In response to a Youtube entitled An Exercise to Balance the Brain’s Two Hemispheres on the Iain McGilchrest channel I offered a comment whose edited and slightly expanded version now follows. (The comment is addressed to Iain McGilchrest.)
In dzogchen awareness one can exercise attention without intention or object resting in the nature of mind itself. Or so they say! Of course one has to develop the intention to rest the mind that way which takes training and time. In traditional Buddhist doctrine there are said to be ‘two wings of enlightenment’ which are shamatha/mindfulness and vipashyana/awareness. Mindfulness involves placing attention on a particular and learning to rest there; and awareness is about becoming aware of the space-atmosphere-mind around mindfulness until on finds the ‘object’ of attention becoming in fact the nature of mind itself. So it seems that in this tradition a two-brain approach is in play.
I have been thinking about this as I slowly go through your videos and the Matter with Things (on the desk but not yet read except for the last chapter) and it seems to me that the reason we have this two-brain approach involves an existential prerogative for creatures coming out of the realm of Idea or Mind, as it were, and into Embodied Form as living creatures who in turn create fields in which other seemingly solid phenomena like planets and rocks etc. also form and coalesce. In our dimension, and as individual beings, we experience place/location, meaning there is a particular ‘here’ and an ‘everywhere else.’ This is the spatial equivalent of the One (everywhere) and Many (particulars). Once we have a realm with particulars, including dimensions in which particular locations can be experienced, we have two zones, the particularity place and everywhere else all around that place. Given this binary existential setup as a sine qua non for any type of individualized experience (which is what each living organism is) I find it hard to believe that the left brain (particularity) and right brain (context-space) dynamic is random happenstance, rather it reflects something fundamental about the nature of embodied reality and moreover the dimensions in which it is experienced. In other words, the twin brain is a symptom or result of the underlying situation not the cause. Because of course the brain does not create mind or space, rather it is the other way around.
In practical terms: no doubt the left brain can be trained to pay attention to particulars versus leaching off into habitual conceptual-discursive-abstract ‘monkey mind’ false pistes. Forming concept is a type of particularity in that it brings all of mind to one point; this is a helpful form of mental magic but is not without pitfalls. The notion of a tree is very helpful, for example, but it is not the tree itself rather an abstract re-presentation of a tree; the problem is that once generated we tend to regard this concept of ‘tree’ as equivalent to the tree itself and rarely even see actual trees any more even when directly looking at them. In your terms, I believe we could say that we are seeing the tree only with the left brain and not also the right brain. Moreover we usually think of trees (or whatever) in combination with other similar abstractions in complex thought constructions, akin to or actually part of stories. Once catalogued as ‘tree’ (or any other such concept) they get somehow ignored as no longer living processes but fixed corpses.
That said, there can be valid, helpful left brain attention such as the old-school Anapanasati sutra style mindfulness, equivalents of which exists in other traditions of course. Once the mind’s attention is placed (left brain) then the right brain spacious awareness can open. Something like that. **A teaching called ‘the nine ways of resting the mind in shamatha’ goes through nine levels of doing this….
[And now more for this Article:]
Also: this particular place versus overall space dynamic is essentially the same as the self-other dynamic, self being me and other being everything outside me. Now there is an added layer of complexity for us humans in that there are other living humans as compared to other living things (like trees) or dynamic living presences (like rocks, sky, rain and suchlike). In terms of our awareness, and thus presumably also brain function, we therefore have an inner as well as an outer experience. Always. Our experience always has this binary aspect. There is me experiencing and there is not me outside I am witnessing, though it is also part of my inner experience. We can never fully separate inner and outer even though clearly there is some sort of difference between self and other. Again, this seems an unavoidable sine qua non in our ‘experiential continuum’ and thus it is hardly surprising that our brain has two main parts.
Now I’m not saying that one part of the brain relates to inner and the other to outer. I wouldn’t know. I will never become an expert in brain studies. But structurally, organizationally speaking, just as there is particularity of place versus overall general space, so also there is particularity of the self as part of an independent, particular being (aka ‘me’) versus all the other beings and everything outside which is still part of what is being experienced but it appears to be distinguishable from ‘me’ (who of course has a particular body shape and thus also location.)
It might look like I’m trying to make a hard argument in some way and perhaps I am, namely that the twin-brain structure, not unlike the Two Body King paradigm, is a reflection and function of the fundamental nature of reality rather than being the prime cause of that reality. In order for a living organism and consciousness such as ourselves to have the experience of being individual and different from the space around we need an experiential dimension in which space can be perceived as having particular locations, one of which is that of our own body-mind matrix. So there is a ‘here’ which is different from ‘there’ giving reality a fundamentally binary nature.
Who’d have thunk it? Yin-Yang all over again! No getting away from it!
For example: confusion is focusing the mind so intently on the individuated mindstream that one entirely loses awareness of overall reality whereas wisdom is seeing clearly the nature of confusion which only happens when one steps out of the overly self-centered process and sees the bigger picture in which that particular process is occurring, at which point its nature is perceived. Clearly seeing that nature IS wisdom.
In shamatha and vipashyana first one stills the mind, usually by resting its focus on a particular. This is likened to allowing the surface of the pond to become still at which point clear reflections can be seen. Once movement occurs the surface can no longer provide such clear reflections. And awareness is like paying deep attention to those clear reflections provided by the still, tranquil mind. And not just reflections: once the surface is still, we can now see down to the bottom of the pool whereas before we couldn’t, so now we can see the full extent and feel the nature of the entire pool down into its depths and bottom, not just the agitated, fragmented shimmerings on a moving surface.
So here shamatha is likened to stilling the left brain functions so that they are still there but steady, not like little dogs compulsively following whatever next scent arises in their path and swerving off accordingly. And vipashyana is exploring the depths of the pool now revealed by shamatha’s tranquility by using the right brain function. Once we understand this dynamic, we really don’t need to talk about left and right brains anymore. They are abstractions. We cannot see or witness our brains; but we can experience the simultaneous nature of focused stillness and general awareness.
For example the exercise McGilchrist mentions but does not demonstrate in this 4 minute video as a way to train both brains, namely ‘to focus intently on a particular whilst at the same time being aware of the wider space.’ In other words, use both. What he is recommending, therefore, is to develop the two wings of enlightenment. Both are needed though one cannot develop steady vipashyana without first establishing shamatha; that said one can develop shamatha without necessarily mastering vipashyana. This is similar, funnily enough, to how the right brain can be aware of the space within which the left brain is functioning (well or poorly) whereas generally the left brain mentality can never perceive the right brain’s wider perspective because it is too busy focusing or narrowing.
So I look forward to slowly working through McGilchrist’s left-right brain material because it is thorough and well presented – he used to teach the romantic poets at Oxford before moving into clinical psychiatry and neurology. But at the same time, we already have all we need in that all of us have a simultaneous sense of here and everywhere else as well as the sense of self and other. That direct experience is our personal immediate contact with the twin brain phenomenon which is always there, moment by moment, in this our collective experiential continuum.
Exercise:
McGilchrest didn’t demonstrate it but here is a simple suggestion.
1. For 10-15 seconds focus only on the black dot below. Put 100% of your attention on it. (Read #2 first)
2. For the next 10-15 seconds keep that attention on the black dot but also now include awareness of the space around, both inner mental awareness and outer physical space.
By doing this you can quickly grasp how to do both at once, though doing the first (mindfulness) opens the way to doing the second (awareness). If you lose track, you start again with first the focus, then opening out.
** Some of the results from searching for ‘The Nine Ways of Shamatha.’
Article on Shamatha by B. Allan Wallace whose book ‘Attention Revolution’ book is terrific and deserves a review on this blog: https://tricycle.org/magazine/within-you-without-you/ He doesn’t go into the nine ways but he does go into shamatha/attention quite thoroughly and why it is such an important skill to develop.
Picture Article on Nine Ways: https://enlightenmentthangka.com/blogs/thangka/nine-stages-of-samatha-meditation. A lighter treatment of the topic.
A more thorough approach in modern English: https://www.lionsroar.com/the-nine-stages-of-training-the-mind/. This article goes through the first four of the nine ways.
There are other articles on this no doubt one can find.
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