Matt Dorsey
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Yeah, it’s the same for me. I’m in the US, so I’m wondering if maybe the servers are in Europe? I’m no IT expert, so not really sure if this is even a reasonable explanation. Right now I’m just doing my best to be patient and take lots of deep breaths while I’m waiting for the page to load, LOL.
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No problem, Don! I’m doing my best to add plenty of new content for discussion. Hopefully the two new groups I’ve started will help.
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Lateralus, an Exegesis
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Black then white are all I see in my infancy
The left hemisphere is far more black and white in its thinking than the right, relying primarily on either/or, without also having access to both/and, which is the right hemisphere’s domain.
This kind of rigid, binary thinking is a hallmark of the kind of naive, overly simplistic thought processes of children.
Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me
Lets me see
As below so above and beyond, I imagine
Drawn beyond the lines of reason
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The appearance of color, which is of a far higher order of complexity than monochrome sight, is essentially another way of saying ‘shades of grey’; perhaps red and yellow are referring to some kind of (alchemical) fire, but it’s of course unclear.
As mentioned, this work is deeply alchemical, hence the ‘as above so below’. Other songs have multiple references to alchemy as well. Maynard (Tool’s singer) is clearly describing a process of growth / transformation, perhaps with respect to inter-hemispheric balance.
The reference to imagination speaks for itself.
It’s unclear why he inverted this famous alchemical saying, but regardless, it’s clear that this sort of fractal style of thinking, with which one can recognize patterns that persist at different scales—from the cosmic to the subatomic to the psychic—is more reminiscent of the integrated way of seeing reality of the right hemisphere.
If we take ‘reason’ to mean ‘the limited rationality of the left hemisphere’, then this statement could be seen as further evidence that these lyrics represent a shift from relatively immature left-hemisphere-only ‘infancy’ (described in the first set of lyrics) to a more right hemisphere integrated approach.
Push the envelope, watch it bend
Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind
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Aside from the obvious meaning of pushing a boundary, bending an envelope is the act of taking something linear and making it curved
The left hemisphere, which is consummately analytical, has a difficult time connecting in a personal, experiential way with the body (Cartesian dualism being the perfect example, as noted in Iain’s work).
People with right hemisphere damage (but almost never left) are prone to various pathologies in which they will even disavow their own body parts or do not perceive the body as a whole (anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, RH stroke with hemineglect, asomatagnosia, somatoparaphrenia, etc)
Embodiment is a function of the right hemisphere. Excessive thinking and analysis (thinking in a linear, language-based way) is evidence that one is in a left hemisphere dominant state, and thus would have less access to the body image and the sensation of embodiment.
Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will to feel my moment, drawing way outside the lines
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Obviously, what we call ‘intuition’ is more associated with the right hemisphere, as we’re not consciously aware of its ‘translinguistic’ way of ‘thinking’ and understanding.
With ‘missing opportunities’, there’s a sense of remorse for spending too much time in the left hemisphere dominant state, and thus missing out on the richness that the right hemisphere’s intuitions can provide. Perhaps spending too much time on the extreme of left hemisphere dominance has withered his connection to intuitive thought.
‘I must Feed my will to feel my moment’ might suggest that he is attempting to increase his motivation to experience life through the right hemisphere, which allows one to feel more deeply and to be in the moment as it presences.
Lines = linearity = left hemisphere. The idea of breaking the rules and operating on intuition is very much a right hemisphere way of doing business.
The left hemisphere is of course much more concerned with staying within the boundaries and following the rules of the artificial model that it’s engaging with.
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Black then white are all I see in my infancy
Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me
Lets me see
There is so much more
And beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities
As below so above and beyond, I imagine
Drawn outside the lines of reason
Push the envelope, watch it bend
Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind
Withering my intuition leaving opportunities behind
Feed my will to feel this moment
Urging me to cross the line
Reaching out to embrace the random
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come
Except for these last two lines and a few other phrases, this part is basically a recapitulation of previous lyrics with small modifications.
The right hemisphere of course embraces whatever may come. It remains open to new information, to new discoveries, to ‘the random’ (which in this sense may mean more unexpected by the left hemisphere’s predictive algorithms / modeling than literally random).
In a sense, embracing is the opposite of grasping. Grasping connotes ownership and utility. Embracing suggests a kind of open receptivity, or ‘active passivity’, as Dr. McGilchrist puts it.
And speaking of embracing:
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I embrace my desire to
I embrace my desire to
Feel the rhythm, to feel connected
Enough to step aside and weep like a widow
To feel inspired
To fathom the power
To witness the beauty
To bathe in the fountain
To swing on the spiral
To swing on the spiral to
Swing on the spiral
Of our divinity
And still be a human
With my feet upon the ground I lose myself
Between the sounds and open wide to suck it in
I feel it move across my skin
I’m reaching up and reaching out
I’m reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me
Whatever will bewilder me
The sentiment here is so obviously stemming from the right hemisphere that it’s almost silly to comment.
Feeling connected, feeling beauty, weeping like a widow (sadness, longing / grief): these are all classically right hemisphere.
Opening wide = receptivity (to whatever will bewilder him, implying totally new information that does not match the left hemisphere’s map)
Is this part of the song describing a kind of breakthrough, in which one has come fully back into the world of the right hemisphere?
Read the next section for comments on the spiral imagery
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And following our will and wind we may just go where no one’s been
We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been
Spiral out, keep going
Spiral out, keep going
Spiral out, keep going
Spiral out, keep going
Iain has referred to the spiral as a symbol of the integration of the hemispheres many times.
Because the left hemisphere is far more linear, it could be symbolized by a straight line, whereas the right hemisphere is more embedded in the curved nature of reality, and thus could be seen as a circle.
The circle / Ouroboros is also a symbol of the unification of opposites / Jung’s Enantiodromia. When you take a pole with two opposites and then curve it in on itself, then the opposites overlap and become unified.
The right hemisphere is tolerant of both/and reasoning, and understands paradox and how opposites can actually be the same in certain important ways.
When you view a spiral from one axis, the linear progression is emphasized. When you view a spiral from another, the circularity is emphasized.
Understanding of higher order mathematics is also of course more in the domain of the right hemisphere. The Fibonacci sequence (which certainly required the perspective of the right hemisphere to discover) is encoded into this album in multiple ways. The cadence with which the singer delivers some of the lyrics is based on it.
Lastly, going “where no one’s been” of course means that it’s uncharted territory and thus there’s no map to orient the left hemisphere.
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A few last comments:I’ve been listening to this album for 22 years and at no point since I heard it for the first time has it not been my favorite rock album of all time. I have a deep and highly personal, even spiritual connection to it. You can thus see why this discovery, enabled by immersing myself in Iain’s work, excites me beyond words.
According to Dr. McGilchrist, polyrhythms and odd time signatures are more attended to by the right hemisphere; as mentioned, this album is replete with them. It’s extremely rare for a band this famous to use these kinds of rhythms this extensively. Show me a band this famous and I’ll show you a bunch of people who are terrified to step out of 4/4.
There are a few other songs on the album whose lyrics are worth paying attention to with respect to lateralization. I may comment on these later.
Did Maynard consciously intend these meanings? Is he concerned with the hemispheres of the brain?
Or perhaps these are all just intuitively delivered through his right hemisphere? Who knows. The fact that the album, and the song, are both called ‘Lateralus’ is uncanny, though.
Lastly, could ‘Lateralus’ mean ‘Lateral Us’, as in ‘we are lateralized’? Something to ponder.
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Hi Sebastian,
That’s incredibly interesting. Before I got into Chinese / Integrative medicine, I did a BS in psychology and was considering doing a master’s so that I could do psychedelic research (and/or become a therapist).
I’m not familiar with any psychometric scales that are used for this purpose, but I wonder if you could also use some kind of test that can infer L/H balance.
For example, you could assess novel metaphor comprehension. In the paper ‘Activating the Right Hemisphere Through Left-Hand Muscle Contraction Improves Novel Metaphor Comprehension’, the researchers demonstrated that repeated left hand contraction was in fact able to increase volunteer’s ability to pick up on new metaphors.
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Thanks, Don! Appreciate that very much, and glad you enjoyed my response. If I think of any pertinent videos, I’ll post them, absolutely.
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Hi Mary,
Thanks so much for the warm welcome! Yes, I’ve always tended toward approaching mind and body from a wide variety of perspectives, and consider myself ‘medically bilingual’, meaning that I do my best to study and appreciate more traditionally ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ approaches.
I’m very much looking forward to engaging with more likeminded folks on here! I’m going to start up a few new discussion groups soon that I think might serve the community, so be on the lookout for that. I’m particularly interested in psychopharmacology, and think that there’s plenty of fertile discussion that could be had on that front.
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I was not familiar with manas and buddhi, but that seems to overlay quite nicely with the different ways the hemispheres perceive reality, based on how you phrased everything.
In my experience, with any kind of practice like breathwork or internal QiGong (as we would call it in our tradition) practices that require that you put your attention in a particular part of the body, I often see that many people will struggle in a way that suggests that they are overly left hemisphere dominant.
It seems likely to me that directly sensing the body ‘from the inside’ would be a wholly RH activity, as it contains the body image and is far more in touch with the body on an experiential level.
If I were talking to a particularly LH dominant patient, and trying to get him or her to ‘feel your hand from the inside’, this may not compute, whereas for someone who perhaps has more interhemispheric balance, this idea will be immediately groked and I won’t have to further explain.
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Hey, Zak. Yes, I just finished ‘the Master and His Emissary’ a little over a week ago, and started TMWT yesterday. I’ve been watching the videos as I read the book. The last month has been basically a total immersion in his material.
Glad I don’t need to buy any new books for a while now that I have this 1100 page behemoth! 🙂
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Hey, Don. Apologies that it took me so long to respond. Within days after I signed up, I was suddenly unable to log back in, and the problem was only rectified today.
Yes, Yin and Yang relate perfectly to Iain’s work. I just finished ‘the Master and His Emissary’ about a week ago, and did a small workshop on it at an event last weekend. Here’s some of what I presented:
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“I call Chinese medicine ‘Medical Taoism’ because it’s based on Taoist thinking, and thus is primarily concerned with the interplay of Yin and Yang, and largely sees disease as stagnation and health as flow. It sees the body-mind as a deeply interrelated network in which an organ or body part can never be understood without respect to the context of the whole body.
The idea of two opposites mutually antagonizing one another, yet also paradoxically supporting and giving rise to each other, is at the heart of the Taoist tradition and its veneration of Yin and Yang. And of course, they contain each other, as seen in the Taiji, commonly called the ‘Yin Yang’.
The tension of opposites, like the tension on the string of a guitar, makes music, which incidentally the right hemisphere particularly appreciates.
And in fact, the character in Chinese for ‘medicine’ is actually just the character for music with a couple little symbols above it that mean ‘shaman’. Some say that the role of the Chinese medicine doctor is to ‘create music in the human heart’ and the heart in our medical tradition is the organ most closely associated with the mind.
The string of a musical instrument such as a guitar requires just the right amount of tension.
Too much tension, and the pitch is too high, or way too much tension and the string breaks. Not enough tension and the pitch is too low, or far too little tension, and it just sits limp against the neck, totally unpluckable.
Either way, when the tension of opposites is out of balance, there’s no music. There’s no health. We’re lost in the wilderness of extremes.
And that’s precisely where I think many humans live on this planet: lost in the wilderness of extremes, because this appreciation of the dynamic interplay of opposing forces has lead us into confusion, hubris, and overly simplistic conceptualization of the universe.
Yin and Yang can be seen everywhere:
Masculine & Feminine
Hot & Cold
Proton & Electron
Particle & Wave
Sun & Moon
Birth & Death
To study physiology even from the Western medical perspective is to study the relationship between opponent processes in the body:
– Sympathetic & parasympathetic nervous systems
– The all-important sleep-wake cycle, where one being out of balance can profoundly affect the other
– Flexor muscles & extensor muscles
– Stimulating and exciting neurotransmitters like Dopamine and Glutamate & calming and inhibitory ones like Serotonin and GABA
– Absorption of nutrients by the small intestine & the excretion of toxins by the large intestine
– Testosterone & Estrogen
– Pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines in the immune system
– And the Immune-Reproductive axis (<b style=”background-color: var(–bb-content-background-color); font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; color: var(–bb-body-text-color);”>the Immune system, which defends and destroys, and the <b style=”background-color: var(–bb-content-background-color); font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; color: var(–bb-body-text-color);”>reproductive system, which loves and creates)
Philosophers and theologians have, since time immemorial, attempted to reconcile these opposite qualities of the soul using various approaches, some extremely wise, poetic, and insightful, and others in a way that flaunts a pathological obsession with logico-linguistic precision, either / or thinking, and decontextualized, abstract conceptualization.
The elegance with which people have dealt with these universally opposed ways of seeing reality is proportionate to the degree to which these thinkers were able to reach, a la Hegelian dialectical, BOTH / AND type thinking—a beautiful synthesis, rather than simply taking one mode of being to be the ultimate truth and then attempting to completely nullify or invalidate the other, such as with body-mind or body-soul issues.
The paradigm of scientific materialism is as blind, stupid, and dysfunctional as the fundamentalist religions that they so love to denigrate.
And in fact, the left hemisphere, with its steadfast dedication to maintaining its paradigm, its map, its belief system, despite new information that might contradict its axioms, is the hemisphere that is dominant when we fall prey to any sort of fundamentalist-type thinking.
It’s not science VS religion. It’s hubris borne out of the desperate need to know everything, versus the humble reverence for the vast complexity of the universe.
It’s closed-minded, arrogant, delusional, and fundamentalist thinking VS open-minded, modest, realistic, and TRULY scientific thinking.
A lesser scientist or a lesser religious believer fights against the mysteries of the universe in an attempt to conquer them and gain control, out of the unconscious need to subdue the anxiety of not knowing how everything works.
A great scientist or a great religious believer, rather than trying to conquer them, takes in the living mysteries of the universe, imbibes them in an act of reverence for the incredible and awe-inspiring complexity of the vast unknown.
If you live in the mystery, if you truly let it into you, then it will change you…for the better. Paradoxically, you will learn more, NOT LESS, about reality by assuming this posture of openness.”
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As you can see, the workshop I gave was heavily based on Iain’s work, but I also had plenty of opportunities to share my own thoughts that naturally dovetail with his material.
Yin and Yang, I believe, are pseudo-opposites, but then again, viewed from a non-dual perspective, so are all opposites. Taoism suggests that, despite the fact that they are opposites, and that they do in fact antagonize one another, they also support and mutually give rise to one another.
Beyond the Taiji, closer to the ultimate ground of being, lies the Wuji, which is non-dual, undifferentiated, and of course, thoroughly ineffable.
Hope that wasn’t too long of a response, and that I could at least in part answer your question about Iain’s work and Taoism.