The Master Betrayed #9
A series based on Iain McGilchrist's conclusions about a left brain dominated world
In the conclusion of Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary, the question is asked, “What would the left hemisphere’s world look like?” if the left hemisphere of the brain “became so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere’s world altogether”.
In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.
Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6 Part #7 Part #8
Such a government (see previous post) would seek total control - it is an essential feature of the left hemisphere’s take on the world that it can grasp it and control it. Talk of liberty, which is an abstract ideal for the left hemisphere, would increase for Machiavellian reasons, but individual liberty wold be curtailed. Panoptical1 control would become an end in itself, and constant CCTV monitoring, interception of private information and communication, the norm. Measures such as a DNA database would be introduced apparently in response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances, against which they would in reality be ineffective, their aim being to increase the power of the state and diminish the status of the individual. The concept of the individual depends on uniqueness; but according to the left hemisphere’s take on reality, individuals are simply interchangeable (‘equal’) parts of a mechanistic system, a system it needs to control in the interests of efficiency. Thus it would be expected that the state would not only take greater power directly, but play down individual responsibility, and the sense of individual responsibility would accordingly decline. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)
Allow me to remind you that McGilchrist was writing this over the decade prior to 2009 (when it was published). Yes all these things described in the paragraph above were developing at speed but boy, what about now! How this starts to read like alternative news editorials rather than a “what if the left hemisphere took over the world” muse.
I’m not sure where to go with this paragraph as it’s all so blatantly obvious to us now, slapping us in the face: government seeking total control; entrapped in a society wide panopticon and calling it liberty; individual responsibility abolished for efficiency (and/or ‘health’).
…the state would not only take greater power directly, but play down individual responsibility, and the sense of individual responsibility would accordingly decline.
This, we know, has been in the works for a long time. But the suddenness of the last few years of not just playing down individual responsibility, but strongly opposing it, is disturbing to the highest degree. Not just because power brokers are doing this to us but because so many embrace it! It seems good to many that they don’t take personal responsibility - an old communist ploy to be sure - and take it upon themselves to make sure others around them also let the power brokers do all the thinking and directing for our lives.
But this is perfectly ‘natural’ if we subscribe to the idea that there is a social-wide shift toward left-hemisphere thinking. The veil is thick yet imperceptible to the ones trapped in the left hemisphere’s hall of mirrors. The movement toward the left hemisphere perception of the world may have been nudged by the power brokers, the psychopaths, the forces of darkness, but once the pendulum starts swinging it seems to gain its own momentum. Maybe it needs a nudge here and a nudge there to maintain the trajectory toward left hemisphere dominance, but it’s a systemic psychopathology on a global scale. Solzhenitsyn would say it’s because we have forgotten God - I’d tend to agree with him. Nietzsche has a more dramatic view…
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Over to you.
Your thoughts?
The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. (see an image of a panopticon here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#/media/File:Panopticon.jpg)
Fascinating exercise. The momentum of this left-shift over the last decade in particular is an era I might call the tyranny of the toddler. A world in which the Id - or whatever we might call the hindbrain, has been unleashed in a sea of unmitigated abundance, where its wails and cries are met with more dopamine and less self-control. Responsibility becoming fully outsourced, invites all matters of pathologies, just as a household run by the whims of a toddler would reflect that of an insane tyrant even though there are presumably two adults in the room. (Again, this reflects the greater Inversion we see elsewhere)
The result is the death of the intrinsic and the complete reliance upon the extrinsic. In human systems this often means there is a point in which the body no longer produces its own essentials and instead must seek continual - and perpetual, intervention from the exterior system.
When the system aggregates such power and ubiquity, the iterative process of brain development on the individual level, and societal development in aggregate, just might result in a kind of culture that is perpetually trapped as a toddler. Full of want and meglomaniacal desire for control but the complete and utter lack of the capacity to conjure up and exercise that control and so the wails grow louder for the System to intervene, which it gladly does. And those children never develop that deep internal sense, the intrinsic anchoring to something greater, which is our divine communion with God.
Absent that the childlike self-god will reign. All while being further enslaved, with each successive generation being less aware of their enslavement.
Some random thoughts.
Scientism which is now the world-dominant ideology/paradigm is the religion of the left brain.
Left brained or analytical thinking is a valid and useful strategy or cognitive style, ut the chronic exercise of the verbal, sequential mind is purchased at the expense of human emotion, or depth of feeling.
The scholars of our time and place vivisect the Body of God and Sources of Enlightened Influence and mount them on pins for display, mocking, mocking them, making them into scapegoats, and crucifying them on the linear structures of language.
Human beings are all "living" in a virtual world of mind - a tower of babble/babel. Human beings are, characteristically, self-identified with a robot, an artificial intelligence.
REAL Intelligence is tacit, or intrinsically wordless living existence.
The reason we are so confused, misdirected, and unspiritual is that our consciousness has been made to adapt to the views of men who have not been Enlightened by the Realization of The Living Divine Reality. We are mind rather than intelligence. We do not openly Commune with What IS, and the One Who Is. Therefore, we must be liberated from false adaptation and fear saturated self-defense, and we must be restored to the primal or Master Principle disposition of Divine Ignorance in the midst of all conditions. Then we will not resort to the fragmented mind of the usual dreadfully sane everyperson, but remain sensitive to conditions themselves, prior to speech and self. The brain and nervous system can then then Commune, or Abide in unobstructed continuity, with the Current and Process of Existence, and the Great Secret will be revealed to Consciousness.
Consciousness or unbounded Feeling-Awareness IS The Master Principle.
Because of our mind created presumption of separateness and independence, we are constitutionally divorced from the Infinite Condition wherein we have appeared. We are thus separated from our Primal Food Source. Humankind is not merely hunger. We are staving. We cannot even hope to be satisfied, and, therefore, our hunger has become doubt, unlove, fear, self-possession, self-indulgence, violence, dis-ease, and a death that is not merely a lawful change of state, but a suppression of existence to the point of the illusion of annihilation.
Enlightenment is the Principle of existence, and when there is Enlightenment, then the purpose of existence is obvious. The purpose of existence in manifest human form is to Transform manifestation, to Transfigure existence, to glorify Being in form, expressed as Sat-Chit-Ananda.
Mindless embodiment.
Consciousness without inwardness.
Thus It Becomes Obvious.
Every object is only Light, the Energy of Consciousness.
Even so, there is no mind.
Only this stark embodiment, without inwardness.
First transcend the mind, not the body.
Inwardness or all thinking is flight from Life and Love.
Only the body is Full of Consciousness.
Therefore, be the body only only, feeling into Life.
Surrender the mind into Love, until the body dissolves in Light.
Dare this Ecstasy, and never be made thoughtful by birth and experience and death.