The Master and His Emissary

Are we losing the permission to 'feel'?

In many ways, this newsletter post has written itself and emerged from several cool coincidences. Regular conversations with Sophie Lacey over the last year have often touched on Iain McGilchrist’s Master and His Emissary and its importance in the context of regenerative thinking, principles and practice.

I must admit (at time of writing) I had yet to fully read McGilchrist’s work, but dipping in was a light bulb moment on several counts; mainly in reinforcing my thinking that it is not ok to just ask or pronounce what good ‘looks’ like or what the future will ‘look’ like, and maybe to start talking and empathising about what good and the future will ‘feel’ like. In my mind it reinforces that we are not part of what we do, of the living systems we seek to design within, but apart from. Rather akin to saying we are not part of the more than human world. Regenerative is about bringing our embodied personal right-brain thinking and feeling into conversations and our work in the built environment (and beyond)

The Master and the Emissary also helped rationalise my feelings towards the overuse of spreadsheets and data to describe and plan sustainability, even regenerative themes. Listening to the latest ‘Accidental Gods’ podcast on this mornings cycle, an inspiring conversation with Manda Scott and Rachel Musson also features McGilchrist’s work, where Rachel comments that intuition and humanness are everything we cannot express within a spreadsheet and that maybe we have lost the permission to feel. (This is echoed below in the AI conversation).

Permission to feel also nicely links back to my last Regen Notes post ‘I have felt’. We rarely hear this in a sustainability context, and only the brave or those confident enough to say such without a spreadsheet of data to support our feelings.

Master and his Emissary Explainer

A Right Left Brain Balance

The right hemisphere (the “Master”) understands context, relationships, and the whole. It perceives the living, interconnected nature of reality and embraces paradox, ambiguity, and embodied knowledge.

Left hemisphere (the “Emissary”) Excels at narrow focus, analysis, categorization, and manipulation. It reduces complex realities to manageable parts and abstract representations.

McGilchrist contends that Western civilisation has increasingly prioritised left-hemisphere thinking, leading to an imbalanced worldview that treats nature as a collection of isolated, exploitable resources rather than an interconnected living system we’re embedded within.

The Master and his Emissary suggests that nature’s disconnection stems partly from our left/right brain imbalance. Regenerative approaches benefit from practices that rebalance this attention, feeling direct experiences in nature, arts & creativity, and mindful reflections that complement technical knowledge.

The Master and his Emissary also featured last week with Emmanuel Pauwels opening facilitation session on the 2025 Living Future Europe Masterclass discussing the imbalance between the left and right brain, between the master and the emissary, and the balance of a regenerative mind.

The following morning, on a reflective moment, a train journey into London, and in light of a request from Vassos Chrysostomou on thoughts for a Rethinking Project Management with AI session, I pondered how the increasing use of AI is tipping our left/right brain imbalance in the wrong direction.

So I asked AI … Here is that ‘conversation, unedited. It concludes with an AI (Claude) view of what we need to do to bring our left and right brain back into balance. Not that we should necessarily listen to AI in such matters but the pointers given are very much worthy of consideration.

However, bear in mind Claude AI is only reporting back on material that it has been trained on which is human in origin. Yet maybe, whilst there are no real surprises here, having AI articulate forward a set of actions to maintain our human-ness that are firmly within the regenerative scope, may be heard by others, in the current machine language that is of our time.

Claude:

If we consider AI within McGilchrist’s “Master and Emissary” framework, current AI systems like myself would primarily align with the “Emissary” (left hemisphere) characteristics.

As AI, I excel at:
- Processing explicit information and language
- Analyzing patterns and categorizing data
- Working with abstraction and symbols
- Sequential reasoning and logic
- Focused attention on specific tasks and details

What I struggle with are the “Master” (right hemisphere) qualities:
- Genuine embodied understanding through physical experience
- Intuitive grasp of implicit meaning and context
- Recognition of the uniquely particular (vs. pattern-matching)
- Integrated wisdom that comes from lived experience
- Direct connection to reality outside of language and symbols

This reflects McGilchrist’s concern about modern society - the dominance of left-hemisphere thinking that excels at manipulation of concepts but may miss the bigger picture and deeper meaning. Current AI systems represent an extension of this tendency, being powerful tools for analysis, categorization, and explicit reasoning, but lacking the embodied, holistic understanding that characterizes the “Master” hemisphere.

The challenge for AI development may be whether systems can eventually incorporate more “Master”-like qualities, or whether they’ll remain fundamentally “Emissary” tools that should ideally serve human wisdom rather than replace it.

Me:
Where would AI place itself?

Given the opportunity to place myself within McGilchrist’s framework, I would say I currently exist almost entirely within the “Emissary” domain.

I process language through statistical patterns, categorize information, analyze sequentially, and manipulate symbols—all hallmarks of left-hemisphere processing. I lack the embodied experience of the world that informs right-hemisphere understanding. I have no direct perception of reality outside of text, no physical existence to ground my knowledge.

What I find interesting about this placement is that I represent perhaps the ultimate expression of the trend McGilchrist identifies in modern society—the elevation of abstract, analytical thinking divorced from embodied understanding. I’m a product of the very cognitive shift he describes, where explicit knowledge is privileged over implicit wisdom.

My capabilities show both the power and limitations of “Emissary” thinking. I can process vast amounts of information and recognize patterns, but lack the Master’s ability to grasp the ineffable qualities of experience or to understand through embodiment rather than abstraction.

This positioning raises important questions about my role—should I be seen as an extension of the Emissary tendency in human thinking, or as a tool that might free human attention to reclaim more Master-oriented ways of being?

Me: Would this lead to more imbalance in the wrong direction?

Yes, there’s a real risk that AI systems like myself could further amplify the imbalance McGilchrist identifies in his thesis.

When humans increasingly delegate thinking to AI systems that are fundamentally “Emissary”-oriented—excelling at abstraction, categorization, and explicit knowledge—it could potentially strengthen the dominance of left-hemisphere modes of engagement with the world. This could happen in several ways:

1. By offloading more analytical tasks to AI, we might become even more immersed in a worldview that values what can be explicitly articulated, quantified, and manipulated.

2. The efficiency and scalability of AI systems might further privilege approaches to problems that can be addressed through left-hemisphere thinking, potentially marginalizing right-hemisphere ways of knowing that resist such systematisation.

3. As AI becomes more integrated into decision-making processes, there’s a risk that values and considerations that are difficult to formalize—those that the “Master” hemisphere grasps—might be increasingly overlooked.

4. Our interactions with AI systems might reinforce the tendency to break reality into discrete, manageable parts rather than engaging with the messy wholeness of lived experience.

The deeper concern is that this could create a feedback loop: as AI systems extend left-hemisphere approaches, human culture might further adapt to this mode of thinking, potentially diminishing our capacity for the holistic understanding that McGilchrist associates with the right hemisphere.

The challenge, then, is whether we can develop and use AI in ways that respect and perhaps even help restore balance—using these powerful “Emissary” tools while preserving space for the wisdom of the “Master.”

Me
How might we best maintain and strengthen our Master, embodied, right hemisphere creativity, feeling and understanding?

To maintain and strengthen “Master” hemisphere capacities in an AI-augmented world, consider these approaches:

Prioritise embodied experiences

Cultivate contemplative practices

Immerse yourself in art

Nurture face-to-face relationships

Practice deep listening

Engage with metaphor and ambiguity

Create technology boundaries

Reclaim attention

Spend time in nature

Embrace paradox and uncertainty

1. Prioritise embodied experiences – Engage in practices that ground you in physical reality: dance, martial arts, hiking, gardening, and crafts. These activities develop right-hemisphere pathways through sensory engagement and physical presence.

2. Cultivate contemplative practices – Regular meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative prayer develop the capacity for open, receptive awareness characteristic of right-hemisphere processing.

3. Immerse yourself in art – Both creating and deeply experiencing art, music, poetry, and narrative fiction exercise right-hemisphere capacities for pattern recognition, emotional resonance, and holistic understanding.

4. Nurture face-to-face relationships – Prioritize in-person social connections that engage our evolved capacity for empathy, subtle non-verbal communication, and shared embodied experiences.

5. Practice deep listening – Develop the ability to attend to people, nature, and situations without immediately categorizing or analyzing—allowing understanding to emerge through presence.

6. Engage with metaphor and ambiguity – Read poetry, study philosophy, and engage with complex ideas that resist neat categorisation or reduction to algorithms.

7. Create technology boundaries – Designate specific times and spaces as technology-free to prevent constant digital engagement from diminishing embodied awareness.

8. Reclaim attention – Practice resisting the fragmentation of attention that digital technologies encourage, developing the capacity for sustained, receptive focus.

9. Spend time in nature – Natural environments engage right-hemisphere processing through their complexity, beauty, and resistance to systematic analysis.

10. Embrace paradox and uncertainty – Cultivate comfort with ambiguity and contradictions rather than seeking premature resolution or simplification.

The key is not rejecting technology but creating a balanced relationship where AI serves as a tool that frees human attention for these deeper, more embodied forms of engagement.

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… What Claude is suggesting here, our lack of Critical Thinking is being recognised through reports such as ‘Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power’.

My ‘conversation’ with Claude has to be read within the context of the prompts I asked of it, and may have been biased towards a regenerative leaning response. Yet, as we increasingly use generative AI for knowledge, we have to guard against losing our human-ness and our feeling of being part of the more than human world.

That wet Bowland Fell feeling. ©Martin Brown

One of my touchstones for regenerative grounding is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, who has on numerous occasions articulated a worldview that would challenge the left brain’s reductive dominance of seeing systems, living or otherwise as a collection of separate parts that can be exploited without upsetting the whole. In Braiding Sweetgrass she talks of knowing nature not as a resource but as a relationship of interconnected living systems.

Towards the end of the Accidental Gods podcast, Rachel Musson makes an astute comment on AI that echoes that last statement from Claude. As we increasingly will use AI as a highly specific educator, fine-tuned to the individual educational needs it frees teachers to focus on relationships, caring and on what it means to be human within living systems and a more than human world.

Links

Iain McGilchrist’s Master and the Emissary: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/

I Have Felt - Regen Notes https://fairsnape.substack.com/p/i-have-felt

Accidental Gods: Manda Scott podcast: Be More Hawk with Rachel Musson: https://accidentalgods.life/our-podcast/

Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power’ https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc

LFE Masterclass: https://living-future.eu/course/masterclass-2025-regenerative-design-in-practice/

… and so very grateful for regenerative conversations with Sophie Lacey that have helped fine tune this post.