Gary Peterson - September 19, 2025
Why have an interest in pursuing enlightenment?
Buddhists tell us that an enlightened view of reality will end our suffering.
What is the nature of this suffering that enlightenment can end?
Obviously it’s not physical pain or an illness. It has to do with everyday unhappiness, stress, feeling separate and alone, unconnected to the world and others, and knowing no relationship to the Divine.
Perhaps the best way to start is to raise some basic questions about the nature of reality. What does an enlightened view of reality entail? How different is it from our everyday point of view? Have we been blindly following a path that ultimately leads to unhappiness and suffering? Could it be that our most basic assumption about the nature of our reality is wrong?
What if consciousness, and not the material world, is fundamental. Eastern philosophies have pointed to this truth for millennia. Unfortunately, since Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, the West chose a different view and we were all educated to believe that the foundation of our world is physical matter. A few Western philosophers saw the error and understood the problems it caused, but they were largely ignored due to the enormous scientific and technological advances in manipulating matter. Without realizing it, we adopted a machine model for reality. Now quantum physics is showing that the West’s view of reality is fundamentally flawed. Western philosophers are also awakening to the suffering, misery, and alienation that a materialistic view and the machine model of reality eventually bring. If consciousness is fundamental, existing prior to the material world, how did we end up taking the wrong path?
Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis offers that — whether we realize it or not — we experience two different views of reality. We rapidly and unconsciously switch between the two and effortlessly integrate them, as both are needed for everyday living and survival. Our brain is divided down the middle, with each hemisphere shaping consciousness in a different way. Each hemisphere creates a different view of reality and pays a different kind of attention to that reality. McGilchrist offers that while one brain hemisphere provides a far more truthful knowing of reality where consciousness is fundamental, it proves to be far less useful when one sees only a material world.
We in the West typically hold the reality provided by the left brain hemisphere to be the truth. This default shaping of our consciousness drives us to break reality into pieces and see a world of explicit, static, separate things. This kind of attention creates its own objects for analytical and conceptual thinking. In this consciousness of separate things, we value these mental creations according to the degrees we find them useful and/or pleasurable … and reject or devalue the things that we find unuseful or dislike. With this shaping of consciousness, we have an endless task of creating and focusing on details and then placing them – things, ideas, perceptions – in our concept of time and space. While it can be an inordinate source of stress, developing this limited way of seeing reality leads to the development of language and provides enormous evolutionary and competitive advantages in decision making and planning. Simply put, our left brain hemisphere creates and shapes a representation of reality that it can manipulate. With its limited knowledge, it thinks it knows everything and rejects information that does not fit its model. The left hemisphere finds rewards for its efforts in power, control, pleasure and dopamine.
According to McGilchrist, our right brain hemisphere shapes consciousness in a way that is rarely acknowledged in the West. It exists prior to – and one could say it is the parent of — our current default way of viewing reality. Our right brain hemisphere sees reality as a whole experience. Instead of creating things, this view of reality senses the relations, events, processes, and qualities (of consciousness!) that are in constant, never-ending motion. Instead of valuing explicit things that we might find useful or bring us pleasure, the right brain’s consciousness values unity, beauty, resonance and cooperation. The right hemisphere can also incorporate the products of the left hemisphere’s thinking, constantly creating a new whole picture. This feedback process provides us with intuitions and feelings of resonance about the things the left hemisphere creates and believes. The right hemisphere is comfortable with mystery, has a power to integrate paradoxical ideas and information, something the left cannot do, which makes the right hemisphere the primary source of intuition, imagination and creativity.
The relationship between these two views of reality determines whether we are enlightened. The left hemisphere’s reality derives everything it knows about real-time reality from a subset of the right hemisphere’s content, from which it then creates a very limited view of reality. The left hemisphere cannot integrate the right hemisphere’s holistic way of seeing the world. Instead, the left hemisphere makes either/or choices which it defends rigorously to maintain its consistency. To maintain power and control, it often utilizes the one emotion that only occurs in the left hemisphere: anger. The environment of a competitive material world makes it far easier for the left hemisphere to become overactive and then dominate and suppress the reality offered by the right hemisphere. This innate tendency that causes us to experience a less truthful view of our world, live in a hall of mirrors of own creation, have values based on utility and pleasure, and experience frequent anger and frustration — all of which lead to unhappiness and suffering.
In my opinion, Buddhist meditation has been unknowingly been explaining and teaching the hemisphere hypothesis for 2500 years. McGilchrist’s first book about the hemisphere hypothesis, The Master and His Emissary, was published in 2009. The core message of his books is that we must make our right brain hemisphere the master, and the left brain hemisphere its emissary or servant. We ultimately discover that awareness (consciousness), not matter, is the basis of reality. We can know a truer, deeper and unified reality that is an ongoing, creative experience. Students of Buddhist meditations have yet to incorporate his hemisphere hypothesis into their practices, despite the many new explanations and insights into meditation techniques it offers. I believe McGilchrist’s 2021 book, The Matter with Things, a deep inquiry into nature of truth, will be mined for decades for the insights it provides for Buddhist meditators. It offers many new and exciting ideas on how neuroscience, Western and Eastern thought, and many fields of science (especially quantum physics) are converging into a unified view of a Sacred reality.
As McGilchrist states, whether we know it or not, we all believe in a myth. Almost all of us believe in the myth of a separate, isolated self, which is a source of our everyday unhappiness. Additionally, considering all the environmental, economic, political, and sociological crises that we must mutually face, it is time for the West to embrace a better myth. In order to change how we know the world and our true place within it, we need not only facts and logic for the left hemisphere, but more importantly, we need to have deep, holistic, right hemisphere experiences that permanently alter our views of reality and self. I highly recommend that everyone watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk entitled ‘My Stroke of Insight.’ She is a brain scientist who unexpectedly experienced her pure right-brain consciousness. These life-changing, transcendent experiences of our ultimate identity are a goal of all spiritual paths.
In closing, I will 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.”