[Don Salmon]

Just one thought. I think it’s around 38′ where Iain suggests that God (or Tao) creates because it/He/She is only “fulfilled” by engaging in this creation.

It’s long been understood that if God is Absolute, there can’t possibly be a motive or reason in the human sense.

Jung and Whitehead and other moderns don’t have a problem with this because they don’t truly take seriously the idea of a transcendental absolute.

But the Indian tradition, less left brained that most moderns, has insisted always the only possible “reason” for creation is not a reason at all but sheer spontaneous non-motivated Delight.

Since there is no creation apart from the Absolute (how could anything be apart from the Absolute) even this is a poor human way of saying it. And the usual objections to the idea of the Absolute are perfectly fine, since no idea of anything Absolute could possibly be correct!

Better to say that the morning stars and evening sun just delight in singing together and leave it at that.

Too bad there’s not more emphasis on practice in Iain’s writings and discussions. The world is not going to change one bit even if every school and every workplace and every person knew every word of his writings.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Rodney,

I was so impressed with your essay I started a separate group using it as a basis for discussion. Please feel free to join in. I hope you’ll take my disagreements in the spirit of friendly dialog. I was fascinating and moved by the evident passion you have for this topic and I think it will be a great springboard for taking us beyond simple LH/RH discussions.

Thanks for sending it. Again, if you feel ok about it, I’d love to get a PDF – you can send it to info@remembertobe.Life

[Don Salmon]

I’d love to read this – it’s a bit hard for my old eyes in that format. Any chance you could email a PDF? You can write me at info@remembertobe.life.

Thanks!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Whit:

I read the article and if I’m understanding it correctly, it underscores a point I’ve been making since I read TMAHE over 10 years ago.

While it’s helpful to have these theoretical discussions in which we talk as if there’s some precise delineation between left and right hemispheres, my understanding is that in practice, we have absolutely no idea in any moment what is going on in terms of relative activity in each hemisphere.

I think it’s much much more powerful to learn to discern the differences in attention that are occurring moment to moment.

This is particularly interesting to me because cognitive flexibility was the main theme of my doctoral dissertation.

In the mid 1990s, I did clinical work, teaching people with chronic pain how to use mindfulness to reduce pain. My subjective assessment of how people did was that almost 2/3 weren’t actually being mindful at all; they were just using mindfulness techniques to develop muscle relaxation.

Which, of course, is great, but I know that if they understood mindfulness it would be more powerful. So the hypothesis I developed was, the sign that people were actually being mindful was the their mindset shifted, which reflected a significant level of cognitive flexibility. My general estimate was about 33% of people actually had sufficient cognitive flexibility to use mindfulness to reduce pain.

My specific hypothesis for the research was that pain reduction would be directly proportional to the level of cognitive flexibility (ie more flexibility, more pain reduction).

I (and my advisors!) were quite impressed to see that in fact, in the experiment, about 30% of research subjects demonstrated sufficient cognitive flexibility to make a significant reduction in pain, and in fact, flexibility was indeed proportional to the level of cognitive flexibility.

Now, you don’t need any brain scans to see this. Les Fehmi, a physiological psychologist, taught people to modify their attention, and over 50 years used this with great success to reduce depression, anxiety, chronic pain, relationship problems, and to train competitive athletes (including those at the Olympic level) to improve their skills.

In real life, attention is INCREDIBLY complex, and in any moment, you’re using a very very multi-layered level of different kinds of attention, some of which you can correlate with the hemispheres, but for the most part, you’re using not just the whole brain at each moment, but the entire nervous system, and in reality, the consciousness associated with all the trillions of cells in the body (and dare I say, the consciousness outside the body as well>))

[Don Salmon]

HI Zak, I’ve done 16/8 IF for a long time, and for some months last year was alternating that with 20/4 (one meal a day!).

I don’t quite get what you mean by breaking the fast. Do you only start eating at 5 PM? What’s your schedule?

And speaking of meditation/reading – I’ve been a member of this channel since it started in September and so far, except for one member (Lucy Fleetwood, 16 years a Tibetan Buddhist) I can’t find anyone else interested in practice. Iain rarely talks about it and seems to have quite a limited knowledge of it – but it seems to me, if this understanding of different modes of attention is to have any real impact on the world at all, it’s going to be through practice, not through intellectual (whether LH OR RH) knowledge.

I’ll get to your other comment in a moment.

[Don Salmon]

You might be interested in Culadasa’s “The Mind Illuminated.” He teaches meditation methods of integrating LH and RH attention that had astonishing results. Meditators came to him with 20-30 years experience who had never experienced complete silence of the mind. Quite a few got to that point within a few months of studying with him. I found his distinctions between selective attention (LH) and peripheral awareness (RH) to be key in experiencing the complete absence of verbal chatter and sustaining it.

It’s a tough book but you only need to go through the first 100 pages to “get it” – highly recommended!

[Don Salmon]

Do you know at all about Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology? He has been writing for decades not just about integration of the hemispheres, (which goes beyond the idea that meditation is primarily about activating the right) but integration of cortical and subcortical regions of the brain, integration of the “head” brain with the “heart” and “gut” brains, integration of the nervous system with all systems of the body, and integration of mind/body/world.

In his book “Awareness” (2018), he comes even closer than Iain does to integrating science and contemplation, noting the fundamental role of Consciousness (not mind) in the universe.

[Don Salmon]

Thanks Rodney. You might be interested in Les Fehmi’s Open Focus. Meditation ultimately results in a highly coherent integrated brain. And with truly integral meditation, the head brain is integrated with the heart brain (40,000 neurons) and the gut brain (100 million), and – to go further into Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, (IPNB), with the whole body and world (which Siegel calls transpirational integration)

In a way, Iain does a disservice to focus in such a limited way on just cortex, missing even the vital importance for meditation and life in general of subcortical regions, not to mention the entire body and world.

But it’s a good start!!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Whit:

I guess I have to fall back again on my preference for experience over neuroscience.

I think the examination of brain functions is interesting, and perhaps in our modern world necessary, but there’s two crucial points.

1. Rick Hansen, who may have started the modern craze for neuroscience and mindfulness, wrote in the intro for Buddha’s Brain, “You don’t have to know ANYTHING about neuroscience to practice mindfulness. He kind of tentatively added that it won’t necessarily help you practice mindfulness to know anything about the brain. I’ve personally used neuroscience references a LOT in teaching mindfulness, not because it helps practice, but because it gives people more faith that it works.

2. At present, we have no technology, no means, to even have a clue what a person is thinking or feeling except by asking them. That’s how all neuroscience research is done. we don’t even know for sure if a person under anesthesia is conscious.

So in regard to what is happening in the brain, it’s interesting but as far as I can see from 4+ decades of practice, it not only not helps but can get in the way.

Mindfulness in PRACTICE is SO much more complicated than the inhibitory processes you describe.

To give one example I’ve had to deal with a lot, take the default mode. For over 10 years, the reporting on this emphasizes that in the default mode (when we’re not focused on any particular task) our mind tends to focus on the negative – a result of our evolutionary history and the need to be on the lookout for physical danger.

But recently people have been protesting – no, mind wandering is wonderful and the basis of much creativity.

So then people say, “Well, mindfulness may be good for some things, but mind wandering is good also.”

ARGHHH!1 This is such a profound misunderstanding of mindfulness AND creativity.

I prefer Les Fehmi’s language. Rather than ever talking about “mindfulness’ (which, by the way, in the way it’s almost universally taught nowadays, doesn’t exist in Buddhist texts!!) he speaks of open focus

In open focus attention, you can choose to engage in any number of different ways of attending. And these ways are combined in so many different ways, it’s a virtual impossibility that ANY brain description could capture the subtlety of it.

Since nobody has determined whether the brain produces consciousness or simply receives and transmits it, if it turns out what we call the “brain” is nothing more than an image in a universal consciousness, obviously, our experience is going to be infinitely richer than anything that occurs in this one particular localized image referred to as “brain” or “body.”

[Don Salmon]

By the way, Lucy, when I discovered Culadasa’s book, I wrote to him and asked if he heard of Iain’s work, since I thought they were addressing the same thing.

He wrote back to say he had just discovered TMAHE the week before.

Synchronicity!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Lucy,

I’ll do one better. If you like, you’re welcome to take our courses for free. Write me at info@remembertobe.life.

Our courses on effortless mindfulness and effortless sleep are all based on this understanding of attention (and awareness) – I daresay you might even get some new insights on the doshas and their relationship to the gunas!

Take a look at the 2d video (the lower one) on this page: http://www.RememberToBe.Life where I go into the different modes of the brain, and how this relates to different kinds of attention. I don’t mention hemispheres, but you’re welcome to ask here if you’re interested.

To me, this is by far the most important thing related to Iain’s work. Like Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who has researched flow experience for over 50 years, Iain has touched on the key to the survival of civilization, but he’s not very good at offering practices.

Here’s 3 people who have done so:

1. Loch Kelly. His “glimpse” practices – basically, simplified versions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen practices from Tibetan Buddhism – are excellent. his first book was not written to well, and you can get all you need from his 2nd: “The Way of Effortless Mindfulness.”

2. Culadasa, aka former neuroscience professor John Yates. In his book, “The Illumined Mind,” there’s a section near the beginning where he teaches how to shift attention from “selective attention” to “peripheral awareness.” The book is INCREDIBLY complex and I only mention it to show that others are working with this. I will say – meditators who practiced 20-30 years went to him and within a month or two, were experiencing long stretches of complete mental silence (NO verbal thoughts). I can attest – as this was happening to me more and more when I discovered Culadasa in 2016 – his practice works. But you can do the same with Loch’s practices or the next guy, Les Fehmi:

3. Dr. Les Fehmi. He was (deceased in 2019) a psychophysiologist who since the early 1970s, studied hemispheric relations, but unlike Iain, his interest was almost entirely practical.

He noted 4 basic types of attention

Detached narrow, and detached wide attention (tending to be associated with the LH

Immersed narrow and immersed wide (RH). Both of these are related to the flow experience.

But most of all, and this relates to what I said about how, in experience, you can’t really isolate one thing as “LH” and the other as “RH – Fehmi taught Open Focus, which is a state of deep integration of the entire brain (subcortical as well as the cortical hemispheres).

You can learn to shift into Open Focus (which is what we mean in the video on the Remember To Be site by “experiential mode”) and from there, you can make a choice as to how to attend. You don’t really choose in a LH fashion, by analyzing. You learn to surf the world of experience.

IN any moment, I’d be hard pressed to say “I’m in a LH mode or RH mode.”

But you get a feel for an emphasis – you’re more focused, or your attention is wide. You’re more immersed or detached, and it changes from moment to moment.

Fascinating stuff. Be sure to write at info@remembertobe.life if you’d like to take the courses for free.

[Don Salmon]

Hi again Lucy:

My friend, Marco Masi, just posted this on the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” In his post, he discusses sentience as one aspect of conscious experience – explains it MUCH better than I did!

https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/comments

[Don Salmon]

Oh my goodness you’re asking tough questions!

no just kidding happy to try.

Ah, words….. let’s see.

I would say, loosely, the way I’m using “conscious” here refers more specifically to human SELF consciousness, and “sentient” refers to the awareness of the sensory environment common to animals – and if the latest studies are to be believed, even plants.

In Tibetan Buddhism and Vedanta, “Cit” (translated quite loosely as “consciousness”) refers to the awareness which both encompasses and pervades and ultimately, constitutes, the universe. In simpler language, it’s related to what I wrote you in the contemplative group, awareness looking through our eyes, and ultimately, as we merge more fully into and as that awareness, we can literally – viscerally – FEEL the energy, aliveness, “sentience” of all things, even what we consider to be “dead” matter – as “made” of awareness-energy.

These words are easy to write and it’s easy to think, if we spend some time reading them, that we know what they mean. But in my experience, it’s helpful to be very very light about them, otherwise they end up being an impediment to direct experience.

I’m conscious of your question. There is sentient awareness of the feeling of writing, sitting in the chair, etc. There is an awareness “behind” or looking through the eyes the takes in everything, and as I relax into this awareness, everything takes on a quality of alive, sentient awareness, vibrating with Presence and aliveness.

hope that wasn’t just clear as mud:>))

Time for a chai break:>)

[Don Salmon]

Hi Whit

Not sure I’ve correctly understood your post, but maybe if I address one particular point it might help make it clearer.

My apologies first, as I see I’ve used “consciousness” in the sense they use it in Indian philosophy (and in Yoga in general) so obviously, since I haven’t made that explicit, it would be confusing.

So if i understand you, you’re talking about the question of the extent to which collections of things (plants, animals, humans, machines, whatever) are “conscious.”

Actually not just in Indian philosophy but universally among contemplatives, “Consciousness” (with a capital “C”) is the energy of which all “things” in the universe are made of.

So in a way, from that perspective, there ARE no “things” – not in the sense of some independent, self-existent “thing”

Ah words, this is all sounding so abstract. Let me see if I can make it more concrete.

Say I have some tightness and pain in my lower back (In fact, I do, very mild though). Now, as long as I relate to that pain as a “thing” – it is kind of an enemy, or at least, something “I” – separate from the “Pain” want to modify, fix, control, etc.

Furthermore, it feels, at first, like “I” am a “thing” which is inhabiting another “thing” which we call a “body.”

Lucy Fleetwood gave a very nice phrase recently – to recognize that which is seeing “through” our eyes, that which is aware through our mind, but which (to paraphrase the Kena Upanishad) “the mind is not aware of, which the eyes cannot see.”

So a little shift takes place. Suddenly, instead of being a localized, spatialized, temporal “thing” – I’m everythign, in and as everything. The AI software AND its output, the microorganism AND its “mental consciousness,” the stars, the sun, the planets are no longer things but formations, waves, in the all pervading ocean of Conscious-Energy (“Chit Shakti,” in Sanskrit.

Or to put it in religious language, I have a direct visceral recognition that we (quoting St Paul quoting a secular Greek poet) “live and move and have our Being in Her” (well, Paul used the male pronoun but hopefully you get the point>))

She then is everywhere, everywhen, nothing but Her – the object or thing is Her, the consciousness is Her, the skeptic and atheist and denier is Her.

I hope that didn’t make it more obscure!!

[Don Salmon]

I wish I could just put a heart as big as the cosmos here.

Sri Aurobindo uses BIG words. You don’t need to think at all about what he says. Just feel it>)

Does that sound just absurdly New Age? Sorry. Let me try again.

You wrote in another comment that you like the question, “What is looking out of my eyes?”

In part of the passage I quoted, he talks about the ancient practice of imagining Brahman as a vast (non physical) space that encompasses all of our experience.

In MUCH simpler language, Loch Kelly (who went to Nepal to study Tibetan Buddhism, by the way – Mahamudra and Dzogchen) he has a very nice sequence similar to your question.

Can you be aware of space (the spacious awareness “surrounding” us)

Now, can you be aware FROM space?

Now, can you be aware AS space?

So you feel that vast spaciousness looking through your eyes – you’re aware OF it.

Then you shift – and you’re aware from that spaciousness – you’re aware “FROM” that which is looking through your eyes.

Then a still more profound shift – you ARE that which is looking through your eyes.

****

You know, the reason I created this group and am posting these is, so far, in another McGilchrist zoom group, in these website groups and even in those zoom conversations with Iain, I haven’t found anyone interested in connecting his work with practice. I’d so love it if you could bring your Ayurvedic/Tibetan Buddhist perspective to these conversations. I love your newsletters, by the way (I subscribed).

Maybe a “recipe” with ghee and cumin and some other spices that we can make while opening our hearts and minds to that vast, luminous, “delicious” Presence.

In fact, maybe an Ayurvedic cooking group here on this channel that connects with what McGilchrist has written. So many approach Ayurvedic with a kind of literal, analytic, LH approach – how interesting it would be to counter that!!