Greetings, Friendlies.:)
All experience is preceded by mind,
~DhP 1.1 Translation by Gil Fronsdal
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Well, almost. It appears experience is shaped, not by mind, but by minds. Two of them. And those two minds are conditioned by the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
To truncate E.B. White: We are torn between a desire to save the world, and a desire to savor it.[1]
This tension—between an embedded knowing of the world and a hierarchical controlling of it—I see as the core insight of hemisphere lateralization. One hemisphere has apparently evolved to know experience deeply. To recognize itself as embedded in context. To see what “is”. The other hemisphere is more interested in abstract ideas and fixed concepts; its main interest when it does engage in the “real” world is controlling and manipulating, usually for my benefit.
This opposition is evident across individuals, philosophies, even entire cultures. Take Confucianism and Daoism, contemporary philosophies, side by side in time and place, the one celebrating explicit, rule-bound control, the other enjoining us to try, with all our might, not to try.
Some of you have read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary—you know what a whale of a text it is. [2] Neuroscientists have collected, and we know ourselves through the constant flow of experience, an overwhelming quantity of data. But data does not equate to meaning. A pile of facts does not wisdom make.
The aforementioned tension between embedded knowing and hierarchical control seems to me a lens through which one could interpret the entirety of the data. But that would be an unfortunate oversimplification and leave many skillful means off the table.
I’d like to offer a slightly fatter gloss of the Hemispheric Worldviews. This structure is necessarily conditioned—someone else will slice the pie differently—and provisional—the future is wide open—but here it is: four seed crystals around which one’s understanding of hemispheric worldview might coalesce.
- The Right Hemisphere wants to know the world as it is. The Left Hemisphere wants to control and manipulate it.
| Right Hemisphere View | Left Hemisphere View |
| Know what is | Control / manipulate what is |
| Sustained attention | Transient Attention |
| Floodlight Attention | Spotlight Attention |
| Know what is | Grasp |
| Know what is | Devise explanations for what is |
| Holistic, Gestalt understanding | Serial scanning / parting-out / “thingifying” the world |
| Open to newness / novelty | Habitualized (past-oriented / “known”-oriented) |
- The Right Hemisphere is interested in the embodied, grounded terrain of experience. The Left Hemisphere cares about the abstracted, re-presented map.
| Right Hemisphere View | Left Hemisphere View |
| Terrain | Maps |
| Context dependent / aware of conditions | Decontextualized / blind to conditions |
| Embodied / embedded | Disembodied / fragmented / “thingified” |
| Situated in time & place | Abstracted from time & place |
| Pragmatic | Ungrounded epistemology |
| Can hold an array of views | Entrenched in single view |
| Ambiguity | Certainty |
| Experiential / grounded | Conceptual / abstract |
| Continuous / in flux / spectrum / clouds of meaning | Compartmentalized / static / binary / fixed categories |
| Betweenness | Subject/object, Self/other |
| Open to whatever is as much as possible without preconceptions (simple knowing) | Strongly conceptualized “known” world |
| Embedded in / connected with what is | Isolated from the world |
- The Right Hemisphere is committed to ethics and care. The Left Hemisphere is ethically blind and interested in utility.
| Right Hemisphere View | Left Hemisphere View |
| Care | Utility |
| Ethical / relational | Ethically blind |
| Betweenness / Interbeing | Subject / object, Self / other |
| Bonding | Competition |
| Empathy | Empathetically blind |
- The Right Hemisphere manifests creativity. The Left Hemisphere manifests cultural conformity.
| Right Hemisphere View | Left Hemisphere View |
| Creativity | Cultural Conformity |
| Humor | Literalism |
| Spontaneity | Culturally conditioned response |
- Knowing ⇄ Controlling
In formal meditation we can feel this as the tension between wanting to simply observe the breath and the tendency to manipulate it. Is my breath too short? Should I make it longer? Am I breathing too loudly? Why don’t I know how to breathe? - Terrain ⇄ Map
We might forget the lived experience of path-ing and lose ourselves in maps of progress. Am I a stream-enterer yet? Am I in the first or second of the three-lifetime model? And where’s that person on the map? - Care ⇄ Utility
Am I treating this meditation session as an end in itself? Or as a means to some other end? - Creativity ⇄ Conformity
Am I doing this because it feels right? Would I know what it felt like to have an opinion either way?
This orienting framework, provisional, conditioned, can give us a place from which to begin our riffing. We must know the whole to understand the parts and we must understand the parts before we can know the whole. This kind of metabolizing takes a leaning in and a leaning out, a zooming, a rabbit-hole-ing. A whale goes down one bite at a time.
Your Thoughts?
***
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/lifetimes/white-notes.html
[2] No need to click through, but if you’re in to this kind of thing, I’ve collated every reference to one or other of the hemispheres in this soporific spreadsheet, complete through Chapter 3 at the time of this writing.
Dharma PhD 