Wisdom, Nature and the Brain

    In "Breakfast of Champions" Kurt Vonnegut writes: 
    “As for the story itself, it was entitled 'The Dancing Fool.' Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.” 

    Imagine that you are an experienced swimming coach, and you come across a drowning person screaming & flailing ineffectually in deep water. You can't jump in & pull him out, all you can do is try to persuade him to shift from screaming & flailing to effectively, relatively-effortlessly swim to shore. But the drowning person is furious because you're 'wasting his time' with 'irrelevant nonsense.'

    "Most human institutions, by the purely technical & professional manner in which they come to be administered (left hemisphere dominance), end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their (usually right hemisphere dominant) founders had in view." William James

    The above illustrate the certainty of our left hemisphere, which typically fails to understand & obey the broader perspective, greater wisdom & thus better judgment of the right hemisphere. 

    A relatively brief excerpt from a superb recent Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

Iain McGilchrist (IM)    “Of course, I'm not suggesting that physically the brain has changed enormously since 2000 years ago. It will have changed a bit, because it's always evolving, but it's not that I'm referring to. It's that we use the brain in different ways. We can choose to listen to one part of the brain more than another. And I think that what happens as a society becomes a powerful civilization, a number of things happen. One is that it overreaches itself either in terms of its territory or its military and economic power. And in doing that, it needs to be able to control or thinks it needs to be able to control an ever vaster panoply of elements in human life. And to do that, it needs to simplify, to roll out, as we say, a bureaucratic system and so forth.
    So as a civilization becomes too large & overreaches itself, it moves more & more towards a kind of left hemisphere thinking that helps it with the map, the theory, the diagram of life rather than the actual business of life.
    And I think the other thing that happens, well, there are many things that happen... about half a dozen that I refer to in the preface to ‘The Master and His Emissary,’ and take much further in ‘The Matter with Things.’ But one is something that the great philosopher A.N. Whitehead said that ‘A civilization thrives until it overanalyzed itself.’ And I think what's happening in our world is we don't really live connected so much to nature. We don't live connected to a spiritual tradition. We don't live connected to our history & culture. Our art has become too intellectualized. It's become too conceptual, not powerful, visceral and metaphoric in its nature as most great art is. And so we've been cut loose and we're all kind of at a loss and when we try to talk to one another across these spaces, we tend to talk in very theoretical terms, so people talk about a theory of politics, a theory of economics, and a theory of how people behave and so on.
    Usually this is inaccurate, over simple. And so it's that that gets us into this frame of mind because the left hemisphere's message is money for old root. It's incredibly simple: that 'we are just apes competing for territory, money & power.' That's the left hemisphere's knowledge because, let me put it this way, the left hemisphere's raison d'être is to make us powerful, to help us grab things. It controls the right hand, which for most of us is the one which we do the grabbing and the manipulating, and it helps us maintain power. But all the rest of the understanding of everything else that humans are capable of, the life, the spirit, the life of morality, of beauty, of goodness, of truth, all these things are somehow left out of this picture and become somehow marginalized or trivialized as they have done, I believe in our culture at the moment.
    And so why I wrote ‘The Matter with Things’ was because I could see that we all agree there is something that is the matter with things. Very few people think everything's going fine right now, but it's also a notice of the facts that we overvalue matter in the most simple sense. I actually say that materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They're people who undervalue matter because matter is a very extraordinary thing. Matter is wonderful, but this kind of simple idea of matter is what we tend to overestimate the power of, the consciousness & the spirit, the mind is somehow a secondary secretion of matter which it cannot be, and that we've made a world up out of things, which is how the left hemisphere puts things together. Whereas I believe the importance in everything lies in relationship, not in what we call the things themselves that are related.”

     “I’m not sure that religion only comes from the right hemisphere, but I do think you’re right that the most important parts of religious experience & practice, the consensus is, seem to be underwritten by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is sort of necessary for systematizing it and turning it into a durable phenomenon such as Christianity, Islam or whatever it may be. But in doing so, it often over-legalizes, makes over-certain, over-fixed what should be less certain, more fluid, more awe-inspiring, in fact.

I think we’ve lost the capacity for three very important things: a sense of awe or wonder; a sense of our own humility, or the humility we should have; and compassion. And I think these are the things that most religions that are real religions, or true spiritual traditions have in common - that they induce & rekindle in us a sense of wonder. They make us feel appropriately humble about what we can do and what we can know, and they increase our sense of oneness with and compassion towards the rest of the created world.
    Now I think that is what’s going wrong. I think we’ve completely failed to understand that religion is not about a matter of propositional belief, but dispositional belief. Belief is a matter of a disposition of your consciousness towards the world in a certain way. It’s not about propositions or six impossible things that you have to believe before breakfast. That’s not what religion’s about.

And what I want to do in my work is take people from a standpoint where they will almost certainly be part of the culture that believes that only somebody rather simple or uneducated would think that there was a divine realm, to a position where they will see that only somebody who’s rather simple or uneducated would just want to rule that out. I’m not saying would become suddenly religious, but I think it’s extremely clear that people who either are fundamentalist religious or fundamentalist atheists are on the wrong track, and that they have more in common with one another, than they have with true believing people. In any case, I just think that business of the ever-evolving, deeper relationship, a loving relationship with the world in all its manifestations, is the secret of human wellbeing & happiness.

And you say that there is now a different religion, that of economic growth and so on. … I’m sure you’re broadly right, and it reminds me of something that GK Chesterton said, that ‘When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ And that ‘anything’ for them is their own power, to become more & more rich, powerful, wealthy. And that leaves out of the count just about everything that sustains human happiness. And in the seeking for it, they will never find happiness. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful people are not the world’s happiest people."

Interviewer, Nate Hagens:     “As a former high-net-worth stockbroker on Wall Street, I totally concur with that assessment.”
    Iain McGilchrist interview: "Wisdom, Nature and the Brain" - The Great Simplification #85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dogVQDydRGQ

    Reality may well be - OK, is almost certainly - infinitely more wonderful & complex than the bleak, simplistic black & white model to which our left hemispheres have reduced it to.
    “This is the kind of trick our minds sometimes play with history – the sort of extravagant romantic fantasy it can be such a temptation to fall for, of projecting our own imaginings and needs onto the realities of the world.”
    Peter Kingsley. “A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World.” The Golden Sufi Center, 2010.

 

“The rush & pressure of modern life are a form of violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” Thomas Merton

 

“My salvation is to hear & respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.” Thomas Merton

 

"Try to be mindful, & let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come & go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." Ajahn Chah