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there is something more fundamental about the world that is brought into being by the right hemisphere, with its betweenness, its mode of knowing which involves reciprocation, a reverberative process, back and forth, compared with the linear, sequential, unidirectional method of building up a picture favoured by the left hemisphere.
Compare with sand talk yarn on spirit.
This enables us to have knowledge, to bring the world into resolution, but it leaves what it knows denatured and decontextualised.
Consider the two men four apples example frpm the Santd Talk chapter on spirit.
The left hemisphere, the mediator of division, is never an endpoint, always a staging post. It is a useful department to send things to for processing, but the things only have meaning once again when they are returned to the right hemisphere.
Life can certainly have meaning without books, but books cannot have meaning without life. Most of us probably share a belief that life is greatly enriched by them: life goes into books and books go back into life.
No longer static, boundaried, ‘frozen’, the contents of the book are taken up into the world where nothing is ever fixed or fully known, but always becoming something else.
Compare to the concept of dreaming / turn around and the introuction to Sand Talk
reverberative, that is to say, both receptive and generative – both picking up, receiving, perceiving, and in the process making, giving back, creating ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves but includes ourselves’.
Consider the sound created by a tuning fork with a reverb board.
Interesting to consider the hemispheric/dual nature of the fork as possibly analogous to the brain: does a single pole create sound with the board on the same way?
Such limitation is a condition of its functioning at all.
biphasic, and essentially apophatic (‘no-saying’), structure to the disclosing of whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves
This negatory or apophatic mode of creation of whatever-it-is is reflected in our experience that what we know about things as they truly are, starting with Being itself, is apophatic in nature: we can know only what they are not.
right hemisphere, which sees things whole, and if asked to describe them has to remain ‘silent’. It has no way of coming at what this thing is other than by pointing to it, or by unconcealing it, allowing the thing to reveal itself as much as possible (by not saying ‘no’ to it, but saying ‘no’ to whatever lies around and obscures it),
The 'pointing to' not 'is' paradigm of koans/parables
‘The cortex’s job is to prevent the inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one’, writes Joseph LeDoux; that is, it pares down from among things that exist, it selects, it does not originate.
In this sense, it may exert its influence more as ‘free won’t’ than ‘free will’.
Is the what the thonking in mindfullness traditions points to when suggesting the space between stimulus and reaction/response?
i.e. An opening between urge and action for - the capacity to recognise the urge.
i wonder if meditators have been subitted to the tests with those mind reading machines? Would they (more quickly) come to recognise the apparently unconcious urge?
The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience – Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts – abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops
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Sand Talk image for spirit - two circles connected by two lines indicating the neccesity for a circular/reverbrative process between the two points/perspectives of tge world: duality within unity.
It will be appreciated that this contrast does not correspond neatly to the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere – more, in neuropsychological terms, to the frontal lobes versus the more ancient, subcortical regions of the limbic system;
say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. This idea lies behind Blake’s perception in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy
The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for their opposition ultimately to be harmonised.
Consider again the metaphor of traveling between higher and lower dimensions: the column in the dimensions is whole but is divided into its parts when viewing it re-presentation in two dimensions, its shadows (circle & rectangle). Believing this is all there is to it limts the understanding so one must return the parts to each other and reconcieve the three dimensionality.
The column is not just the whole 3D shape or the re-presented 2D shapes: it is both and simultaniously neither.
the idea of the unity of union with division.
‘Where philosophy stops, poetry has to begin … Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.’
In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having done so, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.
there are always elements that arise from within the system (rationally conceived goals) that cannot be achieved by the system (rational means of pursuit), and that indeed draw our attention to the limits of the system, and point us beyond.
The axioms of a system, upon which a system is built, require another system to explain or justify them.
‘immediacy’ (the quality of being understandable without the need for any other concept or idea) is not compatible with determinacy, and hence certainty is purchased at the expense of content: ‘The more certain our knowledge the less we know.’
all things counterfeit infinity!
interconnected whole always in the process of becoming:
Consider The Dreaming or Turn-around as conceptual parent to this definition.
However distinguished, the individual remains part of the whole and is understandable only in terms of the whole of which it forms a part.
The joint is made possible by the existence of the tendon, an elastic connection that allows the bones that take part in the joint (but do not constitute the joint) to move away from one another and to remain connected, or to move together and remain separate;
the ‘givens’ of the left hemisphere need to be once again ‘given up’ to be reunified through the operations of the right hemisphere.
Consider the roles of axiom (given) and the inabilty of their system to explain them.
But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.
the slave’s recognition of the master is rendered worthless to the master because of the master’s contempt for the slave,
In each there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.
this miscalled ‘annihilation’ of the self is a sacrifice of the boundaries which once defined the self, not in vitiation of the self, but in its kenosis, a transformation whereby it is emptied out into a whole which is larger than itself.112 So it is that neither the bud nor the blossom is repudiated by, but rather aufgehoben in, the fruit.
An image appears: Consider a metaphor of the cup overfilled with water and thinking it is that water that is in it. The kenosis occures when rather r than being filled and overflowing it is instead placed inside, sunk into, the stream that it was filled from.
It the cup is always there, so too the water, the realisation is the movement from cup, cup with water (regardless of amount), cup with constant stream of water ever (over)flowing and cup in the stream with water flowing all around.
Is it neccesary for the cup to disintergrate to the point that the cup and the stream are inseperable?
even the rational mode of operation itself, that of the value of reason, cannot be confirmed by the process of rationalistic systematisation, but need ultimately to be intuited.
Consider perhaps that Socrates was not the hero of rationalism, as i had thought, but rather the hero of intuition; his crimes (the eponymous dialogoc method) were percieved because they pointed people toward the floors of their own expert rational knowledge - exposed the left hemisphere to its own inadequacy against its own measures.
However much rationalistic systems give the illusion of completeness – and they can be very hard to escape for those who cannot see their weaknesses – they do in fact conceal within themselves the clue of thread that leads out of the maze.
Consider, for the three pigs play, prior to the irrational solution at the ending (don't destroy the wolf as by doing so one destroys oneself)
The difficulty is an expression of the fundamental incompatibility involved in mounting the vertical axis at the same time that we go out as far as possible into the world along the horizontal axis.
Consider the sand talk image of axis linked by curves
Just because what it produces is in focus and at the centre of the field of vision, it is more easily seen. This is one reason we are so much more aware of what it contributes to our knowledge of the world.
A play, speech or any form of argument is effective in its focus but neccesarily leaves out other perspectives - the inherent heirachy is neccesary for movememt.
the thumb infront of your face or the window behind it
the impossibility of covering a distance by halves or the reality that we do it every day
An action in one hemisphere is not usually best mirrored in the other: it is not co-operation for the surgeon and the assistant both to try to make the incision.
Paradox Of cooperation/complementary action and conflict /independence
But my purpose in referring to these experiences here is to suggest that the main evidence of disturbance following the operation was not, as might have been expected, things that no longer happened, but just the opposite – things that couldn’t be prevented from happening, which, in other words, couldn’t be inhibited.
21 It may not be a coincidence that babies and young children are also more reliant on the right hemisphere, which matures earlier than the left, and it may be that it is the increasing importance of left-hemisphere function with age that necessitates the separation, in both hemispheres’ interests, of their realms of activity.
‘In the space within the heart lies the controller of all … He is the bridge that serves as the boundary to keep the different worlds apart.’22
Just as inhibition may be maintained in the interests of co-operation, co-operation may be maintained in the interests of competition: where two co-operate, the first may do so in a reciprocal spirit, while the second does so out of self-interest, that self-interest benefitting from the generosity of spirit of the first.
Kant’s famous formula, Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind (‘concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind’), applies here.
Read alternate translation in note for example of rhetorical importance of repetition.
Does this connect somehow to Einstein's comment on science and religion.? ( i think they were the points of contrast )
that something new, that was not present before, comes into being through the process, not negating the earlier stages, but transforming them.
the nature of processing when both hemispheres are involved cannot be predicted from the parts.
having a ‘utilisation bias’ in favour of the left hemisphere intensifies this effect, whereas having a similar bias in favour of the right hemisphere does nothing to upset the even-handedness of its concern.
What is more, such interhemispheric competition appears yet again to be asymmetrical, with the suppressive effect of the left hemisphere on the right being greater than that of the right on the left.
At any rate, at least we can deduce that when she says ‘I know what I want to wear’, she means ‘My left hemisphere knows what it wants me to wear, and I am identified with my left hemisphere.’
is essential that what the left hemisphere yields is returned to the realm of the right hemisphere, where it can once again live. Only the right hemisphere is in touch with primary experience, with life; and the left hemisphere can only ever be a staging post, a processing house, along the route – not the final destination.
Again The path of knowledge from embodied to abstract amd bacl again as expressed in Sand Talk.
In the absence of such concerted action, the left hemisphere comes to believe its territory actually is the world.
Confusion of the map with the territory: abstract with the concrete
But we also know from them, as we know from our own experience of divided will, that, despite all this, there can be only one unified field of consciousness. And how is that?
The other voices: deep, slow, loth-like and higher, fast, erratic oth within the fied of conciousness. They were always aspects but never the centre of or controlling element of conciousness.
It seems to me more fruitful to think of consciousness not as something with sharp edges that is suddenly arrived at once one reaches the very top of mental functioning, but as a process that is gradual, rather than all-or-nothing, and begins low down in the brain, rising up from below the level of the hemispheres, before it reaches the great divide. It may be that the reverse of Sperry’s model applies.
Most forms of intentionality and deep emotional feelings are not split in any obvious way by a parting of the hemispheres. Only the cognitive interpretations [high-level phenomena] of specific events are affected
