Without a Forceful Mind

News of a conversation tonight between Iain McGilchrist & Alastair McIntosh

At the end of a full year, December has been a time for slowing down at last, noticing the wear and tear picked up along the way, and picking up a few of the dropped threads. I’ll have another post or two coming up before I go offline for Christmas, including some afterthoughts on the final episode of the Great Humbling for 2023, which dropped a few days ago.

But I’m writing to share news of a live online event tonight that brings together two people I’ve been wanting to draw into conversation, hosted by my friends at

Perspectiva

. Here’s the link to register for First Principles & Second Sight: A conversation with Iain McGilchrist and Alastair McIntosh, or read on for a little more of the story behind this event.

Longtime readers may remember that back in February, on the eve of publication of At Work in the Ruins, I boarded the night train from London to the Scottish Highlands, continuing the journey by boat and hire car, to arrive in the deepening darkness in a remote corner of the Isle of Skye, where my longtime co-conspirator

Caroline Ross

was taking me to meet her friend Iain McGilchrist.

For those not immediately familiar with Iain’s name, he is a genuine polymath: a literary scholar who became a fellow of All Souls, then went into medicine, doing neuroimaging research at Johns Hopkins and becoming a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley, before combining these interests with his study of philosophy to produce a pair of magisterial books, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. These bring together research in neuroscience on the hemispheres of the brain with epistemology and metaphysics to offer an account of our ways of inhabiting the world and the trouble they can get us into. While the books are long, complex and fascinating, this twelve-minute video from the RSA gives a clear introduction:

I’d been hearing about Iain’s work for years, but it was only after finishing work on At Work in the Ruins that I finally sat down to read The Master and His Emissary. And I was startled to discover how many crossing points there were between the lines of thought that I had been tracing and the arguments he made there.

This was the background to the trip that Caroline and I made in February and the conversation Iain and I recorded during our stay. I can also highly recommend watching the conversation we recorded between Caroline and Iain, where they talk about how Iain’s work provided an English vocabulary for deep understandings carried within the T’ai Chi and Taoist tradition which Caroline has practiced and taught for decades. (Incidentally, paid subscribers to this Substack can read the full story of our Skye adventure here.)

After two days on Skye, Caroline and I set off for Glasgow, where we launched the book in a public conversation at the Galgael Trust in Govan with Alastair McIntosh and my old Dark Mountain colleague, Dougie Strang.

Alastair is one of the handful of people of whom I can truly say that I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t come across his work at the moment in my life when I did. One of these days, I’ll have to write up the whole story of how an encounter with the soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, while I was in journalism school, set me looking for connections between shamanism and the Bible, how this in turn led to an essay of Alastair’s, which meant that I recognised his name when, the following year, I stumbled on a copy of his book Soil and Soul in Portsmouth City Library. By that point, I’d walked away from the beginnings of a career at the BBC and was puzzling over what was actually worth doing with a life. In the pages of that book, I found an answer: not a model for what I ought to do with my own life – no-one can give you that – but an example of a kind of grown-up that it might be worth growing up to be. Finding a few of those examples may be the most important part of the work of being young. To this day, Soil and Soul remains the only book where I’ve got to the end and immediately written to the author. Alastair wrote back – and over the years, I became one of the many people who has benefitted from his mentorship, in one way and another.

There were so many things we might have talked about that night at Galgael, as Alastair helped me launch my own book, but what came to my mind was the connection between Caroline and Iain’s discussion and the Taoist concept of wu wei – ‘non-doing’ – which I had first met in Soil and Soul. So that became the theme around which our conversation rolled.

Later, back at Alastair’s place, I learned that despite their shared connection to the Hebrides and the touching points that I saw in their work, he and Iain had never met. So as I headed southwards, I took with me the thought that this was a connection it would be good to make.

Roll forwards half a year, through the many conversations my book would lead me into. Here and there, I’d feel a tug on the thread. Someone would send me a clip of Iain talking about my book in a lecture. My friend

Elizabeth Oldfield

did a fascinating interview with him for her podcast, The Sacred.

And then, last month, I took part in a conversation with

Jonathan Rowson

of

Perspectiva

, ‘a community of expert generalists working on an urgent one hundred year project to improve the relationships between systems, souls and society in theory and practice’. Jonathan and I had first crossed paths years ago, when he worked at the RSA, and I knew that he was also Iain’s publisher. During our discussion, I must have talked about Alastair’s work, because afterwards Jonathan sent me this beautiful post about the day when Alastair took him and his sons out fishing in the west of Scotland.

So I shared with Jonathan the thought that someone should bring these two thinkers into conversation, and I’m glad to say that he ran with it, because Perspectiva feels like exactly the kind of platform for this encounter. I’ll look forward to being there tonight – and the last time I checked, there are still places available, so book soon if you’d like to be there too.

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It’s a time in the year for picking up dropped threads and tying up loose ends, so I’m delighted that this particular thread got picked up. It strikes me, too, that the way in which it happened embodies what I first learned from Alastair about wu wei. Here’s the passage where he describes being introduced to this principle by one of his own mentors, Tom Forsyth:

‘Don’t force it,’ Tom would say to me. ‘Just be mindfully present to the rightness of what it is we’re attempting. Swing with opportunity as it arises and wait at other times. It’s the only way we can hope to go anywhere.’

On stage at Galgael, Caroline spoke about various ways of expressing wu wei in English. Later she wrote that the phrase that had been on the tip of the tongue was acting ‘without a forceful mind’.

For me, that often looks like carrying an idea gently, noticing whether there’s still life in it, and keeping an eye out for the right moment, the right person to make a suggestion to. My part in the work may be no more than a line or two in an email, then allowing others to take on the responsibility of making something happen.

When they do, it’s a joy to see – and given all the different threads that pass through the work I’ve been doing in a year like 2023, I can say with Tom, this effortless action truly is ‘the only way we can hope to go anywhere’.

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Here’s the link to book for tonight’s Zoom event with Alastair and Iain. For those who can’t join live, there will be a recording.

And if you’d like to support this work of weaving words and connections, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack.