How Prayer Deepens Consciousness with Iain McGilchrist (Part 2)

In this continuation of their rich exchange, Sr. Ilia Delio and Dr. Iain McGilchrist explore the deeper dimensions of consciousness—and how our overreliance on the left hemisphere of the brain distorts our understanding of reality, relationships, and even God.

Together, they reflect on:

• How attentiveness shapes the way we relate to the world
• The role of environment in forming perception and meaning
• Why prayer, nature, and human relationships are vital to human flourishing
• The distinction between brain and mind—and the mystery of consciousness itself
• Why the future depends not just on new tools, but on a renewed inner life

With clarity and conviction, Iain invites us to recover the neglected right brain, embrace relational knowing, and remember the divine ground that holds us. In a culture driven by certainty and efficiency, this episode points gently back toward wonder, prayer, and possibility.

ABOUT IAIN MCGILCHRIST

“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.”

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press. www.channelmcgilchrist.com

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to the conversation between Ilia Delio and Iain McGilchrist. Last time, Iain explored the distinction between mind and brain, focusing on the roles of the left and right hemispheres. Ilia begins by revisiting these insights before they turn to Iain's diagnosis of our cultural crisis, an over-reliance on the left brain, and a neglect of the right. Later, Ilia asks about consciousness, what it is, and how it can be deepened through mindfulness and prayer. And finally, Iain offers a closing word on why we need not despair.

Ilia: First of all, the way your description of the left and right hemispheres and their distinct functions, the right hemisphere really seems to me to be, in a sense, reflective of environment. So our environment, therefore, makes a significant difference. And in other words, you use the word attention. And that is a very interesting terms, even in terms of the brain, the way the brain can focus or attend. And what is that within the mind that allows that freedom of the mind to, the brain to be attentive, to allow the feelings to be part of what's being perceived or experienced, to allow an emotional response. 

So that kind of right brain attentiveness, very environmentally situated is extremely important in embedding us within the context or the flow or the relationships of the whole of reality that we're embedded in. Whereas you so beautifully described that left hemisphere is in a sense the targeted or kind of the mathematical side of us, the focus side, the machinic side, that attention is different in the left brain. It's very detailed, discreet attention. It doesn't have this kind of wider environmental attention. It's taking what's perceived in the environment, seems to me, and then focusing on particular things. So if I hear you correctly, we have a brain problem in our culture today, because we are children of a Cartesian type of dualism, we're children of a mechanistic paradigm, and the very kind of split, if I can use that term, I'm gonna take it out of its clinical notion, split brain syndrome, in a sense, where we have allowed the right brain to lie dormant or to neglect it. It's kind of a neglected right brain, which goes hand in hand with our neglected environmental crisis that we're in. These two things are probably not unrelated. 

And what is it about the left brain that has lured us in? We seem to have developed another environment of progress, success, careerism, money, the things that we like to focus on or abstracted from a wide world of relationships. It becomes very singular in terms of self-improvement or I can become something more if I focus on this. It's a very focused type of development. So I don't know what, you identify the symptoms and the problems, I think a significant problem for our age. Where do you see, because we're living in a technological age, AI is not going away, it is actually the way into the, it is what our future is going to be. AI really shifts how we're thinking about everything. Where do you see us going in terms of if the whole person requires the whole mind working together these two hemispheres. Where do you see us going in an AI world?

Iain: Good question. I don't think it's wise to predict the future. Most people who have done have ended up with egg on their faces because human beings are unpredictable and resourceful and we really don't know what the next turn in the history of ideas may be. I see signs that we're turning away from a mechanistic view now, just in the last perhaps 10 years. There are more people, young people, turning to the established religions as well as to spirituality, because they realize that the version of the world that they've been told they live in is entirely meaningless, pointless, and random. ample evidence that it is none of these things from physics and from biology, let alone from capacity to think and understand philosophy. 

So I think we are, there's a sense in which the worse it gets, the better it gets, in that I think we need something, and I hope it's not a major catastrophe, but it quite well might be, to shift us out of the mindset we've got into. It's a comfortable mindset because as you pointed out it has really only one value which is more stuff for me and nobody can actually have a meaningful life. Why does he require more stuff? And there's a lot of evidence that above a very low threshold having more money and more possessions don't make people happier. In fact if anything the trend is towards greater anxiety and gloom. So clearly that's not a good way to go. I want to pick up a couple of things, which is your comment about the environment and the nature of human happiness. 

So first, when you say the environment, I know what you mean. And I think that, I mean, I tend to prefer the word nature because “environment suggests" something that is around us but is not us. Whereas we are part of nature and nature is part of us. In fact, we are our nature. So our inability to understand the importance of that connection is one of the things that makes us so unhappy. Until about 1800, 99% of all people in the world would have lived fairly closely related to a natural setting. It was only with the advance of the Industrial Revolution that that drastically changed. And there's a lot of evidence that spending time in nature and feeling a communication with nature is profoundly healing. It's spiritually healing, it's mentally healing, and it's physically healing.

 So that the effects of this are on your physical health, your mental health, and your spiritual health. I can say more about that if you want, but anyway, I just want to make that point. Because the two other very big relations are with one another and with God or with the divine, whatever you like to call it. And again, there is an undeniable bulk of literature in psychological studies showing that these three things, sensing yourself to belong to a culture where you share ideals, ideas, meals, worship, whatever, has a very powerful effect on human well-being. The closeness to nature I've talked about. 

And the third is the business of spending time, as it were, in opening yourself to the divine, in prayer, in meditation, in the way you live. And these three things overall have more effect than giving up smoking, losing weight, and going to the gym and all the rest. They also are enormously healing to the mind and the spirit, because we ignore these things at our peril, we are relational beings, and these three relations are the most important ones we can have. I argue in The Matter with Things that everything is relational, and that relations actually come before relatio, the things that are related, which surprises some people, because they're used to thinking, how can there be relations until there are things to relate? But I suggest the relationships come earlier in the form of fields and networks, and that the things are just material objects that stand out in that frame.

Ilia: Yes, completely 100% with you, because that's the best of science today, quite honestly. What we learn today from the new physics is relationships are primary. It seems to me we have a right brain, so all that you're talking about is really that right brain that's freed to be itself, to be in touch with the wider world of emotions and nature and the relational brain. And I think we're kind of, it's very interesting because we have a longing. We have a desperate longing today for retrieving that relational, that deep primordial relationality that allows life to be free and to grow in a fruitful way. And yet we spend most of our waking hours in artificial rooms with artificial lighting behind artificial screens. So we seem to be a little bit conflicted. What we long for desperately, we kind of work against in a sense by, because I do think environment trains us. I mean, I'm speaking to the choir here, but it conditions us, right? You know, and so we're conditioning the brain to be apart from nature and we desperately long for to return to our own core which is nature in that deep relationality.

Robert: If the brain lies at the heart of our current crises, how can we respond on a personal level? Next, Ilia asks Iain about the nature of consciousness and how it can be deepened. And finally, they explore the role of prayer, mindfulness, and human relationships in an age increasingly shaped by technological connection.

Ilia: What is your understanding of consciousness? That's a huge, huge area today, right? There's so many different understandings. But I'm going to ask this question because I'm interested in, you mentioned meditation or centering and what that means in terms of levels of consciousness and this kind of awakening the brain to the wider world, to our awakening ourselves to the wider world relationships. So what is consciousness and how can we deepen it today?

Iain: “What is consciousness?” is a very difficult question, but I think we all know intuitively what we mean by consciousness. It's experience, it's having experience at all. And of course, there are different ways in which the word conscious can be used. For example, I can say, I wasn't conscious of that, but I was conscious. It's just that my consciousness wasn't alerting me to whatever it was. So there's a kind of consciousness that you lose when you're dead. There's a kind of consciousness you lose when you're on the operating table. There's a kind of consciousness that is really only looking at a tiny bit of the world all the time you're moving around your familiar environment. But essentially it's awareness, there being something like to be a conscious being. And I can't defend this here, but just to state my position, because we don't have a lot of time. 

I argue in The Matter with Things, and I have a long chapter on matter and consciousness, that it is illogical to suppose that consciousness can arise out of matter. People have been thinking like this for a very long time, and nobody has got even a tiny bit of the way towards explaining it. And there's always a, and now a miracle occurs and somehow the subjectivity, nobody can tell us how. And it does beg a belief that there are presumably intelligent people occupying philosophy chairs in universities around the Western world who deny the existence of consciousness. I'll just leave it at that. The one thing we cannot avoid knowing is the existence of consciousness. If it's an illusion, it's an illusion in consciousness. So there we are. And the one thing we know is consciousness, but we don't really know what matter is. 

Matter is something that nobody has ever seen. We've seen aspects of our consciousness, our conscious experience, that we call material, 'cause it has those qualities that we designate as material. So I hold that consciousness is the ontological primitive, that which one cannot get behind or before. It's not emergent from anything, it is. And I believe the whole cosmos is conscious and that the way in which that works is that it is creative. One thing one can definitely say about the universe is that it's creative. It starts from very little diversity and seems to end up with amazingly beautiful, complex innovations, structures, and so forth. My view is that matter is an aspect of consciousness that has its uses, and its uses are those of resistance and persistence. Again I haven't got time to expand on this idea, but I believe that creativity cannot happen without a degree of resistance. 

So resistance is not negative in that way. Resistance is part of life and part of what helps other new things come into being. And persistence is important in a creative cosmos because otherwise nothing, as it were, is evident there. My thoughts can go anywhere you like, but the things that I'm surrounded by, the table I'm sitting at now, will be here tomorrow morning, barring a cosmic accident. So that's my view on consciousness. It manifests as matter. And people say, well, it doesn't seem to be at all like consciousness. But I call it a phase in the technical sense that chemistry and physics talk of phases. 

Water, as you know, has phases. In those three phases of being water, being a block of ice, and being the water vapor that is in this room and enables us to breathe, it has completely different qualities, appearances, and so on. And if we didn't know it, we'd think they were separate things. That's my vision of consciousness. I think that I'm a panpsychist in the sense that I believe that there is consciousness at some level in everything. I think matter and consciousness are not ultimately separable completely. So we think it is a common thing we think nowadays is that if you make a distinction, you've made a division. But there's a distinction there, but not, I think, a division. An important distinction nonetheless. 

So I also believe that consciousness is relational. It is the divine, or at least it is an aspect of the divine. The divine itself can't be captured in language and it can't be fully expressed, but it calls to us in certain ways and makes itself known. And it's our job either to respond to it or not. And I believe that what it is asking from us is to enter into a relationship, because that divine ground of being is in almost every tradition I know expressed as a form of love, and love is nothing if it is not relational. So I think love is an aspect of it, and we haven't got time to explain the problem of pain, but I'm satisfied that there are ways in which one can avoid having to ditch the idea of a loving God. And what we do is we respond to the great trio of values that Plato also thought were most important, the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that these are aspects of what we mean by that something awe-inspiring that we call the sacred. 

So when, I think you asked me what do I mean about meditation and so on. Well, I am a bit of a meditator sometimes, at least mindfulness. I think mindfulness is very important because it stops one's constantly analyzing, categorizing, judging left hemisphere mind, what in the Eastern tradition is called monkey mind. It stops it constantly prancing around and occupying the stage so that we can actually be in the presence of something again rather than just with a representation. But really, to be honest, and I know you won't be upset with me for saying this, but in any case, it's the truth, prayer is the thing that I find most enlightening, most beautiful, most real in this particular realm. And I do have certain prayers that I often repeat, but I do also take very seriously the idea that prayer is listening. And so I do that. Sometimes it's rather like being put on hold for an hour and 40 minutes after you've tried to communicate with a large corporation, and they're constantly reassuring you that your call is important to them, but not actually answering it. 

However, this is also part of the experience, I believe, and it wouldn't be what it is if one could be guaranteed that a voice that sounds like a human voice we're talking to one. So a lot of the time one has to dwell in uncertainty and mystery, but if one holds to that, a lot comes to be revealed that one would never otherwise have seen. And as you rightly said earlier, when it comes to God, it's about experience, not about knowing things. Trying to work out in the abstract whether or not God is a rational idea is rather like hoping to learn how to swim by sitting on the bank reading a book. You have to get in and swim before you understand what it is to swim. And I think the same thing is true of religious experience.

Ilia: Oh, that's beautiful. I love and I'm delighted to hear actually your emphasis on prayer, because I think prayer is that deep, you spoke about listening, that deep dialogue in other words, that two lords are coming together and exchanging the mystery of God within us. And I've been intrigued by Jung's idea about religion as a natural part of a part of our natural development. And I think this is really true. I think this is there's something deep and ineffable within the human person and prayer as that relationship with God, a God that name of mystery, the realm of the possibility of that which can be. 

Thank you for pointing out the uncertainty. And so we're always navigating in this flow of life between the known and the unknown. And in this age of kind of a frenzy for certainty and achievement, getting back to the flow of life in the wider realm, in the wider relationships that we're embedded in, and to know that we're not alone. I think one of the greatest problems today is the fear of aloneness or loneliness, that we're cut off and we have to go in search of finding that to which we belong to when it's already here. And having that freedom to awaken to what's already within us, I think, is one of the greatest tasks of our time. You know, not so much how many degrees I have or knowledge I have, but simply that awakening to the simple presence of divine love.

Iain: Yes, I think the way our society is going is rapidly cutting us off from human intercourse. So not only is it enormously frustrating and wastes an enormous amount of time when companies sack most of their employees and have machines take over, I mean, what they're really doing is making money at our expense because it costs us our time, which is our life, to negotiate their ridiculously complex platforms in which there is never a box for what you want to say. But it also robs us of those daily contacts with people. A supermarket checkout where you do it yourself is not the same as one where there is a person there, even if the conversation is minimal. 

Where I live on the Isle of Skye, I think a lot of people, perhaps elderly people, isolated people, see going to the supermarket as a way of meeting people and just chatting about a few things. So I think we're also taught that there is no God and perhaps we are God and the machine may be God and all this. This is, Well of course what so many fables, religious and otherwise, from so many parts of the world have warned us of, that it will be our demise. We will be committing suicide by turning ourselves into kinds of machines. So that worries me a great deal. Yeah.

Ilia: We should be worried, I do think, Iain, because it's not a given, you know. Our persistence as a species is not a given. We have choices to make. Your work is extremely invaluable to awakening to what we are within the wider context of things and how do we make the choice for connectivity. And thank you for bringing up the panpsychic position, to hold that position. There's a deep consciousness flowing throughout every level of life. So our task, and I've always felt that our crisis today is a deeply religious one. made God into a brain object and we've lost that deep relationality of that living presence of God within us. I'm going to ask you for your final word to our listeners. What would be the message you want to leave?

Iain: Well, I'd say don't be, don't despair in the face of things that look pretty grim. I think if only a smallish group of people really understood that what is required is not just doing things, important as doing things is, but a change of heart and mind. And that that change must involve, I believe, the embracing of the idea of a divine cosmos. I often think of Soros in its sins, many things that he said, but one was that the reason that things have got so grim in the 20th century, and in which so many dehumanizing horrors occurred was because, as he put it, man has forgotten God. 

And I think that unless we remember God and take the values and directional nature of life that comes from the existence of God, it will be pointless trying to save the oceans or saving the forests. I mean, don't get me wrong. The massive undertaking, preserving and restoring, are doing marvellous work. But on their own, they aren't enough. On every level, we need a change in how we think about what a human being is, what we're doing here in this world, and what is life. I think that you can argue that life is a very odd thing for the universe to have come up with. First of all, it's extremely expensive on energy, and for a while it has to buck the trend of the second law of thermodynamics. 

And this is a very odd thing to have happened just for, as we're, just chaotic things happening. I believe there is a direction here. And what is happening is that the cosmos, or God, or the ground of being, or whatever, is calling forth in the cosmos something that is capable of reflecting that ground to itself so that it enters into greater knowledge of what it can do and create and integrate a knowledge of what it itself is. Now that may be, it's white-headian, it may be a little unconventional, and I know Rowan Williams tends to dislike my suggesting that even God can be in process. I think he's happier when I say in the case of God alone, all things are possible and that God can be within time and within process and at the same time eternal and unchanging. These are different aspects that God can have and that this is to do with the creative desire to spread love, truth, good and beauty. But that sounds very glib but I've written about these things at some length so if people are interested they can, I suggest, pick up The Matter with Things.

Ilia: Well, Iain, honestly, it's been wonderful speaking with you.

Robert: Many thanks to Iain McGilchrist for joining us. Coming up, we continue exploring the relationship between consciousness and matter with Terence Deacon, neuroanthropologist, and author of Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. A special thanks to the Fetzer Institute and our team at the Center for Christogenesis. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.