Peter Barus
Forum Replies Created
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Thank you Whit, for inspiring thoughts…
“language, and the left hemisphere’s tendency to too often lead us away from truth by it”
Reading this, it occurs to me that this “leading” is structural, not in any way intentional; inherent to language, not some nefarious scheme. The LH is in a way confined to language and the world it encapsulates, like a mosaic that only shows the tiles, and nothing of the between-ness that gives the image meaning, or like the saccades between visual impressions that leave invisible blind-spots. Seeing a mosaic we get the meaning without ever seeing those connections, which may be the function of language, structure, and the LH as well. That is, a feature, not a bug.
And structure itself is only a part of something much greater, a visible armature, which may support much visible refinement enhancing the appearance of wholeness and completeness… but like a statue, only conveys movement with, at best, a hint, like the implication of wind in flowing garments, or (somehow) angelic weightlessness.
I think it was Drew Kopp who said, at a workshop in London I was lucky to attend, “Did you ever care about speaking in such a way that what you didn’t say was present? Probably not. But that’s where making a difference lies.”
“Out here” in the space of a conversation, where my internal state is negligible, is where live is really lived.
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Shannon, marvelous, thank you.
Bonnitta Roy just sent out a link to this, with a twist!
Her (brilliant) post contains a montage of the ad, about which she has very interesting remarks, here:
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This sounds interesting; If I may, I’ll see you May 3.
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I seem to have sparked a discussion that veers rather far from Iain’s focus on what, after all, makes us tick. Windmills are a personal matter to me, having grown up next to one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere (the left?), with its carved wooden cogs and canvas sails rotting into the sand of Cape Cod; and now, looking out across the Vermont hills, they creep up the mountainside into our fabulous (and taxable) view.
I do credit the idea of microplastics contamination, something I have followed since long before “microplastics” was a word. It is trace amounts that are more dangerous, and the vanes deteriorate quickly, as I learned working with fiberglas boats many years ago. But fossil fuels trump all that: we are very close to the end of our opportunity to mitigate the damage now.
To tie this back into Iain’s area, our thinking is always suspect now. We must learn to check in with the wider picture with particular emphasis on several areas that seem disproportionately influential. Our artifact, the Internet, even without AI, has fragmented our culture severely, and continues the process, in relentless pursuit of profit. It’s another kind of toxic byproduct.
Our culture may be ultimately delusional, but it worked to our benefit by virtue of its commonality; without that it ceases to qualify as a culture at all. Of course a culture that is truly integrated with the natural world of which it is part is desirable, but at least humanity can address collective problems more effectively when not actively killing each other.
The “veneer theory” holds that humans are nasty brutes underneath a thin veneer of civilization. This is the basis for most of our delusions, if you ask me. I think it’s upside down, and it’s so-called “civilization” that has brought us to this horrible and bloody state. I have some basis for this view, having lived with and among indigenous peoples from time to time, although in modernity most of the time. In any case “civilization” would be a product of the left hemisphere, if I read Iain correctly.
The situation variously called “metacrisis” and “polycrisis” is not amenable to solution by attacking one aspect or another. Oil, chemicals, nuclear waste, war, hunger and poverty, bad politics… fix one part and another is disrupted; but try addressing all at once, there’s nothing we can get a grip on; certainly not with the LH.
The hope for us that I see is in the way in which a flock of birds turns on an instant, without an obvious leader. I think we have that capacity, to enter that level of awareness of both immediate and remote circumstance, laying aside our internal state, immersing in community. When birds alight, they enter a different state, feeding and breeding and avoiding predators; but in flight they operate like a very specialized supercritical network. It would not require telepathy or magick.
We may be growing toward such an expanded capacity, and the Internet may be essential to this, but cultural selection is always at work, and we may select ourselves out. A worldview of scarcity and accounting, very much the creation of our left brain, is not a world of possibility, much less creative communal flow.
There is a very interesting set of distinctions here, by Four Arrows, that seems to align beautifully with the LH-RH theory:
https://peaceandplanetnews.org/dominant-and-indigenous-worldview/
peaceandplanetnews.org
Dominant and Indigenous Worldview Manifestations
All people are indigenous to Earth and have the right and the responsibility to practice and teach the Indigenous Worldview precepts.
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I found this forum while preparing to post an article in General. It might be relevant here, but might go unnoticed by many people I would like to see it.
But as it happens I share many aspects with some members here, such as living in Vermont, a career as a drummer, a 1958 epiphany about peace & war (not the last I hope), highschool dropout, but class of ’66, some deep Scots-Englishness, etc. I mention this but to indicate a sense of the speaking/listening here. I have a few comments, and a citation.
Can somebody post the statement on Feudalism? I missed it in my state of rapt awe at going through everything I could find from Iain since his latest reintroduced me to his astonishing work.
It seems odd to read about studies measuring comparative “happiness” in the context of hemisphere specialization, a measure of the immeasurable, a comparison of the incomparable.
Regarding “power that maintains structure,” I see it the other way around. There is one rule seen as natural law, but is a human artifact: nothing can be done unless seen as profitable by investors. This is a cultural structure (see anything by Howard Richards https://www.transcend.org/tms/?s=howard+richards)
Also “Philosophical Journalist” brings to mind an interesting idea about the conversational roles people tend to fall into, and their effectiveness in different contexts, using the metaphor of a sporting event. Players speak in action; Coaches speak in strategy and tactics; Fans in the bleachers hear and speak only “boo!” and “yay!”; and Journalists report on Monday. All contribute to the game, with diminishing influence on actual play in the moment “on the court.” It gets complicated when we don’t attend to our roles, for example when I speak as a Coach to somebody listening as a Fan, or as a Journalist to a Player. And this is not to knock Journalism, without them the game might very well cease to exist at all.
On Feudalism vs Democracy my view, since I was taught a definitive (very questionable) description of Feudalism in elementary school, has been that it is the default setting for human societies, and has never been replaced: we just change the labels. And that Feudalism is a cultural adaptation. Cultural selection displaced the Darwinian kind some time ago, and now drives our evolution. “Happiness” has little to do with it, although resistance seems to lead to persistence.
Lately my inquiries concern acceleration and scale, which combined with Feudalism portend doom in no uncertain terms.
About Zen, the Samurai, and most of the other related issues, may I suggest a book of my own about my studies in Japanese swordsmanship, “Maters of Life and Death: Essays in Budō” (2013) https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/matters-of-life-and-death-peter-barus/1115682048
Also try “Before War” by Elisha Daeva https://beforewar.com, and try to find out about Marija Gimbutas’ amazing work, so long suppressed, and now back in serious consideration. Stonehenge was built by women…
There is also a fascinating book looking at Heidegger in parallel with Werner Erhard’s remarkable large-group workshops (a verbatim transcription of the last “est Training”): https://speakingbeing.com/
I guess it’s not inappropriate to add my Substack feed: “Surviving Extinction at the Dawn of the Attention Age” https://peterbarus.substack.com/
And thanks for a wonderful romp through the maize…
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Thanks for this delightful interlude…
There are many opportunities for personal development, in myriad flavors and shapes. Whether they are one’s cup of tea is a serious question, even before evaluating something with which, as a student, one can as yet have no meaningful experience.
As a practitioner and instructor (Japanese sword) for several decades, one approach I try to encourage is finding your practice, and then following through, as if it were a mountain whose summit you may never get to see.
I regard a “practice” as something with no retirement age, and little or no hierarchy other than sustains a certain mindset, and protects disciples (from the word discipline in its sense of inner integrity and perseverance). For example, in my dōjō there are uniforms and ranks, rituals and codes of conduct, largely for the purpose of letting everyone know the level of intensity beyond which they can’t be expected to learn much, and might get discouraged or injured. This applies to our more contemplative practices and armed combat training alike. Accordingly, a black belt is considered entry level for more serious studies.
Students who bounce from one discipline to another are ok, but will find it effective to do so as a way to identify the one that really works for them. That should really be a practice in itself, until that stage of commitment is reached. Otherwise it is something else, possibly wonderful, but not the kind of practice I think we’re discussing here.
A student, asked by my late Sensei why they were training, said: “To unify my body, mind and spirit!”
“Your body, mind and spirit are already unified,” said Sensei, “Otherwise, you’d be dead.”
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–very interested in your thoughts, as I’m citing Freeman in a book, and want to get it right…
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After watching the videos, I want to bring up Walter Freeman III, and Thomas Acquinas.
Freeman says here that Aquinas got it right, that the mechanized model of brain computation, representation, and information processing is inaccurate and incomplete.
I’ll think I can attach his paper…
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I want to ask, in which hemisphere does a question about weakness/strength arise?
Here is a bit from a book I’m working on now, approaching this from another direction:
“We live in a world of answers. We hardly notice that they are really questions, and almost never return to the questions they are supposed to have settled. For example, nobody ever asked the absurd question implicit in the statement: “A Woman’s Place Is In The Home.” The real question that got that answer was about why women were not allowed to vote. In several countries that question still elicits that silly answer.
“This trick of switching questions by answering a different one used to be called “begging the question,” a cheap debating-club ploy to deflect attention from an argument that won’t withstand a second glance. A bit of rhetorical jujutsu that has taken on enormous power since the advent of global electronic information networks, when critical new social infrastructure was built on groundless arguments propped up by absurdities taken for answers.
“When questions marked “answered” may be safely forgotten, we live in a closed world where every question comes with its answer, the answer, just waiting to be found, to convert the question into a fact of everyday reality. Often we settle for answers without the questions, and call a person “educated” when they have memorized enough of them.
“Why don’t we ask better questions? That question has a good, solid answer: because we see questions as stepping-stones across uncertainty, not as doorways to possibility.”
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I can say that I was totally without any cool assessment of my situation in every case. Had I been trained in dealing with charging critters, or flying bullets, my training probably would have taken over. These stories are clearly the LH talking after the fact, and putting a little spin on things. When something happens that we’ve trained for, the stories don’t seem to matter much.
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It’s well to remember that memory is memory, not the event itself. Hard to say anything definitive. If I understand this, any experience I can remember in language is probably going to be LH, as RH doesn’t speak.
Fun to speculate… Maybe getting startled is RH, and passes (If there’s time) to LH for interpretation and cataloguing.
Now it’s already a memory (Shooting? At me!? Better get me with the next one, #%&?!)
Or, perhaps it passes back to RH and is resolved.
If I had to guess, it seems plausible that in one case, LH decided to go after the shooter, doing a blow-by-blow running commentary; with the raccoon there was no memory of how I moved ten feet back, but it was over, and LH had dropped it at the first feral hiss. The flight response (faster than LH) seems to have worked.
Imagine: a trained martial artist encounters a purse-snatcher. Mildly surprising, but not a new experience, so she doesn’t break stride (LH has gone through the techniques thousands of times and isn’t interested). RH, which stored all that training in “muscle-memory” and has no need for LH to figure anything out, moves her body just the precise inch that leaves the mugger grabbing air.
An untrained person would not see the assault coming (RH), or would react (LH) with typical ineffectiveness. Like I did with the shooter. Or get lucky.
It’s always lucky if you don’t get shot, or bitten by a wounded animal, or eaten alive by a bear.
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I was so glad to have joined this gathering. We had the most wonderful conversation! After a round of introductory remarks, we just soared, sharing from our own lives the ways in which Iain’s work has inspired so many different insights among us, bringing depth and clarity to our interactions in many different walks of life.
I hope to see you all again, at any excuse! Each one brought something that enriched us all. Thank you!
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Thank you very much for your response. Respectfully I will try…
What is the question, spoken as if it were a statement?
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I’m finding this conversation quite clarifying, thanks for staying with it. Without this thread we have been sharing, I’m not sure any of this would have occurred to me.
I suspect memory is a synthesis of the narrative and background (L & H), but it is all representation and a memory of a bullet is not the bullet. The moment anything happens, it is gone, and the representation is all we have. And maybe all we ever have. So memory is as real as it ever gets, and certainly does matter if anything does.
I’m intrigued by the notion that the two participate in synthesizing any complicated series of actions, so that even with constant feedback and adjustment to circumstances, familiar functions don’t require a lot of attention. I’m thinking of performance, for example, when technique, once perfected to a degree, is completely discarded, and one becomes a human being (as distinct from a human doing).
I can attest that at such moments performing is as easy and thoughtless as breathing. And afterwards it is nearly impossible to remember.
A friend of mine, a student of Lakota medicine, says that fear, such as may arise in an encounter with a bear, is an opportunity to practice a virtue, such as generosity. Perhaps the bear has many mouths to feed, and needs your body, so you make the offer. This doesn’t require you to get eaten, it’s just acknowledging our relationship to life. Maybe an upbringing in that cultural context would qualify as bear training.
In the heat of the moment, LH might struggle to keep up with events. And certain default reactions are available, such as fight, flight, freeze, flock, etc. Or, the situation being other than life-threatening, but still a cognitive overload, one might break into helpless laughter. In some Japanese martial arts, this is a well-known phenomenon known as the “aiki giggle.” It certainly clears the mind.
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Don, this reminded me of an interview with Phillip Glass that stunned me.
Nadia Boulanger had taught Glass about the relationship of technique and style. It happened when she assigned him an exercise in harmony. He followed all the rules of voicing, and constructed the passage correctly. Still she shook her head. “But Mademoiselle Boulanger, every note is correct,” he protested. “I know,” she replied, “But it is still wrong.”
Ancient Zen masters nod approvingly. Correct, but still wrong!
It was then, Glass said, that he understood what she was teaching him. “Before you can have a style, you have to have technique,” he recalled. “It is the only basis for choice, otherwise you just have a series of accidents.” But it’s more than the sum of its parts: not a question of attaining a voice through technique. “It’s getting rid of the thing,” he explained.
Reading “The Matter With Things,” there’s an astonishing passage about beauty being the supreme measure of any great achievement, whether philosophical, mathematical, scientific, literary, or artistic.