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the crowded, noisy ignorance of the modern world is less easily invaded by knowledge than was the silence of illiterate epochs.
As the theory of complex systems shows, within such a system, while every single part has its effect on the whole, no single part can determine, or necessarily influence, or even perceive, where the whole is nonetheless tending.
The pursuit of hedonic happiness depends upon a set of values that our society has taken to be axiomatically superior. These are the values of individualism: personal autonomy, control, choice.
Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it – and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.
The account we give of ourselves helps determine our values, and hence our behaviour: and, since how we behave is central to whether we could ever save ourselves and our world from the current tragic state of affairs, all this matters profoundly.
Dogma is the besetting sin of the age; and if one wanted one it would be hard to find a better expression of the left hemisphere’s take on the world than dogma.
For example, when I am absorbed in the flow of experience, enjoying what I am doing, my body is in the background, as that through which I experience the world – it is the lived body, der Leib; and time, too, is in the background, that in which I live, think and act intuitively. They do not obtrude, as things, objects of experience – that is to say, not subject to the Gorgon stare of the left hemisphere.
When, by contrast, I am outside the flow of experience – because, for example, I am bored, stressed or in pain – my body is foregrounded, and becomes focussed on as a thing in the world, ein Körper; and time, too, becomes my focus, some thing I observe anxiously from the outside, constantly looking at my watch, only too aware of something I call ‘lateness’.2 This change in the nature of attention changes the experience of time and the body.
In our awareness there are, at one and the same time, yesterday’s pleasure or pains, and tomorrow’s hopes or fears, inextricably bound up with one another, as each note of a tune inevitably brings with it its relation to those parts of the tune that are technically past (no longer detectable by a recording device, but crucially alive to the mind) and those that are to come (which the mind inevitably anticipates).
Memory of the past is a living process, not a thing, and neither fictional nor insubstantial; stored in the body and substantiating who we are from moment to moment.
The right hemisphere tends to make moral judgments by reference to the intention of the doer (as in deontology or virtue ethics), the left hemisphere by reference to the consequences of the deed (utilitarianism): and ‘normal judgments of morality require full interhemispheric integration of information critically supported by the right temporal parietal junction and right frontal processes’.
Guilt is often a motivator for prosocial behaviour: only psychopaths have no capacity for guilt.
There is a clear shift toward right hemisphere dominance in altered states of consciousness, such as the shamanic state, induced by meditation;4 and in the shamanic state there is increased activity across the whole range of electrophysiological frequencies in the right (but not left) frontal region,
Above all else one must be clear that in religion language is used in an entirely different way from that in which it is used in science. The language of religion is closer to that of poetry than that of science … one of its most important tasks is, with its language of images and parables, to keep us mindful of the wider context … We know that in religion we are dealing with a language of images and parables, that can never precisely convey what is meant … At the end of the day, the central Order, or the ‘One’ as we used to say, with which we commune in the language of religion, must prevail.
Cults motivate themselves by having adversaries.
Extreme views are often a reaction to the perception of extreme contrary views.
What the research of Nye and her colleague Hay revealed was more like the opposite of the thesis that children would never think in such terms unless they were ‘forced’ to do so: rather, they naturally thought in such terms until they learnt that it was not considered smart to do so, and an alienated, atomistic, inanimate vision of the world was imposed on them at school.
Experience of the divine is not necessarily something at all rarefied or ‘super’-natural, but rather a normal and natural phenomenon.
