In Conversation with Daniel Christian Wahl – Extra: Plato, Disconnection and the Left-Hemisphere Bias

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A dewdrop catches the sun as you walk past. To an indigenous knowing it is meaningful, it communicates, it is no coincidence; to the modern eye it is light broken into a visual stimulus and nothing more. Daniel reached for Owen Barfield to hold those two together, an original participation we have lost against a final participation we might still earn, and it gave me the opening I had been waiting for.

Through Peter Kingsley I had come to suspect that the fracture we lay at the door of the Enlightenment runs much further back, to Plato, who took the mystical, interconnected life of the older world, moved it into the intellect, rewrote the record and buried his sources so well that we believed him and never saw the damage. Whitehead called all of philosophy a footnote to Plato. I offered that footnote as the wound, and said I had been trying to see past Plato to what the mission of the West might actually be, and whether that first injury is the very thing we are being asked to redeem.

Daniel would not pin it on one man. He answered with language: literate people learn words, illiterate people learn worlds. He spoke of Francisco Varela and the world brought forth through us, of the first distinction that opens a perspective and with it a blind spot we cannot escape, only honour. A noun-bound tongue makes us objects standing apart from the world; a verb-bound one lets us be a node of consciousness through which the world comes to know itself.

Then he turned a challenge on me. Why reach for yet another dualism, left brain and right brain, when the brain is plastic and either half can learn to do the other’s work? I was glad to be pedantic, because this is the exact place where McGilchrist is wrecked by the very hemisphere he describes. Left and right are not a binary. They name an asymmetry in how one unified reality is attended to, two narratives in dialogue, and a culture that has leaned so hard on one of them it has nearly forgotten the other. The danger folded into Daniel’s lovely phrase, becoming indigenous, is that the left-brained ear hears it as another people’s story we might simply put on, turn East, and be whole. That is not what he means. The agency to recognise the unity of things sits in each person standing in their own field, never in a codified programme.

Daniel agreed, and raised the stakes. He had summoned the crude cartoon of left and right on purpose, weary of trainings built on a shallow reading, and reached instead for Blake praying to be kept from single vision and Newton’s sleep, and for Henri Bortoft’s two modes of consciousness, both true and yet impossible to hold in the same instant, like the drawn cube that flips between two readings you can never see at once. I said the talk was more than a privilege. It is in the stories we tell unwittingly that a different world becomes thinkable, and unless the seed is sown there will be no harvest. I added, half in paradox, that I had perhaps done enough talking in my life already.

The extra conversation in the series. Back to Part 1: A New Way of Seeing and Part 2: Hope or Despair.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability from the recording. Any passage that could not be made out is marked [unclear].

These new ways of seeing we are trying to speak about are, at the very same time, ancient ways of being that are being rediscovered. We are only speaking about something in new language, from the perspective of a culture that has lived separation to the point of believing it, and has created technologies that, as Arthur C. Clarke I think said, are indistinguishable from magic. And so, on that journey personally, I think, and now that I am a father of a five-year-old I am being reminded, that the knowing is there from the start, but it is undifferentiated. It is simply participatory, and that is a very different way of being in the world than once we even start with the powerful technology of being taught words, and with that the categories of the world.

I think it applied early on, helped a little bit [unclear] with my culture, coming from Germany. In the decades that I grew up, education about German history was pretty much a re-education of other people, to the point that it was really sticking young faces into a past that wasn’t really theirs, but, of course, into a kind of intergenerational trauma and responsibility. And so I think that made me reflect quite early on. There was also the luck that a sports teacher realised that I wasn’t that skilled in all the competitive, ball-based games, and invited me into yoga when I was eleven, as an alternative, at the school that I was going to. Then, very early on, that introduced me to the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, and just some writing that made me question perspective.

Along with living in Munich, that meant being in the middle of the Cold War. It meant understanding that we had Pershing missiles and SS-20s pointing at us, and that we were part of the battlefield of World War III at that point. Where we were talking about crisis: some of us will remember that, for others it is in history books, but it was imminent, it was real. I remember sitting with my brother, who is three and a half years older, on the roof of our house, looking towards what was maybe two kilometres away, which was the government communications headquarters in [unclear], in Munich. So we knew that one of the direct targets in this game of mutually assured destruction was two miles away from us. I am getting all emotional remembering that, but yes, we have been a threat to ourselves and to life on Earth for a long time.

As for where we started, with the ancient ancestry of us, we need to remember that we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been regenerative, place-sourced cultures, place-like cultures that understood themselves as guardians and expressions of the bioregions they inhabited. That is a different way of being in the world, that is in its very nature holistic. In many ways our conversation about holism is in the power and the misunderstandings that language can produce. We eventually needed a way back to an understanding that, before all that talk, we already had. For me, that is what holism is trying to do: it is trying to remind us that this is a deeply participatory universe.

So now I have come off topic from my story, where it starts. It is a double question, just briefly. It is about knowing how we know, and how that in and of itself is already part of the root causes of the crisis we are currently experiencing; and then knowing the crisis, knowing how deep the messed-up things have gotten at this point, and how twenty past one, not five to twelve, it actually is. That is another knowing that is still growing, deepening every day, and maturing me every day, beyond, taking impermanence seriously.

Yes, we will come to the topic of hope or despair in one of the next episodes. And I see Marcus has his hand raised. Marcus, I’ll ask you to bring in whatever you want to say.

Yes. I wanted to acknowledge that you just helped me understand something about myself, Daniel, that I had not quite so consciously reflected upon, although I was very aware of the theme. That is, I too grew up in Germany. I grew up near Dortmund, and then lived in Heidelberg for a while as well, before I moved to the UK in 2003. But this theme of the very conscious education into the past, and the intergenerational split: my father, born just after the war, not getting any answers from his family, and the pressure that was on the education system in order to confront the next generation with the sins of the fathers, is extraordinary, and a very fertile ground for my own development. So I appreciate the reflections you have given of it.

You have touched on a theme with that, which is that, like you, I also recognise that others had a hand in my development early on. My recognition was not a PE teacher who allowed me to experience yoga, but I had an individual who gave me books. He recognised something, and he gave me books of a particular thing that were well beyond my reading age, and it started something, a reflective process. I am very aware that in this kind of thing there is an interconnection: despite our world of separation, for me a theme of connectedness was set up through this recognition of elders who somehow didn’t see themselves as elders, but who did a service unto me, very much so, by giving me books that helped me become who I am today. It took me a long time to see it like that.

Then you spoke about how these ways of seeing today are really ways of being of an ancient kind. There is an aspect here, with a very fine edge, that I have a need to explore, and I just wondered what your contribution to that might be. Which is that it is very easy to dismiss Western culture and its approach to science and so forth as the reason for the difficulties we experience globally now, the meta-crisis, which we will come to later, and especially its notion of progress, that any problem will always be sorted in the future. But through a writer called Peter Kingsley, you might be familiar with him.

Yes.

I discovered for myself that the problem of the West might lie much further back than we so readily assume. He puts his finger very firmly on Plato as the beginning of a disconnection, in Iain McGilchrist’s words a focus on the left brain, advanced very much by Aristotle, where we were cut off from our mystical past. Plato did an enormous deed of essentially moving all our right-brain, religious, interconnected experience of life. He moved it; he very skilfully rewrote history as it were, didn’t acknowledge his sources, created sources in order to place himself very favourably in a particular light, and that has lived since then in a way that we believed him, but we didn’t see the damage he actually did. So when Whitehead says all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, that is for me the origin. It is something that I have explored deeply, and I have been trying to look beyond Plato into the past in order to understand what might the mission of the West actually be. Could it be that this issue with Plato is actually part of what we need to redeem? This is a big interconnected rabbit warren, but I just wanted to offer that into this space, and we can skip it.

No, no, no, let’s stay there briefly, because we are mentioning Whitehead. I mean, why would Whitehead say this? Because Whitehead was pointing towards process philosophy, in one way of speaking. Just as you were sharing how important books have been in your life, of course, if you are familiar with my work, the same in my life. I remember many mentors, particularly Seaton Baxter, who I did my PhD with, who were just genius in feeding me the right book at the right time, in a way that magically allowed me to come up with new ideas that I would then excitedly tell him; and then, after telling him in the evening, realising, wait a minute, he planted the seeds. I only had that insight because of that conversation that I had with him two weeks ago.

So I hear all that, but at the same time I had this interesting email today from somebody who led with the subject line, which I would look at with, “literate people learn words, illiterate people learn worlds.” That is big, and to the point of what we were going to talk about. So, nothing is a coincidence. This person writes to me today, and addresses Plato’s need to objectify the world in order to frame it in ways that can create structures of power over rather than power with, structures of separation rather than structures of inter-being, and [unclear] framing. And more than that, the word is the beginning of this kind of philosophy, explaining the world through the intellect, through rational mind, through logic: that something is either A or it is B, it can never be A and B at the same time. This exclusionary logic, this binary system, that even I love in McGilchrist’s work. But I find the left hemisphere, right hemisphere thing is polarising and difficult in and of itself. If you actually understand neuroplasticity and brain science, you can see that the brain is entirely capable of switching the areas that it is using, to a certain degree, in its own healing after accidents and so on. But anyway, that is me going into a rabbit hole.

What I am trying to speak to is this: how important it is whether we see the world through a language that is focused on nouns and on objectifying, versus seeing the world in a more verb-based way. As we begin to see the world that way, we are going to be seeing ourselves that way. So we become more and more of an object, more and more of something separate from the world, that is standing in the world, rather than a mode of consciousness that, in Francisco Varela’s perspective, is actually bringing forth the world. The way of knowing, the very act of the world knowing itself through us, is the act of the first distinction, that then brings forth what the Buddhists call samsara. We might as well live into it, with it, because you cannot take a perspective without creating a blind spot. But if we are aware of it, and we honour the present.

You also: because there was a lot in your question or comment. Of course it is dangerous to vilify Western science or the Western perspective. There are lots of examples of people in the West: I mean, just the wonderful book The Passion of the Western Mind, where he actually takes you through how this story evolved in the West, and he also, towards the end, highlights the counter-current, [unclear], Hegel, the greatest, to some extent Rudolf Steiner, and so on, the other way of participatory knowing the world. So for me, yes, I am agreeing with you, that with Plato a lot of things started, but I wouldn’t necessarily blame Plato for it, in the sense that I think all these steps are, there is a wonderful book talking about the intellectual anthroposophist Owen Barfield, who wrote a book called Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, or something like that, if I am remembering the title correctly. In it he speaks of original participation, which is the participation of the indigenous, where everything is significant: I am part of this web of life, all my relations. The dewdrop that is hit by the sun as I walk past is not a coincidence, not a physical phenomenon that breaks light into a certain visual stimulus. No, it is meaningful, it communicates to me, it says something. That is one way of knowing the world, through participation. But I think we needed the story of separation, the Enlightenment, in order to now come to what Owen Barfield calls final participation. And that is going to take us, I mean, because we left it so long, I think we are going to get a bit of a pasting that will humble us, but we might just find higher ground, rather than go into some kind of end game, which is the other option, which wouldn’t be so nice. I think what we are all about is trying to find different ways of connecting people, so we can find that higher ground. At the moment we are still using this technology, and may it be with us, but it also comes with a big red [unclear], and it also takes us away from the physical communities each and every one of us are living in every day. I am living that in my body a lot at the moment, because it is taking me away from my child, from my relationship, from my neighbours and my community, to be in conversations with people all over the globe, which is magic, but I am realising it is dangerous as well. At the moment I can’t do very much more than name it, and try to redesign my life in a way that I come back into balance with that. And sorry for a long answer to not question one.

One phrase that we might use in order to describe the situation we are now in is meta-crisis. Meta-crisis, meaning that there is a large number of individual crises that are occurring in parallel, and we recognise that we cannot solve them at the level we created them, which almost feels trivial to say like that now. There is something that connects all of these crises, and that ultimately is summarised, maybe, in the way we think needing to rise to the challenge. So we lump them all together, we call it a meta-crisis, and we address the shift in thinking. Then you, quite nicely, just in the last answer, talked about the differentiation of your view of regeneration from the view of Carol Sanford and Regenesis, Pamela Mang and so forth. If I understand correctly, so here is my first question: you are saying that there is a certain idealistic assumption in the work of Carol Sanford, where a system has a certain state of health that we can get back into, as opposed to seeing the system itself as part of, in development, as in development. Is it, have I summarised that correctly?

No, I don’t think they would feel fairly represented. The understanding of what health is about is that health is this falling back into a perfect state, rather than understanding health as dynamic, evolutionary and regenerative. But everything else they do, even, to finish your question with regard to the meta-crisis: even, they have a very powerful response to this crisis, to this problem-based approach. But please, please continue your question.

So I am very interested in their work, and also in yours, and for me there is a tension between the two that I haven’t yet managed to resolve for myself entirely. I feel that, whenever I get into a situation like that, there has to be another level of integration that allows the duality to exist, if that makes any sense. But, speaking of many different aspects, what for you are the hallmarks of the meta-crisis we live through at the moment? You said it is a crisis of thinking. How would you describe it?

Well, I mean, people have all sorts of. We have a water, energy and climate crisis, in the framing of a lot of people. We have lots of well-meaning people working really hard, racing to zero carbon, seeing the world through a carbon-myopic climate-change response, and they are all good people, they all mean well. Then we have one COP, where fifty thousand people descend on Egypt to talk about the climate, and then a few days later we have another COP to talk about nature-based services, and quantifying and monetising nature so we can save it. What happens there is that an approach to crisis, or problem, or situation, plays out. That is what I learned through Carol Sanford and through the Regenesis group, and why I so deeply am indebted to their twenty-five years of regenerative practice in all I do. I don’t really disagree with them on most things, many things, but that issue about health is a specific one that we simply don’t seem to be able to evolve together, which I have been trying for a long time.

But what I have learned from them, that Carol Sanford points out so clearly, is we have all been trained through education to look at the world through problems, that we then have disciplines, and the might of experts in disciplines, take perspectives on the problem; and then we bring them all together in large conferences, and once they have defined the problem in the abstract, from fifteen different disciplines in all detail, and shown how it shows up in every place on the planet, so it is a globalisable problem that we all need to deal with, then we bring in the financiers, who say, yes, let’s do a little competition with the designers and the technologists and find solutions to this problem. Let’s bring them all together for five days and do a hackathon, or a sandbox, or a design sprint, or whatever you want to name it, and then the best ten get our funding to do a start-up, and we launch it, and then we force it on everybody on the planet because it is the solution. That is the pathway that happens when you take everything through problem, abstraction of problem, find solution, and then bring the solution back to the specific.

What Carol Sanford and Regenesis have been about in all their work is to remind people, and to bring the dialogue to the group of people they are working with, to say: okay, well, that was a little bit abstract, and it doesn’t make sense to me, can we go into the specific? Where do you live? Who do you talk to? Who is against it, who is for it? What have they had for breakfast, and where did it come from? In the sense of, what is the specific of the place that you are trying to have agency in, and that you are actually capable of having agency in, because you are in that place? And then suddenly you have two ways of reducing complexity here: either you look at it as abstract problems, or you reduce complexity so you can respond to it, through specificity. Suddenly hunger, energy crisis, food crisis and brittle supply chains, pandemic response, all shows up in every single place, but it shows up differently, in a different ecosystem, in a different culture, with a different history, in response to all these things. And what they are saying is, if we want to have a snowball’s chance in hell to respond to the polycrisis, let’s think of it as a polycrisis, let’s come home to place. Let’s understand that, in a cosmopolitan bioregionalism, in full awareness that everybody needs to do this in their place, it is not about, we Western privileged people can afford to do this here, and let’s forget about Africa and the other people, that they better sort out their region and then we will all be fine. We need to address past colonialism, problems of economic injustice, and help people everywhere to start the process of meeting what you call the polycrisis in place.

And you, I mean, you named the [unclear], which is interesting, because when you actually sit in place, in my book I call it living the questions together, you don’t look at the solutions. It is not about solutions. Of course you need them, and somebody needs to propose them, and you need to experiment with them, but at a scale where the feedback from the impact of those solutions is quick enough that we can course-correct them, or actually abandon them. If we don’t look at them as final products, but understand every solution as a stepping stone in learning, and we live the question continuously, whether our past solutions are still fit for today, then we look at the fact that we can’t avoid but live in the world that our answers, or our predecessors, designed for us. We either accept that world or we transform it, and some of it is worth transforming, and some of it is worth accepting, and some of it is worth recovering, because we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater more than once in human history. Yes, and I could go on forever, but I don’t, these endless monologues, sorry.

It is fascinating to hear you explain the background to your thinking a little more. I want to take this conversation about health and move it into the particular space of our relationship with nature. I am involved very much with agriculture. For me, one of the arenas in which the tragedy of being human plays out is the engagement with nature through the production of food, and what we think about that. There is a lot to the approach that I have developed, but one aspect that is very central to it is that we work with Allan Savory’s Holistic Management approach, where context is everything. Every problem, as you say, is first and foremost a question of the holistic context, and the holistic context always requires that I bring myself to it. I will not find a solution unless I have an outcome in mind. This is part of my approach to regeneration, that regeneration is ultimately tied to outcomes. We cannot have a standard operating procedure that pursues an abstract goal. We have to have something that we are pursuing, in the field underneath our feet, with the people that are part of the local community. But it still begs the question: what actually is a healthy relationship with nature? And that question deliberately sets up nature as separate to humans, because that is one of the core dualities we have got at the moment. So I am wondering, what do you personally see as a healthy relationship to nature?

The thing is that you always mention so many interesting things, so I will get there eventually, but just briefly: I mean, of course agriculture, I think, has a lot to do with the place where we started to create the conditions, through the technology of the plough, that allowed us to be sedentary, and therefore begin a different relationship with resources, that ultimately led to constructing power-over type situations. In many ways, if you look at Cook arriving in Australia and saying the Aborigines didn’t practise agriculture: they actually practised an agricultural system so far advanced that it was indistinguishable from what Cook thought was just the wild forest. And they did so over vast distances, divided into eight seasons, where they knew when to be where, and to disturb how, in order to make that place more abundant. You will recognise this from how Holistic Land Management works in terms of disturbing, and rotational grazing, and all those kinds of practices, and they mimic the natural regeneration process that is in all of the larger transforming whole that we are part of, where we are not separate from what we call nature, but we are fundamentally participants in it, emergent properties of it.

So, outcomes, yes, but I always liked, in a conversation with Bill Reed, the Regenesis approach to working with people in place, in context, on a specific project that does get executed and does get built, or co-created: it is, at all the steps of the way, to be aware that the process, coming back to Whitehead and participatory knowing, the process by which we co-create these outcomes creates the most important outcome, which is capacity. The capacity of people in place to do it again, or to tweak it, or to transform it when it needs transforming. If the outcome is delivering what the design brief asked you to deliver, and you give them the key and say, here, call us, or here is a maintenance contract for the next ten years, that is a solution. That is not the solution, that is a prototype that has been co-developed with the people, to say, you have learned a lot on this, we learned a lot on this, we have actually ended up implementing something completely different to what we started doing when we first started talking to each other. I think you will recognise this also from Holistic Land Management, that you need that flexibility in the system, and that ultimately the outcome is learning to learn the questions together, even better, is continuous awareness of how our participatory, unavoidable interference with a place is either degenerative or regenerative, and we need to pay attention to this. Now, you might want to repeat the final question you got to, because I think I took a detour.

No, no. So, one individual that helped me open the space that you have gone into a little bit more is Ethan Soloviev, another Carol Sanford student, or master pupil, whatever you want to call him. He says that we are going to struggle if we define regeneration, because we are only going to be able to do that now, with the knowledge, language and so on as we stand here. So rather, we need to understand it as a continuum, and open ourselves up to the ever greater seeing, ever greater understanding of what regeneration might mean. It is an evolutionary process.

Absolutely. Ethan is so spot on with this, particularly with regard to this, because the current rapid take-up of the meme “regenerative” everywhere means that the usual suspects run the usual programme in the usual way with a new adjective in front. They are not meaning badly, but they are professionals trying to feed their families, they are doing what they have always done, they just close the file on Lean, and on Integral, and on SMART, and they open the file that says “regenerative”, and they dump lots of stuff in. I don’t want to know how many of my Medium blogs are in there, and they don’t read them, unfortunately. But the issue is that we will now, and this is where, again, dancing with Carol, I hope I get to speak together, because we have never spoken, can you believe it, but I have spoken a lot with Pamela and Ben and Bill and all these people. We can either say, you don’t get it, if you are trying to create a regenerative agriculture certification scheme you have already lost the plot and you are not being regenerative anymore, and they are absolutely right, yes. And there is a skilful means that says, don’t hit them on the head and say “you bad students”. Say, okay, if you hold your certification scheme lightly enough, we can learn something from it. But the danger, of course, is the minute it then just gets put into businesses, usually, and invested into, then it actually becomes a corset, and it avoids exactly what Ethan was pointing to: the ability of the system to be meaningful in context, and break the rules, because the rules are written by the place, and not by us. The rules emerge in the dynamic relationship between climate, us, the place, water availability, people moving in and out, you name it. It is a complex, dynamic, fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable system. The best thing we can do is aim for appropriate participation. That is what I learned in the Master’s in Holistic Science, from Brian Goodwin, and it is different from the holistic notion of building the perfect whole, which permaculture sometimes likes to do. It is participatory, it is paying attention to the whole role that we have in it. And I love Ethan’s work, and I think regenerative agriculture will somehow play out this field of how do we keep people engaged. You can, for example, run a classic questionnaire on, is your farm regenerative, and it is living the questions; but if you do it just as an exercise to put another label on your produce, then you have missed the plot. But if you use it as a, whoa, that is a whole different way of doing agriculture, okay, we’ll plant trees, okay, let’s plant trees, and agroforestry, all these different tools, the toolbox is growing every day, particularly as we are acknowledging we are not the pioneers, we are the quick learners who finally realised that the pioneers have been among us all the time, and we had the arrogance to call them primitive cultures. I mean, that is as embarrassing as it got. In seeing that, we see that some of these cultures have developed beautiful place-based adaptations, like growing underground, in sunken greenhouses, in dry conditions, which is something that I want to try out in the food forest I just planted here, because I am two hundred and eighty kilometres from the north coast of Africa, so it is going to get hot anyway.

The notion that I found very helpful here is to let thy food be thy medicine. But as I explored that more, I recognised so much that we try, in our life, to break things down into, say, moments, or little packages, like the food somehow transports health: I imbibe health, and then I am healthy. But what I recognise is that actually this whole thing is not just the doing, and it is not just the being. It is, as Claudius in the introduction was pointing to, actually a dual evolution, a co-evolution going on, of the world that I am looking at and the world that is looking at me. We are becoming together in the process, and I have active agency in that. Not a special kind of agency, just a relevant kind of agency. I am relevant to the system, and I can influence it, and it influences me. So I am in danger of going off-piste. Having said that I was going to bring it all back, but the important point for me was that food is just another angle, agriculture is just another angle, on the particular problem of a regenerative mindset. And what we eat is related to what we think. I just wondered whether you had a comment.

Absolutely. There is the problem of the problem again, of seeing things as a problem. But what you pointed towards, for me, is this Wendell Berry quote, that the problem is that we have a food system that has no idea about the health system, and we have a health system that has no idea about the food system, or something along those lines. And even now, where, in the space of regenerative agriculture, the world has picked up quicker than a lot of areas, and even these large incumbents are seemingly moving into that space, in a way that, well, makes my fingernails roll up a little bit, this understanding that we need a new food system is now everywhere. And there are a hundred and one, UNDP, you name it: I have been invited to some, even some Thich Nhat Hanh-inspired consultants running a kind of conscious food systems lab inside the UNDP, lots of interesting conversations going on. And we are still looking at the food system, and we are looking at the water system, and we are looking at the energy system, and we are looking at the health system, and we very rarely look at the observer. We very rarely look at the narrative that informs all of that, and how they are all connected. And then, when you try to bring that into the room, people go, that was a really inspiring talk, and that was really interesting, but let’s get practical now, so where were we with our food systems thing, we need to get this stuff done by 2024, because then we run out of funding, and then we publish a report, and nobody reads the report, and they have wasted so many wonderful people’s time, who are actually trying to make a difference.

And how do we overcome that? I think that food is one of my, if you haven’t seen her work, if you are working in agriculture, the work of Helena Norberg-Hodge, and the International Society for Ecology and Culture, and even her wonderful, by now quite old, book Ancient Futures: she, when I studied at Schumacher College in 2001, she was the one that actively, locally, campaigned for a local food economy, and a relationship of people with their place through the food they were eating; and then the big [unclear] and so on started putting food miles on the stickers and stuff, but she really got that conversation going. This entry point of food leads to place, to water, to watershed, to our health, to the fact that we are a walking ecosystem with more non-human cells than human cells. The ones in our gut are full of an ecosystem, without which we wouldn’t have health, and which critically depends on what food we put inside of us, in terms of what ecosystems we have. And this is again, having you on the call, the Asian cultures always knew that you need to eat kimchi and those things to get the microorganisms to build health. We need to bring those deeply lived, participatory engagements with place into modern culture. How do you make kimchi and those, and a real food forest, and still make a living for your family? That is new ways of living together.

And the left-right hemisphere conversation, yes, it is powerful, and has helped a lot of people, and has even helped some sort of social healing of different ways of seeing. And there is a danger, as far as I know, that there is a huge plasticity in the brain, in its even late-stage evolution after trauma, to be able to cross over, reconnect, and take over the functions of the left to the right and vice versa. So why do we need yet another strong dualism to help us evolve our thinking? I think that when we frame things too much in these dualisms, we begin to sell old wine in new wineskins.

I wanted to thank you for offering the warning about McGilchrist’s work, that it can be so readily misunderstood by the left hemisphere. But I am a deep fan of his work, because he goes to such great lengths to explain that left and right are to be understood symbolically, not in any way as a duality that is based in a binary, or a reality that is split. Rather, he is at pains to say that reality is always unified, and that we have two ways, at least two ways, at the very basic level, of understanding the world. So there are two narratives, and these two narratives stand in a dialogue with each other. What we call Western culture is a good description, because there is a group of homo sapiens that is subject to, if you want, a cultural or epigenetic narrative that over-emphasises the impact of what he describes as the left-hemisphere thinking. That doesn’t mean that that is my, or your, left hemisphere, and it doesn’t mean that it can’t also be compensated for in the right hemisphere. It is simply an asymmetrical way in which the human sense-making apparatus operates, much like there is asymmetry in all of the relationships that you have outlined, from the cell through to the biosphere. This asymmetry is what creates the perpetual motion that is the narrative motion. That is the important part, I think, of his work: not that there is a duality, but that there is an asymmetry, and the asymmetry is part of what either leads to a misconception of the world as a duality, or to one that allows us to get the inkling of the unity of things, which I think is the very fine line we are approaching here in thinking.

The reason why I am being so pedantic about what McGilchrist is saying is because it is very easy, with your notion of becoming indigenous, to fall for the idea that there is another story, told by another people somewhere, that we can adopt, and then wholeness will follow. So if we turn east, or we, that’s not what you are saying. I am saying that the left-brain interpretation of what you are saying could very quickly be, there is a better way, a different way, which is essentially what you are talking about when you talk about the danger of codifying regeneration in all sorts of contexts. So this, and this is the point I am trying to get to, what McGilchrist’s whole asymmetry is about, is that the agency for the recognition of the world’s unity is vested in each individual. We have what we need in order to have the experience of the field. But it is the left-brain idea that creates a glass ceiling at the level of systems thinking, because we codify knowledge in this very abstract way that removes from us our personal capacity to stand, literally, in the field, and develop our senses to the extent that our scale of things allows for, which is that the unity of things flows through us, and is influenced reciprocally through how we imprint on nature, and nature imprints on us, which is essentially what you were talking about with your oak tree experience.

That is fascinating. First of all, just briefly, as a meta comment: I called up this completely oversimplified left-brain, right-brain picture, because I have been annoyed by how many people refer to, and build entire, detailed trainings and conversations to train people around, a very, very shallow, not even understanding, of McGilchrist’s work, that you just described beautifully, but rather another kind of dualism. It is a similar way that I find with a lot of people that have done deep work in the regenerative world. There is a beautiful conversation I had with Tyson Yunkaporta, on his other podcast, where we both reflect on how, as an author, for example, you have to let go of others completely bastardising what you have said, and using it in a completely different way. And what you were beautifully summarising, the McGilchrist work, is what William Blake was referring to when he said, may God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep. It is understanding that, as powerful as this way of seeing is, there are other ways of participating. And Bortoft said exactly the same thing, but he calls it, he speaks of two different modes of consciousness, both informative but mutually exclusive in the present moment. When you are engaging in the whole, you cannot, it is like a Gestalt switch, you can see the world that way, or you see it that way, but you can’t see both cubes at the same time.

It is a real privilege to take the time to talk in this intellectually stimulating way, as you put it. But I think there is more at work than it just being a privilege. I think it is a little bit like gardening, and one has to choose one’s time, and one can’t always garden, and one can’t always have intellectual conversation. But where it goes beyond the privilege is in the ways we think, and in the stories we tell, quite unwittingly, what we think about ourselves, and what our role in the world might be. And the exercise of that muscle: it is through words that we recognise the capacity to tell our own story, and when that is not kindled, when people who haven’t thought about it in the way, if you don’t go out there and share that capacity to think for yourself, people do go to sleep, or the reverse, they don’t wake up. So, unless you sow the seeds, there will not be a harvest. And by that I don’t mean that you put what you think is the seed in there, obviously. What needs kindling is that the agency is at the individual level, not at the institutional level. This won’t be sought through any form of codified knowledge, or programme. It will be, because if there will be a change, it is through individuals connecting through the place right under their feet. So I just wanted to say that there is that privilege, and the possibility of a different world through conversation, and that I have really enjoyed so many ways in which you have stimulated me beyond the intellect. I have really felt this deeply in me. It has been very, very inspirational, and not least because I recognise very clearly that, to a certain extent, I have actually done enough talking in my life, just to be paradoxical.