ev drivon

“The more I thought about this developmental scheme, the more something seemed profoundly wrong. I read and reread what I had written, trying to figure out what was so insistently bothering me. In an unflattering moment, it seemed to me that I had stated the case so carefully that I couldn't crack my own argument; and yet something was definitely wrong."32”
― Frank Visser, Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion

“This finding is remarkable in a number of ways that have not always been appreciated. To begin with, it illustrates that attention is involved primarily not with seeing in itself, but – as far as the left hemisphere is concerned – with the bringing into being of the world, seen or unseen. We can see without attending and we can attend in the absence of sight.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree which is supposed to grow to a proud height could do without bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, whether any kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, greed, and violence do not belong to the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible?”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World