Below is an abridged extract from an interview with Iain McGilchrist conducted in July 2016. In this short excerpt Iain McGilchrist explains the importance of his question, and why a good education should be ‘maximally irrelevant’.

KP: Given the time you have spent researching and theorising about how humans interact with the world,  would you be able to distil your main concerns into a question that you think it is particularly important for people to be asking themselves?

IM: The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing? Not, what is it that my culture is banging on about – let me see if I can jump on that bandwagon, but let me see how disruptive and controversial I can be. What I mean is standing a lot of that stuff up on its head. Accepting that there is no truth, however good, that is always true in all circumstances. Or that can be taken so far that it doesn’t become a danger or a problem. Built into every truth is a hidden untruth, and it’s our job to uncover those. So, adopting that attitude to received wisdom – inverting it – and asking what is it that is hidden from me, is terribly important…

KP: Might you be able to offer an example?

IM: A very obvious one in the UK would of course be religious belief. A lot of people now think that religious beliefs are not beliefs that anyone very intelligent or well educated could possibly hold. This is patently untrue. I suppose another is the absolutely rigid view of the life sciences that the model that reveals truth about living things, is the mechanical one. It is just taken for granted by many in the biological sciences that everything is treated as a mechanism – though physics has long discovered that everything cannot be treated as a mechanism. That is an example of a dogma that cannot be questioned in the mainstream academy. If you do, you are branded as a bit odd or eccentric. 

KP: Would Rupert Sheldrake be a good example of this, his TED talk was initially banned for questioning scientific orthodoxy?

IM: Yes exactly. One would have thought that the whole purpose of science was to look at things from a different point of view, and be able to see what it is that one is not seeing. It is no secret that science is an establishment that rewards people who toe the line.

KP: Where then should we look for the answer the question you pose?

IM: There are a number of ways. It seems to me that education has become more and more about exam passing. And exam passing is more and more about saying certain things that people find important. It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct. So all the things that people assume are right, try and argue and find reasons why it might not be right. To be trained in school to argue passionately for something that you believe in, and then to argue just as passionately against it.  I think teachers should be subversive, they should be constantly subversive. Why are children bored? Because they are not being made to think. We are boring children, which is a sin. And we’re creating not very good citizens for the future, because they need to be able to think in the round. To think flexibly. And not to be so sure of their opinions that they can shout down people at universities because they don’t like their opinions.  Education shouldn’t be confirming what children are already believing – in that sense the worst possible philosophy is that education should be relevant. It should be maximally irrelevant. It should not aim to tell them all the things they are hearing outside school all over again, but it should be making them think about all the things that people in other times, in other places, believed. Not in the sense of ‘well, they were stupid and didn’t know what we know’, but in a respectful way. One of the things that impresses me is how fantastically insightful people living 2000 years ago were. How in their relatively short lifespans, they were able to accomplish so much. To find people like that nowadays, would be very, very difficult. So to benefit from the all-round wisdom of ancient scholars, because if we don’t understand the history of ideas, we don’t understand our own ideas. There is no context from which to gain perspective on our views. If you’re too close to them, you can’t see them.  If you’re too close to them, you don’t see the background against which to set them, which would automatically begin to mould them, to temper them, and to bring up contraries to them.

So as far as I am concerned, the absolutely key thing is to look for what it is that we may be missing, not for all the things that people are saying. It’s not until you consider other people’s truths that you begin to see how complex truth is, and you begin to doubt your immediate reactions – and that is the beginning of wisdom, when you start doubting the truths that you held.

This interview was conducted early in 2017 in the West London Synagogue

KP Could I begin by asking how this question has animated and influenced you over the years?

JN I think I need to go back and say that I grew up in a family surrounded by different forms of activism. My grandmother was responsible for getting quite a lot of refugees – Jewish refugees and other refugees – from Germany and Austria into Britain. One of the things she always said was that you haven’t got long on this earth, and so you have got to make the best use of it. Of course, that’s a very Jewish way of thinking because we’re not terribly good on the afterlife, in fact we’re pretty rubbish. Certainly we don’t have a well-developed sense of the afterlife – contemplation of it is not a major part of Judaism. Judaism focuses on this world, with sayings like ‘if you save a single life it is as if you have saved the whole world’ – that kind of thing is very strong within Judaism…So I suppose before I knew where the thinking lay, it was almost as if it was part of my DNA because that’s just what I grew up with.

I think I always felt that just doing what you absolutely must do, isn’t enough. Even as a kid I used to volunteer. I volunteered for an organisation where I was visiting isolated elderly people, and I got very involved in issues about poverty and hunger and so on while I was still at school. It was a sense of, you can’t just do your homework – that’s just not enough! I have an interest in music and I play the violin extremely badly – I mean really, really, really, badly. But from quite an early age at school I was encouraged to go to concerts, and I remember battling with my dad about whether I could go to concerts instead of synagogue on Saturday mornings. In the process music began to matter to me hugely, and it wasn’t because I was doing it for an exam of any sort – it just made me explore some ideas about what was really possible in life, and wonder how people were able to do these amazing things. So from quite early on I thought, you can’t just use your spare time for watching movies or reading rubbish novels – you’ve actually got to get your head around the great novels, the great musical works or whatever, and you’ve got to get involved with some kind of social activism.

KP You indicated that social action and spending time with those who are suffering gives you some perspective, can you tell me – what has your own involvement taught you about why you’re here, what kind of perspective has it given you?

JN I really started spending time with people who were suffering and dying at the very end of my time at university, then during my time training to be a Rabbi. When I was a student Rabbi with a congregation that didn’t have another Rabbi, I did spend time with people who were dying for the first time. It taught that almost everybody who is dying has regrets about what they haven’t done. They largely (at least in my case which may be totally idiosyncratic), don’t have many regrets about what they have done, but they do have regrets about what they didn’t do. Often, they have very real regrets about things they didn’t learn, places they didn’t visit, books they didn’t read or whatever. And what it teaches you is that you need to fill your life with as much as you can, so you have as few of those regrets as you can – so all passions are spent, as it were. You won’t succeed, and the younger you are to die, the less likely you are to succeed, but do all the things you want to do – don’t say, ‘I’ll leave it until next year’, carpe diem and all of that.

That’s one bit, but the other bit is the way people deal with that when they are suffering and when they are dying, and the way they come to terms with things is very moving. The capacity for the human spirit to overcome regret and to face the unknown with equanimity is something that’s magnificent.

KP So seeing people face death has been a fairly instructive teacher for you?

JN Massively instructive, it’s extraordinary. My first congregation was in Streatham in South London where a lot of the people were not at all well-off, and had quite hard lives. They would mostly describe themselves as very ordinary people. When you were with them and they were dying, they would say ‘I’m really a very ordinary person, I haven’t done anything extraordinary with my life’, and you would think ‘you are not ordinary, you are remarkable. The fact that you are able to talk about yourself like this is remarkable, most people are not able to do that’. It’s like they are watching the film of their life backwards, and that is a very remarkable thing to do – particularly with clarity when you probably haven’t got terribly long left. There is something about nobody being ordinary, and the remarkability of the human spirit where you see the individual shine through, in what is for them, very extreme circumstances.

KP So you’ve learned through the experiences that you’ve been through that life is precious and short, but you have also got a road map through religion, can you talk about that?

JN I have found a road map through religion, but it’s a religion which is very different from Christianity, and perhaps more like Islam in some ways. My road map is a form of Judaism which is very much about social conscience and social action and what you do in this world – actually, I think all of Judaism is about what you do in this world. It’s very much about how you live your life here on earth. What I get from religion is Jewish teaching and the sense of community acting together. One of the things that is so important about a community is that they feel this sense of cohesion, even though the people are very different – they do things together, in the name of their community. I get that from religion, but in a sense it is not only from the religion itself, but from how Jewish communities behave – which I think is quite a significant distinction. So, for example, this congregation [West London Synagogue] runs a drop in centre for asylum seekers and winter night shelter with some local churches. The drop in for asylum seekers is a mixture of things, and all those who come to the drop-in centre are either Muslim or Christian, not Jews – for obvious reasons because that’s where most asylum seekers are coming from. As a congregation of Jews, we offer help, support, succour or whatever, to Muslim’s and Christians. What is interesting is that it is hugely popular to volunteer at the drop-in, we have more volunteers than we can use. That’s not just about doing what God tells you to do – it’s about being taught in our religion that you do what you can in this life, but also that Jews have had historically huge experiences of being asylum seekers. It’s about thinking ‘I’m well and I’m safe in this country, but I’m going to do my best to ensure that others can be safe and well too, and we’re going to do it together as a community.’

KP Can you tell me about volunteering, what is it that makes people want to use the little time they have to volunteer and help others?

JN Nobody volunteers for its own sake, we may think we do but that’s not what happens. Research shows that perfectly clearly. I chaired the commission on volunteering, and if you ask why people volunteer you quickly discover that the reasons people volunteer are all in one way or another to do with themselves. Why do we volunteer? We volunteer to give ourselves a reason to get up in the morning, we volunteer to get some meaning in our lives, we volunteer so that we can make friends, we volunteer because we think it is the right thing to do and we will feel better about ourselves if we do it…I think that it is really important that we understand that people volunteer for all sorts of reasons, but those reasons will in some way always refer back to themselves.

KP So this question of how to use the time you have, what are the ways that the question continues to guide you in your current position?

JN I’m quite old, I could retire – but instead I’m thinking, what can I do to change the country? What can be done about our very restrictive access to asylum seekers, which I feel is wrong? Brexit seems to have licensed a form of hatred that I thought we wouldn’t see, how might that be challenged? So, in this little bit of life I have left I would like to see what I can do to make the world a better place.

This interview was conducted over a video-call in early 2016. The photos were sent by Tariq Ramadan’s office.

KP: Can you begin by explaining why you chose this question, what brought you to it?

TR: If I come back to the very essence of what I believe, and if I look at the value system from within the Islamic tradition, the main question for me which is very particular to Islam – though also universal – is ‘am I on my way to peace?’

Peace has to do with inner peace, peace with the environment, peace with our fellow brothers and sisters in humanity. So peace is not just ‘peace and love’, peace is very demanding. We have to take peace seriously with our heart and with our mind.

The second question coming out of this is how much am I consistent? Consistency is important, because you are at peace when you are consistent. And also when your questions get their answers. So it is an intellectual process and it is a psychological process. But the ultimate thing for me is to try to be at peace.

KP: The English word peace can mean a number of things, and perhaps does not have the same scope or depth as its Arabic equivalent ‘Salam’, can you unpack the meaning of Salam a bit?

TR: Salam means peace with all the dimensions. It is one of the names of God, it is the name of paradise in Islam, but it’s also what we need to try to get inside of us. It is the very root of Islam – Islam means peace. It is also to be at peace with the environment, to show respect for creation and the creator and to spread peace to human beings.

KP: Peace as you describe it, is a very evasive thing – how do we find it?

TR: So, this is why the second part of the question is very important – looking for consistency. Intellectually, to be at peace is to never avoid questioning, but always be looking for answers. It is a process, we do not arrive but to ask – ‘am I on my way to peace?’ – means that has to be translated into many ways. Am I on my way to intellectual peace, to psychological and spiritual peace, am I on my way to human peace – which is peace with the environment and peace with human beings. So when philosophers are saying that the ultimate goal is happiness, I would say for me it is to reach a state of peace with God, and with myself, and with humanity.

KP: What do you think is at war with our quest to seek and to find peace in our culture today?

TR: When we think that happiness is in what we have, not whom we are. Consumerism is the ultimate alienation. It is confusing emotions with spirituality. Emotions are necessary, but they are not the spiritual state of peace that we are talking about. In fact it is very difficult to be emotionally at peace. Very often you have to master your emotions to be at peace, because emotions are coming from outside. Emotions could be good as much as bad, depending on how you deal with them. We should never be the object of our emotions, we should be the subject of our emotions.

KP: You have found that road to peace to be through Islam. Do you look at people of different faiths and say that they are on their own road to peace?

TR: Of course, of course. I think that peace is not the monopoly of any one tradition. I think peace is when your questions find their answer, it is when your heart feels that ‘this is it’. So this is why the spiritual communion between people of different spiritual backgrounds can find this peace. I have met people who are not Muslim who are much more at peace with themselves than Muslim’s I know. This is the image of the mountain that I have in ‘The Quest for Meaning’, that we are on different paths up the mountain, and peace is at the top of the mountain – this is what we are all sharing. So we cannot just confuse the path towards peace with peace itself. We have many paths, and we have this state of peace that we are all longing for. It is the ultimate question for human beings, I would say. It is very demanding, it is the opposite of what we think. You can’t be passive and at peace, you can only reach peace through struggling; through adding knowledge to knowledge, developing interpersonal relations with human beings, and even with nature.  If there are contradictions, you know you should start your journey towards peace.

So the only way you can get moments of peace, is to be on your way towards more consistency. The deep questions you might have require deep quests and deep answers as well.

KP: Perhaps I misunderstand the mountain analogy, how do you square that image with the exclusive claims of Islam and other religions?

TR: Because I as a Muslim really think that God is the truth. Now, I belong to this truth, but it does not belong to me. I can understand that some people can experience this peace in the way they deal with truth in their life, so at the end I don’t have the final word on truth. I think that He is the one and He is the only one, and He is the ultimate one that can provide my heart with peace. Can I judge the other paths? No, I just have to acknowledge the fact that God wanted many paths, and there should be a reason there that I cannot get.

KP: It seems to requires some humility then?

TR: Yes, that’s very essential – no humility, no peace.

MV: A question that I am thinking a lot about at the moment is how to see spiritually. Seeing spiritually is about how to see with the imagination, or see with the soul – you might say. It comes particularly from Plato, who offered a  philosophy that is about a reality that is immanent and all around us, but which we are otherwise rather blind to. This is one way of reading his myth of the cave, the idea that we are stuck at the back of the cave, and what we take to be reality is really shadows dancing on the wall, and there is a journey that we have to undergo – and it’s a fearful journey as well as a joyful journey – but if you undertake it, then your inner eye opens up, and you perceive the same world, but in a very different way.

So how do we see spiritually – what might that be about, what does it take within me? Because Plato was very clear that we have to resonate with reality, in order to perceive reality. And so if our minds are narrow, or our minds are preoccupied with certain questions (maybe personal questions that are quite troubling), that will be what we perceive as reality. Whereas if we can get over ourselves a bit, and open our minds, then we will perceive reality in a very different way – because we are resonating with it. Knowing was all about participating to Plato, so that’s what we must try to focus on.

KP: Can you unpack this idea that knowing is about participating a little more?

MV: It might help to contrast it with scientific understanding because knowing in this way stresses not participating in reality. So a  scientist aims to be objective, detached, and scientific knowledge doesn’t depend on how the scientist lives or who the scientist is. Reality is treated as something that can be studied from the outside in, whereas participative knowing argues that it must also be studied from the inside out. Who you are and how you’re living makes all the difference to what you see. This is what is meant by participation.

KP: What do you mean by the soul or spirituality – these are important concepts here, but also difficult to define…

MV: Soul is the quality of aliveness that you and I have. It’s what makes us ourselves. It’s what makes us a person as opposed to a biomechanical machine. It’s something felt rather than measured. Spirituality is the capacity to appreciate this felt aliveness both in yourself and everything else. To be spiritual is to take this dimension of life seriously.

KP: So what is the process then, how do we begin to see spiritually?

MV: I think the first task is to know yourself, as the old adage in the Greek world went. What that does is help you to realise the limits of yourself, and the limits to your perception – then you begin to see over the horizon of your perception.

KP: Is this something that is really only known through experience, that perhaps you can be guided towards, but you cannot learn it in the same way as you might learn facts about a subject?

MV: I think it’s something that comes to you. You might read someone who is describing it. For example, you might read a bit of poetry one year, then you return to it five years later and think ‘goodness me, that is extraordinary’. I really like William Blake’s line ‘eternity’s sunrise’

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

I remember reading that years ago and not really understanding what it meant. Now when I read it, I think this is him on the cusp of a spiritual awakening. He’s got over himself, which is why he can fly with the dawn – and what he sees is eternity’s sunrise, divine presence wherever he looks.

KP: As a psychotherapist, do you think seeing spiritually is related to mental health?

MV: The premise of psychotherapy is that you cannot solve your problems in the way that you think you should be able to solve your problems – because if you could, then you would probably would have done it already. Psychotherapy works on the idea that we are trapped in a worldview that we think should help release us from our problems, but in fact it is part of the problem. So in psychotherapy what you are trying to do is work with people so that gradually they become less tied to the worldview that is troubling them so much, and they start to see different possibilities and new ways of dealing with the world start to emerge. Spiritually, the same sort of principle applies. In a ‘spiritual psychotherapy’, you are seeking to be free from a world perspective (the kind of worldview of our time), which is materialistic and causes us all sorts of anxieties about mortality, wanting to possess more, having concerns about the future etc. That seems to be the neurosis of our time, but working with that – seeing the limits of that, becoming less tied to that, could happen through a process that might be like psychotherapy, and could be liberating and lead to these different perceptions.

KP: How do you think the dominant worldview of our time is at war with our ability to see spiritually? Do we have the vocabulary for this at the moment, or is there language and ways of thinking that need to be reintroduced?

MV: I certainly think that spiritual sight which would have been regarded as the best form of sight until about 300 or 400 years ago, that has reversed and now everybody has to give a nod to materialism some way or another. There is of course some reason for that, because materially our world is a lot easier to live in than the world was a few hundred years ago – so it’s not all bad…I would much rather have a tooth ache in 2018 than in 1618, that’s fair enough. But I think the gains come at a tremendous cost. We don’t appreciate the inner life of things anymore, we appreciate very much their exterior life – which science reveals so amazingly, but we don’t directly experience the soul of things and how they have a kind of vitality and liveliness which complements our own vitality and liveliness. And so spiritual sight would be about reawakening to the inside of the whole world, as well as our own inside. That is an expression of a chap called Owen Barfield who I am very influenced by, he said that consciousness is not one thing stuck onto the rest of everything else, it is the inside of the whole world. Nowadays we need to learn to participate with this inner life afresh.

KP: It seems that one of the problems in society is with what might be called expressive individualism, this obsession with the self – and so, in a sense you might think that one of the issues is thinking too much about yourself, and so one of the ways to heal yourself is to start doing things for other people, like stop thinking so much and just start doing. Do you think there is any truth in that?

MV: I think you have to be careful there, because that kind of advice can become a bit of a moral burden, saying that ‘you should be doing this or you should be doing that’. That actually just makes you more self-obsessed because you just feel guilty for not doing enough etc. I think the key to becoming an individual is to love yourself enough to forget yourself. Knowing yourself is part of that, because you become more at ease with yourself and more comfortable in your own skin, and then you start to become aware that there is more than just yourself. Iris Murdoch, the great Platonist, had a great way of putting it, she said that ‘love is the painful realisation that something other than myself is real’. That only really begins by loving yourself enough to be able to forget yourself. In psychotherapy we say that the problem with narcissism is not loving yourself, it’s not being able to love yourself, so that you become self-preoccupied with the self. Your whole life becomes an effort to love yourself, in ways which will never fully deliver.

KP: In terms of where you look for answers to the question of how one sees spiritually, some of these answers for you lie in the great thought of great thinkers. Are there ways of trying to see spiritually that are not so cognitively demanding and intellectual?

MV: Take something like music. I think music is way we all have of hearing spiritually. The reason is that the scientific description of music is just the notes, but what the physical description never gets is the melody, or the meaning or the emotion – which is the real impact that music makes. That real impact is partly emotional, partly psychological, but I think it is also spiritual because it awakens us to the transcendent or to ‘the more’ as William James puts it. When you’re immersed in music, it is quite as real as anything you could touch. So things like music, art, poetry help us access the spiritual. Owen Barfield thought that words have a kind of soul, and that the art of the poet is to put words in an order that releases the soul, so you have a felt sense of what the words are doing, as well as just a descriptive sense. He said imagine a prose writer writing the two words ‘old prophets’. When you hear that phrase you think of people who had a gift to see the future who were either elderly or lived a long time ago, it’s kind of a description. But the poet would say ‘prophets old’, and that phrase with the inversion has a very different resonance. It makes you think of the spirit of those prophets. It almost feels like it’s conjuring their presence. That’s the kind of thing that poetry does. It puts words in an unexpected order that releases the inside of the words, as it were. The best kind of spiritual poetry takes you to the edge, and encourages you to look over the edge because of the way the words are put together.

KP To what extent do you think learning to see spiritually is something we must learn to do individually, or is it something that can and should be done in community?

MV: It’s both an individual and collective undertaking. You must know yourself and work on yourself in order to see more. But seeing spiritually  is greatly aided by engaging with what others have already discerned and conveyed. They offer a path that you can follow, though you yourself have to follow it.

Mark has a series of videos on the question of how we learn to see spiritually, these can be found here.

I met Sugata Mitra following a brief and intriguing correspondence in which he had replied to a letter I had written with:

Question: ‘Is this a dream?’

Where to look for an answer: Inside the old matchbox somewhere at the back of the lowest right hand drawer.

We met to discuss this in Newcastle in the Summer of 2015.

KP What did you mean by saying that we should look inside an old matchbox for the answer?

SM I think I meant that there is an answer, but we just don’t know where to look for it. If you ask somebody how long will it take for an object of 20g to fall to the ground if I drop it one meter from the surface of the earth.  But then I say, I don’t want to know the actual answer, I want to know how you would find it.  So then, what could we do – well we could say I need to know the fundamentals of why things fall, and figure it out. Or you could say, I’ll google it and find a formulae, and then I’ll figure it out. Or you could say, I ‘ll take a stopwatch and an object and I’ll tell you. Or you could ask a friend. These are all valid answers.  But you could not say, ‘I need to look inside a teacup’ – that is considered not a valid answer. Nor would it be be valid to say ‘I’ll ask my dog’.

What I’d like to question is the last two examples, is it really true that you can’t find the answer by looking into a teacup or asking your dog? What if the real answer is that you can find the answer by looking anywhere.  What if the answers to all questions were in everything, and not in specific places?  Somehow it seems more elegant to me to say that all the answers are everywhere, they are multiplexed, as opposed to saying that answers are kept inside little boxes, which are kept inside other little boxes, and until you know the sequence of boxes to look for, you can’t find the answer.

KP The scientific method has been very effective, so why would we look elsewhere?

SM Yes, we would look elsewhere only if there are questions to which the scientific method is unable to answer, like ‘is this a dream?’  So since such questions exist, therefore the method of answering them must also be questioned.

KP Is the question in any way borne of a worldview influenced by Hinduism?

SH Most Indians are affected by that view of the universe – that it could all be a dream. But on the other hand, the Hindu texts are very different from other religions, because they also after a while say that maybe the argument itself is not correct.  The most famous one being about the existence of God.  One of the vedas speaks about multiple God’s, that you cannot have this reality without having millions of Gods. Then the next one says you don’t need that, there is only one God. Then the third one says, what if there is no God at all? And it just leaves you with that.  I don’t know if the authors were merely having fun, or were they seriously trying to say that you can’t box things [in]. You cannot say that ‘this is true’ and ‘this is false’.  The true can be false and the false can be true…it depends on how you look at it. It basically says that it isn’t an ‘ism’, it never says that it’s a religion, it never says that it is right.  It just raises certain issues for you to think about. It is a way of thinking, and a way of looking at life.

KP So Hinduism inescapably influences thought, but your training is in physics – presumably that has influenced where this question comes from too?

SM Yes. I find it interesting to think about not only in terms of mysticism, but also in terms of hard science. In my work as a particle physicist I have done many experiments to look for where meaning comes from.  They all made some scientific sense, but left me with the feeling that somebody is fooling around with you. Somebody or something is fooling around. Let me put it this way…

Imagine a space which is full of an absolutely random distribution of little things that are and little things that are not. It is quite easy to imagine that can be true. Since we think in three dimensions, let’s think in three dimensions. So, a huge three dimensional space full of ones and zeros. If it is big enough, can I not say that all possible strings [of digits] exist inside it? Of course I can, quite easily. So Beethoven’s 9th symphony exists inside there, depending on where you look at it from. But to know where to look at it from, you need a conscious being to make sense of it. So what is consciousness? I have no idea what consciousness is, but I know that there is well over 100 trillion neural synapses in the brain, and each neuron either fires or it doesn’t. So I could represent my entire brain as long string of ones and zeros. If that is so, then in that infinite space of one’s and zero’s, that string also exists somewhere. So if that string encounters the right header [starting point for a sequence] and the right string, it will then hear Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It is a string listening to or interpreting another string…But then I can imagine a world without physics, because this world doesn’t need any physics – it’s just strings reading each other. And since all such strings exist in that infinite space, all realities can exist inside there. This is immaterial, there is no matter involved in this – because matter doesn’t have to exist in this reality. All you need is a state of being and a state of non-being – an infinite number, an infinite volume. And then you can have a self-consistent universe of strings reading each other. Some strings think that they are brains, some strings think that they are music (if strings could think) – so there you go. At that point I gave up, because I thought – is there a way I could prove this or disprove this?

I started with the search for where meaning, where does meaning come from? Then I ended up with this situation where being didn’t seem to be a requirement for the world to exist.

KP So the question is not as playful as it sounds?

SM Not at all, so – is it a dream? Yes…it could be. I’m not even sure our binary thinking of ‘this is real because it exists’ and ‘this is not real because it is not made of matter’ is valid, that seems to me a false dichotomy. This table is real, I can feel it and so on…but is my mind not real because I can’t feel it? That can’t be right either. Sometimes to my students I ask, what is matter? Does matter have to exist in space somewhere? They would say yes, things that exist have to be somewhere – at least in science. But what about the internet, does the internet exist? Of course it does, but then where is it? The internet is everywhere, and it is nowhere. We actually created it, we created a non-tangible object. So that settles the issue as far as I’m concerned – reality doesn’t have to be occupying space, time, to have a weight, to react to forces, to exist. As I was growing up I learned about a lot of things that I thought existed, but in the end didn’t – like ghosts, Santa etc. So what if we’re the same – what is we are not real? It could be this way.

KP How does asking and investigating this question personally affect you?

SM Hinduism doesn’t make me feel very happy, because it confuses you. It constantly brings up this question of – is it a dream? Being a Hindu and studying quantum physics means that you cannot put your foot down and say ‘this is the way it is’ for anything. The most you can say is that this has the highest probability. I think that makes a huge difference, because the rest of Western civilisation is built on the fact that there is right and there is wrong.

So that is the origins of the question of whether or not this is a dream.  The answer I gave you – where to look. That comes from a story from when I was about 9 years old, and I had learned to write hieroglyphics – because it’s an exciting thing to do for a 9 year old. We had bungalow in Delhi with a garden, and I took a piece of bark and scratched out in hieroglyphics and I think what I wrote was ‘it is all a dream’. And then I put that bark into a matchbox, and I buried the matchbox in the garden after blindfolding myself. Then I covered it up well, spun myself around and took my blindfold off, so I don’t know to this day where that matchbox is.

KP One day some archeologist might dig it up…

SM That was exactly my 9 year old thinking! I thought they would dig it up and find it a contradiction, because they would find the hieroglyphics but wonder why it is in a matchbox, and why does it say – it is all a dream?

KP Is it a question worth asking if you never resolve it?

SH You would have to ask the Buddha. He used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. There were some questions to which he would say, the question is more important than the answer.  Questions have a great deal of intrinsic value, and the answer can sometimes not be as important as the question. Mainly because the answer could be different depending on where it is that you are coming from. For example, if we don’t have the header for hearing Beethoven’s music, it will come out as horrendous noise – we’ll be asking, what kind of shit is this? Likewise, for all we know when we hear a bird chirping, it could actually be reciting the solution for quadratic equations. It depends on where you’re standing.

Though what you ask is a very important thing, is it worth thinking about? Because, what will it do to you? That kind of brings us back to Hinduism and one of the Upanishads, which says – is it worth it now that you have read this huge book? Well, we don’t know the answer to that, but it says that if you have finished it, you should find yourself some wine, women and chariots.