“THE MATTER WITH THINGS: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World,” is a two-volume book authored by Iain McGilchrist. Combining science, philosophy, and spirituality; his writing makes sense of consciousness and complex reality. The brain’s left hemisphere reduces the world into things; separate, isolated, and machine-like to dominate the right hemisphere’s holistic view.
OUR BRAINS, divided into two hemispheres, each attending to everything we do, but in different ways. We need science and reason of the left hemisphere’s fragmented and mechanistic worldview to be servant. The right hemisphere’s organic, big picture version of interconnected reality is dependent on intuitive understanding and imagination for creative solutions to human problems.
OUR DELUSIONS and blind faith overvalue science, technology, engineering, and math as answer-all to human problems. Understanding the parts to make sense of the whole is a mistaken belief. The whole defines the parts within interactive reality. Modern society is broken, fractured, fixed, and focused on narrow, short-term monetary gain.
UNMAKING of the WORLD results a mechanistic mindset which dominates by devitalizes reality as something to be shut off, taken apart, and put back together again and restarted. That cannot be the case with living systems. A linear, cause and effect approach treats people, life and nature as useful commodities or things. Controlling and manipulating parts, shows disdain for complexity of relationships in context with a dynamic whole.
Our society has allowed the servant to become the master, a devouring machine that extracts resources, values only useful things and then discards waste without regard to the externalized mess it makes in human deprivation and planetary degradation. Albert Einstein declared, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
Harold Honkola
Stillwater