Gary Peterson - March 17, 2024
(The first six postings of the blog serve as an introductory set.)
Every person who travels a spiritual path – whether East or West — will eventually have to wrestle with the concept of the self. As the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher said,
“… the human soul… has its existence chiefly in two opposing impulses. One impulse towards the individuation of the self, the other towards surrender of the self to union with the whole.”
The ideal for the self in the West is to be self-actualized, to be a person who attains their full potential. Towards this end, Western psychology specializes in treating self-defeating thoughts and behavior created by an unhealthy ego, pathologies of the self, or a lack of focused attention. In the secular West, individual achievement is seen as the highest goal of life. A Westerner who gives up their status and wealth to pursue spiritual goals is seen as abnormal or having a crisis of identity. In short, the Western concept of self is about the left hemisphere’s view being dominant.
In contrast, Eastern societies have a more balanced approach. While celebrating personal accomplishment, they are equally interested in how the individual will fit into family, social groups, and overall society. Social cohesion and harmony are seen as the highest goals. The Eastern spiritual psychologies stress a harmony of opposites, i.e. yin and yang. It was not considered unusual for someone in the East to pursue a spiritual path later in life. This desire to renounce and transcend the concept of the self was considered admirable. In terms of the brain hemispheres, Eastern psychology is about quieting the left hemisphere and allowing the right hemisphere to express its subtle interconnected Gestalts. An ultimate goal of Eastern spiritual traditions is to know a grounding consciousness that is unshaped by any conceptual thought.
As Westerners studying Eastern spiritual traditions, we are pulled in both directions. A Western orientation directs us toward full development of the self and all our capabilities, while an Eastern orientation sees the self as an illusion and leads to a striving toward non-self. Using Eastern practices, we aim to change our mental experiences so that they are no longer framed by our memories, needs and desires, but instead are framed with positive qualities of mind, which include compassion, beauty, and truth (values of the right hemisphere).
Few appreciate the depths and dangers of these differences and conflicts. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who studied and practiced Easter spiritual traditions, continually warned Westerners of the dangers of zealously embracing Eastern ideas and practices. He found that Western minds are poorly suited for holding paradoxical views, an essential part of Eastern thought (and a capability of the right hemisphere). He urged Westerners to find their own way to the great truths. It seems the Gestalt of the traditional Eastern mind is virtually incomprehensible to the modern Western mind. As McGilchrist repeatedly points out, the left hemisphere cannot understand the view of the right hemisphere. Jung even attributed the insanity of Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I Ching, to be the result of his attempt to incorporate two disparate cultures into his being simultaneously.
The biggest theme of McGilchrist’s work is that the left and right hemispheres see and do everything in different ways. His hemisphere hypothesis, along with the ideas that consciousness is fundamental and that opposites fulfill each other, can help us deal with some of the paradoxes of the spiritual path that often perplex Westerners.
Hemispheric Differences of Self
As for the hemispheric differences of self, McGilchrist writes:
“The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be — and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-oriented, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously willful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge.”
“The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously willful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance.”
It is useful to think of these as polarities in a self-regulating system. Neither can be eliminated, but which is dominant determines our sense of self. If we are human beings, the left hemisphere makes us “only human.”
Seeing a material world of things, the left hemisphere creates the concept of a separate self, but also dismisses the right hemisphere’s far more holistic view. Alternately, the right hemisphere can comprehend both hemispheres’ concepts of self, but the right hemisphere view is suppressed when we experience a lack of awareness during thought or speech, feel desire or anger, or utilize our dopamine reward system.
A Transcending Idea
In today’s western society, our default sense of self is from the left hemisphere. It can only be transcended by seeing a bigger, wider Gestalt. McGilchrist asks us to consider a bigger picture:
“…there is a natural process of individuation, but one the aim of which, far from disrupting wholeness, is to enrich it.”
It is helpful to keep in mind that only 0.05% of our overall consciousness is used for our “limit case” thoughts. The explicit is just a tiny fraction of the implicit. While this explicit content is what consumes most our attention and provides our “normal” sense of identity, he urges us to remember that there is a larger process at work:
“The cosmos is in process, one in which the potential that is infolded within being is constantly unfolding into actuality and then being re-infolded into the now enriched whole, in a cycle that endlessly returns. But to see the bigger picture, one has to see not only the actual, but the potential through and behind the actual. This means having always before one’s eyes the bigger Gestalt from which the actual comes and to which it returns; being able to remember, while in the field of actuality, the potential out of which it arises and to which it contributes its part, for a time.”
McGilchrist says that as we travel the path of development, we move not just in a circle, but in an upward spiral to ever wider Gestalts. This mechanism towards higher forms of consciousness is built into our anatomy. Our right hemisphere “presences” to the current environment, our left hemisphere then “re-presents” a subset of the information for practical uses, and then this formulated information is enfolded back into the right hemisphere’s overall view to confirm its truth and validity. A paradox becomes a process.
And a Transcending Identity
McGilchrist frames the book The Matter with Things with the question: Who are we? At the end of the book, he concludes:
“…the attention we pay and the values we hold both contribute to the answer which we receive.”
In today’s metacrisis, our attention has become a moral choice, one with far reaching consequences. As humans, we constantly switch between and integrate two very different views of reality. Who we are depends largely on which brain hemisphere’s view is most active. Trying to remain mindful of the right hemisphere’s view is, to say the least, very challenging. Regrettably, too often, many on a spiritual path find it easier to adopt one of the extreme positions of the left hemisphere: religious fundamentalism or atheism.
McGilchrist says that while the self is needed for our development and individuation, we must eventually transcend the self. He points to a value that will lift us to a higher Gestalt. It is a remembrance – a renewed knowing – of our higher identity. Our highest identity is as the undifferentiated potential of consciousness, which continually expresses itself as awareness, attention, experience, resonance, harmony, beauty, truth, goodness, love, time, space, matter, and self. There is one teaching on which all varieties of the Perennial Philosophy agree: ‘That Art Thou.’ It is the last end of every human being to discover that fact for themselves.
McGilchrist concurs:
“… I believe each being is an individuating, and individuated, actualized expression of potential of consciousness as a whole, which is never ultimately divisible from it.”
This is reminiscent of Bernardo Kastrup’s work on the philosophy of idealism and the multiple personality analogy that he uses to explain our personal identities:
“We are alters of God.”
In closing, I will again offer the comments of author of The Meditative Mind, Daniel Goleman, who wrote in 1988:
“All too often, religious institutions and theologies outlive the transmission of the original transcendental states that generated them. Without these living experiences, the institutions of religion become pointless, and their theologies appear empty. In my view, the modern crisis of established religions is caused by the scarcity of the personal experience of these transcendental states – the living spirit at the common core of all religions.”
According to Jung, personal experiences of higher Gestalts — transcendent states or even theophanies — bring a lasting peace of sense of self.