Is Life's Depth & Breadth Endangered?

     Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist puts forth powerful scientific arguments that our current culture is excessively left-hemisphere dominant. Twenty years of his research in a nutshell: 

     “... the left hemisphere is dependent on denotative language and abstraction; yields clarity & power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.
     The right hemisphere by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings, within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, never perfectly known. And this world exists in a certain relationship.
     The knowledge mediated by the left hemisphere is however within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but the perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness.
     There’s a problem here about the nature of the two worlds. It offers two versions of the world and obviously we combine them in different ways all the time.
     We need to rely on certain things to manipulate the world. But for a broad understanding of it, we need to use knowledge that comes from the right hemisphere." 
       Iain McGilchrist. “The Divided Brain.” TEDtalk RSA Animate: https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain

     “So for humans the need to have both ways of understanding the world, and yet keeping them apart, is paramount. And it turns out that in humans the corpus callosum, the band of tissue that connects the hemispheres, while it does both connect and inhibit, is more involved with the process of inhibition, with keeping things separate.
     What is the left-hemisphere expansion in apes for, then? It has to do with their capacity to form concepts, in order to better manipulate the world. And so it is in humans, where it is also related to our capacity for language and, literally, to manipulation with the right hand. 
     And the bump at the front on the right in humans and in some apes, is associated with a whole array of 'functions' that distinguish us from other animals and relate to our capacity for empathy: in intimate connection with the right hemisphere as a whole, it plays a significant part in imagination, creativity, the capacity for religious awe, music, dance, poetry, art, love of nature, a moral sense, a sense of humour and the ability to change our minds. The ways in which hemisphere differences affect what each hemisphere ‘does’ are profound.
     Unfortunately, though the hemispheres need to cooperate, they find themselves in competition, simply because the left hemisphere’s take on things is such that it thinks it knows it all, while it cannot be aware of what the right hemisphere knows. Each needs the other, but the left hemisphere is more dependent on the right than the right is on the left. [Obvious when comparing the effects of left- vs right-hemisphere-function loss from strokes etc] Yet the left hemisphere thinks exactly the opposite and believes it can ‘go it alone.’ I believe the battle between the hemispheres (which is only a battle from the left hemisphere’s point of view) explains the shape of the history of ideas in the West and explains the predicament we find ourselves in today.” 
       Iain McGilchrist. “Ways of Attending. How our Divided Brain Constructs the World.” Routledge, 2019. I highly recommend this 32 page summary for those who understandably find themselves reticent about tackling the full 588 page feast of facts.

     “Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind (right hemisphere) a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind (left hemisphere) was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.” Bob Samples

     "In this culture, we have science and technology as religion. We no longer have a religious or philosophical basis for making choices regarding the evolution of technology. All those decisions are made in the corporate world. But there are other societies where taboos, the very concept of taboo, still exist. Taboo is probably the only concept that is taboo in this society. But in traditional societies they have had centuries-long discussions about whether to plant or whether to continue being nomads or whether a certain kind of agricultural relationship is a good idea or not. Taboo constitutes a philosophical framework...
     ... We seem to have it backward. In the absence of the sacred, anything goes, because we’re completely spun off, unrooted, with no sense of consequences, no family, no community, no nothing... These technologies do act as drugs. They are what society offers to make up for what has been lost. In return for family, community, a relationship to a larger, deeper vision, society offers television, drugs, food, noise, high speed, and unconsciousness. Not only are those the things that are available, but those are the things that keep you from knowing that there’s anything else available. It’s easy to see why people go for those things and why they become addicted to them, because each one offers some element of satisfaction. . . . Now if you’re asking how we might change that pattern, I can only say that you have to create alternative visions; you have to get people to experience what they’ve lost.

     ... I have to reject the idea that selfishness is instinctive. It’s come to be understood that selfishness is part of human nature, but I think that’s in the context of the lives that we have now. We are so isolated that we tend to act only in our own self interest.

     ... The fantasies of utopian existence promoted by proponents of the technological, industrial mode of life for the last one hundred years are now demonstrably false. That’s not what we got. What we got was alienation, disorientation, destruction of the planet, destruction of natural systems, destruction of diversity, homogenization of cultures and regions, crime, homelessness, disease, environmental breakdown, and tremendous inequality. We have a mess on our hands. This system has not lived up to its advertising; in developing a strategy for telling people what to do next, we first have to make that point. Life really is better when you get off the technological/industrial wheel and conceive of some other way. It makes people happier. It may not make them more money, but getting more money hasn’t worked out. Filling life with commodities doesn’t turn out to be satisfying, and most people know that." 
       Jerry Mander, author of: "In the Absence of the Sacred" interviewed by Catherine Ingram https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/theSun.html

Conflicting Perspectives and Neuroscience

     "The medical humanities receive more than their fair share of students’ critiques in terms of both quantity and virulence. ... many refer to humanities teaching as pointless, boring, worthless, or just plain stupid. Even otherwise favorably disposed students are sometimes adamant about not making medical humanities required coursework." 
        Shapiro J et al. Medical Humanities and their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and Implications. Acad Med 2009; 84(2):192-8.

     So why this surprisingly aggressive assault by supposedly bright, well-intentioned medical students on something as civilized & prosocial as the "medical humanities"?

     “My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe that they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”
       Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019.

     McGilchrist devoted 20 years to research and write the above 588-page book, so no summary, even in his own words, can do justice, but here's a taste:

     “Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.
     Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. Each hemisphere of the brain is involved in everything. Both contribute to language, both contribute to reason, to emotion, to creativity, everything, but they do so in a reliably different way. And this has to do with attention. … solving a survival problem, which is how do you eat and stay alive. 
     This may not sound difficult but is actually a problem in the wild. Because on the one hand you’ve got to be completely focused on getting your prey or picking out that seed against a background of grit etc, entirely focused on it, and yet at the same time, if you’re not to become someone else’s lunch while you’re getting your own, you’ve got to have the exact opposite kind of attention paid to the world, at the same time, which is vigilance – open, uncommitted as to what it will find.
     Attention is the foundation of our experience. How we attend to something, literally changes what we find. And indeed, if you’re the object of somebody’s attention, you’ll feel yourself change, depending on the kind of attention you’re subjected to. It can make us feel warm and accepted, or small and mechanical, or whatever. And our views of the world similarly re-create the world through attention. So on the one hand it is not disputed that there are massive differences between these two hemispheres, because if you have a stroke in the left hemisphere and the same stroke happens in another person in the right hemisphere, they’ll have quite different consequences. And everything you can measure about the two hemispheres is quite different. So it’s not logical to say ‘Oh, they just do the same thing.’ 
     But the secret is in this attention. And that means that what they do is they create two different worlds that we’re having to balance. We’re not aware of this, because we’re doing it all the time below the level of consciousness. Although ideally they do complement one another, and in reality we have to draw from both, effectively, they’re two kinds of reality. So when people start doing theology or philosophy or whatever, they have to commit to one or other of these two kinds of reality. 
     And if I could sum them up, in the left hemisphere’s world there are a lot of little pieces that get put together to make a big picture, and those pieces are individually certain, fixed, static, circumscribed – they’re a bit like particles, billiard balls or whatever, and they have simple causal relationships with one another.
     In the right hemisphere’s world it’s quite different. Nothing is actually separable from anything else. Nothing is fixed and certain. Everything is changing and flowing. 
     So in one world you have a dynamic, evolving, changing, flowing, interconnected world which we are part of, and which we affect by our observations. 
     And in the other, a sort of world which is cooly detached from us, in which we can tinker with the little bits and make up a picture of the world. 
     But they’re not really of equal value. One is like a map of the world, the other is more like a real world. What I think has happened is I think there’s a conflict going on. … These hemispheres are doing two separate things. Their needs and values are separate. The right hemisphere wants to understand and to connect. The left hemisphere has discovered that it’s very good at exploiting, getting, grabbing, manipulating, because that’s what it actually exists to do, to catch food, to catch prey, pick up a seed, get a twig to build a nest, it’s the one that does the manipulation of the world. And that makes us powerful. 
     So of course the left hemisphere has kind of a superficial attraction. If you latch on to this point of view, you start to be technologically powerful. 
     But at the same time, if you ignore what the right hemisphere is telling you about how we are connected to everything else in the world, we end up turning the beautiful, amazing, awe-inspiring universe of which we are a part into a heap of rubbish through our efforts. 
     My thesis is that in the last 150 years, since the Enlightenment, and even more since the Industrial Revolution, we got locked into a very reduced, mechanistic version of the world, which rules out many things. I mean fortunately, most of us know deep down that this can’t be right because we go to an opera or we see a very beautiful scene and we know that it’s not reducible to all the garbage to do with sexual selection – not at all. It’s obvious we have a love for certain things – goodness, beauty and truth in themselves. So we know that’s not right, but unfortunately our present culture has a rhetoric which drives us ever more into this, I would say, very reductionist model of the world.” 
       Iain McGilchrist, quoted from some excellent videos.

Harmony between Hemispheres

Serving More Wisely

     In our time of workaholism, substance abuse, materialism & other severe imbalances, secondary traumatization, burnout and suicides, we need a MUCH healthier perspective on life.

     "… an important teaching by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen: ‘Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.’ Remen explains that helping is based on inequality: ‘When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of self-worth, integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But we don’t serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness of life.’" 
       Joan Halifax. “Standing at the Edge. Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet.” Flatiron Books, 2018.


     “Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden.... 
     Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life.” Rachel Naomi Remen MD

     “… the spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging and participation. We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not. There’s no place to go to be separated from the spiritual, so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma and practice. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual - but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it.” Rachel Naomi Remen MD
 
     "I am reminded that death, like love, is intimate, and that intimacy is the condition of the deepest learning.
     I am reminded, too, of the simplicity of the true teacher, and the power of story to include us in a web of connection far more profound than the superficial things that divide us.
     Ultimately, death is a close and personal encounter with the unknown. Many of those who have died and been revived by the skills of science tell us that the experience has revealed to them the purpose of life. This is not to become wealthy or famous or powerful. The purpose of every life is to grow in wisdom.” Rachel Naomi Remen MD

     “mindfulness concerns freeing oneself from misperceptions, thinking patterns, and self-imposed limitations that impede creativity, clear seeing, and optimal mental and physical health. Moreover, from both the Eastern and Western view, every individual has the intrinsic capacity to be mindful, and with intention and practice, mindfulness can garner strength and stability. In this sense, the greatest potential of mindfulness may emerge when one consciously decides to pursue mindfulness not as just a ‘tool’ in the proverbial toolbox, but as a way of seeing oneself and the world, or a conscious way of being and interacting.”
        Jeffrey Greeson, Eric L. Garland, David Black. “Mindfulness - A Transtherapeutic Approach for Transdiagnostic Mental Processes.” in Amanda Ie, Christelle T. Ngnoumen, Ellen J. Langer, eds.
 “The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness
.” John Wiley & Sons, 2014. 

Taking Care of Ourselves More Wisely

"Sometimes I go about with pity for myself
and all the while Great Winds
are carrying me across the sky."             Ojibeway wisdom

     "Be still... drop in deeper... listen.... sense into these 'Great Winds' that carry you...."                                    WisdomAtWork.com

     It's normal & healthy to look after ourselves. But don't we at times flip-flop between self-neglect & overindulgence? 
     Consider the ideal grandparent. Doesn't she wisely nurture her beloved grandchild? Nurturing means providing whatever's needed to maximize the probability that a person, animal, plant or project will flourish, thrive. 
     Wise nurturing has at least three components: unconditional love, experience & patience.
     Experience requires not just time, but also quiet, patient, honest self-reflection - intentionally, humbly learning from our mistakes, as well as things that went well; always guided by the open question, 'What will nurture us, others & our environment in the long-run?'
     Unconditional love is very rare! It must come, first & foremost, from ourselves! We must generate this precious, vital nurturing energy through self-acceptance, self-compassion - recognizing ourselves as being human beings, instead of mythical superheros. Unconditional love is the one & only source of the essential energy that unleashes & fuels our full human potential.
     All this requires patience, for we need to listen deeply to re-connect with our authenticity. Authenticity is easily drowned out by noisy distractions and the roller-coaster artificial highs & lows of our adrenaline-junky lives. Wisdom waits patiently as we slowly realize that we're fed up with noise, and that we're much, much more than thrill-seeking children. 
     Wisdom awaits - AND - life is short.

Origins of Medicine, Surgery & Psychotherapy

     “Alchemy, descended from shamanism, is the ancient art and science of elemental transformation. … alchemy grew historically out of the work of shamanic miners, smiths, and metallurgists. They were the masters of fire, who knew how to extract metals from stone, blend them into alloys such as bronze, and make tools, weapons and ornaments. In the archaic and classical period the knowledge of metalworking, because of its obvious connection to power and wealth, was preserved in secrecy and handed down in craftguilds from master to student. Such technical knowledge was regarded as magical by ordinary people, because it seemed to involve inexplicable mastery of natural forces. The crafts of masonry, which uses mineral stones in building, and medicine, which uses mineral and botanical extracts in healing (as well as metal tools in surgery), were parallel and associated secret societies. All three movements developed an esoteric or inner component, concerned with practices of psychic and spiritual self-transformation.
     A popular misconception is that alchemy was solely and futilely concerned with the transmutation of base metals to gold. In actuality, it is clear from alchemical writings that the main focus of most alchemical practitioners was healing and what we would nowadays call psychotherapy: the transmutation of the physical and psychic condition of the human being – starting with oneself. The worldview of the archaic and classical eras was holistic – the physical, psychic, spiritual, and cosmic dimensions of life were seen in their wholeness, not as separate fields.
     … the sacred science of the alchemical tradition came to be revived by two twentieth-century scientists: C.G. Jung, who identified alchemical symbolism as the language of the psyche; and Albert Hofmann, who uncovered a secret link between psyche and matter in the form of mind-expanding substances. Medieval alchemists in the Western tradition called this link the ‘water-stone of the wise,’ blending fluidity and solidity. Buddhist alchemists of the vajrayana school called it the vajra – the ‘lightning-diamond’ – blending luminosity and hardness.
     My suggestion is that the language of alchemy, both Eastern and Western, updated with contemporary scientific concepts, can provide the appropriate paradigm for a worldview that integrates rational science and intuitive wisdom." 
 

        Ralph Metzner. “Ecology of Consciousness. The Alchemy of Personal, Collective, and Planetary Transformation.” Reveal Press, 2017. 
 

“Black Sun”, from Splendor Solis, a German alchemical treatise, 1582

Wisdom from Helen Keller

     Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968), American author, political activist & lecturer, was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree.

"Security is mostly a superstition, it does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men (and women) as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure
or nothing at all!"

"All the world is full of suffering. 
It is also full of overcoming." 

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched
- they must be felt with the heart."

"Your success and happiness lies in you. 
Resolve to keep happy, 
and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties."

"All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."