 The left hemisphere, this is the first point to make, is not designed to help us understand the world. It's only designed to help us utilize it or manipulate it. And because of this particularistic, very narrow beam, precise attention to detail, what it sees is a world made up of fragments, bits that are decontextualized, abstracted, categorized, inanimate effectively, and fixed so that they can be grabbed easily. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees a world in which nothing is atomistic because everything is ultimately connected to everything else, that it is moving, not fixed, that it is importantly what it is in a context, that context is often the body, and that everything is actually unique, not just the exemplar of a category. You've got these two kinds of visions of the world buying. It's very striking that what we call the scientific worldview embodies exactly the ways of perceiving that you ascribe to the left brain, the decontextualizing, the inability to see things as unique, but merely as examples of a category. Scientific ideology at its very foundation says that. It says, for example, that any two protons are identical. They are merely members of a category, and their differences are only because of the different forces that act upon them, but otherwise they are generic. And it's not only physics or science that narrates the world in this way, but it's also economics. You could say economics has created a world in the image of this way of perceiving by converting the uniqueness of each thing in the material world into commodities that are ripped from their relational context, their strip mind, you know, they're taken away from all of their relations and made into products whose only relation is the price. The only relation to the consumer is the price. So here we have, it's a kind of a feedback loop where these incredible powers that you speak of that have come from this left brain wave engaging the world have created an environment that further encourages that way of relating to the world. The left hemisphere lives in a hall of mirrors in which its own representation, its own theory about things is more important than any evidence that comes from the senses or from experience. And so it has no way of breaking out. I say that in the past, we broke out of this hermetically sealed representation of the world through things that made the world presence to us, things like nature, the greatness of viscerally powerful art, the business of religion properly understood not as a matter of propositions but of a disposition towards the world, a proper understanding of the body. These things, they gave us intimations of something beyond whatever construct of an abstract kind the brain was currently producing. We need both union and division. And in fact, Goethe who was an uncommon new wise man said that uniting the divided dividing the united this is the whole business of nature. And I think this is right. Of course, if you fuse selves enough and they all just become tools in a huge mechanistic society such as the Soviet Union was and that no doubt China probably is now then the individual has lost all that uniqueness and all that capacity to contribute. And so you need to be able to preserve neither atomistic separation nor total fusion. This is true of most relationships that they are best when they enrich one another. In fact, we're enriched by the society out of which we come and we can enrich the society in turn by what we give back to it. But when we talk about madness, I mean, one of the things is that there are very obviously impossible things that are being put about as the absolute truth that mustn't be questioned. And when you're in that state, you're in the totalitarian state as Hannah pointed out. She said, when there are things that you can't even question then you're in the totalitarian state. And I think one of the unique points you made at the outset was violence and anger and so on. And I think there's two ways of looking at this that in some ways the more improbable the position you're trying to assert is the more you have to silence any possible opposition and be very angry about it because if the opposition was allowed to say anything reasonable, it would destroy your argument. So there's a lot of investment in maintaining certain positions and once they become the positions that are the mainstream opinion whether it's in Lenin's Russia or in England in 2023, woe betide you if you don't stick to this because this is how people exert power. It's how bureaucraties flourish. They look at the way bureaucracies are taking over all the professions. They're things that would have rooted us in some kind of a reality would be the intactness of a tradition which we've talked to be only ashamed of and to destroy. The intactness of a family, religion, the professions, the doctor, the teacher, the community. These have all been semester systematically attacked by the localism. All these things have been pushed out of the way partly for capitalist economic reasons and partly for reasons of just being able to totally control. And it's this desire for total control that I think is now the key element in our situation. And again, Hannah Arendt said that when people feel completely powerless, which I think a lot of people do to make any difference to this, they turn to violence. And so we're in a situation that can incubate that violence unless we begin to make it very, very clear that freedom to speak and to be honest is of essential importance. One of the things that you mentioned earlier was the triumph of the scientific reductionist materialism but not just in science across our philosophy of what it means to be alive. And in that system, a lot of people believe that science has proved that there is no purpose and science has proved that there are no values, that they're just things we invent. I believe powerfully that they're not things we invent, but things that we discover, i.e. they're there to be discovered, if we can or if we can't. So what we need to do is to be open to them. Science begins from ruling out all considerations of purpose or value because perfectly logistically, it wants to understand mechanisms and it wants to see how things work as it were. So it forbids talk about them, but it can't then announce that it has discovered that there are no values and there is no purpose because it's what they themselves decreed. There's a nice little thing in C.S. Lewis where he says it's like a policeman stopping all the traffic in the street and then solemnly noting in his notebook, the silence in this street is very suspicious. Beauty is one of my main operating principles and I propose that as an orienting principle especially when our notion of what truth is has kind of collapsed into objective fact. There are kind of gaudy substitutes for beauty that we've become hypnotized and associating with that word. But beauty is an emergent function and it cannot be copied. It has to come from the infinite and that's why I think that it is such a liberatory orienting principle. It's because of its irreducibility and when you're just shuffling the bits which is what AI does and to a large extent what our culture does. I mean, how many movies are just sequels of other movies cannibalizing our cultural legacy? When you are cut off from life, from the infinity of being, then you just end up recycling things and beauty is lost because beauty is contextual. It has to draw from something outside of what already is. That reminds me of this difference between the presencing of something which is always real and vibrant and awe-inspiring and the re-presentation of it. And this is a distinction between the right and left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is what enables us to allow things to presence as Heidegger would have put it. But I mean, what I'm talking about there is the kind of thing you can feel if you practice mindfulness and you stop the chatter and you try to just be there embodied in that place and see it for the first time. And that is something that requires imagination, something the machine can do. It's dealing only with representations. And so the mechanical reproduction of the things creates more of this dead, effectively world. If you suppress the right frontal cortex, people actually start to see living things as inanimate. They start seeing people as kind of zombies. Whereas if you do the opposite and suppress the left frontal cortex, they start to see things that wouldn't normally be considered animate as animate. So they see the sun and they see it moving in the sky and they see this as a living thing. The motto of our program is sanity is a group project. And these counter-cultural beliefs that are based on a larger perception and a more open perception of the world that you associate with the right brain, these are hard to hold by ourselves in against the onslaught of culture and economics and law and social pressure. And that's why we're here. We're here to establish an island of sanity.