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cognitive science Discourse

Alan Watts, Iain McGilchrist, and Awakening, Part 4, Equating Attentions

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!

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Discourse

Alan Watts, Iain McGilchrist, and Awakening, Part 3, Watts’ “Mystic”

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 […]

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cognitive science Discourse

Alan Watts, Iain McGilchrist, and Awakening, Part 2, McGilchrist and the Attentions

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. […]

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Discourse

Alan Watts, Iain McGilchrist, and Awakening, Part 1, Watts and the Attentions

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, […]

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Discourse Scholarship

Subjective Experiences of Awakening, Part 2, Alan Watts

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 […]

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DharmaPhD

Especially Buddhism…

Brought to you by the inimitable Mr. Alan Watts. :)