You keep using that word…
Tag: Iain McGilchrist
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Long time no emails, eh? Twelve months since the postcard from the road. A great many things have happened. I explored the Colorado Plateau and the deserts of the American Southwest. Was officially authorized to teach jhānas. Officially retired from teaching jhānas. There were retreats, a house move, backpacking in Olympic 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.:) 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 […]
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Imposter Syndrome in Dhamma Discourse
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. Shall we play a little What If? What if Watts is correct that a mystic [awakened being] is one who has experienced a permanent perspective shift such that they now dwell “fully aware of … floodlight consciousness”? And what if McGilchrist (et al) is correct that focussed attention is the “view” of 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. :) 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 […]
