Tending and Befriending

    Twenty-five years ago, Taylor et al published a paper "Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight" (Psychol Rev 2000; 107(3): 411-29) in which they suggested that female behavior is more marked by a pattern of "tend-and-befriend" than by "fight-or-flight."  
    They defined "tending" as nurturing activities to protect self & offspring to promote safety & reduce distress; "befriending" the creation & maintenance of social networks that help this tending process.
    Despite this surprisingly promising start, the story - to be published in a "hard science" psychology journal - still has to devolve into reductionism: "oxytocin, in conjunction with female reproductive hormones & endogenous opioid peptide mechanisms, may be at its core." 
    So wise motherly love for children, family, friends, neighbors & beyond is reduced to meaningless, accidental matter, simply machines driven by hormones, while male machines are driven to kill or run by different hormones. 
    Now it's all figured out! BUT ONLY IF you value a meaningless, accidental, mechanical universe model to the exclusion of a broader, wiser worldview!         

    Iain McGilchrist is a highly & broadly educated (a very rare combination) and experienced literary scholar, neuroscience researcher, psychiatrist and author of 3 respected books. He sees our present society as being far from wise, and hence, recklessly speeding towards self-destruction. 
    The key feature of this dangerous shortsightedness is having a left-hemisphere-dominant perspective on life, which is all about grabbing as much as we can, as fast as we can, with no concern for the destructive impacts on other people, animals, plants, the Planet as a whole. This struggle to rob-or-be robbed, is an adversarial relationship that is sadly similar to "fight-or-flight." India, China, Japan etc which once had profound wisdom traditions, are now also infected by rabid capitalism. The inevitable result is degradation of quality of life, the environment, international relationships, etc.
    This is in stark contrast to a right-hemisphere-dominant perspective on life, which uses & values the left hemisphere's qualities of looking after practical matters, AND BALANCES this with careful attention to larger contexts, 'the big picture' in order to nurture & collaborate or 'tend-and-befriend.' This is living in wise relationship with ourself, other humans, other beings, Nature, Cosmos, Source. 
    Too many of us have forgotten our own wisdom nature, traditions & practices. We must reclaim these ASAP to help revive our culture's wisdom vacuum.

    "... consider Thomas Banyacya's four words: 'Stop, consider, change, and correct.' Stop what you are doing. Consider the effects of what you are doing. Is it upholding life on this land? Or is it destructive to the life on this land? If it is destructive, then change your value system and your actions. We are not supposed to be subduing the earth, treading it underfoot, vanquishing the earth and all its life. We are supposed to be taking care of this land and the life upon it. So it's up to you to consider which side you are going to be on." 
    Craig Carpenter, traditional Mohawk messenger, in "The Book of Elders - The Life Stories & Wisdom of Great American Indians" as told to Sandy Johnson & Dan Budnik

    In one of his recent informative online interviews, McGilchrist comments on materialist science when it strays far beyond its appropriate limited domain:
    "Reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it’s going to make. A simple down to earth example, if I may give one, is a piece of music. So if you ask somebody who is analytically bent, to work our what a piece of music is doing, well they’ll say, first of all what is a piece of music made of? It’s made of notes. Well, the first question then to answer, what is a note? And a note is a sound like that. Then what does it mean? Nothing. Okay, well the music has another of these notes. What does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I’ve got Mozart’s G minor quintet. It’s just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing! And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye, which was the web of connections in which, and only in which, the thing had any meaning.

    The point I think I’m trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning. And if you think of the Universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you’ve got down to with your microscope, you can’t see what it makes in aggregate. 
    A simple analogy would be like, what is a motorbike? Oh, I’m going to find out. There’s one in the garage. I’ll take it apart. And several hours later, the other person comes back and says, ‘Okay, what is it?’ ‘Well, it’s got two of these and three of those, and something else, but search me, I have no idea what it is.’ And it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s completely destroyed by the acts of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was, was to get on it and ride it. 
    And life is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, from outside, and understand it. A religious belief is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, and inspect it, and go, ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, according to where I am standing now.’ But it only doesn’t stand up from where you’re standing now because of where you’re standing now. 
    Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book saying ‘this is how to swim,’ and swearing you’re not going to get into the river until you’ve learned to swim from the book."
    Iain McGilchrist "Your Brain Has 2 Masters — And One Is Leading Us Astray" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5C11mlTH4 

    “When good is done, it contains all good. Although good is formless, when it is done, it attracts more good faster than a magnet attracts iron. Its power is stronger than the strongest wind. All the accumulated karma throughout the earth, mountains, rivers, world and lands cannot obstruct the power of good.” Master Eihei Dogen

"Choices in a meditator's life are very simple: 
Do those things that contribute to awareness. 
Refrain from those things that do not." Sujata

“Now is the time, and we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Hopi elders