The Master and His Emissary

From truly terrible tragedy in his childhood to military service in Korea and the murder of his wife, Michael's personal journey has led him to explore how we can each overcome adversity and rediscover our capacity to belong.

I loved hearing about his Belonging Circles project and not one, but two new books, The Wisdom of Belonging, Remembering Our Place in the Greater Whole, and his autobiographical Traumatized, A Love Story.

And to be honest with you, it's a shame this isn't a video podcast, because if it was, you'd be able to see that Michael looks about 20 years younger than he should.

I just love Michael's enthusiasm for supporting more people to restore that sense of belonging to each other, our ancestors and the natural world that, let's face it, can sometimes seem a little hard to reach these days, but is in fact only ever a heartbeat away.

We carry a lot of pain.

As you're speaking, Michael, I just feel the transmission.

And I love it because I was just reading one of your two new books.

which is From Separation to Belonging, Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science and the Journey Home, which to me is a beautiful integration of the wisdom that you've been, I don't even want to say acquiring because that's the wrong word.

Ian McGilchrist, the British psychologist and philosopher and neuroscientist.

He said, he wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary.

I brought it with me.

I was going to show it to you.

There's a researcher Ian McGilchrist who's done a huge study on this who describes the brain as an organizing and organized into two hemispheres or two modes of regulating information.

The name of his book is The Master and His Emissary.

The master is supposed to be the brain's right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the wholism of personhood as it relates to vitality and humanly to the world.

The emissary, in his understanding, the left brain, is focused on detail, analysis, and rather than connecting to living thoughts, tends to focus on the static, the lifeless, on machines, numbers, abstractions.

Also, we'd love to have you join our community at patreon.com slash neongalactic for early releases, exclusive content, a Discord server, and much else.

For today's show, we're again joined by the exo-academian, Darren King, who as an experiencer, an educator, a podcaster, and now the author of the new book, Beyond Appearances, Transcending the Spacetime Construct.

In this volume, King identifies a number of riffles in an emerging intellectual current that seems bent on undercutting and finally toppling the scientific paradigm of physicalist materialism.

He lays out those strands, profiles the prominent thinkers who best pursue those ideas, then delineates how the re-emerging idealism of today theoretically outperforms mechanistic reductionism.

Crucially, King then explains how idealism accommodates contact with non-human intelligence, the sort long reported by people of every continent and culture, as well as other outlying phenomena, finally making natural the kind of anomalies that leave modern thinkers too often dumbfounded.

We'll explore his book, The Race for UFO Disclosure, Consciousness, Human Evolution, Human Weakness, Politics, Discernment, and More.

If the nature of the universe is holistic and rife with meaning and purpose, how do we break the perverse and brutal habits that become so reflexive when surviving and thriving in this modern world? Welcome, Darren.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm best known for a couple of books that I wrote.

First of all, The Master and His Emissary, and a book called The Matter with Things.

And what I'm really looking at is the influence that the fact that our brain is divided can have on the way in which we look at the world.

So we're not alone in having a divided brain.

inner like a child, that expertise is helpful in some ways and actually the antithesis of what you need.

Have you read The Master and His Emissary? Who wrote it? Ian McGilchrist.

I don't think so.

It talks about...

That book has been of enormous help to me.

The other one that's really, really, it's a tougher read, it's called The Master and His Emissary by somebody called Ian McGilchrist, who's a professor of psychiatry, who originally was an Oxford Don in English.

But those two, and because it's such a hard read, I believe he recognized that and he made an animation, a short animation, which if you dial in Ian McGilchrist, the master in his chemistry, you'll find this animation and it'll be a lot easier to understand what he's talking about.

But when I read that book, it was just like, That was that child I was seeing.

Theo, what's your bonus read for this month?

Oh, a book that I'm currently reading or rather that I just finished and very much enjoyed is The Master and His Emissary by I think you say Ian McGilchrist, which is a part neuroscience, part cultural history book.

It's huge.

The author is trained in both neuroscience and literature and philosophy that makes the argument basically that the development of Western culture can be understood as the competition between the left and right hemisphere of the brain and It's a very ambitious read.

And if I failed at it, I failed doing something worth doing.

And near the end of the Master's Emissary, you say the shape of an individual life in the past had the qualities of a circle.

In my end is my beginning, and in my beginning is my end.

And I wonder, what of you? What has that beginning and end entailed

His books are just extraordinary.

The Master and His Emissary is the first book.

And then he's written this mammoth two-volume work called The Matter with Things.

I mean, there's not a single subject that is not covered in one way or other, very lucidly by him as an author.