[Joseph Woodhouse]

Hi Anthony, I feel exactly the same and try to share Ian’s work with anyone who has developed some attention/awareness flexibility and is interested in exploring the full range of the awareness phenomenological state space. For me, living in Iowa/USA, and after the display of the startling decay of awareness exhibited in our election, it is even more important to reach out to the awakened/aware around our troubled planet… Thank you for your message. Joe

[Laurence Burrow]

Finally I found someone who could “square the circle” of a philosophy that is both spiritual AND embodied! I was both into the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty AND mystical philosophy but couldn’t put the two together as he presents as being a Marxist and doesn’t mention spirituality in general. Spiritual philosophies, on the other (?right hand), tend to be suspicious of embodied experience and gravitate toward Decartes’ dualism, while neurology points out the fact that parts of the “soul” disappear when parts of the brian get damaged.

Yet it seems that Merleau-Ponty’s is very similar to “non-dual” Vedanta and other mystical “monist” views; indeed his is a “technique” that I would argue is a “therapy” for shifting hemisphere’s from left to right. His is a “both and” philosophy: one that embraces paradox and ambiguity (and there’s plenty of that in our “life world”!) Iain has diagnosed our predicament and now we need to look for ideas, experiences and techniques that can shift our perception and help to balance our cognitive faculties. Merleau-Ponty’s practice of Phenomenology seems like a good place to begin and his work is explained clearly and simply in David Abram’s: “the Spell of the Sensuous”. Abram also describes how he spent time with indigenous cultures and noticed a definite change in consciousness when he returned to NY that sounds exactly like a shift back into habitualised left-hemisphere style.

Incidentally I also recently read the work of Geraldo Reichel-Dolmatoff and his study of the Desana native South Americans in Columbia. They actually had quite a sophisticated understanding of hemispheric lateralisation but were wanting to shift in the opposite direction: towards the left hemisphere! But of course hunter gatherer situation may well benefit from such a shift: maybe they were on there way towards becoming more like the city dwelling Aztecs, who resembled our situation far more closely: like us they were paranoid of cosmic forces and preoccupied with how to appease them.

I am a rock musician (though I love all types of music); I used to be a psychiatric nurse (until 12 hour shifts did for me!), and i studied Art Psychotherapy (which could be another way to shift perspectives but that hasn’t caught on as much as it should considering it’s been around for some decades now.!) I hope to connect with others who respond to Iain’s work and share similar interests and concerns.

Laurence Burrow (Monty Oxymoron of the Damned)

[James McMullen]

Hi Laurence,

Very interesting, about the Desana and their desire to shift to LH-style thinking. Can you give us some examples? Iain’s work has got me thinking a lot about the “reasons” for the shift to the LH style over the course of human history, and (if it’s not unreasonable to ask) what we are headed toward. The push in the direction of civilization seems to me to have everything to do with building ourselves a larger and larger, more and more complex house. And according my take on McG, if we want to keep our house from
falling apart, we have to make it a proper home–we have to be in
heartfelt relationship with it. So the LH strikes me as the systems-oriented “house-builder” while the RH is the relationship-centered “home-maker.”

(Aside: I have to think McG has noticed the relation between the two “personalities” of the hemispheres and stereotyped gender psychologies–especially given autism’s being referred to as an “excess of maleness”–and he has just chosen to sidestep a minefield)

Basically, what I find most interesting to wonder about is if we can see a “reason” for the dominance of the LH, beyond its own domineering tendencies? Could we frame the history of civilization, with the “power struggle between the hemispheres” as something like the sorting of roles in a new marriage, with a child on its way, and arguments over where to channel resources? And just to speculate a bit further, could we see it as parallell to multicellular life emerging out of the organization of single-celled life? Might our own organic organization be setting the stage for the emergence of something truly new? Is AI, which “supervenes” on humanity, a new true whole?–a genuinely new phase of life, broadly construed?

Also, I know I’m betraying my own LH-orientation here: future-focused, biased towards optimism, and most obviously in thinking about what “kind of thing” could possibly be “put together out of the parts” of humanity. I’m currently reading Irrational Man, by William Barrett, in order to get a better handle on Heidegger, so as to better handle McGilchrist. In it he talks about the duality of St. Augustine, whose Confessions is a clinic in RH-style embodied relationality, (he had “an almost voluptuous sensitivity to the Self in its inner inquietude, its trembling and frailty, its longing to reach beyond itself in love“) —but in his Enchiridion, he LH-style concocts a cosmology designed to make sense of all the evil which can besiege an embodied soul. Basically, I can see that my wonderings are much more Enchiridion than Confessions, meaning I may need get out of my own head, and balance the speculation with some phenomenology. So I’m grateful for the Merleau-Ponty recommendation. Thanks, Laurence.