Hi there,
Here's something worth chewing on: you're not perceiving reality right now. You're constructing it - and the tools you're using to build it are shaping what's possible for you to see.
Most of us have heard the left brain / right brain story. Logical left, creative right. Except that's not quite it… both hemispheres are involved in almost everything we do - the difference isn't what they process, but how they engage with the world.
The left narrows, fixes, and grasps; it's brilliant at isolating things, naming them, making them useful. The right holds the broader picture: context, relationship, ambiguity, the living quality of experience. They were designed to work together - but psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist's argument (check out his excellent book The Master and His Emissary) is that modern western culture has become dangerously dominated by the left hemisphere's mode of seeing. We've built a world of measurement, abstraction, and control, and in doing so may have filtered out much of what makes life feel real.
The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup pushes even deeper, asking what reality actually is before we attend to it at all. His answer - reached not through mysticism but through rigorous philosophy and a career in hard science - is that matter doesn't produce consciousness.
Consciousness is all there ultimately is (they both agree on this), with each of us a dissociated aspect of something universal, like a whirlpool convinced it is separate from the river. These ideas will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has sat with a psychedelic experience and felt the ordinary architecture of perception come apart.
Next Tuesday, McGilchrist and Kastrup are sitting down with us online to compare notes - on neuroscience, metaphysics, the nature of time, and what it means to know anything at all…
🌀 Iain McGilchrist & Bernardo Kastrup: With Reality in Mind (7 April, online) with live Q&A. Tickets from £10 - recording included!
A warning to the curious: this isn't an introductory chat, so we'd encourage you to do some digging ahead of time! There are excellent starting points linked on the event page. Come with questions ready 🤓
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