s also changed by the continual becoming. So even though in retrospect, it looked like this, now with further retrospect, it looks different. So the whole of everything is changing, and I would see the present moment as a something that is traveling through a medium of potential and actualizing as it goes, leaving this actual path behind it. And it’s not determined from behind by a series of steps but actually drawn towards fulfillment of purpose.”

TF     “Yes, beautiful, there’s so much in there. … so the moment right now seems to be the meeting of the past and the possible, always. And the possible is what you mean by the creative or the cosmic imagination, that kind of sense that there’s something which is giving birth to something new – doing it now, and now, and now. … It’s that journey of realization potential which seems to be fundamentally what a life is, as part of this greater journey, that ‘I am doing that.’ John Keats said ‘the world is a vale of soul-making.’ I love that. That’s a very essential message for me. It feels like I’m making my soul, because I’m made of my past. I’m made of everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever been. This is now who I am and I’m making myself. Or I’m being made as well. It’s not just me doing it.”

IM     “I think that remark of Keats is both beautiful and quite deep. It’s suggesting that the soul is not a being, an entity, a thing, but is instead an aspect of a process which we help to nourish or can stifle. So in our lives we can grow ourselves or we can stunt ourselves. It’s those choices that make our life what it is. So I think it’s a very good remark. This is where we get into the realm where language is extremely difficult, but the present is where the past and potential meet. I think it’s very difficult not to almost spatialize when talking about time, so we see two things that meet but of course they’re not two things that meet. The present is an infinitesimal moment that travels through this business, actualizing as it goes. … The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood. We think of things in binary sort of ways, that is, there is nothing, but there is no thing there. This emptiness – the word ‘sunyata‘ – is derived from a root that means a seed that is potential to grow, and it’s an emptiness as that of a womb that is a potential for something to grow in. And so quite often what we need to be doing is the idea of negation, which in the Western tradition just looks like the absence of something important. But negation is the stopping doing things that get between us & something that is there for us to discover. Often what we need to do in order to be creative is not to make something happen, but to create a space, in which what is already potentially there is invited to grow, to flourish & fulfill itself.”

TF      “My strange life has led me to be interested in what traditionally gets called spiritual awakening or waking up in consciousness to this presence which is completely spacious, emptiness. And I want to invite you to do two things: to mention just the essence of left vs right hemisphere dominance, and the thing I’m particularly interested in is how that or does that have anything to do with awakening or spiritual experience, because one of the things I notice is that a lot of people come to me and say ‘Look I understand this all intellectually, but I don’t experience it.’ 

    And one of my jobs is to help them experience it, and that’s probably what I do most. And I wonder, is that to do with being trapped in a left brain conceptual understanding and needing to free up into a more right brain understanding? For me the gnosis that arises, the deep knowing, the most central thing, which is before words. And I try then to put it into words and what I end up saying sounds very naïve & a bit child-like, ‘It’s all good really, despite everything. I know it’s awful, but it’s also good. It really is.’ It’s very childish intuitions, but they’re the deepest things I know. And I wonder is that also to do with the left brain and right brain thing, or is that something separate?”

IM      “Everyday language arose to enable us to utilize the world effectively, and we have to use special kind of language to deal with things that are not everyday realities for us because, unless we’re careful by expressing them in language we reduce them to familiar things, whereas the whole point about them is we’re trying to convey something that is unfamiliar. As Nietzsche said, ‘Words make the uncommon common,’ and what you’re talking about are things that are generally-speaking, unusual but nonetheless very deep in meaning. We wouldn’t expect them to translate easily into everyday words, so I think that everyday language is a problem for certain kinds of understanding, because it tells us that we’ve got it. It says, ‘I understand that.’ ‘I grasped it.’ Whereas, in fact what it needs to do is to abdicate that power because it’s actually a destructive process. It’s getting between us and understanding something that only by removing language we can contact, and for me as a psychiatrist, one of the things has been an understanding that people who are particularly articulate often need special help with realizing things of a deep emotional kind. This can be done by using implicit therapies rather than explicit therapies. A lot of therapy takes place in language, but there are therapies that don’t involve that, that involve either metaphors of bodily movement – of enacting things, or of painting or sculpting.
    And often city lawyers would be very reluctant to go and do these therapies, and I’d need to persuade that it didn’t matter that they had no artistic skill. But the trouble is they were so good at articulating things in everyday terms that that got between them & something which, only when they were able to adopt a more implicit approach a more oblique approach, came to life.”