Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death, Iain McGilchrist talks to Tim Freke (Part 2)
Welcome to the second half of the excerpts from the EXCELLENT discussion: “WHAT IS LIFE?” between Tim Freke & Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY
Again, you might aim for quality & savour slowly, with all your senses open. You might even benefit from reading this material over more than once. Enjoy!
Iain McGilchrist (IM) “Now you asked me about the (left & right brain) hemispheres, and it’s a difficult thing to convey briefly. Effectively one needs to throw away all the preconceptions one has about what the difference between the hemispheres might be. It took me 20 years of work to get some idea of what these differences were about and to try and counter the prejudice against the idea that there’s some difference between the two hemispheres.
Mind you arguing that there isn’t, is a bit of a non-starter because all the things we can objectively measure, that science can measure, are asymmetrical in the brain. They’re different sizes, weights, & different shapes, and have different convolutions, and different cyto-architecture, different neuro-endocrine responses. They use different balances of neurotransmitters, different greater white matter ratio, there’s everything about them that’s different. And if you were a clinician, rather than somebody merely working in a lab, you’d know from experience that when something happens to somebody, in terms of a stroke or an injury to the brain, it matters at least as much which side of the brain it’s on, as the site within that hemisphere. So I wanted to find out what those differences were. And to summarize very simply, they seem to me to boil down to differences of attention and to the way we see the world. There is perhaps a need to unpack that, but there is a good Darwinian explanation of why we need to use two kinds of attention to the world. I can allude to it very briefly. We need to be able to get hold of things in order to eat them or to use them – say a twig to build a nest or pick up a seed rather rapidly, before another bird does, latch onto a rabbit, or whatever it is. Then for that we need highly focused, extremely precise, but highly localized attention – just a few degrees of the attentional arc. But if that’s the only kind of attention we pay, we’re vulnerable because we also need at the same time to be paying quite the opposite – sustained, long-term, broad, open, uncommitted attention, in which we haven’t already made a preconception of what we’re interested. This brings us back to the question of what do we mean by conscious, because I’m only conscious in the focus of my attention of a tiny part of 1% of everything that my brain & body are receiving, because the brain is seamlessly connected to the nervous system, which is seamlessly embedded in the body with its muscles & its blood supply, and so on. So everything we experience is information about our environment, and only a very tiny part of that is what we’re aware of. But I can choose what I’m aware of. I can focus on that painting, or I can focus for a while on a piece of paper, or whatever. I can choose what I focus on. But what I’m doing is excluding everything else for a while. What is very hard is that because we’re so present with the thing that we were attending to, by definition, that we forget that it’s just a minute part of everything else, and we privilege it over all the other stuff. But actually it’s not necessary for us to be attending to things in order to make intelligent use of them. Our bodies are intelligently using information that I’m completely unaware of, and even at a rather sophisticated level, my brain is taking in things that I can’t articulate and I’m not aware of. Tiny changes in the musculature of your face that last for tenth of a second, I’m aware of and understanding, for example. So there’s very much that gives meaning and importance to life that doesn’t begin to become part of consciousness, never mind to become articulated in language.
But earlier you mentioned how something very important came to you. You weren’t sure where it came from, but you couldn’t articulate it. There’s some very nice research which shows, at least implicitly, that our thinking (1) begins at a pre-linguistic level which is a sense of a gestalt, in other words of a shape or form, an analogy, a metaphor of something, that our (right hemisphere) thinking is embodied in a, if you like, nonverbal, visual, or kinesthetic way, bringing all our senses to bear.
And the next stage (2) is that we allow the left hemisphere’s language centers to process that in language. But that’s only an intermediate step.
(3) In order to understand it fully, whatever has been made explicit, then has to be reabsorbed or taken up again by the right hemisphere’s global understanding and made sense again in context (ie integrated).
Tim Freke (TF) “What for you has given your life purpose? How have you made sense of the inevitable hardships & heartbreaks we all go through? What has enabled you to maintain this lovely infectious curious open-hearted presence?
IM “… Despite the fact that my life has gone through many strange knight’s move steps, from philosophy, to literature, to medicine, to whatever, and it’s gone through many phases, there have been very consistent themes. So like you, from a very early age I was interested in questions that are foundational in philosophy & theology & the life of the mind. The pursuit of ideas simply because they are fascinating & alluring and tell me of themselves that there is something important here. That is one of the things that has guided my entire life and given it the sense of evolution and purpose that it has.
But along the way, just about everything that I’ve encountered has enriched that, in the sense of meaning. I mean above all of course the love I have experienced in relations with family, friends, partners, things like music, poetry, and the arts in general, and above all, perhaps the relationship with nature, which seems to me so profound and so elemental that when I’m away from here – where I am surrounded I only have to go out of the door to be surrounded by the natural world – when I go away, for example I make increasingly infrequent visits to London, but I’m afraid it’s like suffocating and I really can’t wait to get out of it because it’s the antithesis of just about everything that seems to me to matter, which is harmony, peace, silence, not doing, attending, and slowly, deeply thinking about things. I can’t find that in London. The press, the sheer press of everything going on around me, most of which doesn’t seem terrifically meaningful. It has, if you like, a beautiful illumination at my idea of purpose that everyone seems to be driven by a purpose – to get that bus, to go to that meeting, to do whatever it is. And yet, the big question hanging over it all is, why? What’s all this about? Whereas here (Isle of Skye), nothing seems to have a purpose. The plants grow, the trees grow, the sheep graze, the sea crashes on the shore, the rain comes down, the sun comes out. None of it seems to have any purpose. That illuminates the difference. So provided I am not stifled by being yammered at, by media – I don’t do social media at all, I don’t have a television, I switch on the radio not every day, but usually around 6, just to reassure myself that the country still exists. But it seems to me that it’s much better for me to be spending time where I love to spend it, which is in dealing with things that are not time-limited, that are in a way the really interesting questions about what we’re doing here on this planet in this universe at all. That’s what gives richness to life and for me, both meaning – extraordinary meaning, and an extraordinary sense of purpose. And I’m not bothered in the least by the fact that it’s coming to the end for various reasons I don’t need to go into, it’s probably coming rather quickly for me, but I don’t mind that at all. I’m intrigued to know what happens when by body is no longer here, and if nothing, I won’t be disappointed.
TF “Do you have a theology of death and its relationship to life?”
IM “Well I’m uncertain about most things, but probably nothing quite as uncertain as about that particular question. I really don’t know. I say I’m intrigued but then I have personal experience of going to extremely dark corners of the universe in my consciousness at times, so I know that as it were, there are very powerful painful places in the cosmic consciousness. And it’s not guaranteed that, on an ‘n’ of one anyway, that everything is going to be tolerable if consciousness persists. But I have a view that my consciousness, as me, will not persist in any obvious way. I think that I’m like and we are like eddies in a stream that for a while, are visible, measurable, photographable, have force, but move on. Or a wave in the sea, which for a while can be very powerful, can break things and is palpable, but it’s absolutely seamless with the water of the sea at large, much as the whirlpool is seamlessly part of the river that flows. And I see water actually as a very good image, one I’m always coming back to, in trying to understand the existence, and in fact use images of various kinds of streams. And my all-time favorite philosopher, Heraclitus, famously supposedly said, ‘All things flow.’ But I think that it’s not that our having been is of no avail, but it’s that it is no longer palpably there.
It reminds me slightly of my whole idea of the way in which we understand anything or get to learn anything, which is that (1) we have an attraction to something based on our right hemisphere sort of sense of a connection, say to a piece of music. (2) Then we go through a period when it’s all made explicit in the left hemisphere and it has to practice that passage of bar 28, and oh there’s a return to the dominant bar 52, whatever it is, and (3) then when you go on stage, the performance happens, and you must not be thinking of all those things (details). And it’s not that therefore they’re negated, or it was pointless. There is this Hegelian idea of something being taken up (integrated) into something greater. (For Hegel, only the whole is true. Every stage or phase or moment is partial, and therefore partially untrue. Hegel’s grand idea is “totality” which preserves within it each of the ideas or stages that it has overcome or subsumed.) And the image he gives, which is not a bad one, is that there cannot be fruit without there having been a flower, and there cannot be a flower without there having been a bud. So each of these is important. Each of these carries the flow and has its purpose for a while but they’re all subsumed in the process of this plant, producing this fruit.
TF “My own meditations on it, which are always completely provisional, and based on my own experiences of being around death quite a bit, and after-death connections as well, and trying to make sense of them, but also the philosophical movement, we were talking earlier, before we were filming, I said that I see this movement from unconscious oneness and then the process of becoming, of individuating leads to greater & greater consciousness, as things become more complex and more individuated, until there’s you & I, which compared to most things around here – the trees, windows, & the floor, it’s pretty individuated – we’re able to have this conversation about the nature of life, and then you’ve got death. I was very influenced by a lot of Eastern philosophy, mysticism generally, and there is a very traditionally pessimistic view, I think, underlying spirituality which is – it’s not so much an evolution as a fall. We’ve been in some place which was better and we’re fallen, and we need to get back. And one of the ways that works out is in a lot of the Eastern traditions and non-dual traditions is the best way would be if you could dissolve your individuality back into the oneness, because your individuality is just in the way. It’s, ‘You know what the problem is? It’s Tim or Tim’s ego’, or something which is in the way, and get rid of that. And at death, if you are really smart, there will be the light, which is the great light of possibility, that Clear Light of Potentiality (that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls it, beautifully I think) that you can dissolve back into, and everything’s returned to where it was. Which sounds great, if you don’t think about it too much, but that actually negates the whole process of this creative agony of individuating – we’ve gone through it for nothing? And that doesn’t satisfy me at all. And so I’ve been playing with is the opposite of that, which is not to dissolve into the light, but actually to not dissolve. That actually it is only by holding our individuality that we are conscious and that the whole process of evolution of the universe for these thirteen, fourteen billion years has been to individuate. And that it’s on the soul level, on the level which we experience already as immaterial, life & death is not an issue because it’s not biological anymore, it’s information or existence on a different level, and the whole point is to get that to be more & more robust and able to sustain itself in a disembodied state where it can actually commune with the ground of being, which we can do now, but which seems to be what people describe in NDEs and in the spiritual literature, not to dissolve into it, but to actually create it. And in some way, this is kind of resonant maybe with people like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that it’s not coming from God, it’s going to God, and that the universe is giving birth to the most emergent thing possible, which is God, and that when we commune in the light or just in the Oneness, we are creating not by dissolving ourselves, but by becoming so individuated, so conscious, so particular and not just embedded in our unconscious conditioning but actually becoming ourselves, that we are sparks then, and the light is all of those sparks communing. So the analogy for me is just as my body is a communion of cells, there is a transcendent being which is a communion of souls. And when we enter that more awake space, where we are conscious that behind Tim, there’s this oneness of being, we are bringing God into existence.”
IM “Well I wouldn’t disagree with much of that. I certainly believe that God is a process of becoming, that God is becoming, (( “The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.” St. Teresa of Avila )) and that we have a crucial role in that. We’re not just some sort of weird epiphenomenon, but that the whole purpose of individuation in creation was that there should be something other than God – that could love God, and God could love. So we co-evolve – God and ourselves – we are part of God’s evolution. And so we play a very valuable role. I certainly would also agree that we don’t just – I don’t like, never have done, and I’ve written against the common Eastern spiritual idea that somehow there’s a problem with my ‘I,’ my being myself. Like you, I think what’s the whole bother about, if the idea is just to negate it. And it seems to me that it’s part of the unfolding and unfurling of something which is a whole, which when it’s just potential is almost a nothing, an emptiness, but that comes into being through the constant unfolding of individuation within something that is never breached, so that it’s not an atomizing, it’s not a fragmenting, it’s an enriching by the implicit becoming more explicit of a whole that is constantly growing & developing. That’s the way I would see the universe and God as either the ground of that, not the starter of it like he pushed a button and then went off and watched the 9 o’clock news, but that God is the ground of it ontologically, outside of time, is sustaining whatever this is.
So I think we would probably agree, I suspect, about most of that. It’s perhaps the degree and the nature of the minus that exists afterwards. I think that while we’re here, maybe we are more encapsulated and cut off from things than we will be afterwards. One way I think of this is of a membrane. It could be the membrane of a cell. But it could also be a membrane in physics that has undulations. And if you like, when you’re in one these outpouchings or undulations inside it, you’re almost enclosed and a lot of what you feel reflects back from the sides of this, but it is in fact open deeply to everything else and that you are therefore part of this whole that, for a while is doing Tim Freke or Iain McGilchrist, and afterwards the Tim Frekeness and Iain McGilchristness are not lost but are more connected to what is everywhere else.
William James, who I think is one of the most reliably wise writers in the last 500 years, says he sees us as like islands above the water who are all fundamentally connected when you go down below the water level. And that has its problems too as an analogy, but perhaps only by thinking in terms of analogy can we come to any kind of understanding. So I would agree with all that. I also would suggest that it comes out of a nothing, and that again negation is terribly important. Heidegger has been much mocked for a thing he said, ‘The nothing nothings itself.’ And a number of not-particularly-imaginative analytic philosophers went, ‘Oh God, what nonsense. Piffle.’ There’s something in, ‘The absence of absence is presence.’ The nothing is not an utterly empty nothing. It is a nothing, outside of which there is nothing. So it is the original state, but nothing will always snuff itself and in doing so, something comes into being, and that is the something that is growing.
TF “What I get from that is, if you have nothing and it negates itself, you get something. So the theology I guess is this God as Alpha & Omega, like where it starts and where it ends. Although I don’t think it starts or ends but just as a way of framing the idea. So you’ve got the ground of being, which has no qualities but being, which is therefore the potential of everything that becomes. So it’s not conscious for me, because it’s not anything. It’s not anything – it’s ‘un.’
But it’s being, which is going to give birth to, and it’s I suspect continually giving birth to, this becoming, which is reaching into ever more emergent possibilities. And the most emergent possibility is this oneness of being, conscious of itself. But that oneness will only become conscious of itself through individuating. And that’s the paradox. And we are that. We are in that process. We throw our consciousness back onto our being. There’s a universality to it. Because there’s a presence witnessing the imagination and the sensation, the body & the mind, body & soul. But the present itself has no qualities but being. And that’s the great insight of mysticism, that you can be aware that your deepest being is being everything, even though it’s become conscious through Tim or Iain, and it’s absolutely unique and wonderfully so, and precious for that.”
IM “That is right, and also in the European mystical tradition, Meister Eckhart in particular, perhaps Jacob Berman, are particularly good on this. While embracing the idea that ‘God’ is many paradoxical things, in fact by embracing that he’s paradoxical, they avoid the simple idea that the negation of the ‘I,’ my ‘my-ness’ would be a good thing. (( The aim of Western psychology is to nurture a healthy ‘quiet ego’ vs low self-esteem or inflated ego. ))
When I say that I think consciousness is foundational, I think one has to separate the idea of something utterly, utterly unknowable & unspeakable about which in all religions ‘God’ is, that we cannot describe, that is the origin or everything, and the next step in which there is something. Now as soon as there is something, I believe there is both matter and consciousness.”
TF “I would call that just subjectivity – it’s just a matter of words.”
IM “I wouldn’t because I think the whole subject-object divide is – I mean sometimes people think is the right hemisphere subjective & the right hemisphere objective? The answer is no. The left hemisphere thinks that there’s such a thing as being subjective & objective; the right hemisphere sees that it’s a betweenness, which is neither subjective nor objective. So what occurs when there is something is a betweenness, and that is love or this force between the primal whatever that can’t be said, and the thing that is coming into being – the relationship between them. Then consciousness is already. In their consciousness is a betweenness if it’s not that, it’s nothing. As soon as there is something in which there can be betweenness, then there is conscious betweenness.”
TF “Betweenness of the potentiality with that love being in becoming?”
IM “Well that relationship and the one between what in the kabbalah is called ‘ains zoff’ – the primary of being. This is not quite equitable with God.”
TF “The vision of ‘God’ in the more personalized sense – that being of love, is what is now coming into being. Which is why you don’t see very much of ‘God’ in through the first billion years of evolution, because ‘God’ isn’t love at that point – ‘God’ is becoming love.”
IM “Exactly. And it’s also because of this becoming, is not actually either omniscient or omnipotent. And I think this is very important. And recently, I’ve been saying it for some fairly orthodox theologians and being surprised that they’re willing to accept that.”
TF “I’ve come to exactly the same thing. How can I rescue this experience I have of a transcendent being of love, of goodness, with the reality of the world and of evolution? And I think if you put that (‘perfect God’) figure at the front, you’ve got endless problems, no matter how many theological sleight of hand you employ.”
IM “Yes, that’s right, but I want to embellish what I’ve just said, in the light of the hemispheres, because I think it makes sense – to me anyway. When I say that ‘God’ is not omniscient and not omnipotent, I don’t mean that he’s not omniscient or omnipotent, because I just think the terms are wrong. He’s not a potentially omnipotent that is somehow falling short of omnipotence, nor a potentially omniscient that is somehow falling short of omniscience. This is what it sounds like if I say that ‘God’ is not omniscient and so on.
But what I’m saying is that the left hemisphere conceives knowledge in a very special way, which is that it is a kind of factual, almost subjective propositional knowledge. ‘I know that H2O is water.’ ‘I know that Paris is the capital of France’ or whatever. That is a kind of knowledge. So that might be ‘God’ knows that the day after tomorrow, I’m going to be run over by car, but it’s hopefully not telling me. That is the kind of omniscience that is irrelevant to ‘God’ because God’s knowledge is of a kind that we don’t have a word for in English. Frustrating, because every other language that I’ve come across does. It’s the difference between in French savoir, which is to know a fact – the kind of knowledge I’ve been talking about, and connaître, which is to know somebody, to know a place. This kind of knowledge is an encounter. (‘to grok’ from the sci-fi novel, “Strangers in a Strange Land”) The other kind of knowledge is a proposition. This is an encounter. And it’s the same in German, where they distinguish between ‘wissen’ sort of as it were factual knowledge, and ‘kénnen’ to get to know. It’s always a process. I can never know you. I can only get to know you more and more. And I can get to know this place. I can to know a piece of music. So that’s different from knowing – that this is the case as it were, finished, that’s that. So God’s knowledge is ‘kénnen.’ Therefore God’s knowledge is perfect in the sense that fulfilling what is happening, he knows everything that is happening. So in that sense he’s not omniscient, but an omni knower of the other kind of knowledge – we don’t have a word for it.
This same thing applies to omnipotence, because the left hemisphere sees power as the ability to manipulate. Effectively, the left hemisphere controls for us the right hand with which we manipulate things. It’s the one that creates tools and uses them. That’s the one that uses the bits of language that help us pin things down, so its agenda is about interfering in the world in order to produce a certain outcome.
But God’s potency is not the potency of an interfering God nor an engineering God, which would be that kind of omnipotence. So it’s not that he could potentially be omnipotent, but is somehow falling short because there are certain things he can’t do. Just using that term at all about God is a mistake. It’s a category error. (the error of assigning to something a quality or action that can properly be assigned to things only of another category, for example, treating abstract concepts as though they had a physical location.) Instead, his power is to bring into being everything that is. So it is the foundational power that is his omni-potence – to bring everything that is into being.
And he doesn’t sort of set aside what it can be, because if he did, it would just be a dead extension of him. It’s got to be something other. And therefore, it’s got to take it’s own course. But I don’t think that that means that necessarily it’s all bad news, because like you, I think although there are many ups & downs on the path – as there are bound to be in any natural system that is finding its way, it’s going to fluctuate around certain means, constantly – there is an upwards movement of evolution in everything in the universe. That bit I will agree with. It doesn’t apply to whether we’re better in 2018 from what we were in 1518, but it does apply to things that are more interesting – better & richer now than they were when there were only sea slugs. And interestingly, when people want to express how awful creation is, and how vicious this God, if he existed, would have to be, they resort to often really quite primitive elements in the history of life.
Now I know that we have the particular powers to be specially cruel, but that’s the flip-side of our being able to be particularly good, and produce all kinds of things that you and I know about, that any human fly cannot. And on the whole it seems to me, that with the evolution of mammals – of course they eat one another, but they don’t do the really particularly horrific things that people finger when they get a God that creates this, just to happen like that. However, it’s got to be left untrammeled, and if that happens, human beings will be led by a path towards something. I think that’s the point. There is a goal, which is something embedded in something sacred & benign ultimately. But along the way there, you can’t separate the good from the bad. That was one of the things I felt in your book – may have got it wrong – but I felt that there was a sort of non-acknowledgement of the role of opposition in the evolution of everything, that actually the contraries are just as important as the consonances. That what happens in evolution is cooperation, which is both competition and collaboration.”
TF “My body has come into existence from a very simple beginning, and it’s enabled, one way or another, this experience of being conscious, not only of sensation but also soul of imagination and I can disappear off and this, the whole wonders of my life has come from, you know, sperm & egg, and wow, that’s incredible that complexity, and then here’s this emergent being of soul, and I have some control over it, but it’s only some. And if the universe is doing something comparable, it is giving birth to something which is transcendent, which has some control over it, but has to accommodate itself to all of these more primitive levels just like I have to accommodate myself to all these primitive levels. And so this presence of communion which I experience as love, as the felt communion, is the transcendent thing which is emerging, which is calling me to it, but which has had to accommodate, as I have to accommodate, all the more primitive levels which has allowed it to exist.”
IM “I like that very much, and I largely agree with it. I think that the only point I would stress is that Heraclitus again hit the nail on the head when he said, ‘War is the father of all things.’ Of course he didn’t advocate military strife. What he was getting at is that only out of the coming together of opposites that new life comes and that therefore it’s intrinsic to this process that there will be both the things that – in our naïve way – we want to foster, and the things that we don’t. And it’s okay for us to steer things, but the mistake is when we think that things are ever unipolar. So we decide that X is good, and the more of it we have, the better things will get. But there is nothing actually that the more of it you have, however good it is, things will get better, because you need to have a bit of the opposition. And it flips, and it’s inescapable. It’s a bit like having a bar magnet that has a North and South pole. And you decide, ‘I only like the South pole, I don’t like the North pole, so I’m going to cut if off.’ Now you’ve just got a shorter magnet, with a North pole and South pole. It’s a very, very basic point that people may go, ‘Yes, yes’ but do they actually take that into account when they think about philosophical issues because I think it does help illuminate a number of conundrums.”
TF “You obviously work as a psychiatrist, but I deal with the psyche in so far as people who are exploring awakening. And the place I’ve ended up, which is incredibly simple, is just, ‘Look, don’t try and get rid of the thing which is bothering you. Just find the opposite. Don’t try and deny this, just look for the opposite, because it will be there too, even in the worst of times. Find the one thing which is not.’”
IM “I think that’s very good. It also encompasses the idea of acceptance of fallibility, weakness – the dark side, the things that we don’t like. And that doesn’t mean we become complacent about them. We strive to further it’s opposite as much as we can. But we acknowledge that it’s there. A lot of my work as a psychiatrist actually (not with psychotic patients, who in a way have a brain illness & you can’t have a conversation with them at this sort of level until they’ve gotten out of the psychotic episode) for a lot of my patients was helping them to accept their dark side, and to stop being obsessed by the idea that things should be all of a certain kind, that their lives should have only these things in them, rather than all the downsides, or that their personality should be single & perfect, and so on. It just isn’t the case.
It’s only a lack of insight that makes one think that it could be possible to be anything else as a very flawed human being. It’s marvelous.”
TF “There’s something lovely about that. You‘ve said before that denial of individualism is disastrous. I feel that as a parent. That’s how I came to that. I just looked at my young children and thought all these things which I’ve picked up in spirituality are wrong. I’m not sitting to my young daughter going, ‘Don’t develop an individuality.’ Or ‘the mind’ – oh ‘the monkey mind – stop thinking.’ ‘I’m really worried about school – keeps making you think.’ It’s a terrible thing. ‘If only you stopped thinking, you’d be enlightened.’ Or ‘don’t be attached.’”
IM “Well of course these things have meaning, as you & I well know, within a context and up to a point.”
TF “Of course they have real meaning to me if I say it’s both and not either or. So there’s a place, which is silent, where there’s no thought and if you don’t know that, and you’re just …”
IM “And that needs to be fairly stated because the pressure of our culture is to the opposite. So what it is it’s more addressing an imbalance. It’s not about saying, ‘This is bad and this is good.’ It’s both and.”
TF “Somehow it’s much easier I think often for me and the people I deal with for instance with awakening to the powerful sense of communion, of oneness, which 40 years ago when I started doing it myself, it felt like God, how do you ever do this? That I could be now, at this ripe old age, traveling around to people in different cultures and being pretty confident that people will experience this. And the key shift, I would say, was that I now go, ‘You’re great as an individual’ – I love Iain, how marvelous and through Iain, oh, there’s God. And this oneness is there as well, not instead. Suddenly people could relax into being this ambivalent person they know they are, and there’s this transcendent thing just waiting just behind, and it’s so obvious, and there’s both.”
IM “That leads me to something that I think is terribly important and is very hard to articulate – that we find the infinite through the finite; and we find the general through the particulars. And somebody who just loves mankind is not loving anybody. You love mankind through loving individual people. Blake’s thing about ‘He who does good must do so in minute particulars.’ He goes onto say, ‘General good a plea of the scoundrel.’ But no, I think that is terribly, terribly important and it therefore involves acceptance. And so much … I mean this is a drum I bang a bit these days, but so much depends on acceptance. Really what I was saying about patience, that often what (my psychiatry patients) needed was to accept things, that were causing them grief because they didn’t accept them. And one of my mantras was, ‘I’m not alright, you’re not alright, but that’s alright.’ You know we’re constantly being pressured to make everything like some sort of unreal ideal and it’s just not necessary. But if one actually accepts things, it’s so much easier to forgive, it’s so much easier to experience gratitude. And these are the things that keep you happy and relishing the business of living.”
TF “… you’ve said ideas today – which I will go away and think about deeply, and create a new understanding I hope. But part of that will be seeing something I hadn’t seen before, and may evolve seeing things which I saw differently, and have to go, ‘I was wrong about that.'”