Posts Tagged ‘ Master and his Emissary ’

The Powers Arrayed Against Us

The story of David and Goliath has been reversed. In modern times, the entire human race has been confronted by monstrous invisible powers – and, in a process lasting hundreds of years, has succumbed to them. It now exists in a greatly depleted state, from which it is unlikely to recover.

What are these forces? They are forces within us we have not recognized, and which we have allowed to take control. Our ignorance has not been complete, these forces have been recognized by many people in many ways – but their findings have not been consolidated. This weakness (which we poorly understand) has allowed these forces to consolidate themselves, and become a nearly unstoppable social force.

I speak as an expert here: an expert on how not to be, who has made a partial recovery, and is now struggling to understand what is left of the world he is in. I have no lack of source material: my bookcase is stuffed, and I get more books every week. But my main resource is myself – and that is a work in progress. As the Buddhists say, I have to become nothing – and then start from there.

Note the paradox: in order to be, you have to not-be. This makes no sense to the left hemisphere, as McGilchrist points out in his excellent book The Master and his Emissary, one of my main sources.  I only have one objection to this type of intellectual analysis: these guys have never had a real job. I have, and I have been properly terrified.

My only difference is that I was consciously aware of this terror, while my fellow-employees were not. They were hard at work destroying the world – by fighting the War against Terrorism, ironically enough. They were simply doing what everyone else was doing – which, as far as they were concerned, completely justified their actions.

But let me back up a minute: what were these forces? The honest answer is “I don’t really know, but I am working on understanding them.” But one thing seems clear, and I have a lot of agreement on this – it is our obsession with progress. We don’t know what this is, but it seems to be the magic word that goads us to increasing efforts to be better and better. And to surrendering more and more of our selves.

One symptom of this is the increasing amount of mental disorders – and their accompanying physical disorders. It seems to me that these are much more widespread, and much more subtle than most realized. Here Oliver Saks is invaluable. Wikipedia says he is the author of numerous bestselling books, which must be true. But it is also true that he is preaching to the choir: the minority of Americans who are well-read, and have a good understanding of what is going on.

The majority have no such understanding, and don’t want it – but are clearly in charge. This is a crucial point that no one seems to be making – perhaps because they don’t want to seem superior.

It seems to me their modesty, if that is what it is, will result in their own demise – and they have to get off their butts and do something about it.

2011
08/22
CATEGORY
Philosophy
TAGS
Leave a comment

One Man Speaking to His Fellow-Men

First of all, I want to make it clear that by men I mean men and women.

My text for today is from McGilchrist, chapter 7, The Renaissance and the Reformation (pages 298-303). First, what he says about the Renaissance:

I refer at this point to a renewed interest in the world at large, a thirst for knowledge of the natural world, and the historical world – he broader context in which we live, with the accent on how things are, rather than how they ought to be in theory, or are according to authority: the beginnings of modern science, history, and philosophy. In the arts it is usual to speak of the new sense of the importance of harmony, of the relation of part to whole, a new spirit of conception that is both daring and tactful, graceful yet original. In all things, we learn, there was a new sense of the balanced reciprocities of individual and society, and of male and female.

He then goes on to speak of the poetry of François Villon and his ways of remembering. I am also listening to Oliver Saks, and his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - about memory and its losses. I am even thinking about my first love Shirley, in Terre Haute, Indiana. At the time she was 29, which seemed shockingly old to me because I was 21, a young engineer just out of college. It pains me now to imagine what she must be, if she is still alive. Like many of the women in my life, she had severe mental problems. I am even remembering my father’s Haitian girlfriend – whom he abandoned.

Not for the first time, I thank God I am not a woman – who are being murdered right and left in Latin America. And I also make sure to steer clear of the old women around me, who seemed determined to get even with men in general. But I see I have digressed. Let me return to McGilchrist, page 303:

Our feelings are not ours, any more than, as Scheler said, our thoughts are not our ours. We locate them in our heads, in our selves, but they cross interpersonal boundaries as though such limits had no meaning for them; passing back and forth from one mind to another, across space and time, growing and breeding, but where we do not know. What we feel arises from what I feel for you what you feel for what I feel about your feelings about me – and many other things besides: it arises from the betweenness, and in this way feeling binds us together, and, more than that, actually unites us, since the feelings are shared.

Yet the paradox is that those feelings only arise because of our distinctness, our ability to be separate, distinct individuals, that come, that go, in separation and death.

Once more I thank God (if he is not getting tired of my thanks) for making a failure of me in Silicon Valley, and plopping me down here in a remote valley in Costa Rica – but someplace where I can get all the books I want – and all the Internet I want – including this blog.

2011
08/19
CATEGORY
History
TAGS
2 comments

The Logos

The Gospel According to John is described by Wikipedia:

John presents a “higher” Christology than the synoptics, meaning that he describes Jesus as the incarnation of the divine Logos through whom all things were made, as the object of veneration,[8] and more explicitly as God incarnate.[9] Only in John does Jesus talk at length about himself and his divine role, often shared with thedisciples only. Against the synoptics, John focuses largely on different miracles (including resurrecting Lazarus), given as signs meant to engender faith. Synoptic elements such as parables and exorcisms are not found in John. It presents a realized eschatology in which salvation is already present for the believer. According to the majority viewpoint, the Synoptics are more historically reliable than John.[10][11]

I was tempted to continue reading the Wikipedia article, but I had to restrict myself to what I learned from reading The Master and His Emissary this morning. Beginning on page 285, McGilchrist is writing of the way Greek thought had been corrupted by Socrates and Plato.

Let me repeat that: Greek thought had been corrupted by Socrates and Plato. They made the idea of things more important than the things themselves. This is part of the process McGilchrist is writing about: the transfer of power from the right hemisphere to the left.

Christianity, which contains a blend of Judaism and Greek influences, made Platonic idealism part of its religion: the Logos (translated as The World) was God! As a child this puzzled me; I tried to make sense of things – and not just swallow them whole. In college, I heard about the Logos in John, but still did not understand what that meant.

Quoting McGilchrist on page 286:

This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be know by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years.

He does not mention religion, and the extremely degenerate thinking typified by contemporary religious trends.

2011
08/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Religion
TAGS
Leave a comment

People or Power?

One of the key movements in the Modern world was Humanism. Naturally, I turned to Wikipedia to refresh my knowledge of the subject – and quickly got bogged down. I have all kinds of books on this all-important subject – and all this learning boils down to one fact: the more you try to put it into words, the more stuck you get. Only one person has clarified this problem that I know of: Iain McGischrist, in his book The Master and His Emissary.

He says something that was lost with Plato: to understand reality, we have to rely our bodies – just like the birds flying outside my window. They also have divided brains, but the two halves work harmoniously. With humans, they have gotten out of sync. The left hemisphere has gotten drunk on power. But let me resume my main line of reasoning.

With the advent of civilization (large-scale society) we discovered large-scale power, and quickly became addicted to it – as related in the Old Testament. The Hebrews, a nomadic pastoral society, saw civilizations all around them, each one with its king – and demanded a king of their own. God did not think it such a good idea, and explained why. The Hebrews ignored his good advice, and continued to demand a king. The result, eventually, was the disappearance of their kingdom into the sands of time, with all the other kingdoms around them.

This is inevitably was happens to any society based on power – without exception. The Modern world thought it was an exception, because it based its power on the people, on democracy. But the Modern world consisted of another power also: Industrialization, or Capitalism – which was not democratic at all, but simply an old-fashioned hierarchical power structure.

This power won the power-struggle that ensued – because few noticed this struggle was going on. They had become affluent, and for them, this was all that mattered. Any loss of their power, as a democracy and as individuals, was not important.

Very rapidly, in about two hundred years, society regressed back into the Middle Ages – with one important difference: the new power structure was invisible, consisting of whoever had obtained power and managed to keep it for awhile. Life inside any of these structures (mainly corporations) was essentially the same as for the ancient Egyptians: lots of functionaries devoted to serving power – including the all-important military.

But there is one very important difference between us: our technology, which seems to make us far different from them. We assumed it would keep us on an exponential power/growth curve forever. This obscured a basic fact: that the world was being destroyed – beginning with the people in it.

Right here is where I lose everybody: when I talk of people who are not really people, only partially people: dysfunctional people – and therefore a dysfunctional society. People can see they live in a dysfunctional society all right – but cannot see how this relates to them.

They seem to think that society is composed of automatons, each behaving nicely as it is instructed to. In reality, it is composed of people who have lost the ability to be themselves – or think for themselves, and cannot imagine what that could be.

The rich and the powerful have no ability to do anything – only to take their wealth from others. In a high-tech society, the creation of wealth has become mysterious. If you doubt this, check of the prices of the iPad.

But this hardly matters – our economy is close to collapse, exactly analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire. Only in this case the entire global economy is involved.

2011
08/13
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
TAGS
Leave a comment

Right-Brain Death

This is another posting about a book I have been reading forever: The Master and his Emissary. It is not an easy read because it is not an easy subject and the author, Iain McGilchrist, takes great pains to go into his subject carefully and thoroughly. His subtitle is The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World. My last posting on this was How Can People Be and Not Be at the Same Time?

The author has an academic background, which allows him to calmly regard his subject from a distance. I came from the trenches of the business world, where a war is going on – where people being blown apart, right and left. I cannot be as sanguine about it all as he is.

Also, his work is hard to categorize. He uses many sources, usually academic ones, but is mysteriously silent, so far, about philosophy; perhaps that will come later in the book. Or perhaps he is ignoring it because, as a practical matter, philosophy no longer matters. I suspect the later.

His main point is that we must use both hemispheres harmoniously to function normally. Both are necessary because each creates a different way of being. Unfortunately, this whole idea of two different ways of being is completely unknown to us.

Popular consciousness has latched into a simplistic notion of what the two hemispheres do, and will not consider anything more sophisticated. This is because the left hemisphere is not very sophisticated itself – and that is where they live. Their right hemispheres have become inactivated, and are practically speaking – dead.

This is a serious matter – but something else if far more serious: we have almost no way of knowing how our brains are operating. McGilchrist has been active in neuroimaging research himself, and uses some of its findings in this book. Other fields, such as linguistics, have shown that different switches can be set to determine how the mind (and presumably, the brain also) functions.  But we have no way of directly knowing how these switches are set, since the brain is just a gooey mess, when observed from the outside. We have to do a lot of detective work to infer what is going on there.

The modern world resulted in a different kind of mind – and the post-modern one in further changes still. All of which we did not bother to notice. Living in Latin America, I am living with another kind of mind – one not much much affected by the modern world – and with no idea how to cope with it. When the rest of the world goes down, it will no doubt go down with it.

I am studying existentialism now, very seriously, because I think it has a lot to say to our time. Existentialists have been aware of much that was going on – and wrote about it extensively. But they were as ignorant as babes about much else that was going on, such as the impact of technology – or about the workings of the brain.

This is where it is at, as far as I am concerned. And I will be doing my own writing about it.

2011
08/03
CATEGORY
Psychology
TAGS
Leave a comment

How Can People Be and Not Be at the Same Time?

This question has bedeviled me. It is obvious to me that most Americans do not exist, are determined not to exist, and are forbidden to exist. At the office, this is true in particular.

Of course, these same people are insulted if I say this. “If I am not living, what am I?” they demand. I am tempted to say “Some kind of mechanism,” but that would not help either. I think The Master and his Emissary has an answer – with the forbidding label of cerebral lateralization (the British spelling is lateralisation). It is about the two hemispheres of the brain.

He believes, I believe correctly, that our age is characterized by left-hemisphere domination – which results in widespread mental illness and social dysfunction. I quote from page 259:
—
Initially there was a symmetrical, bihemispheric (his word) advance at this time – an advance in the functioning of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres. It is the frontal lobes that bring distance (in space) and delay (in time): they enable us to stand back from our world, and from ourselves. But this development, permitting as it does a far greater capacity to speculate, to consider the lessons of the past and to project possible worlds into the future, to build projects and schemes for the better governing of the state and the increase of knowledge of the world at large, requires the ability to record: to make externalized, therefore more permanent, traces of the mind’s workings, to fix, to freeze the constantly passing flow of life on the wing.

It requires, therefore, a huge expansion of the realm of the written world, as well as the development of diagrams, formulas and maps; records of observations of nature; and records of the history of people and states. From what has outlined in connection with re-presentation in the earlier parts of the book, it will be seen that this necessitates reliance on the left hemisphere, not the right.
—
This is quite a mouthful, just copying it was an effort.

The left hemisphere is clearly vital to what we now call progress. But his whole point is that this can be carried too far: we can become overdeveloped, and unable to function – and completely unaware of this.

2011
08/01
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
TAGS
Leave a comment

We Become What We Admire

We are fantastic imitators, and always have been. Indeed this may be our most important skill – or meta-skill, actually, that makes us good at other important skills – such as language and music, which are probably closely related – both of which have baffled scientists.

I am back reading The Master and his Emissary again. I am so impressed with it that if I were the dictator of the world (how I would love that!) I would sentence everyone to solitary confinement with only it to read (I might allow them some bread and water, if they were well-behaved). In a scene reminiscent of  the Final Judgement, they would have to appear before me, one by one; and I would examine them carefully to see if they understood it.

His Chapter 7, Imitation and the Evolution of Culture, is as good any other philosopher’s writings on the subject – and indeed, he quotes from many of them – especially Heidegger.

His conclusion is simple: since we have admired machines so much, we have become like them.

2011
07/27
CATEGORY
Philosophy
TAGS
Leave a comment

What the End of the World is Like

People have been looking forward to the end of the world for many reasons – but mainly because they thought it would be entertaining. There were not a few who relished the destruction of their enemies – followed of course by a perfect world made just for them. Who wouldn’t want it to happen- and the sooner the better? I hate to disappoint them, but Elliot put it this way:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

And this was written in 1925, when the holocaust was yet to come!

It seems to me that the end of the world has already happened, and we are now going through the motions of winding it down. If you want to see what the end of the world looks like, look out your window – and notice that nothing unusual is going on. The really interesting stuff has already happened – and no one has noticed.

No one has noticed. This could be carved on our collective tombstone – to be viewed by Martians, trying to understand what had happened.

What the heck did happen? The human race achieved something no other species had ever done: our minds gradually shut down, and for all practical purposes we ceased to exist. We were brain-dead. This is not to say that we stopped all activity – we became more active than ever: maniacally so – as reflected in our technological progress, and our obsession with business - both of which went into orbit.

People were saying “Surely we are the most wonderful people ever!” There was only one problem: we were no longer people. We had no words to label this new state – because we had no way of stepping outside ourselves, and viewing our situation as impartial observers – as poets, and artists, and philosophers have always done. We had no interest in any of these. We were brain-dead.

I like this label: brain-dead, which I made up just now, first thing this morning – on a overdose of caffeine and Gallo Pinto (the Tico version of beans and rices, of which I have my own special recipe, made in a pressure cooker).

Actually, it is not accurate, as Iain McGilchrist explains so lucidly in his book The Master and His Emissary. What has happened is that the left hemisphere (the Emissary) has usurped the right hemisphere (the Master). The result being that the brain (and therefore the whole body) loses touch with reality.

This delights most people: reality is something that only gave them trouble, and they would just as soon get rid of it. At one time, these people would have been assigned to the loony bin. But now, since almost everybody is this way, we have the strange spectacle of the whole world being an insane asylum.

This is what the end of the world is like – don’t tell anyone though, let’s just keep this to ourselves.

2011
07/21
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
TAGS

Leave a comment

The British Sometimes do it Better

All in the mind

Interview with McGilchrist

All in the Mind Blog by Natasha Michell 

Americans excel at the short take: for example, TED – or any television commercial. But for leisurely, scholarly, tasteful thought – even in a podcast, the British do it better. Americans don’t like to think so – but in many ways they are still colonials. I would even take it further, and put England, America, and Latin America on a continuum. Latinos don’t like to think so – but in general their learning is inferior to America’s. And their intellectuals are well aware of this – as American intellectuals are aware of British learning. After all, the British had a long head start, and we got much of our culture from them.

Some of my clever readers will note this is an Australian production, but it certainly smells British to me.

The interview is about the book The Master and his Emissary, which I have blogged about many times. It does not attempt to trivialize the book, as is the Americans do – the listener is expected to have his grey matter fully alive.  The British/Australian accents are definitely there, but not too thick.

The article in Wikipedia, for which we can take credit, is exemplary.

2011
07/12
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Technology
TAGS

2 comments

Meditation Involves Suffering

It is a common misconception that meditation should produce a state of bliss – and that is why people want to do it. Pain is not something they want, they avoid it as much as possible. This is the calculus of their logic: more happiness and less pain. Accepting pain to them seems ridiculous, avoiding it is the only thing to do – and they will do anything to avoid it.

They are dead wrong: pain is an normal part of life, it cannot be avoided, and this avoidance is a common component of mental illness. The ability to deal effectively with pain is, by contrast, an important part of mental health – and an important theme of the arts and religion.

The most serious of our human problems, and we certainly have many of them, is our addiction to thinking – adults have to be thinking all the time. The kind of meditation I do involves calming down this compulsive activity. Which is nearly impossible. But no matter, you do it anyway, the best you possibly can.

The immediate effects are not noticeable, but only become apparent later in the quality of your thinking – strangely enough. To think well, you have to stop thinking completely on a regular basis. This gives the mind a chance to rest, reset itself, start over on a fresh basis, and really get something done. Otherwise, it gets stale.

This process always involves some suffering – or maybe discomfort would be a better word. We are unaccustomed to making this distinction – and assume pain always leads to more pain. Usually, it doesn’t at all, we just feel some vague discomfort, and this makes us uneasy.

What we have to do is just sit with those feelings and get better acquainted with them – precisely what we ordinarily don’t want to do. When I say “get better acquainted with them” I mean with their physical sensations. Thinking about them is not what you want to do – because you will only get stuck in them more.

After reading The Master and his Emissary, I can understand better what is going on. Compulsive thinking is what the left hemisphere does. It has to give up and return control to the right hemisphere – for it to sort things out. Something it is very reluctant to do. And which, as a culture, we have become reluctant to do.

The ultimate left-hemisphere technology is the computer/software/internet. Which we have become completely enraptured of. This is natural enough, there is no clear dividing line between ourselves and our technologies. But the result has been a disaster. We have forgotten what it is like to be human – and the computer does not want us to. It only wants us to become more firmly addicted to it.

“But,” you may say, “You are using this technology now, in writing this blog.” True, and that is am important observation: technology can be used to break our addiction to technology.

It can happen, but it is unlikely – because too few people are aware of what is going on. And this is the objective of meditation – and Buddhism in general.

Buddhism, however, has been a failure.

2011
07/12
CATEGORY
Medical
Meditation
Technology
TAGS

Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 385 other followers