Gary Peterson - November 11, 2024
This winter (2024/25) while participating in a dozen on-line sessions covering a newly translated Bon (Tibet/Nepal) text on awakening/enlightenment, I plan to comment on each lesson using Western ideas and terms appearing in McGilchrist’s work.
My basic idea is this: McGilchrist urges his readers to adopt a view of the world that is dominated by our right brain hemispheres. I have come to believe that moving our ‘base of operations’ from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere is also the goal of awakening/enlightenment in Eastern spiritual traditions. According to McGilchrist, the brain hemispheres embody two different ways of being and two different ways of seeing the world, providing us with two complementary views of the same reality. The processes that produce these opposing views work both separately and together, not only communicating information, but also by suppressing or exciting each other. When the left brain hemisphere is dominant in conscious processes, it creates a world of material things, what corresponds in Buddhism to samsara. If the right brain hemisphere becomes dominant in conscious processes, it provides a unified, flowing, timeless consciousness, which in Buddhism ultimately corresponds to nirvana. Eastern mediation practices can be seen as learning to use and train the brain hemispheres’ processes to permanently establish the right hemisphere’s perspective. McGilchrist’s work is a way to approach awakening/enlightenment through Western knowledge, utilizing emerging neurology (hemisphere hypothesis), philosophy (idealism/process theology) and modern physics (complementarity). Hopefully, my and others’ comments will help those trying to incorporate Eastern (and McGilchrist’s) teachings into their lives and mind-streams.
In attempting to tie McGilchrist’s work and ideas to Eastern meditation practices, I believe the best starting point is with Jill Bolte Taylor’s 2008 TED Talk. Her basic description of the differences between the two brain hemispheres has held up well. Listen to her explanations at two different points during her talk: from 2:05 to 6:15 and late in the talk from 16:30 to 18:05.
As for a quick summary of McGilchrist’s take on the differences of the brain hemispheres, this paragraph is from his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary:
If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference (emphasis added). It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really ‘break out’ to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own representations only. Where the thing itself is ‘present’ to the right hemisphere, it is only ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere’s consciousness is of itself.
Description of the A-Tri Dzogchen class from the Mustang Bon Foundation
Meditation can be done for multiple reasons – to improve one’s health and well-being, to become more present to one’s own environment and condition, or to serve as a pathway to serving a purpose greater than our own selves, or for spiritual realization. The beneficial consequences of meditation practice can be peace, relaxation, focused attention, clearer thought, reduced reactivity, and more positive states of being.
There are many approaches to meditation and for developing our awareness. In this course, we start the meditation journey in the Tibetan Bön tradition of A-Tri. Bön is the native religion of Tibet and is very similar to the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism. The highest level of Bön teachings is Dzogchen – the path of liberation. “A-Tri”, literally means “instruction in the letter A”, (ie, Awareness). The A-Tri teachings are unique amongst similar meditation instructions in that A-Tri provides a complete, integrated, step-by-step path from confusion and self-deception all the way to Buddhahood. The Atri preliminaries and foundational practices are a fast-path to recognition of the “natural state” of being beyond thought, and they guide one in stabilizing this in meditation, and later in all of life.
The purpose of the A-Tri meditation instructions is to open these doors of awareness to the student. As a result of this process, we begin to experience ourselves as part of a continuous field in which everything in this universe is interconnected, interdependent. We move from thought to awareness, and the world appears brighter, clearer, more dynamic. Here we operate not from thought but from awareness itself. We find ourselves aware that we are spending less time fighting an unfair Universe, and more time witnessing resolutions that seem to present themselves, to what used to seem intractable problems.
In this Atri One, Fundamentals of A-Tri Dzogchen course, we’ll be exploring in depth the preliminary and foundational practices of Atri that stabilize the mind and that create deeper awareness. For those new to meditation, this course will provide a basis for more advanced meditation practices. For those who are already familiar with A-Tri, or who have experience in other traditions, the course will allow a deeper understanding and appreciation of these fundamental practices that stabilize our awakened awareness.
Each class will include lectures from Geshe Sonam, a lineage holder in the A-Tri tradition, short sessions to practice meditation and these fundamental practices, and opportunities for Q&A with Geshe Sonam. This current class lasts from Oct. 2024 to Feb. 2025.