Six ways to kill the Tao. Here's a summary of this entire podcast. If you get enough from the summary, you can probably click it off after 20 seconds. So here's the summary.
The left hemisphere of your brain gets things done. The Tao is concerned about getting things done. Let your left hemisphere dominate. You'll never be bothered by the Tao again.
A focus on money is the best tool for accomplishing this. So since its publication in 2010, Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, has pretty much ensconced itself as a modern classic in the intellectual landscape, a shifting work. The book is divided into two parts. Just the first part is the brain's two hemispheres understand existence differently.
The right hemisphere understands existence holistically, taking into account the big picture, all of reality. The left hemisphere understands existence mechanically as a series of problems to be addressed. The second part of the book, by the way, is about how the right brain should dominate and be the master with the left brain as emissary, doing the master's bidding. But in Western civilization, those roles have been reversed with the left hemisphere usurping the right hemisphere's proper role.
But anyway, that doesn't bother us here. The first part is all that matters. So in a properly balanced individual, the left hemisphere, the emissary, works for the right hemisphere, the master. In an improperly balanced individual, the left hemisphere becomes the master.
When that happens, a person suffers a contraction of reality. The left hemisphere's focus, after all, is narrow, focusing on specific aspects of reality. The right hemisphere's is broad or whole, taking into account all of reality. When we allow the left hemisphere to rule, we exist exclusively in the right two-thirds of the reality spectrum.
This is a recurring theme of this podcast, the reality spectrum. If you're in the left hemisphere, you're cutting off one-third. So again, the reality spectrum is active existence or the Tao. It is prior to essence slash accident, which is prior to being and substance.
So the Tao, accident, substance, the left hemisphere is occupied with accident, substance or with essence and being. And it's that left side of the reality spectrum, the Tao portion, that is eliminated in the left hemisphere's understanding and pursuits. So if we want to kill the Tao in us, we need to live in the left hemisphere and let it dominate our lives. A view from the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere approaches the world with purpose and precision. The left hemisphere's role is to let us survive. The left hemisphere is the guy in the trenches, the guy who works to put food on the table. When the car doesn't start, the left hemisphere figures out why.
When a bill comes due, the left hemisphere figures out how to pay it. The left hemisphere is narrowly focused, purpose-driven, mechanistic, interested in dividing and separating, competitive and motivated by power. Money lets us dwell in the left hemisphere. Remember, the left hemisphere doesn't appreciate the Tao portion of the reality spectrum.
So if you want to kill your experience or access to the Tao, you should live through the left hemisphere. You should, in other words, exist solely in a mode of existence that inculcates those six traits above, the ones that I just listed. And the best way to do this, focus on money. One, it's narrow.
You see, it's best to focus on one thing and one thing only. In order to do this, however, you need to find something sufficiently compelling to occupy all your focus. A mere hobby rarely suffices. You need something more important, something that touches on survival and necessities.
Money fits this perfectly. It's necessary for our survival and it's multifaceted. You can focus on your job and side hustles. You can charge stocks and buy Bitcoin.
You can hoard foodstuffs. You can cut corners and increase your savings. Money is a great absorbing source of focus. Two, purpose-driven, with emphasis on efficiency.
Money is high octane fuel here. Time is money. That's not just a cliche. It's a serious fact.
And the money man knows it, feels it in the marrow of his bones. He lives in a constant buzz of activity as he moves from one moneymaking endeavor to another, always scheming, always angling to use his time to make money and not waste on things that don't make money. That's one reason I believe that ambitious people tend to be teetotalers or heavy drinkers. They either eschew liquor altogether because it hinders efficiency, or they hit the bottle hard in order to turn off that constant buzz that tells them they should be doing something to make money.
Three, mechanistic and utilitarian. When you focus on money, anything that doesn't further profitability is discounted. Anything that gets in the way is discarded. Art, poetry, meditation, stupid.
If it doesn't further the bottom line, it's foolish or fodder for immature people who haven't grown up to appreciate the real world. The money man is also mechanistic. Money is, after all, a numbers game, and nothing is more mechanistic than math. The interest in dividing and separating.
This will take a little bit more explanation. The mental activities of dividing and separating allow us to categorize and think more clearly, and indeed to function in the world. They're crucial mental activities. The problem is, categorizations are never fully accurate.
They might be necessary, but they aren't fully accurate. Consider our natural tendency to stereotype. We, for instance, lump all bums. I'm saying bums, not homeless.
Bums is more succinct and weirdly poetic, in my opinion. Anyway, we lump all bums on the street together. Such categorization helps us to avoid harm by such people. As a class, bums are mentally unstable, unconventional, and unpredictable.
And this lets us stay safe, which is a good thing. But it comes at the price of not fully appreciating the handful of full realities, such as the socioeconomic circumstances that lead to bums in the first place. Or, even more importantly, the full reality of the individual bum who has a unique history and is far more interesting and nuanced than just another bum. The acts of dividing, separating, and categorizing are useful, but at the price of contracting full reality.
They're efficient, but inaccurate in their incompleteness. The money man doesn't think about such things. He needs utility. He needs efficiency.
He relentlessly divides, separates, and categorizes. This increases wealth. This doesn't. Full, nuanced reality doesn't matter, and indeed can get in the way of making money.
The sixth trait, competitive. I don't think I need to explain that the money man is competitive. She, and I'm kind of doing the gender-neutral thing here. Money man just sounds cool compared to money individual and the money person.
But I am saying she. The money man, she always wants more than the next person. If someone has more, she isn't content. It's a frequent Hollywood and novel trope for a reason.
Sixth characteristic, primarily motivated by power. The Jewish mystic Simone Weil called money, quote, power's master key, unquote. The person who wants money just wants power. It's that simple.
Money lets a person get and do virtually any carnal or earthly thing a person wants. From jets to sex, money gets it all. Every money man knows it, even if only semi-consciously at times. The money man, in other words, is innately self-centered, so he wants power.
All right, now money is unique in its ability to kill the Tao. I mean, a lot of things can result in the undue swelling of the left hemisphere and separate us from the Tao. In fact, I think every activity you're interested in can take on those qualities, even prayer, if practiced perversely enough, can. I think that's the underlying theme of, or underlying charm, rather, of Clint Eastwood's The Mule.
In The Mule, a flower gardener led a life that exemplified many of the traits above that I just talked about, the six traits. And this made him distasteful to those closest to him. But as an old man, he started trafficking drugs and became a better individual. A task like gardening, which most people consider either harmless and some consider ennobling, resulted in a lot of left hemisphere activity.
But a task like drug running, which most people consider harmful and degrading, resulted in a reemergence of the right hemisphere's appreciation for the greater reality. That's my take on that movie, anyway. And so, yeah, the left hemisphere thinking is not remotely confined to money. It sprouts anywhere and everywhere.
But money, I submit, is unique because it is power's master key. It exerts a uniquely strong pull. Indeed, contemporary studies have borne this out. In chapter 4 of another modern classic, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes the effects that the mere suggestion of money has on people.
He refers to this as priming or priming with money. In one experiment, participants were slightly primed with money images, like a picture that has a stack of Monopoly money in the background or a screensaver with dollar bills floating in the water. The results were startling, leading to greater perseverance in problem solving, greater self-reliance, less willingness, rather, to leave the task to help others, and in general, just downright selfishness. So here's a paraphrased quote from that book.
Reminders of money produced troubleing effects. Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger, maybe the images of the money. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed individuals are also more selfish.
They're much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about