Hell Is More, Faster
I’ve been soaking up the wise words of Iain McGilchrist again.
He was on Nate Hagen’s podcast in recent weeks. Two hours of in-depth conversation about the state of our world and what is being asked of us as the human species on this earth.
McGilchrist refers to the Hindu sentiment ‘Hell is more, faster’ and makes a plea: ‘Gotta be less. And gotta be slower’.
Does the idea of spaciousness appeal to you?
I have to say, I love spaciousness! But I’ve had to (re)learn it.
We’re all different. I have come to love spaciousness, and my version of it. How I experience it, what works for me.
For others, perhaps spaciousness is very close at hand, despite a very full job and home life. It is easy to flip into, when the permission to be ‘off’ is there.
For others still, it may not be attractive at all - boring, nothingness....
Iain McGilchrist puts out a challenge. I think it is one worth reflecting on.
He encourages us to attune more with Life, to realise our potential, to be creative, by cultivating silence and awareness, and the capacity to listen. Listening as in - not filling the space with our thoughts, ‘the talkative voice of the left hemisphere’.
Silence, and awareness, he says, is not a passive ‘not doing anything’.
Rather, it’s a receptive stance. It’s active. It’s making space for - intuition, imagination, ‘knowing’.
‘Being silent long enough so you can hear something.’
We might have a question we’re pondering, something really important. We might need a creative approach. We might be deeply troubled by something. How can we access our deepest wisdom, our deepest inner knowing, our imagination, our intuition?
By clearing a space. By being curious about accessing our right hemisphere.
Did you know that 99.44% of all that we are aware of is unconscious at this moment in time?
The bit that we are aware of is about 0.5%.
Wow.
Would we be well served, would our world be well served, if we were to tune in more to what feels just out of reach? It’s there, somewhere in our awareness, we just need to be quiet, still, open. And trust that it will come. We create the conditions, and the idea, the knowing, the intuition, the imagination, the wisdom has a space to land. To make itself known.
To me, this is a very appealing notion. Much more appealing than my attention being grabbed, and shunted, and directed in directions and ways that I didn’t choose it to be, because I’ve let myself be carried along ....it could be eternal scrolling, it could be recurrent negative thoughts, or problems that I can’t solve no matter how hard I think about them.... That’s when my rational, practical, chittering left hemisphere can go into overdrive.
You’ll have heard of mathematical or scientific discoveries of great geniuses - where they made leaps of thought and imagination, which took them to a conclusion which they just knew somehow was right, before they’d been able to justify it. That’s what we’re talking about. The space for intuition and imagination. Which is at same time working with our reason and our knowledge. But our modern world does not sanction imagination. Or time to think. Or time to be. It denigrates such ways of being. Such that over time, we lose the ability and the confidence - to access our intuition, to trust that we can get to our inner knowing, to listen to the quiet voice that feels ever so slightly out of reach.
McGilchrist: ‘Never, ever think that what you do with your inner life is unimportant.’
As humans, we were meant to be (we evolved as) 70% right hemisphere beings. And that means:
living into interconnection - feeling into how everything relates to and influences everything else; understanding and appreciating everything in context (not decontextualising people/events/information)
living into the values of beauty, love, truth, goodness, connection
valuing friendship, art, music, poetry, ritual, spirituality, family, community, love
opening up to possibility (rather than closing down to certainty)
being in process (rather than fixing events or interpretations in time)
being ever so ok with paradox! Seeing paradox as normal and natural
being humble as humans on this earth
being compassionate
returning to a sense of awe and wonder in the world
So 70% right hemisphere being and living is our natural state. But we’ve become 70% left hemisphere being and living.
McGilchrist: ‘The left hemisphere thinks it knows everything. It sees nothing.’
The left hemisphere loves ‘power over’. The left hemisphere has to ‘win’. (AI is the natural extension of the dominance the left hemisphere has come to have, in our minds, our consciousness, and our world.)
Our world doesn’t have to be left hemisphere dominant and dominated.
We all have a choice as to what we attend to and what we value.
We can choose to have less and to be slower.
We can prioritise creating spaciousness in our lives. Time to think. To sit in silence. To walk in silence. To put our most heartfelt questions ‘out there’. To create silence so that when the response comes, we hear it.
Worth a try?
The words of the philosopher and psychologist Bayo Akomolafe have just entered my awareness (presumably, making an appearance from my pool of 99.4% unconscious awareness!) -
“The times are urgent. Let us slow down.”
Your left hemisphere will likely be jumping up and down in frustration at the sheer nonsense of that!
Your right hemisphere might be quietly curious ....sensing a truth in that sentiment ....even if it doesn’t ‘make sense’ in our rational, mechanical-thinking world. See if it’s an idea you would like to give space to. Sit in silence with. Walk in silence with.
Resources:
Nate Hagens’ Podcast: The Great Simplification
22nd April 2026 - Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist:
Bayo Akomolafe quoted from Climate, Psychology and Change by Steffi Bednarek (2024): https://climatepsychologycentre.org/book
‘Til Next Time, Go Well
Brilliant post Wendy …thanks so much