Putting It Back Together Again: Hemisphere Lateralization as a Framework for Understanding the Dhamma

Greetings, Friendlies.:)

In Western Dhamma we have a tendency to atomize—to part-out—spiritual traditions: take what is useful and leave the rest. This is an incredible privilege. But it can leave a practitioner adrift, yearning for a coherent sense of meaning. Having collected various bits of Dhamma—and they are each immensely helpful: apply this bit here, apply that bit there—if I tip the bucket out onto the floor, I am met merely with a pile of helpful bits. Nothing coheres. No sense of meaning is evoked.

This has not always been the case. For most of the history of Buddha-Dhamma, any practitioner would have been embedded within a single tradition. One’s sense of meaning, interpretation of experience, what mattered, was pre-established within a fully formed, more-or-less coherent, structural understanding. 

I believe Hemisphere Lateralization Theory, HemLat for short, can help Western practitioners piece our Humpty Dumpty back together again.

HemLat’s great promise, as I see it, lies in offering an explanatory model for the Western mind—one coherent across Dhammic traditions. It points to something both instantiated in individual human biology and patterned more broadly across human being-in-the-world. 

The danger for the siloed practitioner is the risk of missing out on the fullness of Dhammic possibility. If one sees people as embedded in many-kalpas-of-rebirths, how then to entrust meaning to a practice from Christian Mysticism? Can one commit—can one truly surrender—to even the most skillful technique if its underlying fabric feels so alien?

As a more homely example: in the suttas of the Pāli Canon, Gotama restricts mendicants from dance. But I myself have been part of deeply moving, some might say “sacred”, dance celebrations. I have experienced the coming together of the many-into-one; when I am without it too long, I yearn for that embodied interbeing. 

Hemisphere Lateralization is the only theory I have come across that doesn’t ask me to compromise something of myself. It emancipates “liberation” from the gatekeeping of any single tradition and re-embodies it into the flesh and juices and phenomenal experience of this lived being.

In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist addresses philosophy and neuroscience, but his point carries just as well to the Dhamma: there is a vast assortment of techniques, teachings, and theories of awakening. Ask why and you are met with a shrug—or sometimes an outright denouncement of the other. There is an “astonishing lack of … curiosity” and precious little encouragement to explore, inquire, to tease out patterns and intertwining betwixt individual instantiations.

Of course HemLat is a framing—and any time we frame there is something inside the frame and something outside it. Wisdom demands we hold this understanding alongside our explorations. There is another essay already in the queue exploring possible pitfalls of HemLat as a theory. 

But this is true of any theory—even those “theory-is-bad” theories. There is no “View From Nowhere”, not even in the Dhamma.

Hemisphere Lateralization does work I have seen in no other Buddha-Dhamma understanding. Its explanatory power, coherence across traditions, and re-embodiment of human awakening make it, at the very least, a most interesting avenue for exploration. At best, it may allow us to put Humpty Dumpty—all of him—back on the cushion again.

Your Thoughts?