Greetings, Friendlies.:)
Have you ever noticed how some parts of you want to deeply engage with the world—and other parts want to control it?
Classically we might identify the one as a kind of Buddha-nature and the other as the work of Māra.
McGilchrist’s view of hemisphere lateralization [1] suggests that these two views of the world are brought about by the different hemispheres in our own brains—that these contralateral pulls can be correlated to each hemisphere.
Sometimes when I’m going on-and-on-and-on about hemisphere lateralization dhamma folk protest: Fine. It may be that hemisphere lateralization is accurate. But I’m interested in liberation. Even if the neuroscience is true, it doesn’t help me get free. Liberation comes through direct insight, not by learning trivia about the brain.
And I agree, sort of. When I first began studying Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins I was struck by the dukkha-ful experience of the grad students. I asked: Why are we doing this, if it’s not to live better? Why study the mind if it won’t help us be better human beings? I was informed by the dean that I was not cut out for a PhD in Cognitive Science.
A while back in Subjective Experiences of Awakening and Hemisphere Lateralization I pointed to a few of the qualities of left hemisphere being-in-the-world:
- “the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’.”
- The left hemisphere is disembodied.
- [The left hemisphere] is preoccupied with details, with the parts of things, where the right hemisphere is more aware of the wholes of things.
- “The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, ‘either/or’, [binary, divisive], analytic and fragmentary”.
- The left hemisphere is reductionist.
- The left hemisphere’s view is of “a world in which competition is more important than collaboration”
- The left hemisphere may be responsible for “denial, rationalization, [and] confabulatory “gap-filling””. [Aka, narrative and papañca.]
Reads like a brochure for the realm of Māra. If nothing else, all the versions of awakening I’ve heard point away from this list.
Okay, one might say, but how does this matter to my path? I’m not going to give myself an ice-pick lobotomy.
Yes. Please do not do that. Humans need the left hemisphere to function. It is only when things get out of balance that we are ostracized from our birthright: a world “[a]live, complex, embodied, … always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, … a world with which we are deeply connected”—the world of the right hemisphere. [1]
So how does this brain trivia help us? Hemisphere lateralization gives us a longer lever when trying to move our own entrenchment.
One example: it appears that the hemispheres are strongly inhibitory of each other. When processing some aspect of experience, one hemisphere will activate and tell the other hemisphere “I’ve got this. You chill.”
Brahmavihārā cultivation is an excellent example. When cultivating metta I am not only cultivating a quality of the right hemisphere, I am inhibiting the competitive nature of the left hemisphere: the grasping, the binary view, and the need to tell stories about whatever is going on in experience.
And yes, we already have Brahmavihārās. No thanks to neuroscience for that. But what about other right hemisphere recruiting modalities? It just so happens that our sense of humor (aka levity) lives in the right hemisphere. Maybe laughter therapy is an awakening modality. It’s not as earnest as charnal ground meditation, but it may be a skillful tool in the service of awakening.
There are some traditions that strongly reject investigations into “theory”. Just sit, they tell us. But we must remember that this too is a theory. We none of us have our arms around the entire elephant of the dhamma.
Of course any knowledge acquired through the left hemisphere must be re-integrated into right-hemispheric experience. But knowledge (ie, trivia) doesn’t have to choke wisdom; it can re-new it. Let me be explicit: I believe hemisphere lateralization may be the newest great gift of the dhamma—not because it replaces the teachings, but because it helps us see even more clearly what is to be done.
It’s a joy to be walking this path with you.
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[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary.
Dharma PhD 