Neil Theise: “When I think of the word ‘enlightenment,’ or ‘kensho’ in Japanese Zen, or ‘awakening experience,’ to me it's not so much about what you discover, but it’s that you have that momentwhen you see the two faces and then suddenly you see the vase. Someone asked me, in a yoga group when I was giving this talk, ‘What’s enlightenment like?’ – like I know (laughing). I had used a video of a murmuration of starlings (see below). And if you’ve ever actually been present for starlings, you may first just hear this sound coming from up there, and you look up and there’s this thing in the sky and then there’s this moment you realize, ‘Oh no, it’s starlings.’ It’s an extraordinary moment! There’s a joy to it and an excitement to it. That to me is an enlightenment experience. You saw reality one way (face / black cloud), you saw it another way (vase / starlings). The most extraordinary enlightenment experiences are, when you see the world of everyday reality, samsara, and then suddenly you see its non-dual pure awareness aspect (ultimate reality), and they aren’t two. It’s just, do you see it this way (face / everyday reality), or do you see it this way (vase / ultimate reality)? I think in Zen practice, in Buddhist practice, the question, the aim, how do you alleviate suffering, is learning to flexibly move between these 2 views. We’re separate. I hurt. I’m alone (face / everyday reality). We are seamlessly one whole thing within which everything is just as it should be (vase / ultimate reality). I’m separate. I’m alone. I hurt (face / everyday reality). Rick Archer: “And my sense is that … it’s not strictly 'either or.' So as you go along, it becomes more & more blended, 'both and.' And that it may be that, like my video camera right now, I’m in focus and the background is a little bit fuzzy, but then the camera could be adjusted so that I’m a little bit fuzzy and the background is clear. And I think that’s the way it works. As one goes along, eventually there’s always this continuum of pure awareness or self-realization or whatever you want to call it, in the midst of whatever else that's going on.”
Neil Theise: “Right. And you’re just able to do it that much more flexibly & freely. You know, the freedom, when people talk about in Zen terms ... People talk about the freedom of a Zen master, of a Zen adept. The freedom is the freedom to move back & forth (face, vase, back & forth) with ease.”
Rick Archer: “And again, to have both there all the time. And sometimes the fact that it’s there might not be obvious. Always there might not be obvious. If you could sort of say that pure awareness is like a tone, the tone is always going, after a while you wouldn’t be paying so much attention to it, you’d be doing this or that, but any time you want to check, oh yeah, the tone is still there. And so, you know, like in my experience, like sometimes if I injure myself, like I fall off my bicycle or something like that. The contrast of that experience makes it, vividly evidentthat there’s something that’s not affected by that and that something is always there and it just, you don’t have to pay attention to it as 'a thing,' because it isn’t one, but it’s just this, like the screen of a movie – they always use that analogy. The screen is always there no matter what movie is playing on it. But awakening is more like a state where you actually see the screen AND watch the movieat the same time. The movieno longer overshadows the screen.”
Neil Theise: “And not get caught by either. ‘Oh this isn’t real. I’m not going to react emotionally what’s going on because I know it’s just light on a screen. But on the other hand, ‘Oh my God, what a story!’
Rick Archer: “You want to enjoythe movie - you paid for it. That’s the task, right?” Neil Theise interviewed by Rick Archer:https://batgap.com/neil-theise/
"Enjoythe problem you're trying to solve!" Wise advice I heard on TV.
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised asinsoluble problems.” John W. Gardner
"Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." George Washington Carver "You learn about a thing ... by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it. You learn about a thing by loving it." Barbara McClintock - Nobel prize-winning geneticist
David Steindl-Rast PhD (psychology) is a highly- & widely-respected Benedictine monk, 97 years young when he wrote this, his most recent book. As one expects from mystics, Steindl-Rast's book beautifully resonates with Neil Theise & Rick Archer's discussion above:
"I have been privileged to meet people whose I seemed completely translucent, letting the Self shine through. In their presence, it becomes easier for me to be myself. At such moments, I’m aware of being a unique expression in space and time of the one great Self. Different traditions call the Self under this aspect by different names. For the Native American Pima people it is I’itoi; for Hindus, Atman; for Buddhists, Buddha Nature. Christians call it the Christ within us. St. Paul points to this when he writes, ‘I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). To become ever more transparent for the Self in this sense is the great task of ‘becoming who we truly are.’
That task involves ‘playing my role in life well,’ …
There is only one Self. To forget this fact amounts to forgetting that it is ultimately the Self that – through its countless manifestations – plays all the roles on the world stage. When I forget that, I become like the actor so lost in my role that, in the end, I can no longer distinguish myself from my role. To the extent to which this happens, my I loses awareness of the Self and, by doing so, becomes an Ego. Ego is simply the Latin word for ‘I,’ but we’ll be using it with a negative connotation because we need a word for the I when it loses – partly or completely – awareness of the Self. The more the I forgets the Self that makes it one with all others, the more it feels isolated and becomes the Ego.” David Steindl-Rast. “You Are Here. Keywords for Life Explorers.” Orbis, 2023.
“Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts.” David Whyte, poet & philosopher
“True adulthood … is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won
glory, which commercial forces & cultural vapidity should not be
permitted to deprive you of.” Toni Morrison
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as thoughnothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein
Michael Singer does an amazing job of illustrating how everything is miraculously amazing even with the restricted vision of materialist science: Michael A. Singer “Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament” Sounds True, 2022.
“The important thing is not to think much, but to lovemuch, and so to do what best awakens us to love.” Saint Teresa of Ávila
"... one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.” Ram Dass
We are called “to servenot our limitations but what’s whole & unbreakable,our true self. It’s easy to identify with all the places we’ve been hurt & abandoned, but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition? If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves and never risk really living.” Bonnie Myotai Treace
Bold title! IF one is more inclined toward the academic / knowledgethandeep understanding / direct experience, then one's meditation practice may never start or will tend to gradually diminish! Along with that, the richness of one's life may peak at "ordinary unhappiness." This is true EVEN IFone's past includes a long track
record of serious meditation practice, including many longish silent
meditation retreats, many years of teaching meditation, and great earnestness in seeking ultimate Truth! All this is to emphasize the PIVOTAL, PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE of REGULAR WISE MEDITATION PRACTICE. You CANNOT replacePRACTICEwith anything else - any amount of reading, thinking, conversation, teaching or writing, any more than you can replace actually skiing by reading, thinking, talking, teaching or writing about it!
Below is the full transcript of Eckhart Tolle'sSUPERB MEDITATION GUIDANCE - savor it slowly & please PRACTICE this rare gift :
“Meditation is really all about becoming still, without going to sleep. It’s not so much about becoming still, but being still. Becoming would imply that you have to go somewhere or do something. Being is already here & now.
And in a sane life, a conscious life, a harmonious life, there needs to be a balancebetweenbecomingandbeing. Becoming is doing things, getting things done and so on in this world, dealing with things, creating things, achieving things. And being is about awareness of the present moment, which after all is all you ever have. Whatever you achieve through becoming in the future eventually turns into the present moment.
So as I speak to you, the meditation, if we even want to call it that, it’s perhaps best to forget about the word, as I speak, be aware of the silence or the stillness between the words. Being aware means just notice that it’s there. It’s very simple. So you notice that in addition to the words, there’s another dimension that is easily overlooked, and that’s the dimension of stillness, which we could also call space or spaciousness. So when you notice that there are two, so to speak, two dimensions here, the dimension of words which you hear and which then become thoughts in your head, and the dimension of no-thing, spaciousness. And so you just notice, that’s all that’s required, that there is that dimension also present. So you notice it in between words, and even behind the words, so to speak. Now when you notice it, what happens inside you? What does it mean to notice the stillness, to be aware of the stillness? (Sense / feel it, without words.)
It means you have become still inside. It means you’re conscious, but at this moment, you’re not thinking, but you’re alert, present, completely here, but not thinking. So that’s the realizationof the dimension of depthswithin you.
And without that realization, your entire life is a surface phenomenon. You run around on the surface of being, never satisfied for long, frustrated, almost aways feeling there’s something important missing in your life. And of course, there is. But you can’t find it on the surface of your life – the horizontal dimension, looking here & there. You have to, notbecome still, but realize that that dimension of stillness is already in you. And another word to describe it is to say it’s thisalert presence that you can sense right now.
And you may find the mind wanting to come in, from time to time, and say something about it, or even deny it, or say, ‘I don’t understand it,’ or say, ‘What’s the point? I have other problems to worry about. I’ll become still when I have solved all the other problems.’
But why most people experience life as a succession of problems, and ultimately a frustrating experience, is because they haven’t discovered that dimension – the most vital thingorno-thingto discover within yourself. That stillness is also power. It's the Source, not only of yourself, it is the Source of life. And nothing creative can ever come into your life if you’re not connected with that.
Whenever you feel joy - for moments perhaps - in your daily life, or a moment of loving interaction with another human being or an animal, or when you suddenly see beauty somewhere and you go, ‘Oh!’, now without you necessarily being aware of it, there has arisen a moment of stillness in you, if only three seconds, or perhaps a bit more. And it’s only there that the joy of life arises, or the ability to really connect with another human being.
Without it, without the stillness, you have onlyyour conceptual mind – thinking, thinking, thinking – and you relate to the world through the conceptual mind – judging, thinking, judging, interpreting continuously, the inner self-talk, the monologue, which may become a dialogue in your head. ‘You’re no good!’ says one voice. The other one says, ‘But I’m trying, I’m trying,’ whatever the voice in your head is doing. And then you try to relate to another human being through that. And before long, concepts come in, judgments come in. So there’s always a sense of insufficiency, of lack, of not enough. There’s alwaysconflict arising when the dimension of stillness is not operating in your life at all, or only very briefly. Yes, it’s good if you can occasionally experience joy and a sense of aliveness and see beauty and a loving feeling towards another human being, not egoic (transactional) love, but goodwill flowing out (spontaneously) towards another human being (ie unconditional love). Yes, it’s wonderful, but if it’s only for brief moments, then yes, at least that keeps you going. But it could be much deeper. It could operate in your life continuously, so that you never lose touch with it.
But the first step is realizing that it’s there always. It’s already here. In the little book, ‘Stillness Speaks’ I wrote, ‘You are never more truly yourself than when you are still.’ And you might think that’s a strange statement. Most people when they talk about ‘myself,’ talk about their personal history, and their personal problems, and their life situation. When they talk about ‘myself,’ that’s what they refer to. They refer to my relationships, my work situation, my financial situation, my home situation, my health, me and my life. And of course, all that is the case. But, is that who youreally are?” "Awakening to Stillness: Eckhart Tolle's Path to Conscious Living -
Guided Meditation"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjMeG6K9Fdw
Another excellent way of feeling or sensing into, directly experiencingtrue Selfbeyond our worn-out words(narrative-self - "the story of me, myself & I," hurt child, small separate self, personal self, noisy ego, etc) is Helen Hamilton's 30-minute guided Self-Inquiry exercise: https://www.helenhamilton.org/uploads/4/0/0/9/4009977/an_introduction_to_self-inquiry.mp3
"Awakening to Stillness: Eckhart Tolle's Path to Conscious Living -
Guided Meditation"
Very recently, two of my fittest friends, both life-long athletes, both in their late 70s, came very close to death with pneumonia. Thanks to ready access to the wonders of modern medicine, both now are recovering - one at home, the other still in hospital. "Knockin on heaven's door" for some, suggests closeness to "the end" - perhaps imagining concrete barriers at the end of a "dead end" street. But Zen talks about a "gateless gate" - a koan or open question (transcending the left-hemisphere) to ponder deeply, until - like plainly visible, tangible water at 100°C suddenly transforms into subtle vapor - everything changes ...
"Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.” Anthony de Mello SJ
Everything is driven by the magnetic pull toward Oneness, our true Self, and this we sense with our right-hemisphere-dominant consciousness.BUT when we're out of touch withour true nature, then we're driven by LACK -gnawing frustration & dissatisfaction which activates our left-hemisphere-dominant mindset, the function of which is exclusively to help us survive & reproduce - so we try to grab, hold & keep 'things, people & experiences.' This (sadly common) obsessive self-centeredness invariably failsto provide peace & lasting happiness: http://www.johnlovas.com/2018/12/towards-intimacy.html Iain McGilchrist spent 30 years of meticulous research, study, writing & speaking about the crucial importance of right-hemisphere dominance which includes a useful subservient, supportive role for the left-hemisphere. He put all the ducks ("parts") in order, to satisfy the most fastidious, materialist, skeptical of linear thinkers so that they might have a glimpse of "the whole" in two masterworks: Iain McGilchrist "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" in 2019. Iain McGilchrist "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World" in 2021.
“Since 2006, Jeffery A. Martin PhD and his team have spearheaded the largest global scientific effort to understand forms of human experience such as: awakening, enlightenment, non-duality, God consciousness, the peace that passeth understanding, unity consciousness, persistent mystical experience, and hundreds of similar others. Academically, we refer to these as types of Ongoing and Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience. Publicly, we most typically call themFundamental Wellbeing.” Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “How to Safely, Reliably, and Rapidly Reach Fundamental Wellbeing: Lessons from the Largest Scientific Project Ever Assembled on Awakening, Enlightenment, Non-duality, Unity Consciousness, and Other Forms of Fundamental Wellbeing.” Integration Press, 2020. (free e-book) “If you stop and truly examine the average person’s life, it becomes obvious that it comes down to tradeoffs that are being made to mitigate their fundamental discontentment. It’s the foundation that all of their experience is built upon, and they spend a great deal of time & energy trying to pacify it. People will do almost anything to get as much distance from it as possible. Sometimes they make the decision that the best option is pleasure in the moment. Other times, they might sacrifice for what they perceive to be a more substantial or durable gain in the future. Every moment involves a carefully calculated move in an overall strategy to minimize fundamental discontent. Findershave this discontentment replaced witha deep-seated foundational, inner peace. Just like the discontentment is for others, this peace simply seems to be there. However, also just like discontentment, there are things that can pull it closer or create some distance to it. The inner game for Finders is about this peace, thoughsome miss this because of their former habit of focusing on & managing discontentment.” Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019.
Michael A. Singer is imho a wise man with 50 years of deep spiritual practice, and an excellent communicator. His regular talks are freely available. Here are the closing 3 minutes of (at this time) his most recent talk: “It's All Energy” - Thursday March 7, 2024 - https://tou.org/talks/ “‘Are you willing to let go of yourself?’ … But you’re just lost in your self, aren’t you? If you think that things should be the way you want, you’re lost in your self. ‘Why is it raining on my birthday?' ‘Oh my God, there you go again. Why did it have to rain today?’ ... That’s ego. It’s not just people who are boisterous who have big old egos. That’s ego, you think it’s you. You look at it all through the veil of ‘you.’ The great onesdo not do that. … they look at things from the center of Consciousness, and realize everybody else is the same as me - it’s the same Consciousness, but it’s looking at something different. And we’ve all had different experiences. Yogananda, an enlightened being, used to say, ‘But by God’s grace, there goes myself.’ That’s how he looked at wrong in this world. Had I not been brought up by my mother, in my tradition, in this, & that food to eat, and so on. How dare you judge somebody else. And Christ is the same way, ‘May you without sin, throw the first stone.’ Wake up! These are the deep traditions. They’re about stepping out of your self enough to realize we’re all in here, but we’re lost in the stuff the psyche built over the course of our lives. Next time you feel low in energy, just remember who you are - five hundred trillion times the brightness of the sun. And you can’t even see it. One star in the spattered sky, and that’s what it really is. And they’re everywhere. And that’s who you are.
But you’ve limited yourself. You’ve limited yourself to stare down at this thing. And the trouble is, if you don’t get what you want, you’re not comfortable. A heroin addict once said that to me. ‘You know I’m much nicer when I get a hit. And I’m really strung out and terrible when I don’t.’ Well, okay, fine. That’s not a nice thing to talk about is it? But it’s the same thing. You’re addicted to your psyche. You’re addicted to the patterns that you have within your mind. All right. The beauty of it all is that you are a very great being. And you’re capable of returning to that state, gradually, by letting go of staring at yourself. The more you let go of staring at yourself, the more you let go of getting all caught up in ("preferences") what you want & what you don’t want, what you like & what you don’t like.
And just start honoring & respecting the flow of life, and serving it to the best of your ability. … You don’t interact with life to make it do what you want. You see something happening, and you feel a reaction – let go of the reaction, and then see if there’s something you can do to help! How nice would it be if every single moment, instead of asking, ‘What I want & how do I get it?’ you were asking, ‘How can I help this moment? How can I serve?’ ("Nurturing") Whoa. That’s the beauty of the path!” Michael A. Singer “It's All Energy” - Thursday March 7, 2024 - https://tou.org/talks/
"At times we are hidden, at times revealed. We are Muslims, Christians, Jews, of any race. Until our hearts are shaped to hold all hearts, We show these different faces to the world." Jalaludin Rumi
Knockin on Heaven's Door
This version was recorded in memory of the Dunblane Massacre 13 March 1996, where 16 children and one adult were killed.
A new verse was written, and the children who sing the chorus are brothers and sisters of the victims.
The song was released 9 December 1996. Proceeds went to charities for children. Ted Christopher - vocals,
Mark Knopfler - guitar.
There are many ways of expressing "separate self": small self, narrative-self, ordinary mind, personal mind, pain body, egocentricity, noisy ego, fearful hurt child, etc. All of these reveal aspects of the common, and for many, the default self-concept / worldview. This worldview is fear-based; conflates survival of the ego with survival of the body; assumes we're all "alone in a competitive, hostile world" where one's external circumstances rigidly, mechanically determine quality of life; where perfect control of one's external environment means everything to the left-hemisphere-dominant mind. But since perfect control is never achievable, "ordinary unhappiness" is as good as it gets. Nevertheless, when anxiety, fear & unhappiness dominate, this ordinary mind rules - much like how during emergencies, the fight, flight, freeze instinct kicks in; and also like how during times of war, right-wing dictators find it easiest to cling to power.
“No one can tell you whatawakening is. I could use a lot of words to describe what it’s like. I could say it’s kind of like wakening from a dream. Suddenly you’re not who you think you are. You are not the dream character, the person or personality that you’ve been playing all your life.” Dan Schmidt
Nevertheless, "Big Mind" has been experienced&pointed towards in many ways & words, such as: Awakening, Awareness, true self, Self, Universal Consciousness, Source, Buddha nature, the Divine, high-plateau experience, enlightenment, Christ consciousness, God, Fundamental Wellbeing, Ongoing Non-Symbolic Experience, Juingong, etc.One of the better books describing how people - whom Martin calls "Finders"- from around the world have experienced this is:Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019.
“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.” Anthony de Mello SJ "Another name for God is Surprise!" Brother David Steindl-Rast “As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.” Anthony de Mello SJ
Those who experience higher states of consciousness for sustained periods reportextraordinary levels of wellbeing. Regardless of geographic location, ethnicity, spirituality / religiosity, education etc, there is remarkable similarity in "Finders'" descriptions. More & more such people are sharing their experiences in serious, in-depth interviews: https://batgap.com/ and http://conscious.tv/ and https://cac.org/podcast/turning-to-the-mystics/ and https://www.guruviking.com/ etc.
Finders “have moved past their moments of doubt & frustration. They have found exactly what everyone else has been seeking their entire life. For them, each moment feels perfectly okay at a deep & fundamental level, regardless ofactual life circumstances. There individuals do not dwell on past regrets or glories, nor worries about future hopes & dreams. They live peacefully in the present, while everyone else around them seems intent on trying to escape it. They’ve not only found fulfillment but a deep & fundamental sense of wellbeing.” Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019.
As soon as we notice that we're confused & suffering, as if we were alone, struggling to survive in a hostile world, Zen advises that we "take the backward step" and ask ourselves, "Who is confused? Who is suffering?Who is struggling?" This "self-inquiry" practice will increasingly serve to snap us out ofthe illusion of being this small "separate self" - the pawn in some cruel cosmic game, and back to our true self, ONE with everyone & everything, the Source,Universal Consciousness.
Gradually, as wellbeing becomes stabilized, Finders can opt to shift into a "quiet ego" ("doing mode") to perform certain practical tasks, then effortlessly return to Awareness ("being mode") again. As an aside, Iain McGilchrist's right-hemisphere dominanceaccommodates both of these (while left-hemisphere dominance is equivalent to "noisy ego" - much higher levels of self-centeredness). Martin's book is quite detailed, providing insight into Finders' profound qualitative change in perspective, self-concept & worldview after which they (other serious meditators, mystics & saints) say / write seemingly opaque, confusing & even paradoxical statements, such as this well-known unequivocal declaration:
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) English Christian mystic
Just asBessel Van Der Kolk's excellent book, “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” helps us look back and understand self-compassionately, the effects of past traumas on our lives,Jeffery Martin's valuable book, "The Finders" helps us roughly locate where we are now on our spiritual journey and provides an important map for the joyful trails awaiting us.
“But by my love and hope I beseech thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Keep sacred thy highest hope!”Friedrich Nietzsche “Thus spoke Zarathustra”
Most of us assume that our identityis defined exclusively by: our name, age, body, family of origin, education, job, successes, failures, illnesses, ups & downs - ie "the story" about us that we keep telling ourselves & others. We've become habituated to an almost continuous level of self-concern - anxiety & fear about our comfort & survival as if alone in a hostile world.
One of the foremost experts in PTSD wrote: “If you feel safe & loved, your brain (is) specialized in exploration, play, & cooperation; if you are frightened & unwanted, it (is) specialized in managing feelings of fear & abandonment." Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.
But what Van Der Kolk observed after severe trauma - preoccupation with managing fear, anxiety & unworthiness - is now almost ubiquitous in our society. This widespread unbalanced mindset, self-concept & worldview is what Iain McGilchrist has been studying, researching, writing & lecturing about for the past 30 years. He's found that ouranxious self-concernactivates & keeps us in left-hemisphere-dominant thinking WHICHoverridesour muchwiser, more balanced right-hemisphere-dominant perspective. Our current, as well as 3 previous global crises, arose due to left-hemisphere-dominant thinking.
Below is part of a recent interview with Iain McGilchrist MD, PhD about his perspective on the huge problems we face, based on his extensive studies & research findings, described in 2 monumental, critically-acclaimed books: "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" in 2019, and "The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World" in 2021. Here's a greatly abbreviated snapshot of, imho, his extremely important work:
“I see my work as essentially philosophy rather than something about the brain, but I think the divorce between philosophy and science has been a disaster for both parties, and I want to try and bring them together a bit in a way that I think could be helpful. Just a little bit about my progress or lack of it. I started off wanting to study philosophy and theology at university. I thought I would probably be ordained and go into a monastic order. But I discovered during the three years I was at Oxford that I wasn’t a very good candidate for monastic life. It wouldn’t have been good for me, and it wouldn’t have been good for the monastery. So that was ditched, and I got a fellowship which allowed me to explore all sorts of things. And I had a problem about the academic study of literature, because people took something that somebody had written in the past, that had great meaning, and that they had left to communicate something to us, and instead, we sat in the seminar room and took it apart. The piece of literature had its value because it was unique. The message was embodied and also implicit, not explicit. When you made it explicit, you lost the point completely, like explaining a joke. And in the seminar room we turned thisimplicit, embodied, unique thinginto something that was explicit, disembodied & with a message you could find anywhere. And that led me to write my first book, ‘Against Criticism,’ and I decided that what I needed to do is to find out more about the mind-body problem, because it seemed to me we were just too disembodied. I spent a lot of time in philosophy seminars on the mind-body problem, but it just seemed to me that the philosophers were far too disembodied in their approach. And around that time, Oliver Sacks had written a book called ‘Awakenings’ which I thought was very important. And he did two very wonderful things there, he went into individual cases in great detail, in order to show general points. This is a Goethean phenomenon. One of Goethe’s most important philosophical contributions is the idea that you don’t find the general by turning your back on the particular or the individual, but bygoing deeper into the particular in the individual. And he also seemed to me to be talking about what happened when the mind and body interacted in an odd way and something happened to the body and it changed the mind, or something happened in the mind and it had effects on the body. And the only way to know more about this was to study medicine, and so I did. And when I had qualified in medicine and was working at the Maudsley Hospital in London, which is probably the foremost psychiatric hospital in Britain, I heard a lecture one day by a colleague (John Cutting, whom I considered the most interesting living psychiatrist) who’d been studying the right hemisphere of the brain. It had never been my intention to study it, but he had done what lots of neurologists hadn’t done, which is to sit at the bedside of people who had had strokes, tumors or other injuries to the right hemisphere of the brain, and discovered that actually their consequences of this were more devastating for their ability to understand themselves, the world, or what was going on around them than a left hemisphere stroke, even though the left hemisphere most commonly made it difficult for them to use their right hand, to write, and to use language. So this was fascinating. And he told me in this lecture certain things that were based on a book, which was published by Oxford University press called, ‘The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders.’ He told me certain things that explained to me that the righthemisphere alone, really understands a unique case; that the left hemisphere has already taken whatever it is into a category, put it into a box, made it a representative of something rather than something unique in its own right. Also that the right hemisphereunderstood implicit meaning, irony, humor, metaphor, poetry, ritual, body language, facial expressions, the tone of voice, but the left hemisphere didn’t. It was more like a computer taking a book of syntax rules and semantics, and dictionary, and working out what people meant. And the third thing was that the right hemisphere was much more in touch with the body; the left hemisphere was effectively less so. I have to cut corners here enormously, but just to give you an idea which I think helps to explain why I ended up in this area. I went up to him afterwards and said this is very interesting, and I told him about the book I’d written about the philosophy of literature, and he wanted to read that. And that started a working relationship in which we researched hemisphere differences together. And I knew very, very well that this was a very risky thing to do. But I’ve got a perverse streak in me that if I think that there’s something here that’s really important, I’m not put off by people who say, ‘Oh that’s all rubbish. The thing about their brain hemispheres, it’s all been exploded. It’s all nonsense. It’s all pop psychology.’ Everyone warned me, ‘Don’t go into this.’ But of course it was true that what we then believed was wrong, but it didn’t mean that there were no differences, and the differences were fascinating. And it was the next 20 years of research, including neuroimaging at John Hopkins, & acquainting myself with the literature, & examining patients that led me to understand these hemisphere differences. And so these experiences were as an adjunct to a philosophical question about how we see the world, and what are the effective differences. I can put this as quickly as I can. For reasons of survival, all living creatures have to do 2 incompatible things at once. They have to be able to focus their attention on a detail so as to get it, and grab it, and eat it, or pick it up and use it, faster than anyone else, accurately. So a very clearly targeted, narrow beam of attention needs to be paid. But, if that’s the only attention you pay, then you don’t see the predators, you don’t see your kin, your conspecifics (organisms belonging to the same species), you just don’t understand where you are and you will not survive. So all the neural networks that we know, all the creatures, not just humans, but all the way down through mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, insects, everything that we know seem to have at least two centers of attention, dedicated to these two differences. And we think this goes back very anciently from examining fossils of trilobites and the most ancient living creature still extent ... And it’s already asymmetrical. So there’s something very, very important about different attention. Effectively, if you pay attention to the world in one way, you will see one thing, and if you pay a different kind of attention, you will see another. One of the things I would say is that attention changes the world. It actually makes the world that we experience – the only world that we can possibly know – different. And it also makes us different, because if we pay a certain kind of attention, we can become alienated from the worldORwe can become connected with the world, for a start.
What do these two kinds of attention result in in phenomenological terms? Well, the left hemisphere’s attention builds up a picture of a world that is made of isolated fragments that have no context and don’t mean anythinguntil they’re put together by us. We arrange them, and we probably put them in a little category. The left hemisphere is very keen on putting things in a little box where they all belong together. And so you have a world which is simply made of fragments. The fragments are static. They’re frozen by this gorgon-like stare of the left hemisphere to capture it. (in Greek mythology, the Gorgons were 3 monstrous sisters with snakes for hair who could turn someone to stone just by looking at them). And they have no particular meaning for us. We are not connected with them. We are very distant from these things because we’re observing them and ready to attack them. And they have nosort of implicit meaning or connection with other things. Whereas the right hemisphere sees a world in which everything is flowing, changing all the time, in which everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Nothing is ever completely isolated. And that when you take something out of its context, you radically change what it is, completely change it. You can in fact reverse the take, or the meaning, or the impact of what it is you’re looking at by decontextualizing it. So these 2 ways of looking at the world are in a way both necessary. They both have a use. BUT they have contradictory effects. And what I began to see was that in the world we live in, we ONLY use the left hemisphere’s kind of attention.
When I was in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins Hospital I was imaging brains and looking at the abnormal asymmetry in the brains of people with schizophrenia. There is a normal symmetry in the brain that is absolutely normal – the brain is bigger at the front on the right, and bigger at the back on the left. But in schizophrenia, it’s often reversed or absent. And we think that is connected with the phenomena of the illness. While I was there, I got a message from my colleague John Cutting to say that there was a fascinating book ... called, ‘Madness and Modernism’ by Louis Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers in New York. What he showed was that in the modern period, people thought that their poetry, their stories, their paintings above all, & even their music, showed an aspect of something that was like what happens in schizophrenia. And in schizophrenia the world makes no sense. Things are no longer coherent. And he points to about 25 different phenomena that are seen in schizophrenia, but are also replicated in the last hundred years of philosophy, literature & art. I thought that this was absolutely fascinating. It’s a brilliant book and very well written. It may sound rather glib, but it isn’t. It’s extremely thorough and well thought through. And I began to think, if that’s happening now, we can’t all be getting schizophrenia, but I had already discovered that people with schizophrenia are very like people witha left hemisphere in overdrive and a right hemispherethat is not functioning properly. And again, I haven’t got time to go into that. But that led me to think, what’s happening nowis thatwe are not listening to what our right hemisphere tells us, only towhat our left hemisphere tells us. And then I thought, maybe there were other times in history when the balance was better. And I found in short that three times over Western history, starting with the Greeks and working forwards to post-modernism, there have been three times when a flourishing societybegan to drift more & more to the take of the left hemisphere before collapsing. So that is quite relevant for us, because I believe we’re in that terminal phase now, unless we wake up and see what it is we’re doing. It’s not enough to have a list of things to do, because if we don’tchange in our heart & our mind, if we don’tchange the whole way we look at the world, we can’t survive. That in an incredibly brief & simple way, is to try and explain why I think this subject is important.” Interviewer: “The way you describe it now, and in your books, really shows how our technological relationship to reality, what defines modernism, and also the kind of effectiveness of modernism, and the particularity of modernism, is very much related to the phenomena described withthe left hemisphere of the brain. And ... that our crises may be related to the one-sidedness of our culture. …” “The central thing is to do with values, because the value of the left hemisphere is in getting things, grabbing things, possessing things, having power over them, having control, and all the rest. It sees this tiny thing. It’s dedicated to something it already knows at once. But all the rest, the uncommitted attention to the whole, is yielded by theright hemisphere. And I sometimes put it like this, that the left hemisphere helps us apprehend the world, … whereas the right hemisphere helps us to comprehend the world, which is really to hold it together, perhaps to Big Life, but it’s a bit more than that. … This is the difference between them in their values, and so there’s something addictive about the left hemisphere, because it gives you power, it gives you control. Technology is the tool of the left hemisphere. But the important thing about technology is it’s neither good nor bad, it depends on the wisdom of the person who’s wielding it. And wisdom is what we’re leaving out of this picture. The right hemisphere is wise, and sees a lot. The left hemisphere isrelatively ignorant, so it sees literally less than the right hemisphere, understands much less and doesn’t see the need forwhat the right hemisphere knows. Whereas the right hemisphereseeing more, knows that its knowledge is limited, & knows that it needs the left hemisphere. So they have an unfortunate inequality, in which the one that should be in control – the right hemisphere, the master as I call it, the one that can see where we need to go, that can exert wisdom, isn’t in control. Instead, we’re driven bythe desire for stuff, for acquisition, for power, for control which is the left hemisphere’s raison d'être.” The Brain, the Sacred and the Soul - Iain McGilchrist & Thomas Steininger of Evolve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5g4tOu6Hgk
So when we're finally fed up with "the story of me," and are ready & courageous enough to experience who we really are, who has been witnessing all the changes over this lifetime of ours, who has been consistently aware of all the changes taking place in that mirror of ours, start meditating in earnest, including "open questioning" or "self-inquiry," and instead of being ruled by fear & aggression, loving wisdomwill guideus.