Metaphors can make you blind – Iain’s Substack
Metaphors can make you blind – Iain’s Substack Friends, I am new to Substack, so thank you for being patient while I work out how to do what I would like to do! And what is that? Just to add pieces from time to time. No schedule, and therefore no payment...
Bread cast on the waters – Iain’s Substack
Bread cast on the waters – Iain’s Substack Bread cast on the waters by Iain McGilchristRead on Substack Boring stuff first: since a number of people have been kind enough to make a gift pledge, I have activated payments (I think!), so that others can, should the...
Resist the Machine Apocalypse by Iain McGilchrist – 2024
No two ways about it: We are making ourselves wretched. We are more affluent than ever, but riches—and power, the only point in having riches—do not make people happy. Ask a psychiatrist. Or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin, who has, alas, the power of life and death over millions of people and is the owner of the most expensive toilet-paper dispenser in the world. No, affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than ever. Why is this? I suggest it is because we no longer have the foggiest idea what human life is about. Indeed, there is a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all, but exist in a simulacrum of our own making.
Iain McGilchrist vs Scott Barry Kaufman, The Right Brain is Essential to Creativity: IAINews
In response to Scott Kauffman’s article yesterday arguing the right-left brain hemisphere split isn’t true, the main proponent of the view, Iain McGilchrist responds
Recovering the Sacred, Recovering the Soul: Session 1 of the ‘Recovering the Sacred’ online series – Pari Perspective
According to Laozi:
He who knows does not tell and he who tells does not know.
The power of unknowing and not doing is celebrated in Chinese philosophy. Also in the Western tradition. For example, Meister Eckhart in one of his sermons speaks of the attainment by the soul of darkness and unknowing and he imagines a bystander asking him:
‘But what is this darkness and unknowing and what is its name?’ To this he replies, ‘I can only call it a loving and open receptiveness which however in no way lacks being. It is a receptive potential by means of which all is accomplished.’
This suggests the fertility of union between a creative principle and a receptive, womb-like space in which something is to grow: a process. It’s of this encounter, this process, that I wish to speak today.