Greetings, Friendlies. : ) I’d hoped to finish the HemLat series before a Dzogchen retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche (and ensuing road trip). But as ChatGPT said consolingly, “The rodent has plans, but the Milky Way has perspective.” That story another time. This is just a hello; I’m cruising the canyon lands of the Southwest US. […]
But, Shannon, isn’t Hemisphere Lateralization just a handy reframe for neuroscience-junkies? I’m glad you asked. :) We’ve already considered HemLat as a powerful explanatory model. But if that were all it offered it might sit—more or less comfortably—alongside other dhammic explanations. For example, I once told a teacher on retreat that I was nauseous and […]
Greetings, Friendlies.:) All experience is preceded by mind,Led by mind,Made by mind. ~DhP 1.1 Translation by Gil Fronsdal 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 […]
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, […]
Greetings, Friendlies.:) “It’s just a theory. It doesn’t have anything to do with my practice.” Some of us have been taught that theory—anything intellectual really—is disruptive to dhammic path-ing. Theory, we have been told, actively hinders liberation. But that take, “theory is not good for practice” is itself a theory and it shapes our practice. […]
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 […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For some Dhamma folk, discussions of “brain hemispheres” and “neural algorithms” elicits an instant—perhaps bodily—contraction. The resistance seems to come from a belief that the richness of human experience, the sacredness of being, is being reduced to mere mechanism. But that view is itself reductionist: “Either I must throw off the knowledge […]
Greetings, friendlies. :) Ever been on retreat, maybe the teacher is talking about dependent origination, and the frustration is clear in the tone of the Q&A: “Wait. Is Saṅkhāra a kind of Saññā?” “Is Citta Viññāṇa??” “How is Vedanā different from Nāmarūpa???” It seems to me that a lot of dukkha in dhamma teachings stems […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) When Martine Batchelor mentioned this book, I remember a feeling of sinking. Sadness. Disappointment. Martine asked: how can this book exist? [2] How can “mindfulness”, a term so central to dhamma, be married to something violent? We could shrug off the question, dismiss it. “Different people define words differently.” But why? And […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) I play improv. It’s a kind of make-believe for grownups. If you know the TV show “Who’s Line is it, Anyway?”, that’s improv. Kalyana-mitta express surprise when I refer to improv as sīla practice. How could such undignified behavior qualify as ethical training? Where are the robes? Where are the cushions? Where […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist says that as the quantity of human knowledge explodes, “experts” find themselves expert on less and less. For those of us non-experts who dare approach a subject: the price may be that one is always at best an interested outsider, at worst an interloper condemned […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) As an extension on last week’s OG-awakening-as-recorded-in-the-Suttanipata, I’d like to highlight a sliver from Rob Burbea’s 2019 “Stream Entry – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“. [1] Burbea describes the entire body of Gotama’s teachings as “set within the cosmology of rebirth”. He invites us to suspend our current operating frame and submit, in […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) With all this talk of awakening, I should probably check with the OG; what do the suttas have to say about Gotama’s awakening? [1] I was surprised not to find a definitive list of all the mentions of G’s awakening in the Sutta and/or Vinaya Piṭaka. If you know of such a […]
Greetings, Friendlies. Shall we play a little What If? Hypothetically. We could then say that Watts’ mystic, an awakened being, is one who has become fully aware of, who dwells in, McGilchrist’s Right Hemisphere “context”, Right Hemisphere “view”. I mean… what if??? With friendliness!
Greetings, Friendlies! In The Tao of Philosophy [1] Watts says, “People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called ‘a mystical experience,’ or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening. …they discover that the real deep, deep self, that which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist says that one explanation of why hemisphere lateralization arose is the evolutionary advantage to a single organism having two types of attention. One attention is focused, capable of discerning objects from their background, breaking things into parts. This attention dwells in the left hemisphere. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Alan Watts differentiates between what he calls “spotlight” and “floodlight” attention (he sometimes uses the terms “awareness” or “consciousness”. Standardizing to “attention” for now). Spotlight attention, just like it sounds, is a narrow beam of intense attention. It picks things out. You can imagine standing in a dark room using a bright, […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In Parts 1-5 we looked at framing and different articulations of subjective experiences of awakening. You won’t be surprised to know that I think all of these have neurobiological correlates related to hemisphere lateralization. That it is hemisphere lateralization that ties these diverse descriptions of awakening together. In The Master and His […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Writing this series I was reminded of a quote from Kitaro Nishida (which I got from Leigh Brasington and he thinks it’s from the book The Nothingness Beyond God but I haven’t gotten a copy from the library yet, so check your facts). Pure experience is the beginning of Zen. It is […]
Greetings, Friendlies! (Parts 1, 2, 3.) The sense I have, and I could be very wrong about this, is that between Watts and Buddhadāsa we have a range encompassing all the other versions of awakening I’ve heard. In Ingram’s list, for example, the Psychological Models and the Nothing to Do Schools fall into Buddhadāsa’s range. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1, Part 2.) Quick refresh: we are looking at subjective experiences of awakening. Last time Alan Watts’ This is It. This time Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone. Buddhadāsa speaks of a “Nibbāna instinct”, a drive egging us to find relief from the irritation of craving and aversion. [1] I think B […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1 here.) I’m going to offer three descriptions of awakening that fit on a sort of spectrum running from more common, everyday, temporary experiences, to (perhaps) the full monty. The descriptions come from Alan Watt’s This is It, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone, and a quote from Kitaro Nishida. We’ll start […]
“The path is open. Often so much more is possible for us than we think.” ~Rob Burbea
Greetings, Friendlies. :) We ended the Pile of Provisional Positions with a hypothesis that Gotama’s awakening had neurological correlates, specifically a shift from Left-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience to Right-Hemisphere-Dominant-Experience. That’s great, and, it leans a little objective. What about the subjective experience of awakening? I don’t know how it goes for other folk, but for me, the first […]
Greetings, Friendlies. 👋 Heading in to retreat ’til 30APR. Posts are scheduled but no responses to your lovely communications ’til May. May you be very well, 🌻
Greetings, Friendlies. :) They say that the best way to learn is to teach. Perhaps. But what do we get from teaching? And are there alternatives? I’d say that the most important thing we get from teaching is learning to refine our ideas. We root around and gather up the vague hints and notions lurking […]
Greetings, Friendlies! For years I’ve threatened to host a book club bringing Dhamma folks together to read non-Dhamma books. Particularly CogScience-y books. The dream is manifest. Behold: Tiny Book Club! Just two people, just one book. For the first iteration kalyana-Darrell and I will read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, a substantial tome […]
Well, friendlies, we made it. Congratulations. :))) Over the past 27(ish) posts we’ve looked at the Classical View of Humanity, the Interpreter Module, Avijjā, Simple Knowing, Skillfulness, Reactivity, Fabrication, Implicit Bias, Hemisphere Specialization, and the Goal of the Practice. The “Survival Series for Kids” authors would be proud of us, I think. Not that we’re […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Okay, the title is an exaggeration. But this quote landed with a THA-WUMP in my lap t’other day: Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before [they allow themselves] to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid. ~H.W. Fowler My writing […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) It is my understanding reading the suttas that all this bhāvanā stuff, this eightfold path stuff, does in fact have a goal. Awakening. Bodhi-pattī. I have not, however, found a satisfyingly simple answer to the question, “What is awakening?” Some will say this is because there is not a satisfyingly simple answer […]
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