METAPHYSICAL REALITY: Abstract

METAPHYSICAL REALITY
Abstract for 'Academia'

This essay is the preface to a later essay in which I explain how human minds can engage directly with the metaphysical intelligence that informs our physical and mental reality via the concept of a French philosopher, Jacques Lacan, of 'jouissance'.
Amongst quantum physicists it is now a commonplace that the fundamental order of our perceptible universe is information. This allows many variants of reality to exist.
Religions commonly describe the creator of our reality as God.
They are puzzled to explain God's inability to curb our capacity for evil; for sexual depravity, of which cruelty is a major part; for attempting to exterminate entire tribes and nations; for the very real risk of exterminating ourselves. This is an urgent problem.
In a recently much applauded book, 'The Master and His Emissary', a British psychiatrist, Ian McGilchrist, attempts to solve this problem by identifying the source of human emotions as the right hemisphere of the human brain.
It is the right hemisphere, he claims, that learns and remembers the cultural and their social habits of different historically evolved groups. It is essential for their longevity.
He calls this hemisphere a 'Master'. It knows what is safe.
His 'Emissary' is the left hemisphere. It likes to question.
McGilchrist then argues that questioning by the Emissaries of the habits of the Masters leads to social division, cultural dysfunction, conflicts: ultimately, to wars.
His solution is simple: silence the Emissaries; never question the Masters.
This is surprisingly familiar. This is simply Orwell's 'Duckspeak' in 1984.
In several earlier essays - and in letters to my friends - I have suggested that when describing our inheritance of many physical and social characteristics of apes, Darwin failed or carefully omitted to suggest that we have inherited much of their emotional behaviour too.
Emotions drive behaviour. Our right hemisphere is highly emotional. The left is less passionate. It favours romantic love. The right favours possession: sex pure.
Inhuman behaviour is generally recognised as being primarily emotional
It is common is to describe anyone in uncontrollable rage as 'going ape'.
The typical response of the right hemisphere to any real or any imagined threat to any of its established habits and sense of security will be highly emotional: and inhuman.
It will attempt to attack the supposed enemy with the aim of destroying it utterly: of exterminating every man, woman, child, every infant, of seeding the earth with poison, even if this means killing its own people, even if it means killing itself.
This is illogical aggression. This is typical ape behaviour. The right hemisphere, the Master, can behave as if the left hemisphere, its Emissary, does not exist. It cannot listen.
This is why the Master is such a fool.
And this is why we are closer to exterminating ourselves today than in 1984.
The only way to prevent this terminally suicidal behaviour is to persuade every young Emissary - even aged only eleven - that the knowledge and practice of jouissance can unite human minds with the metaphysical intelligence that orders the physical universe, has a care for every human self, known to religions as soul, and that is itself known by religions as God.
I shall explain in my next essay how to do this.

Colin Hannaford,
Oxford, UK