Layers & Levels Punto 4 Metacrisis

A call to rediscovering Humanity from Ian McGilchrist, the Sage of the Isle of Skye

This little point (Punto) is simply a shout-out to listen to this condensed, one-hour lecture by Iain McGilchrist entitled ‘A Revolution in Thought’ addressing what some are now calling ‘the metacrisis’, a nice way of saying that everything in the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket on all fronts all at once (!).

For reasons which Iain well describes, we have devalued Goodness, Beauty and Truth, appreciation and experience of which can be called ‘the sacred’, and instead dedicated ourselves to a limited, literal, left brain dominated approach which prides itself on reducing the complex terrain that is ‘reality’ into a clear, compact map and then goes on to believe that the map is real and what it is mapping, the actual terrain, is largely fictive. This is why, for example, most modern scientists pedantically insist that subjective phenomena such as thoughts, feelings, insights, emotional connections, vows, honour, service, loyalty, dedication, sacrifice, the sacred and so much more, not to mention a sense of humour, are all non-existent irrelevancies because they are not ‘actually real’ or ‘really there’ because only the physical is real. Etc.

‘Nuff said. This lecture is well worth listening to because he boils down decades of philosophical and medical research published in two books almost three thousand pages in length into a well-honed one hour presentation.

And if you enjoy the erudite banter of Oxford Don types (Iain used to teach literature at Oxford before going into clinical neurology to better understand human nature), this dialogue between himself and Rupert Sheldrake (a Cambridge PhD) entitled ‘Intersection of Consciousness and Matter’, is also well worth a listen.