Christina Florkowski
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This video is available out of order as it is the Q&A session following the final session of the conference on the Spirituality & the Sacred with presentations by Richard Tarnas, John Vervaeke, and Andrew M. Davis, though the presentations by Tarnas and Vervaeke do not appear to be available – yet.
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<div>Another recording recently posted from the event.
Andrew M. Davis: Iain McGilchrist, Axiological Asymmetry, and the Mystery of Existence | </div>
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It seems some of the recordings from the CIIS event are beginning to informally trickle out.
Matt Segal: In Defense of Truth as Participation
https://youtu.be/-qy5k9vTg-w?si=Gc67jVXI7_EVHVvVAt the end of Matt’s presentation, the video breaks to the Q&A (omitting presentations by Zak Stein and Carolyn Cooke) editing to include only the questions addressed by Matt Segal. (Just in case you are wondering about the two others sitting on the panel in this video.)
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@Andy, good questions! How would you see this reading group working? Do you have a proposal for the cadence and how participants would be invited to engage as we went along?
My sense for this community forum is that it still is finding its way. The tool itself has some issues, but I can’t imagine that McGilchrist and his team has time to invest in that. This feels like an experiment – and so I am here in that spirit.
A question that appears for me right now in this thread: am I a consumer in this forum or a member of a community?
thanks for the question,
~Christina
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It really isn’t a surprise that McGilchrist’s theory is a challenge for some.
I recently noticed that someone has created a Wiki page for ‘The Matter With Things’. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things. It features Ellis’s criticisms.
My sense is that while it honors the appearance of neutrality, it leaves an overall dismissive tone.
The same person who created that page also created a page for ‘The Master and His Emissary’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
It will be interesting to watch to see if anyone chooses to elaborate on these wiki articles.
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Here is David Hockney’s response to a drawing by Rembrandt. “The Single Greatest Drawing Ever Made,” he declared flatly. “I defy you to show me a better one.”
I’d like to hear how others read this. For me, it dances between right and left attention. The details of the marks of the reed pen and the appreciation of the relationships and care evoked by those marks.
“Look at the speed, the way he wields that reed pen, drawing very fast, with gestures that are masterly, virtuoso, calling attention not to themselves but rather to the very tender subject at hand, a family teaching its youngest member to walk. Look, for instance at those whisking marks on the head and shoulders of the girl in the center, the older sister, probably made with the other side of the pen, which let you know that she is craning, turning anxiously to look at the baby’s face to make sure he’s okay. Or how the mother, on the other side, holds him up in a slightly different, more experienced manner. the astonishing double profile of her face, to either side of the mark. the evident roughness of the material of her dress: how this is decidedly not satin. The face of the baby: how even though you can’t see it, you can tell he is beaming. this mountain of figures, and then, to balance it all, the passing milkmaid, how you can feel the weight of the bucket she carries in the extension of her opposite arm. Look at the speed, the sheer mastery.”
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Back to the topic. A number of years ago, Lawrence Weschler wrote a book based on his conversations with the artist Robert Irwin titled, “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” In the chapter ‘Art and Science,’ Irwin is invited to work with Ed Wortz, who at the time was head of the lab working on environmental control systems for NASA’s manned space flights at the Garret Aerospace Corporation. For the sake of brevity, I must pass over the circumstances that brought them and the artist James Turrell together to study perception in an anechoic chamber at UCLA, but that is what Irwin is speaking about in this excerpt.
“After I’d sat in there for six hours, for instance, and then got up and walked back home down the same street I’d come in on, the trees were still trees and the street was still a street, and the houses were still house, but the world did not look the same; it was very, very noticeably altered.”
(snip)
“We’d speculated that the difference came from one’s having been isolated in total deprivation of audio or visual input. For one thing, what happened is that these two senses changed their thresholds. In other words, there is a certain way you look and see and listen every day, but when you are suddenly cut off from the world of sight and sound for six or eight hours and then return to it, there occurs a change in the acuity of the mechanism. In addition, there may be a shift in sense dependence. That is, when you’re in a space having no visual or audio input, which are the two primary senses, you tend to begin to take in more information through the other senses. You start spending more time making a tactile read, building your world in that black, soundless space with information from those other senses, so that when you come out, that shift simply persists for a while, it continues to be honored, and you take in different degrees of information. And we all know that the complexity out there is…we might as well say infinite…”
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“For a few hours after you came out,” Irwin continues, “you really did become more energy conscious, not just that leaves move, but that everything has an aura, that nothing is wholly static, that color itself emanates a kind of energy. You noted each individual leaf, each individual tree. You picked up things which you normally blocked out. I think what happens is that in our ordinary lives, we move through the world with a strong expectation-fit ratio which we use as much to block out information as to gather it in – and for good reason, most of the time; we block out information that is not critical to our activity. Otherwise we might well be immobilized. But after a while, you know, you do that repeatedly day after day after day, and the world begins to take on a fairly uniform look. So that what the anechoic chamber was helping us to see was the extreme complexity and richness of our sense mechanism and how little of it we use most of the time. We edit from it severely, in time to see only what we expect to see. “
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This speaks to the experience of the actor. It is from Peter Brook’s “Threads of Time.”
One morning, I came to Paul [Scofield] with what seemed to me an illuminating discovery. “Lear is someone who wants to let go. But whatever he sacrifices, there is always something left to which he is attached. He gives up his kingdom, but still his authority remains. He must yield his authority, but there is still his trust in his daughters. This too must go, as must the protection of a roof over his head, but this is still not enough, as he has preserved his sanity. When his reason is sacrificed, there is still his profound attachment to his beloved Cordelia. And in the pitiless process of stripping away, inevitably she too must be lost. This is the pattern and the tragic action of the play.“ Paul did not react with enthusiasm. He gave a cautious “Mmmm…” Then he said thoughtfully, “That may be true. But I mustn’t think of it, as it can’t help me as an actor. I can’t play negative actions. I can’t show *not* having. I have to find a different way to mobilize my energies, so as to be fully active, moment after moment, even in loss, even in defeat.” At that moment I saw unforgettably the trap of yielding to the intellectual excitement of “having ideas.” One word out of place in the director’s explanations, and without noticing it he can block or hamper the actor’s own creative process. The same is true for the director’s relation to himself. Ideas must appear, they must be expressed, but he too must learn to separate the useful from the useless, the substance from the theory.
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Yes, thank you @manuela @bobeng @forest @shannon @pbarus.
As I mentioned, McGilchrist’s statement (here is what was said at the Conference on Iain’s work at CIIS) “if we could just get a small percentage, perhaps only 3% or 5% of the population, really to see what I’m getting at about the difference between this fragmented, pointless cosmos of random movements of pieces that have no meaning, no direction, and no beauty, no goodness, no truth. If we could get away from that in only a small fraction of the population, I think a lot of things would change.”
Hearing that, I find myself facing the question: what would it mean to “really get” what Iain is getting at? It is wonderful to encounter these ideas and have a sense that inner thoughts and feelings are affirmed.
At the same time, I am certain that doesn’t go far enough to meet the need of this threshold McGilchrist speaks of. I say that because I can (sometimes) see where I’ve bought into the madness. (Ideological arrogance is one that I sometimes recognize.)
If there is already a topic here where this is being discussed, please provide a pointer.
#3%
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Thank you and @Forest (and @boben) for getting this going. Really wonderful to see real human beings (even if only virtually.)
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@manuela
I am attempting to join the meeting. Zoom says it is waiting for the host to start the meeting. Was anyone designated to be the host? -
Thank you for the suggestion, Bob. While there might be specific meeting here or there that I could not attend, this general plan would work for me.
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Hi Cooper,
If I didn’t already have a queue of my own questions I might. Though, if you only mean to alert Iain (rather than get a response) a message to the admin of this place should do it. There is a ‘contact us’ button on the left bar. There are so many questions submitted to the members Q&A that anything we can address elsewhere, we should.~C
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No apology needed @thaumasmus . The tree has many branches. My interest happens to be the occasions that open experience.