Beauty, Value & Purpose | Iain McGilchrist with Maitreyabandhu
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- Опубліковано 28 сер 2022
- Dr Iain McGilchrist in conversation with Jnanavaca about 'Beauty, Value & Purpose' for the Nature of Mind project. Find out more at natureofmind.net.
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.
He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). - Розваги
Thank goodness for this conversation 💜🌻🐦 deepest respect 🌟
A great man and thinker for the moment we are in.
25 minutes in and this is the best lecture he’s given. Pirsig would love his conclusion that the universe is value. Pirsig would say Quality. Watts would say play, but how do we enjoy anything without values? It’s all the same. Be honest. Strive for the good. But then let yourself do it. Play.
McGilchrist does feel like a worthy successor to writer like Pirsig to me.
@@mattspintosmith5285 My idea of heaven includes leather chairs round a fire in which people like McGilchrist and Alan Watts and Robert Pirsig and Jordan Peterson are having conversations about the meaning of it all.
I could never understand why Lila: An Inquiry into Morals didn’t become recognized and appreciated more. Maybe it was just too ahead of its time. I wonder if Iain was directly influenced by it?
@@nigelpickering5433 I still think about the whole exploration into accents he did in Lila. I read it aboard ship 20 years ago and I still think about it. Need to reread them both now.
“[Meditation’s] purpose lies within itself.” We can say it simpler: when we give our conscious attention to sensations and not thoughts … in other words, to our fundamental experience of the world, not the words we put to it… our very experience becomes meaningful, pleasurable, desirable. It becomes the life we wanted: a life we relish. That’s all we want: to feel relish. Thus ‘meditation’ doesn’t do anything other than make you fall in love with this moment, and the next one too, till you forget. Then when you remember again you’ll see that forgetting was always part of it, anyway, and that you’ll forget again.
And you haven’t become a puddle on your sofa, either - because you are ever-less held back by your inhibitions, not twisted by desire but gently guided to go do that which brings you joy, and it feels obvious to go be your best self.
Surrender to the world. Feel every sensation you can, in every moment. Don’t clinch. Then watch how you treat people in those moments. You’ll surprise yourself how generous and thoughtful and playful you can be, and how much others appreciate it. This is the secret of life. And you’ll forget it. Only to remember it again.
You state "attention to sensations and not thoughts".
One can value sensations, but understanding thoughts gives one a base level of meanings to the experiences.
Mysteries of Life are not solved by just encountering sensations. Surely both the cosmos and the spiritual domain are organized by meanings. Therefore, the values of Life are more than a sum of sensations.
Brilliant
Brilliant
@@steveflorida8699 it's like you read "attention to sensations and not thoughts" and stopped there to make your argument. Read my entire comment, please - I'm not suggesting sensations are 'the meaning' - not at all. Rather, putting your attention on sensation is a *trick* you can play on yourself to rebalance your brain into a flow state. We think we need to accomplish certain things to 'have a life we relish.' The trick of it all is to do it backwards: to put your mind into 'relishing mode' and then see how you act and what you do. You'll surprise yourself how much you'll accomplish, the way you'll treat people, and the meaningful things you'll choose to do.
I too, had an underlining system while reading those books. I used many different colored pencils though!
David Bowie said: ""it's got nothing to do with you/if you can grasp it”"
My interpretation of fantasia is finally shared by someone 🎉 always delightful Dr McGilchrist. Funny is the two different attentional approach was how I would entrain my mind to interpret fantasia as a young child.
Wonderful talk!
Wish the volume wasn't excruciatingly low on this video. 😞
I am so grateful for Dr. McGilchrist's books and all these discussions.
Writing an essay means an attempt trying to make clear his or her opinion on a certain subject. One wants to leave in mind of one idea and one point. How does the author make one laugh? How about a ferocious mouse or about a fish who hates water or a barn swallow who has built a nest in a clothespin basket on a clothesline. (I still use a washboard instead of a washer and dryer to wash clothes.The new ones don't last anyway.) I love birds.
So I take my brain out to the clothesline for a spin and dry for a renewal of a spring cleaning to watch the baby birds and write.
Interdependence of thought and action and constantly broadening of interests of sounds of music playing in nature. Mere academic busywork has carefully been avoided. Attention! Imagination in seeing in the present moment.
🙏❤️
I think now I understand what Dr. McG means by an engineering God. I think I agree with him. His idea to me is not anti deist. I think it more what may be more related to what one thinks a deity is. But, I have a lot of trouble keeping up with him after reading his books and listening to his lectures. This may be related to my lack of focus and or intellect. Clearly Dr. Ian has intellect and focus in spades. His breadth of knowledge, insight and discipline of mind is vastly beyond formidable. Hopefully it is capable of transforming our world. At least in a small way viz 8 billion people on the planet.
I too have some difficulty in understanding what he means when he says he doesn't believe in an engineering God. Have you read The Matter with Things? I have only just read The Master and his Emissary and indeed he writes about this point, but doesn't quite elaborate on it.
Beautiful.
❤🙏
Vertically, the soul and spirit, past and future fold into the self, with this central self and it's divine spark of life providing the conduit between all duals. Horizontally, the left and right brain is pulled to equilibrium of subjectivity and objectivity through the self. Self esteem, by way of clear purpose and value is the tipping point for SELF-perpetuating progress towards fullness, enlightenment and co-created abundance.
The only goal is to be respectful and give back what you got. So you promote life farther in gratitude for ancestors who barely survived (there is only one woman left at one point of human history).
Volume problem
Still can’t get this book in printed form in Canada. I badgered Amazon as to why but got no response. Anyone have the same issue in their location or have any insight?
Books a Miilion
Very interesting conversation if a bit mincing as is the style. I have to criticize the chairs which are absolutely impossible in every way. Too high, arms too low, too slippery, set at angles so they can't comfortably see each other. And, just me, but I prefer watching people talk who are sitting at tables -- it's much more comfortable for the speaker and I don't need a wide two shot of two bodies squirming and slipping and trying to brace themselves in bad chairs. Also why so stingy with the volume? Aside from those little picks this is certainly well above most of what's on youtube and I appreciate it very much.
He should look into types of human thinking in Gregorc test. It literally explains two dimensions of thinking. Focused on detail, divided pieces and abstract, systemic focused on bigger picture, and into second continuum sequential thing after thing in chain and chaotic, picking things without order more like fractal, relative observation.
Nobody use one pattern because we have a varying skill in each of four combinations of ways brain consumes reality. we aren't one, knowing what are our shortcomings let's us focus on what we usually miss with using only our habitual best mode of thinking if few we are all able to use.
Specificity, habituality, filteric, automatisation, staying in comfort & escaping change is what destroys us as humans in time. That's why Jesus said to us to stay like children. That's when you engage with world in its truest but also hard to grasp totality of it. Later we only get more and more narrow minded.
40:00 Beauty is not a Luxury!!!
It is fascinating the contrast in how these two conversants sit. Perhaps brain hemispheric in nature?