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A WELL-ALIGNED MIND: How to Be Alive

Nov 18, 2021

A cover image is shown of The Master and his Emissary, alongside a photo of author Iain McGilchrist.

Guest Iain McGilchrist is a renowned psychiatrist, researcher, and author. His 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary gained worldwide fame for showing how differences between brain hemispheres affect our perceptions – and guide our lives. Each hemisphere has a radically different ‘take’ on the world: the left sees what is in the theater spotlight, whereas the right hemisphere understands the whole play.

Both are part of the theater of our lives, but the narrowly focused left hemisphere has increasingly taken over in the modern world. The right hemisphere offers a more spacious perspective: connectedness, complexity, and creativity – and has a direct and demonstrable effect on physical and mental well-being. Jung says, “One must never look to the things that ought to change. The main question is how we change ourselves.” McGilchrist shows us how: paying attention to what we are paying attention to reintroduces us to who we are – and aliveness. 

REFERENCES:

A 10,000 essay and summary of McGilchrist’s ideas is available free on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008JE7I2M/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_8QPW3VT6QMZQ08C7VK9T 

Iain McGilchrist: The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Kindle Edition only. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KY5B3QL/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_RP260867DNVHG84JYANK 

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300245920/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_7JP0MQCZ71W0PJ5HGVM4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 

RESOURCES:

Learn to Analyze your own Dreams:  https://thisjungianlife.com/enroll/

4 Comments

  1. marie

    Awesome talk!

    Reply
  2. Todd

    McGilchrist’s dreams are interesting. I’ve had similar dreams these past months of being in an ancient city and seeing the flood coming down the alleys. Mountains on all sides streaming with waterfalls. The other day my boss told me her dream of being in a city while the floodwaters were rising and she felt overwhelmed. These are dreams of overwhelm. I asked my analyst and he says that this is also something he’s hearing from a number of his analysands as well.

    Also, have noticed dreams about the Black Madonna, Kali and Isis are things i’m experiencing and hearing from people. Greatmother dreams… Perhaps portending this shift in consciousness that McGilchrist points towards.

    Reply
  3. Todd

    this view of human consciousness and the brain also flows into the critique of post modernism…. which was so reductive. Of course, the main contribution of postmodernism was to allow us to understand that meaning is not particularly linked to the object but is superimposed upon it. So meanings change. Great insight. However, many postmodernists then went on to declare that because of this mutability and non-localization of meaning, meaning is therefore an illusion and there is nothing that truly exists but the thing itself. This put us in a purely mechanistic world. As Ken Wilbur and others points out we have to transcend this into a retrieval of a holism . This gestalt understanding that you talk about here…

    Reply
  4. Michael melim

    Reading master and his emissary now, profound study on the evolution of mind. To bad our specie won’t last long enough to benefit from it.

    Reply

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