Retrospective 2024-41

This is a retrospective of week 41, 2024 (2024-10-07–2024-10-13).

I’ve taken issue with McGilchrist lately (see the related posts). Some would argue that my interpretations are too literalistic in relation to what McGilchrist really is trying to say. My observation, though, is that McGilchrist often seems to fall back on literalistic interpretations himself—questioning the exact the definitions of words—when someone tries to pin him down. His use of language is, by the way, brilliant! He always finds an escape route, which turns this to a never ending game. So, I’ll use my two feet and go do something else next week.

Below are some other things that caught my attention during the week:

We see the world through a structure of values, and we attend to those things that we value.
—Jordan Peterson https://youtu.be/HWBs_p194T4?t=261

The left hemisphere is used to tracking something and getting it. So it imagines truth is at the end of a path that has a sequence of steps, and if you take these in the right order you will end up at truth.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/HWBs_p194T4?t=2223

Allowing things to occur to you versus attending to those are very different things.
—Liam Kavanagh https://youtu.be/zKdx8MrWkOY?t=428

The point is to make use of the teaching, but then to know when to release it, not to get stuck with it.
—Br. Pháp Linh https://youtu.be/dKCJmGzLBMo?feature=shared&t=1305

The ultimate truth has no right to declare itself to be the only truth, or a higher truth, than the relative truth, or conventional [truth], and then, really, the two are also woven together and can’t be separated.
—Br. Pháp Linh https://youtu.be/dKCJmGzLBMo?feature=shared&t=1638

The way in which we speak of knowledge in Buddhism as an obstacle to insight, and that, actually, of course, there’s part of us that wants to accumulate more and more intellectual knowledge, and we think that will somehow shore us up, but learned that to be in contact with life, and with the present moment, and with the constant sort of arising of new truths, we have to be able to release that which we hold to be true.
—Br. Pháp Linh https://youtu.be/dKCJmGzLBMo?feature=shared&t=2238

I think the monastic materialistic paradigm…is really destroying this planet. … People who have these direct spiritual experiences, they don’t experience division in the world. What happens with the great organized religions is that they unite people who are willing to see it the same way, and worship the same way, but at the same time divide the world. … This is very different with the spirituality which is really taking everything in. And it changes changes consciousness in a way that people…realize we have to treat nature in a different way, because we are so vitally embedded in and entangled in nature, that we will not use nature as commodity, something that should serve us at the expense of destroying our environment.
—Stanislav Grof https://youtu.be/3mdYUmvTeig?t=8881

The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making.
—Rupert Read https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/26/facts-about-our-ecological-crisis-are-incontrovertible-we-must-take-action

This is an emergency, an unprecedented emergency. It dwarfs any other emergency we’ve known… And we will be judged by our children by how we respond in this emergency.
—Rupert Read https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/26/we-have-a-duty-to-act-hundreds-ready-to-go-to-jail-over-climate-crisis

In our complex, interdependent global ecosystem, life is dying, with species extinction accelerating. The climate crisis is worsening much faster than previously predicted. Every single day two hundred species are becoming extinct. This desperate situation can’t continue.
—Rupert Read & Samuel Alexander, Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside

Update 2024-10-17: Text changed. First paragraph shortened.

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