Attention and Spiritual Experience

Spiritual Reflections Upon Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary

How Attention Creates Our Worlds

I’ve just got back from a period of annual leave during which I proposed to read some of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. I’ve wanted to read this book for a very long time but have been reluctant to start because I knew it would take a while. Well, I didn’t manage very much during my time off. I just ended up spending time doing other things, many of them family things which were very enjoyable.

But I did read enough to come to realise that this is a very important book. And I have to warn you that I will probably be writing about it for some time to come. I am particularly interested in how McGilchrist’s observations about the human brain and how the nature of things informs the spiritual life. I’d like to begin with a passage about attention.

Before I start, however, for the uninitiated, this book is about the divided nature of the human brain: the left and right hemispheres and how they have different approaches to the world. It’s preposterous to try and summarise what McGilchrist says about this but suffice to say here that the left hemisphere has an apparently more analytical take on the world by which it tends to break things down into their component parts and build them back up again. The right hemisphere is more holistic in its orientation and experiences the world and the things within it - such as people - as entire units that are taken all at once, as it were. McGilchrist’s thesis is that Western Modernity is fundamentally left-brained in its orientation and that this is the cause of so much of our downfall. I’ve not got to that bit yet though. Here’s a quotation on attention:

The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and which those ‘things’ would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world…

(This is the case) not just with the human world, but with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 28