ev drivon

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“It is from motion that we gain our sense of both space and time. The right hemisphere seems to be essential for both, and the capacity for each is linked with the other.69 The left hemisphere’s focus, however, narrows both. If I want to focus precisely on a particular element in my environment, clearly and in sharp detail, I have not just to home in on it in space, but to immobilise or freeze it in time, too. It becomes like a snapshot (what the French call, suggestively, a cliché). The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’ The left hemisphere’s experience is fragmentary and therefore taken out of the flow of experiential life, and tends towards stasis. It is concerned with the moment of the ‘kill’. However, outside of this glare of the spotlight, things carry on living, moving and changing.”
― 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

“What makes so much contemporary debate pointless is that neither side realizes that secularity is a religious phenomenon,
which grows directly out of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it develops in Protestantism. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to insist that not only the modern but also the postmodern world effectively began with the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century.”
― Mark C. Taylor, After God