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 […]
Tag: hemisphere lateralization
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.:) 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. :) 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. :) 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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