B (10:44)
Well, the first thing I have to say is, forget anything you've heard up till now, I think, because a lot of stuff that was branded as pop psychology was put about, and indeed it was pop psychology in the sense that it was largely wrong. So it became an area that was difficult to address, but nonetheless, it seemed to me important. And I won't go into why I came to address it, but there are certain things about this brain structure that make you say, what's going on here? Why is the brain divided at all? Why is it asymmetrical? Why is the band of fibers that joins the two hemispheres only 2% of fibers in the brain cross on that bridge, the corpus callosum? Why is it largely inhibitory in its function? So these questions suggest there's something different about these two hemispheres. And although we gave up having done a bad job, it still seemed to be important to ask the question. And what I discovered is a primary focus of this is attention. Attention sounds just like another cognitive function, as we say. But attention is nothing less than the way we dispose our consciousness towards whatever it is that exists. And the way in which we do so alters what we find there. And what we find there alters the attention we will pay in future. And so it's easy to get locked into by a hasty conclusion into a certain way of looking at the world. And the reason we have two hemispheres is, I believe, and nobody has suggested this is not a good idea, that we need to survive by paying two kinds of attention to the world at roughly the same time. One of them is detailed, particularistic, highly focused on some little thing that we know we want, and we know what it is, and we want to get it. Now, that's like food, or pick up a twig to build a nest or whatever it is. Functional, utilitarian, how to manipulate the world for our benefit. And of course, it goes without saying we need that. So nothing wrong with it. But the trouble is that if that's the only attention you pay, then you don't see the predator, you don't see your mate, you don't see your offering. All of these need to be in your mind at the same time while you're having your lunch. Otherwise you become somebody else's. So we have these two modes of attention, and they produce two phenomenological worlds. In one, that of the left hemisphere, there are just particles. They're just little bits Atomistic fragments that don't have any meaning unless we put them together. And they're not connected to one another, they don't change, they're frozen. And that moment of the kill, they're frozen. They are entirely explicit. They are what it, you know, wysiwyg, what you see is what you get. They are simple, they are in this sense inanimate. And literally the left hemisphere tends to see things that normally we would see as animate, as inanimate. And it is a world that is just a representation, an abstraction, a conceptualized version of the world, like a two dimensional print, or more appropriately, a map in relation to the world that is mapped. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere sees something completely different. It sees that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Nothing is certain and fixed, but always flowing and changing. That the implicit is more important than the explicit. All the things that really matter to us are degraded when they're made explicit. Love, sex, friendship, religious belief, a poem, a piece of music, whatever. It is a myth, a ritual. It comes crashing down to a nothing when you make it explicit. Its whole being can only be conveyed implicitly. And this world is animate and has meaning. It's not the meaning that we make by putting the things together like pieces of Lego. It's a world that already comes with meaning. And it is the real vivid presence of the world, not just an anemic representation such as the left hemisphere has. Now, there's a lot more to say, of course, but a couple of thousand pages. But I mean, the real point for now is that these two kinds of world world are superficially in competition with one another. And when we discuss what the world is like, it is much easier to present a mechanistic picture of something that is just made up of these pieces and so on. It's money for old rope to put that point of view. It's rather difficult to express a view that actually this misses just about everything that is important, that everything is relational. In fact, I hold that relations are prior to relatable, which I can defend if you want. But my view is that relations are what the world is made out of, not things. And the world is in constant process. So these are different versions. There's a static fixed mechanism which we can exploit for our utilitarian pleasure and benefit. And the other world is one which has beauty in it, has true goodness, not just the ticking of boxes as a way of determining what's good and appreciates a kind of truth, which is not just in black and white. Is it this or Is it that fact, but a truth which is a relational truth. In other words, that we are true to experience, we are true to the cosmos as large as the whole in which we take part. So these differences are enormous. And in our society, partly because we focus very much on an empire of one kind or another, either a territorial one, a military one, or a commercial empire, because we want to control very large areas of the world, we tend to do it in a way which brought the downfall of the Greek civilization and the Roman civilization. All the subtlety they had when their civilizations thrived goes out of the window. And what you have instead is something that is rigid, hierarchical, loses all the nuances, the sense of harmony. And just as we now say, roll something out so that it can be. This is how we do things. Everywhere this mentality is perpetuated by big business. Bureaucracy has now got it into universities and hospitals. And everywhere we see this taking over of the individual by the general. The initiative that comes from being creative is down by rule following. And mediocrity results everywhere. And people lose the sense of why they're doing what they're doing. They lose a sense of the pride one has in doing a good job and acquiring skill. Instead, one's told that all of this means nothing, and the only thing that matters is just acquiring as much as you can for yourself. And that is an emotionally, spiritually bankrupt vision of the world, and as I say, is a product of a very narrow way of thinking that leaves just about everything that's important out of the picture.
