An audio version of this talk is at my podcast, Talks and Thoughts, available via podcast feeds.
So you’ve bought into the great insights of Iain McGilchrist, as explored in The Master and His Emissary, and also, The Matter with Things.
You understand that the key ability is “presencing the world”
– comprehending, not merely calculating
– experiencing, not merely modelling
– attuning, not merely measuring
– understanding, not merely manipulating
– living and dying, not merely being on or off.
But what now to do? How not to live?
What’s needed is a conversion of awareness. So here I suggest 10 ways in which our experience might be transformed, not by fixing perception, but by paying attention to how we perceive and experience, and cultivating more expansive modes of awareness.
1. be interested in darkness
2. understand the imagination as concealing and revealing
3. be embodied to be changed by sensing more
4. love the minute particulars to know the universal
5. monitor your experience of time
6. look for the third awaiting to be seen or born
7. be open to other intelligences, natural and supernatural
8. reconsider the nature of suffering
9. love the precipitousness of infinity, eternity
10. know life is a comedy that survives, embraces tragedies.
Drawing on great adepts such as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and particularly on Dante and William Blake.
0:00 intro
02:17 be interested in darkness
06:45 understand the imagination as concealing and revealing
13:01 be embodied to be changed by sensing more
17:05 love the minute particulars to know the universal
19:17 monitor your experience of time
22:30 look for the third awaiting to be seen or born
25:45 be open to other intelligences, natural and supernatural
32:37 reconsider the nature of suffering
37:00 love the precipitousness of infinity, eternity
43:46 know life is a comedy that survives, embraces tragedies
48:45 summary in conclusion