Where did this thing go wrong?

I actually think it happened about 1650. It didn’t make itself felt immediately. Because I believe that the problem is cosmological, and has to do with philosophical principles, and the rift between the I and the You, or between the “objective out there” and the personal interior. And that actually happened when the great religious period came to an end, and with the enlightenment, so-called, one started, forming this quite fantastic Cartesian picture of the world. And within that Cartesian picture you have, inevitably, a split between the so-called objective geometrical “out there” and the subjectively felt “in here”.

[…] Although Whitehead and many others began being troubled about this nearly 100 years ago, the fact is that we haven’t resolved this problem. We’ve not resolved it at all. And we are still living in a cosmological situation which is the Cartesian one. Even though we now drink herbal tea and, you know, have massages and spiritual reunions, and so forth. And I think this is all very positive and is moving in the right direction. But no amount of thought about Spirit solves the problem that our constructed picture of the world is that of an objective geometrical “out there”, away from the personal individual self and soul. This is a colossal problem.

[And] it isn’t ultimately going to come together until a unified picture exists, in which the interior self, and the objective “out there” are unified again.