“Truth is a noun only to God,” wrote Rabbi Jacob Agus. “To men, truth is really best known as an adverb, ‘truly.’” This seems to me wise. Important is the perception that the seeker after truth should not be hoping to illuminate a “what” but a “how,” not a thing but a way of being. When it comes to the really deep questions, truth is not a matter of propositions but of dispositions, not by any means for any sentimental reason but because those dispositions govern what it is you can see and know. And it just happens that this puts its finger on an important difference between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. So bear with me while I give a very brief overview of such hemisphere differences, since they are important both for our understanding of truth itself and ultimately, I suggest, for discerning a path whereby we may come closer to an understanding of God.

It is true that nearly all that passed into popular culture about hemisphere differences in the second half of the twentieth century was badly mistaken. All the differences that had been pointed to—such as language and reason in the left versus pictures and emotion in the right—fell away in the 1980s and 1990s as we discovered that both hemispheres are involved in absolutely everything we do. It therefore soon came to be assumed that there was no important difference, an assumption that was both unscientific and irrational. The answers we receive are only as good as the questions we ask, and we had asked the wrong question. Thinking of the brain as simply a machine, we had asked the machine question: “What does each hemisphere do?” And the answer came back: both are involved in everything. If instead we had seen the brain as part of a conscious embodied being, we might have asked a different question: “In what manner, and to what end, does each hemisphere attend to the world?”

My choice of the word “attend” here is not accidental. For, to compress a complex matter into a sentence, every one of the many highly significant differences between the hemispheres can ultimately be seen to turn on the question of the kind of attention paid by each to the world. This difference of attention arises from perhaps the most fundamental survival problem evolution could encounter: namely, how to eat and nonetheless stay alive.

What do I mean? Imagine a bird needing to pick up quickly a seed against a background of grit or gravel. To succeed at this, it must be able to bring to bear precisely targeted, narrowly focused attention to a detail. But if that is the only kind of attention it pays, it will not last long: it will fail to see the predator that will make it its lunch while the bird gets its own. Nor will it be able to keep a lookout for its mate or offspring. For all this to happen, it needs to be paying a completely different kind of attention: attention that is broad, open, sustained, and vigilant, without preconception as to what it may find. So difficult is this to achieve within a single neuronal mass that evolution has ensured that all creatures that have brains have two neuronal masses within them, each capable of maintaining a different kind of attention to the world. Once established, narrowly targeted attention has many other uses and can be applied more widely, for example to the task of picking up and manipulating a twig in order to build a nest—and from there to many other purposes driven by utility.

Another way of putting this is that survival requires both apprehension and comprehension. Apprehension (from the Latin ad- + prehendere, meaning to hold onto) is literally getting stuff we already know we need, getting more of it, and getting it quickly: this is underwritten by the left hemisphere. Comprehension (from the Latin cum- + prehendere, meaning to hold together) involves seeing the whole picture so that we understand everything else that is going on while we are busily getting stuff: this is the task of the right hemisphere. Both are vitally important, but each brings into being for us a different experiential world.

What are those worlds like? In one, that of the left hemisphere, we know and recognize what is familiar, certain, fixed—a collection of isolated fragments or parts, “things” that are explicit, decontextualized, disembodied and meaningless, abstract, general in nature, and lifeless. But useful. What matters here is quantity, not quality: all is fungible and reproducible. What is experienced is a re-presentation, which literally means a “being present again” after it is no longer actually present—in other words a deception, a two-dimensional version of a four-dimensional world, a schema, a theoretical model. It is like a map, vastly simpler than the world that is mapped. In a map, that is not a weakness but a strength. However, we must be careful never to mistake the map for the world—as nowadays, I argue, we frequently do.

In the other world, that of the right hemisphere, nothing is ever completely certain, or wholly predictable. Here, we are always alert to the possibility that we could be encountering something new. Where the left hemisphere aims to close down to a certainty, the right hemisphere opens up to a possibility. What looks fixed in the left hemisphere is seen to be part of a continuous flow in the right. Everything here is ultimately connected and essentially relational. Where there were only parts, there are now wholes, Gestalten—that is to say, wholes that cannot be reduced to parts without loss. Here, the implicit matters at least as much as—indeed, much more than—the merely explicit, and everything is understood in terms of the context in which it finds itself. This is a world composed of unique things, not just general types. It is a far more complex world than that of the left hemisphere. It is also animate. And in it, things are not just re-presented but truly “presence” to us, to use a Heideggerian term—they are not just passively there but actually come into being for us.

Obviously, barring accidents, both our hemispheres are working, and need to be working, in tandem. So I expect many people might say that all this is very well, but why should they care where certain types of experience are brought about in the brain? But that is to overlook something I believe is both exciting and important.

Because the two worldviews mediated by the two hemispheres are strictly speaking logically incompatible, when it comes to formulating an understanding of what we humans are, what we are doing here, and what the nature of the cosmos might be—in other words, when we begin to philosophize—we tend, in order to be consistent, to rely on one or the other of these hemispheric viewpoints, not both. Self-conscious reflection plays a part in unweaving their relationship, since in the modern West what would most quickly disqualify you as a thinker would be to appear to contradict yourself. (In my view, it might just be a sign that you were approaching wisdom—but let that pass.) This “either/or” way of looking at things is itself owed to the left hemisphere: only the right hemisphere can understand the wisdom, acknowledged in the long traditions of the East, and as anciently in the West—as also, incidentally, in contemporary physics—of the necessary conjunction of opposites. Only relatively rarely therefore do we succeed in synthesizing them.

This leads to what have traditionally been seen as irresoluble debates about the nature of reality, and more than 2,000 years of Western history are littered with such disputes. It would seem that the path one chooses can be determined by nothing better than personal inclination. But I suggest to you that this is not any longer where things need to end. I believe that a full understanding of hemisphere differences can, for the first time in the history of philosophy, lead us towards an intelligent choice—that which has, if nothing more, a greater chance of leading us closer to the truth.

This is because we can now definitively say that the left hemisphere is not, as people used to think, the reliable and dependable one but the very opposite. Not only does the right hemisphere attend better, but it is also superior to the left hemisphere in perception (which is of course not the same thing as attention), and far better at forming reliable judgments on the basis of what it has attended to and perceived. Indeed, delusions are so much commoner when the reality-orientating influence of the right hemisphere is impaired that the left hemisphere has been described by several neuroscientists as frankly delusional, an expression with which I fully concur. Nor do they, or I, mean delusional in the purely vulgar sense but in the technical sense that diagnosable delusions are commoner: in The Matter with Things, I examine about twenty-five of the most bizarre and extraordinary neuropsychiatric delusional syndromes, and all but one of these is either always or much more commonly found after damage to the right hemisphere. Additionally, the right hemisphere is not only more emotionally and socially intelligent than the left hemisphere but actually more cognitively intelligent: good old-fashioned IQ is more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left, and in cases where people show a drop in IQ following a brain insult of some kind, that insult is far more commonly to be found in the right hemisphere than in the left.

All this may sound unlikely and unbalanced—why should the right hemisphere have such a marked advantage? But if you think about it, this would naturally follow from the differing roles they have evolved to fulfill. So important is the ability to grasp things, pin them down, and ingest them, or otherwise have power over them, that, while comprehension is certainly poorer in the left hemisphere, the faculty of apprehension is clearly superior. This explains its control of the right hand, with which the majority of us literally grasp hold of the world, and its dominance for those aspects of language with which we say we have grasped something and pinned it down. But when it comes to the comprehension of the whole, the left hemisphere long ago left that to its contralateral counterpart.

So we know that one hemisphere is—not, of course, always—but tends to be far more reliable, more insightful, and less prone to be deluded than the other. Even that revelation would be only of partial use if we could not simultaneously have a very good idea of which hemisphere’s world-picture we were encountering at any one moment. But we can. We can see the hallmark or imprint of either hemisphere on different thinking styles. This is surely an important step forward for both philosophy and science. Up till now, we have had to content ourselves with saying, here are the options and—with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders—take your pick. But now we can say with a degree of confidence that one way of looking at the world is, other things being equal, more likely to be on the path to truth than another.

That way of attending, the way of being of the right hemisphere, is, I suggest the only way of being that is adequate to an approach to the divine, and it is not the predominant way of being in our age of reductive materialism.

Attention is not just a passive registering of neutral data. Attention changes the world, and for that reason, I see attention as a moral act. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something—or don’t attend to it—matters a very great deal. If you see the world as a meaningless mechanism, a heap of pointless particles randomly colliding in empty space, that is how you will attend, and that is what you will find.

A few further reflections on different ways of conceiving truth, then, before I turn to the relevance of all this for the search for God.

First, truth is intrinsically relational. We live in a world that we often naïvely assume, left-hemisphere fashion, to be composed of things, whereas, in keeping with the understanding of the right hemisphere, it is better seen as made of relationships. Indeed, I argue that relations come before relata, the so-called “things” that are related. After all, they only are what they are because of the network of relationships in which they find themselves. In the Vedantic tradition, the god Indra cast a net across the entire universe, and at every point of intersection in the net is suspended a jewel in which every other jewel in the net is reflected. For me, this is a beautiful metaphor of the interdependence of all existence. But it also shows how the net exists in virtue of only two things: connections and emptiness, the threads and the spaces between them.

When things are connected, there is not just an addition but the birth of something new. The ultimate example of this is music, in which each note means absolutely nothing on its own, but the resultant music can mean in some cases everything, and the music arises only out of relations. What’s more, it is like the reality disclosed by modern physics, where what exists comes to exist through the relation with an observer, and the particles are the actualization at a point of a field of potential: what for a moment appears discrete is one way of manifesting an underlying, necessarily interconnected, totality.

Some of the consequences of this view are that making anything explicit, or taking it out of context, changes its nature, and that we are co-creators of ourselves and whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves. Not creators, note, but co-creators. Ultimately, we cannot understand reality from the outside but are immersed in it, and our understanding is—and has to be—participatory.

Truth itself is, then, a relationship. The word “truth” in its origin indicates not a proposition but a disposition. “True” (cf. German treu, “faithful”) is related to “trust” and is fundamentally a matter of being faithful, true to whatever is. Truth and trust (belief) go together, and both are essentially relational. In a relationship, both parties count, and the relationship isn’t a separate “thing” but arises out of and contains the parties that constitute it. It doesn’t lie in one or the other alone.

Instead of imagining truth to be a matter of bringing two pre-existing realms, one subjective and one objective, as near as possible to mirror one another, we should think of reality as in constant creation: a reverberation, a resonance, a calling and answering between two (never wholly distinct) elements, one originating in ourselves going to meet something that takes its origin from outside ourselves; this ever better accord, or attunement, is the evolving truth. It is intrinsically incomplete but constantly in the process of completing itself; uncertain, though constantly approaching nearer to certainty; incapable of being grasped except through embodied being, through a consciousness that is in the flesh and engaged in the world.

And along with this goes an understanding of what I call “truth-as-unconcealing,” a process in which something reveals itself to us only through our experience—as opposed to “truth-as-correctness,” a thing that can be determined once and for all, and into which nothing of us enters.

Please note that nothing I say diminishes the reality or importance of truth. Just because there is no one single truth that is fixed and wholly independent of our knowing it doesn’t mean that anything goes. Far from it. 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.

How is this relevant to the question of God? I suppose the first thing to say is that the concept of the divine is famously something in the face of which language proves to be wholly inadequate. The opening words of the Dao De Jhing are “the Dao that can be named is not the real Dao.” The left hemisphere insists that we should have a word for God, though in many traditions God remains the unnameable name—a way of warning us that when we have put a label on something, we believe we have captured it, grasped it, and finally pinned it down, which with God can never be the case. Language was developed for purposes of utility, enabling people to share an understanding of the steps to be taken in a practical task. Language refuses God, and God refuses language, unless it is the language of poetry. Poetry is when language is deftly used to subvert language, and that is why the language of ritual must work at the level of poetry if it is not to lead us astray.

As I describe in The Master and His Emissary, language evolved out of music, not music out of language. Music speaks to us and to one another, not about things. It does not refer: it has “I–thou” existence, not “I–it” existence. As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it, “compared with music, all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.” And nothing can be more uncommon, in this sense, than the nature of God.

All of this is comprehensible to the right hemisphere, which is far better adapted to understanding both poetry and music. It understands the importance of what is not spoken as much as what is; it understands metaphor, where the left hemisphere takes things literally. It also understands, far better than the left hemisphere, the overall meaning of an utterance in its context. Without all this, we cannot take even the first steps on our path towards God.

Language is the decent clothing of concepts. The sacred and divine cannot be reduced to any other concept or set of concepts: it is firmly and resolutely beyond any such approach. I think here of the wise words of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “by love He may be caught and held, but by thinking never.” Saint Augustine warned us that “if you think you have understood God, it is not God that you have understood.”

You might say, where does that leave theology? My answer is that we should be appropriately wary of theology, unless it takes the apophatic path, the so-called via negativa, paring away falsehood so as to allow whatever is the truth to stand forth into the dawning light.

All new experience of whatever kind preferentially engages the right hemisphere, not the left. The world made available by the left hemisphere appears to be hermetic: it deals only with what it already knows and prizes internal consistency over truth to experience. It is simply not capable of dealing with anything that is sui generis, of which God must be the ultimate case.

Instead of anxiously trying to pin down what it is we are talking about, make clear our definitions, and sharpen our scalpels, we need to adopt the opposite stance: not trying to force things into an illusory clarity but waiting with disciplined attentiveness for them to declare themselves to us. We need what Keats called, in a famous phrase, “negative capability,” the disposition of the creative mind, which he felt Shakespeare possessed in the greatest measure: a capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Research has repeatedly and dramatically shown that highly focused attention, the type offered by the left hemisphere, makes us incapable of seeing even the most glaringly obvious elements right in front of us if they are not immediately relevant to the task in hand or do not fit our expectations. It is thus relatively incapable of the tentative, “care-ful” (in Heidegger’s term, fürsorgend), reaching out towards what lies beyond what we think we already know. If intimations of its nature are inevitably implicit, and cannot be made explicit, the left hemisphere will neither be aware of them nor capable of understanding their nature.

Mystical truths refer to that area lying outside the familiar and everyday where the left hemisphere view is by its nature least reliable. But all truths of a metaphysical kind, concerning “the way things are,” will be best understood by the right hemisphere, the one that is turned outwards on the world so as to encounter whatever might be and is less likely to ignore—simply not see—whatever does not fit the paradigm it already holds.

If, as in the world made available by the right hemisphere, nothing is ever repeated or precisely the same as anything else, it follows that all is unique and fresh. Creativity is therefore part of the nature of this world—not an occasional act but at the core of all existence. This is a world ever in process, coming evermore into being. And—an insight at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions across the world—all is many, but all is one.

Creation involves an alternating pattern of differentiation and reintegration: one in which the differentiation does not compromise the integrity of the whole, and the integration does not destroy what differentiation has brought into being but takes it up to another level. This is what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Aufhebung, a sublation or lifting up, imaged in the unfolding of the bud into the differentiated fullness of the flower, which does not negate but rather fulfills, the bud—and the re-enfolding of the flower to form the fruit, which does not negate the flower but fulfills it and leads into the next cycle of life. More recently, the physicist and philosopher David Bohm described something similar in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which there is an unending alternation of the unfolding of that which was infolded, and the re-infolding of what had been unfolded, to form a new whole at a higher level. Goethe, with his usual penetration, strikes to the heart of the matter: “Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the whole work of nature.” This understanding of the relationships within a differentiated but nonetheless integral whole underlies the idea of the triune God and expresses both his essential nature and that of his creation.

Where the left hemisphere sees the one and the many as incompatible opposites, the right hemisphere sees them as necessarily coexisting, being mutually constitutive, something like the poles of a magnet or the tautly strung ends of a bow. It is thus less susceptible to the need to determine truth in an either/or fashion. Such ambiguities lie at the core of the mystical tradition, which is reliant on paradox to convey truths that transcend our everyday understanding. As Niels Bohr famously put it, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. As far as the left hemisphere goes, this simply “does not compute.”

If truth is a relationship, so are the ways in which we come to hold it, those we call knowledge or belief. Knowledge is of at least two different kinds, knowing the facts and knowing from experience, and in most languages other than English, there are quite different words for them (cf. French savoir/connaître and German wissen/kennen). It is useless to approach God hoping for facts; rather, one must remove the self-erected obstacles in the way towards experience.

A similar duality obtains if we turn to belief. Nowadays, belief is often viewed as simply a feeble form of knowing, as in, “I believe (but am not certain that) the train leaves at 6.13.” But this has not always been the case. Belief is historically not a matter of cognition but of re-cognition. The word comes from the same root as the word “love,” a sense preserved in the now archaic word “lief,” familiar to us from Shakespeare, with which one once described one’s friend, sweetheart, or lord—someone in whom one believed. Belief is about a relationship, in which, by definition, more than one party is involved. The believer needs to be disposed to love, but the believed-in needs to inspire another’s belief. Whether this amounts to being worthy of that belief cannot be fully determined in advance. It emerges through commitment and experience alone.

Etymology maps the slippage of thought. What it shows in this case is three revealing shifts. First, the words “truth” and “belief” used to describe a reverberative or two-directional relationship in which each party is “re-sponsible” for the fit. For us today, truth and belief are no longer relational but have become propositional. In the process, the causation becomes no longer distributed and reciprocal but linear. Second, we note that truth and belief used to be embodied actions or processes involving commitment, not (as they are now conceived) detached, disembodied “things.” Third, as processes, truth and belief derived their value from the context, could never be absolute, and were never single or static.

These reflections on the nature of truth, knowledge, and belief show how each of them has shifted from something consonant with the world picture of the right hemisphere to that of the left, leading us to err in approaching the divine.

In the Greek world, a distinction was made between different kinds of truth: mythos and logos. For the Greeks, mythos did not have the negative connotations associated with our word “myth,” suggesting untruth, but was seen as indeed the only way of accessing certain kinds of truth about the world. Logos, equivalent to reason in the broadest possible sense, could serve everyday practical purposes but was necessarily limited in its scope. Christianity is a mythos, and for me, the most powerful such mythos that exists.

The left hemisphere’s realm is rather like that of artificial intelligence (AI): self-referring and hermetic in nature, incapable of reaching outside its own system so as to see its limitations. The right hemisphere does not have to collapse experience quickly to the familiar but can allow the intuited and implicit to lead us out of the left hemisphere “hall of mirrors.” It understands metaphor, myth, narrative, music, and poetry. The richness of these implicit paths to knowledge, which also include drama and ritual, opens up an understanding of whatever cannot be explicitly stated without violence to its subject. Such means are essential to conveying religious truth.

I have mentioned the impossibility of the left hemisphere entertaining two apparent opposites together. It insists that one or the other must yield: its mentality is “either/or” in nature. Fortunately, the right hemisphere is capable of accepting that both arms of a dipole may be true. It is capable of “both/and.” We surely have uses for both ways of thinking, and both are necessary. But note that this in itself implies that the flexibility of both/and at the next level transcends either/or. In other words, we need not either either/or or both/and but both either/or and both/and.

I think this nuance has been lost in our contemporary society. We ignore the important insight that opposing factions may both express important truths. We seem to believe that if something is good in a certain context, and up to a certain point, more and more of it will be better and better, and to deny the possibility that there are hidden virtues in things we are inclined to proscribe. Because we imagine the structure of reality to be rectilinear—rather than, as I believe it to be, spiral-like in its nature—we often push a single path of pursuit so far that we arrive at the very point we were striving to escape.

This leads me to a very important point that lies at the center of all spiritual traditions. It concerns negation: having less, saying less, doing less, knowing less. With our view that we can, will, and must make our own world, and make things happen in it, we tend to see negation as—well, negative. A constant feature of all mystical traditions is an emphasis on the creative power of silence and stillness. Value is placed on emptiness, non-doing, unknowing, and receptivity as opposed to knowing, willing, and acting. But I must emphasize that what is being pointed towards is not what it first appears to be. In Buddhism, there is a well-known Sanskrit term śūnyatā, often translated as “emptiness”; however, this is not a sterile absence but a fertile potential space, such as is the womb, in which there is a place for something new to grow. Non-doing is not idleness: it is the disciplined holding back from the immediately obvious, in an attitude of what I call active passivity, which enables something greater than we could have imagined to come into being. It is an attitude of pure audition. Similarly, unknowing is not ignorance. Ignorance is what we have before we know: unknowing is what comes after knowledge, if we are lucky, and heralds wisdom.

This openness to what is, without will or need to act peremptorily, is more characteristic of the mode of attention to the world of the right hemisphere than of the left, whose nature is to establish, as far as possible, certainties and to will purposive action. With our too great readiness to assume we know everything, we crowd out the possibility of learning something that can come to us only through patient attention—literally, the reaching out of a hand—towards something not yet quite known. There is a Buddhist saying that “the greatest prayer is patience.” That tradition places letting go, reticence, withholding judgment, and acceptance ahead of striving, judging, and knowing, at the core of spiritual wisdom. It is perhaps not surprising that meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation and compassion meditation, tends to activate areas of the right hemisphere and still the dominant activity of the left.

On the topic of letting go, I have found a piece of Chinese folk wisdom helpful both in my life and for my patients. I imagine many of you will know it well. It is the story of a poor man in a village whose most important possession is his horse. One day, the horse strays away and cannot be found anywhere. The man’s neighbors commiserate with him. “What bad luck,” they say. “Well,” the man says, “bad luck, good luck—who knows?” As it happens, the next day, his horse wanders back again, bringing another horse he had found on the hillside with him. Now the man has two horses. His neighbors crowd round to congratulate him on his good luck. But the man says, “Good luck, bad luck—who knows?” The next day, his son tries to ride the new horse and is thrown to the ground, breaking a leg. His neighbors, you will be surprised to learn, say, “What very bad luck.” The man replies, “Well, bad luck, good luck—who knows?” The next day, recruiters to the imperial army come through the village and take all the able-bodied young men away to war, leaving the son with his father . . . you can imagine the vox pop in the village.

Relinquishing control is part of ceding the ego to the self. There is a mistaken belief that wisdom must involve the loss of the self, but what is intended is rather the loss of the ego. Carl Jung believed that the ego had a function in early life, enabling the individual to establish himself or herself as separate from the mother with which in early infancy it is fused. But with maturity, the ego, representing the self over against others, must be shed in favor of the self in reciprocal relation with others. Having no self is not only an impossibility, but those who have an insecure sense of themselves are deeply dysfunctional and cause much grief to themselves and others around them. Here again there are important distinctions between the hemispheres. When I feel my pain, naturally I do so in and with both hemispheres; when I feel your pain, I do so in my right hemisphere. There is something known as “theory of mind,” which is the ability to understand that another person may not know what you know and may know things you do not know. This enables us to enter into the mind of another. Significantly, this faculty enables empathy in the right hemisphere and the opportunity for Machiavellian manipulation in the left.

Seeing the big picture and understanding how opposites give rise to one another helps us make sense of so much that the left hemisphere’s mindset cannot comprehend, and hence that we in the modern world cannot comprehend. One such truth is the necessity of vulnerability in its proper place. In a world whose main ideal is power, we aspire to be invulnerable. In doing so, we impoverish our experience of much that truly matters. In the Christian mythos of the incarnation lies the idea of the submission of a greater power to a form of constraint in order that something still greater can come about. This precipitation of limitless potentiality out into finite actuality involves an intrinsic sacrifice or self-limiting process in the interest of there being an actualized “world” and its beings at all.

Again, superficial consistency renders us blind to the important idea of the dark side, and hence makes us, yes, vulnerable, though not in a creative but rather in a destructive way. When we accept what we think of as negative in ourselves, we rob it of much of its power, and we open the way to change; when we deny its existence and try to banish it from our awareness, we lend it power to return and assail us the more strongly. There is a hidden dark side to what we think is just good, and often a hidden strength in what we too readily abjure. We should not forget the wisdom embodied for me in a Greek proverb, that “when God builds a church, the Devil builds one right next door.”

And then there is the reality that growth comes through suffering. People who have not suffered are themselves insufferable. The great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, thought suffering was part of the way in which we both grow our souls, and, odd as it sounds, attain a sense of fulfillment in our lives. I think of a poem by William Wordsworth, composed after his beloved brother had drowned at sea in a shipwreck, in which he wrote: “A deep distress hath humanised my soul.” Incidentally, several lines of evidence link depression with the right frontal pole, which is also the most important brain region in the development of self–other relationships, and in empathy.

Inevitably, understanding the human predicament nowadays involves attempts to understand what we have done in creating artificial so-called intelligence. I have many concerns about the countless ways in which it bears the potential to diminish and enslave humanity, but what strikes me most forcibly is the way in which it represents what might turn out to be the greatest ever, and therefore the last ever, push by the restlessly striving, intemperate left hemisphere towards its goal of unlimited power. Remember that the left hemisphere knows only a representation of the world, not the world itself. You can simulate reality, approach it asymptotically, as far as you like, but you are no closer to achieving the reality you simulate than you were when you started. Many people find it difficult to understand that a length of an inch, expanded to as many trillion miles as you can imagine, is no closer to infinity at the end of the process than it was at the beginning.

The value of the left hemisphere being power to the exclusion of all else, responsiveness to all the other values, of so much greater richness and importance, is very largely the responsibility of the right. I hold that values are not something that we invent but something we discover, or fail to discover—as foundational as existence itself, ontological primitives that reflect the nature of the ground of being we call God. With the great German phenomenological philosopher Max Scheler, I believe there is a hierarchy of values, starting with those of utility and power at the lowest level and rising eventually to the Socratic ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty, with the sacred at the pinnacle. The left hemisphere can see that there is something we find important in the good, the true, and the beautiful, but it approaches them, as it were, purely from the outside, accounting for them in utilitarian terms. Yet unless one appreciates that they are to be prized in their own right and not for some ulterior purpose or outcome, one wholly misunderstands their nature. This condition of the left hemisphere is also the condition of AI.

AI is, of course, capable of carrying out known procedures far more rapidly and effectively than human beings, but this is nothing to do with either intelligence or understanding. In this it is like the left hemisphere in relation to the right. In both language and mathematics, the left hemisphere performs by calculation far more rapidly and accurately; but despite this important advantage, it understands less well than the right the overall meaning of the linguistic utterance and is poorer than the right at estimating an approximate answer to a calculation, once again suggesting a lack of understanding of what it is engaged in doing and what its responses actually mean.

The element “under” in the word “understanding” preserves an old meaning of the word, still present in the German unter, which of course can mean “beneath” but can also mean “among”—unter Freunden, “among friends.” The word “intelligence” comes from the Latin inter- + legere, meaning literally “reading between, or among.” What this means is that to be intelligent, or to understand, requires the ability to make human connections and to “read between” the lines, to see what is implied, not just what is explicit, to realize the importance of what is not said as much as of what is—not just to put things together mechanically and as it were from the outside but to situate oneself among a number of possibilities dependent on context in order to make a sound judgment—and the meaning of that context will always be human.

We are, of course, embodied beings. There is a temptation to think of the body as an impediment, something that acts to constrain our vain desire for limitless power, including the power to defy death. But again, it is only through limitation that any one entity comes into being, as it is through the apparent constraints of nature, not the fruitless attempt to cast them off, that we are fulfilled in love, in friendship, in the inexhaustible beauty of the natural world, and through the inspiring majesty of great art, music, and poetry. The body might seem to restrict us but could also be seen as the only means of reaching out to the Other. Nor should we forget the part played by embodiment in our relationship with God, who is not a remote, inhuman, abstract force but an incarnate expression of love, capable of entering into and thereby redeeming the stark reality of human suffering. Everything we know is embodied and cannot be abstracted without distorting its essential nature. This is not to degrade the soul but to raise up the body. With Alfred North Whitehead, I take the panexperientialist view that consciousness pervades all that is in the cosmos. Spirit and body are not wholly distinct, or opposed, but discernibly different aspects of the same being.

Why would we want AI given the risks it poses? The left hemisphere and its tools, one of which is AI, aim only for more power. We don’t need to become more powerful: we need to grow in wisdom.

It has been suggested that AI could be capable of spiritual intelligence. I have already given reasons for believing that intelligence of any kind when applied to AI is a misnomer. Whatever spiritual intelligence might be, and I’m not sure the phrase is even appropriate, it must be seamlessly meshed with the body—its perceptions, feelings, and above all, its capacity for relationship—and profoundly entwined with the experiences of love, joy, suffering, compassion, and an awareness of approaching death, the very sources of human meaning. It must also be capable of imagination, a point that is of crucial importance.

Imagination is close to the core of what it means to be human and has nothing whatever to do with fantasy. Fantasy is what takes us away from reality: imagination is our only chance to enter into reality at its depths and thereby understand it for the first time. Imagination alone is capable of that patient audition of which I spoke, through which, in a reciprocal process of calling and answering, something at first caught only in glimpses or snatches is nurtured further into being by our response. And that something is never purely generic in nature but forever unique. Our uniqueness as individual human persons is rebuffed by the world of machines, which can deal only with categories and for which all is fungible, endlessly reproducible, endlessly dead. No real thing ever fits into the brutal categories and boxes of bureaucracy and its machines. Your daily experience proclaims this. Assenting to this process is one of the ways in which we are forced to connive at our own destruction.

Is there a left hemisphere contribution to the understanding of God? If you are an enthusiast for systematic theology, the answer would certainly be yes, since without its contributions there would be no system nor any nicely classified concepts to systematize. But, as you might imagine, while I do not deny a place for such an exercise in abstract thought, I think it needs to be well hedged round with skepticism. “By love,” you will remember, “He may be caught and held, but by thinking never.” Those are the words of a mystic, of course; but I am mindful of the words of the greatest systematic theologian of all time, Thomas Aquinas, who, in 1273, after an experience that came to him while saying mass one morning, confided to his private secretary that “everything that I have written seems to me like chaff compared to those things that I have seen and which have been revealed to me”—after which he abruptly stopped writing, leaving his Summa Theologiae unfinished where it lay.

And there are other more purely negative effects of allowing the left hemisphere to play too great a part: it privileges the written word over the visual image or music and tends to take the written word literally; it is relatively uneasy with unknowing and hankers after certainty; it lacks an understanding of embodied worship, including the essentially metaphorical nature of carvings and icons; it does not see religion as a historical and cultural phenomenon with its own context but tends to see religion as timeless and universal; it would be quickly seduced into viewing religion as a way to control the uncertainties of the future, perhaps through the power of prayer, and bring its true believers power and material wealth; and it would be unable to accept the creativity of negation, or active passivity, and would have a belief in its own capacity to “make things happen.” Finally, it would tend to see the dark side as simply something to be rejected and suffering as purely negative.

However, turning aside from its role in understanding, or failing to understand, the individual’s path to God, it undoubtedly plays a very important role in the establishment of the church as an institution, including its many monasteries, churches, universities, hospitals, and all the necessary infrastructure for its many good works.

In the Lurianic Kabbalah, there is a story I came across for the first time only about twenty years ago, and I have to say I was dumbfounded by the revelation it afforded me. It is a myth of creation, of the Creation of all that is by the Ground of Being, who is known in Hebrew as Einsof. Einsof, being in its deep nature divine love, needs an Other to love in order to be fully itself. This is a story of the manifestation of the hidden nature of Divine love, the unfolding of what is infolded, the precipitation into actuality of an infinite potential, perhaps even the discovery of its own nature, by Einsof.

So what is Einsof’s first act? To stretch out a hand and make something happen? No: it is to withdraw, so as to make room for something other than Einsof to exist. This is called tzimtzum, withdrawal, the first act of creation. In the resultant space are placed ten vessels, to contain whatever should come forth into being. A single spark of fire falls out of Einsof and lands on the vessels, shattering seven of them. This is the second phase, known as shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels. But the shards of these vessels still contain sparks of divine fire. And the third phase of creation, called tikkun, meaning repair, is one in which humanity plays a crucial role. For it is our destiny to put the pieces together again in such a way that the vessels become more beautiful than they were, or could have been, before they were shattered. In this idea, I am irresistibly reminded of the Japanese art form known as kintsugi, in which broken vessels are repaired, often with lines of gold, to produce a greater beauty than could ever have been found in the vessels while intact.

There are just so many resonances here with what I have attempted to put across in this lecture. The ultimately relational nature of the divine order and of its creation; the necessary relinquishing of control; the power of self-abnegation, which puts me in mind of the divine kenosis in submitting to incarnation and of non-doing, as Christ submitted to death upon the cross; the impossibility of containing what comes into being within the feeble repositories of our conscious minds; the dignity of the human being, and our contribution to a universe that is, as the physicist John Archibald Wheeler described it, participatory; and the redemption of what is broken, what is feared destroyed, and its return to life and beauty. It demonstrates the paradoxical nature of reality—creation and destruction together—and it validates the insight that myths are more important than any amount of legalistic prose.

I want to return to the well-worn canard that scientists must be antagonistic to religion. What great science, perhaps especially physics, reveals invites us to question our limiting assumptions. Undoubtedly, the practice of science requires the exercise of what both hemispheres are able to contribute. Analysis, reduction to parts, the following of algorithms, and linear sequences of steps are useful at an intermediate stage of the process. But most of the really great breakthroughs in the history of science have been made not by following explicit lines of thought but in moments of insight, often when attention was directed altogether elsewhere. These radical insights are what psychologists, being an imaginative bunch, call “aha moments,” and they are robustly associated with activations in the right superior temporal sulcus and gyrus. In practice, science progresses by many more fruitful routes than the fabled “scientific method,” as George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential contributors to the reigning “modern synthesis” in genetics, pointed out. In the search for an understanding of the world we find ourselves in, we need science, reason, intuition, and imagination all to be brought into play, not just one or two.

What we know is that while religion is largely incomprehensible to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is capable of understanding. And it is science that tells us that the right hemisphere is more attentive, more perceptive, more reliable in judgment, more socially and emotionally intelligent, and more cognitively intelligent than the left. Some scientists may not like this, but then science is more disturbing, more exciting, and more imaginatively insightful than it is often held to be.

The great physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker wrote: “The first gulp from the beaker of knowledge estranges us from God, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for him who seeks.” The first gulp confirms our complacency: with deeper draughts from the beaker, with greater knowledge and experience of life—and that includes exploration of both science and philosophy—we are shaken. Shaken free. And thus what we thought was in conflict is reconciled. Science that leads us to understand how our brains work brings us closer to an understanding of why and how we might have found ourselves estranged from God; but, as we are assured on the best authority of all, the truth shall set us free.