Hello Predator—Meet Prey! You'll get along famously

I forgot to add, they also correspond nicely with the narrative and poetic modes in writing. The narrative being tightly focused and characterised by forward linear momentum toward a goal, and the poetic much more diffused, non-linear, and not goal-oriented. Doing and being. The goal and the journey. I believe many of our dualistic metaphors refer to this central division of brain hemispheres—these two very different modes we find ourselves in at times.

Today I was out walking through parking lots in a shopping center and it happened again—I found myself in the nature-trance, hypnotized by the beauty of the surroundings. I wrote about this a while back in an entry called Murdering the World (why didn't I add that one to the series? I need to do that).

It isn't anything as simple as Nature Good, Pavement Bad—it's more that each time it happens I'm in a wide open area surrounded by—not necessarily beauty, but a novel, fascinating environment. I don't think it even needs to be outdoors—it's happened when I'm in large structures like airports or museums. It does seem to require a large open space that's aesthetically pleasing. There can be other people present as long as I'm not crowded, best if they're in discreet little groups minding their own business.

It's because I'm surrounded by fascinating spaces where all kinds of things are calling out to my interest—look at me! Listen to me! What great textures, what awesome colors and shapes and forms! Subtle, repetitive movment, as of tree branches in a breeze, or perhaps flags being gently stirred or tall grass being wind-scrubbed. The sounds that go along with that, or of distant barely-heard muttering of those small groups of people, or of cars moving past on a street. All of it contributes to the hypnotic, trance-inducing quality.

I'm obviously extremely susceptible to such kinds of aesthetic pleasure and I like to immerse myself in it when I can. Generally when I'm outside, either in the woods, in some big field, or a rolling field of parking lots with clusters of stores here and there. The sun shimmering off a myriad of surfaces and textures. It's a symphony of gentle natural sounds and rhythmic repetitive movments, all quiet and murmering.

I find myself in an environment like this and in a few minutes, quite without warning, my mind shifts into right-brain mode, and I'm filled with quiet pleasure—pure bliss at just existing in this unutterably beautiful world. The word-making and logic-seeking part of my mind shuts down, and I blossom into a creature of peace and love and pleasure. I become unaware of my body and my social identity. I become a spirit drifting through this world of shimmering textures and shifting colors and sounds. Suddenly I have no destination, I'm in no hurry, I don't feel the need to get where I was going. I just exist and feel this intense pleasure. It's a nature-meditation, a loving dream, a spiritual revelation of beauty that's always around us everywhere, but we're usually blind to it. We're too focused on our goals and our ideas and our unfinished conversations, or thinking about endless things. Streams of words that don't really mean anything important (you know that when your'e in right-brain mode). Meaning is silly and shallow and unimportant. What's important is feeling and experiencing this state of bliss. These moments are what make life worthwhile. Even long after theyr'e over you're still filled with the slowly-dissipating bliss, and after that's gone you still remember it and can call up some semblance of it at will just by thinking about being in one of these wide open environments. And it helps if the weather is perfect, though it can happen in any kind of weather, even trudging through slush and snow in wet shoes and a not-warm-enough coat. Heck, a little physical discomfort can even help.

It's like falling into a waking dream of pleasure.

Interesting—I checked the date on that Murdering the World entry, and it was April 29th of last year. Almost exactly a year ago. So, early spring, when the weather is turning perfect.

Left-brain mode is the mode of modern materialism. It sees things as discreet, individual objects and fails to see the connections between them (the individual trees rather than the forest), and it likes to express itself in words, and it has an unfortunate tendency to attach too much importance to the words and its own ideas and to mistake those things for reality. It creates hypotheses and theories, and has a very unfortunate tendency to believe its theories are reality. Right-brain mode is far more in touch with reality, and is required in order to make sure you're not spinning webs of ideas and mistaking them for reality. Left-brain mode is good for creating systems like logic and science, but it needs to be strictly checked at every point along the way to make sure its ideas are actually true, as it does have that tendency to get caught up in its own creations and mistake them for reality. Thus why we have so many false systems like ideologies and all manner of scientific hoaxes or mistaken theories. The thing that makes logic systems and theories conform to reality is constant checking against what can be confirmed to be true. The left brain doesn't like to do that checking, it likes to get lost in its own wild creations and treat them as reality. The left brain tends toward separation and disconnection—from reality, from the world as a whole, from other people, etc. It isolates and sees things as separate, discreet objects. In fact it also like to dissect those objects into separate parts and treat the parts as wholes. It takes the unifying and connection-oriented right brain to put things back together—body parts into people, people into societies or groups, trees into a forest, etc. The left brain would happily dissect (and thus kill) everything it studies, but the right brain puts things together in their natural habitat or environment and makes the connections necessary to understand that whole system. Left to its own devices without the connecting and unifying influence of the right brain, the left brain will divide everything up and invent false ideas about it all.

Too much left brain with too little right brain leads to depression, anxieties, all manner of mental illnesses, and mechanistic, disconnected, seemingly-rational (but out-of-touch) theories that don't reflect reality but are creations of the mind itself. The right brain is the home of spiritual and religious systems, of connection and unification, and of seeing reality as it is. And the left brain is tyrannical. It has a strong tendency to want to dominate, to shut down the right brain, to take over control, and to push its own ideas as dogma. It believes it's correct about everything, but it thinks too small, too disconnectedly, and gets lost in detail without seeing the big picture. And it constantly drives you forward toward goals. Very domineering and tyrannical in nature. A rather unfortunate tendency of the right brain is that it's very mellow and relaxed—it doesn't want to be in control, it wants to immerse itself in nature or in some novel fascinating environment and feel bliss at all the connectedness around it, that it's a part of. But it doesn't take an active part in disassembling the machinations of the militant left brain. It will dissolve those tendencies, but only if the person allows him-or-herself to enter into the right-brain state frequently and lose all those tyrannical tendencies. Unfortunately today a lot of people live most of their lives dominated by materialist left-brain tendencies, and rarely know the bliss and connectedness of the right-brain experience. And if they do experience it from time to time they tend to forget, or even to disparage it later as some silly thing they fell prey to momentarily, or to see it as some pleasant state to be indulged in now and then but of no real importance.

Ideally we live in both modes. We shift freqently between them, and much of the time we can have both activated and working together. That seems to be our natural state. But we've become so enamored of the creations of the left brain (science, technology, logic and reason, words, theories) that many of us get trapped in that mode and don't often enter into right-brain awareness. People for whom that's the case tend to discredit that sense of spiritual connectedness as some dreamy-eyed but false thing, and to disparage it fiercely. They also tend to intepret spiritual or religious writings in a purely literal sense, as if they were foolish misguided attempts at science or logic by our ancestors. They often believe the only things that are 'real' are objects that can be touched and manipulated (material objects), and take a nasty attitude toward inner states, especially the pleasant or blissful ones that characterise right-brain activity. And to have that unfortunate tendency to believe in ideologies or idea-systems as if they were reality, while being disconnected from reality itself.

In hopes of demonstrating that I'm not just making this all up, here's a much longer video with Dr McGilchrist in discussion with Jordan Peterson on the topic:

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Right at the beginning they get into the fact that this duality is not a division, not in the strict sense, but that each form of consciousness is rather an aspect of the other, or of the whole. Unity and division, synthesis and analysis—two necessary aspects of the whole, needed each in their own way. This is very much in line with ancient spiritual ideas about The One From the Many and The Many From the One. The idea is essentially that reality is constantly collapsing in upon itself and at the same time expanding outward from the center. It's a paradoxical description of the two very different and seemingly opposite forms of awareness (consciousness) that we find ourselves existing in or experiencing. Neither is inherently right or wrong, they're both equally 'true', and yet they're so different as to seem incompatible. Like Yin and Yang, it isn't that you choose one over the other, but that you understand both are necessary and essential, and each gives us perspective on the other. It's difficult to think this way, but very rewarding. And paradoxes like this have always been one of the defining characteristics of ancient religious and spiritual systems of thought, leading eventually to philosophy and science and all of our other disciplines of thought. As I've observed before, all of it was originally rolled up into the spiritual and the religious, not to be divided into separate disciplines until later. And yes, that's a form of the Many from the One, perhaps collapsing back into the One now for each of us able to make the conceptual leap and understand it, if only briefly.

Since these are basically two incompatible modes of thought, I guess it isn't possible to have them both running at the same time, or maybe you can at lower levels? I don't know how it works.

This kind of paradoxical wisdom was around from our earliest days. Probably not Neanderthal—well, I'll bet some of it was even then. If you're not distracted by endless linear materialist thinking your mind can wander freely and encounter all kinds of paradoxical ideas and you get fascinated by them. This seems to have happened in every society around the world, and they often expressed the same or similar ideas in different forms. We didn't start to develop more structured logical ways of thinking in the Western world until the time of Socrates and the other Classical Philosophers. Before them were the Pre-Socratics, who dealt with the paradoxical ideas in mythological (well, at the time it was religious) ways, with the various gods representing different ideas, as well as the four classical elements of the ancient world. What they were doing was playing around with ideas using these representative symbols, and largely what they were mapping out without realizing it was the way the human mind works. When you ponder the paradoxical and the fascinating, your own patterns of thought are often what you're really following without realizing it. Early ideas tend to be framed in right-brain ways, as religious and spiritual systems filled with paradoxes, because we hadn't really developed more rigorous logical systems of thought yet like mathematics, formal logic, systematized reasoning, and of course science, which would come much later. The right brain thinks in more symbolic ways. It operates in a very dreamlike way, though of course if you're awake you have access to a lot more cognitive ability and can compare your ideas to reality to see if you're going off-track or not. Hard to do any of that when you're asleep. This is why in the times before the Socratic revolution that led to classical Philosophy, our ideas were framed in spiritual or religious forms—it's the way we thought. The more strictly left-brain (linear, logical) systems came into existence only gradually, and developed over a period of centuries. Neither way is right or wrong, both are equally valid, and they deal with very different domains. The left works with data, evidence, and the known, while the right deals with profundity, paradox, and the unknown.

The problem is that the left brain lacks the ability to grapple with the profound ideas or the paradoxes. It sees things in very binary black-and-white ways and wants to find the 'right' answer to everything, so it reduces away the complexity and subtlety that the right brain is so much better at seeing and dealing with. If you spend too much time in either mode and fail to immerse yourself in its opposite, you get stuck in that way of thinking and lose balance. This is why it's so helpful to get out in nature every now and then and lose yourself in the immensity of Creation, in the vastness of the world and the multiplicity of Being. In a field of shimmering, shifting patches of light and color and texture—waving branches and sighing leaves and muttering groups of people and quietly passing cars etc. Sink into oneness with the entirety of the world, and stop seeing every object as something discreet and separate. Let your thoughts roam to the paradoxical and the profound without the need to resolve things that seem opposed to each other.

This is what I love about living in the suburbs. I go out my front door and I'm on the streets—the social world laid out by central planning and leading to the commercial district. But if I go out my back door I'm in the woods. In fact, even on the streets I can always see the ragged tree line looming over all the houses, and between houses I can always see the big ravines filled with woods that exists between streets. Yes, the street connects us rapidly with civilization, but really we're still in the woods here. It feels like living at the crux point between both modes of consciousness.

And of course it would be a false equivalence to say that you can't experience a fascinating environment in the city. I often have. I find it especially fascinating to be in downtown St. Louis (called the biggest small town, or the smallest big city). It's a very different kind of environment, and the walls do have the tendency to cut your view off in every direction beyond a rather limited range. But sometimes you do encounter a hole in the walls that allows you to see way off into the distance in some direction, or you get up high in a skyscraper with those glass window-walls, or onto a rooftop, and can see for miles and miles (get out of my head, The Who! Well ok, no, you can hang out for a while). I remember a few times as a young boy being taken there and especially if it was in the evening or at night, just being blown away by all the colored lights and the man-made structures everywhere. Like a vast engineered environment, with little patches of nature here and there. Especially to a suburban boy like me I think, or even more so maybe a country kid, that was deeply fascinating and drew my attention out around me to a million points of interest all susurrating at once, so it plunged me deep into right-brain mode; that all-at-once awareness of your surroundings, as opposed to the linear, goal-oriented awareness that drives us through our environment without noticing anything. I've heard it said that the right brain is the chaos brain, for dealing with the unknown by trying to find patterns in it, while the left hemisphere is for dealing with the familiar and the known. When we're in left-brain mode is when we move though the neighborhood without noticing anything, it's all become too familiar. All the novelty has worn off and it all feels like drab, everyday stuff. The right brain brings that sense of profoundness and wonder.

The Map and the Territory

The left brain's main purpose seems to be to create an endless series of maps of the territory of reality. I don't mean literal maps necessarily, showing a down-view of a section of landscape. It does that of course, but it also creates maps of ideas, of relationships, of all kinds of things. It makes extremely simplified little graphics, charts, and maps from all the incredibly dense and comples stuff contained in the much higher-capacity right hemisphere, but with most of the complexity removed, even if that means huge areas left blank or where it just says "Here be Monsters." It abstracts out information, but only that which it believes will facilitate reaching your goals. Hence why maps are simplified in the exact ways they are—to make planning travel (and other things) easy and efficient. Of course once you're in the real territory things are much different. What's represented on the map as a shaped field of flat color is actually a chunk of the world's surface, complete with all the complexity and strangeness that often means. But none of that helps you more efficiently reach Colterville by noon, so it's all left out. It would be ridiculous to try to include it all, not to mention un-helpful and impossible.

Both modes are necessary. We need simplified maps in order to be efficient or to get anything done at all. Without them we'd be lost all the time and not care to get un-lost. We'd just happily exist in bliss and appreciate everything and everything-ness. The Is-ness of Everything. So it makes sense we'd be able to move between these two modes. You need both. Neither is bad or unnecessary. They form a strange whole. And like those optical illusions, you're not capable of seeing it both ways at the same time. You can see the old crone, and for a while you can't see the young maiden anymore, until suddenly it shifts.

McGilchrist made a point oif clearly stating that the contents of the right brain (which he does seem to equate with the unconscious, or at least largely) are far more dense and numerous than those of the left brain. It makes perfect sense if you think about the way they finction—the stuff happening above the threshold of conscious awareness—that we can become consciously aware of—is necessarily a very small subset of the totality of what's happening in the mind. Most of it happens the old-fashioned way, like it did when we swung from branches or swam in the sea. Animals have very little conscious awareness, just something like a dim spark of it. When we became human it expanded massively, but still it works linearly, one thought at a time, and slow enough for us to be able to comprehend it. Meanwhile in the unconscious, everything is happening all at once, multiple streams of thoughts running simultaneously. They're such different ways of thinking, how could they not be epxerienced differently? Conscious awareness allows us to do math and language and art and music and logic and reason and science. We couldn't do any of those things without it. They all require abstraction—the development of abstract thought. We pull ideas out of the vast matrix of all of everything, as it steams and simmers in the gigantic crubible of the unconscious, and we arrange them in a simple order that makes enough sense to serve us as some kind of tool. Maybe a crude idea about how you're going to write a story. You develop it into an outline with a lot of work, putting simplified abstractions together and mergeing some of them, deleting some that don't fit, and organizng the whole thing until it seems like a good workable plan. It's your map of the story. Then you start to write it. But as you go, at points you dip into the richer, fuller well of right-brain ideas (intuition and inspiration etc, memories of what things are really like), and you develop parts of the story with this kind of detail.

That sounds a lot like telling and showing, And you develop the showing in stages, adding more detail as you go. You end up with a mix of both,. But of course all of it is really map—it's all abstractions from reality. You can't put pure reality down on a page. You can only develop the depth and complexity of some of the original rather flat abstractions—the ones you came up with when you were writing fast and just getting it all laid out. Then you go back and put in some of those sparkling moments and details that bring it to life (the left-brain maps don't feel alive, they're utilitarian and flat). So I'd say a good story approximates the experience of moving between these modes.

I make a lot of maps here on my blog. It's almost all I do here. My massive study threads, and the videos of interesting topics. It's all me working out abstractions of ideas, coming up with usdeful maps, and sometimes fleshing them out in places with more detail to approximate the complexity and strangeness of reality.

I think all the studies (I include in drawing and painting as well as writing) are extra-simplified maps, designed to help us understand how to make the more complex maps we call stories or drawings or paintings, the ones where we try to put in convincing approximations of reality itself (showing, or tightly focused detail in visual art).

I think when I'm actually creating art—being an artist rather than a student, Il;m much closer to the right-brain experience, drawing on it a lot more frequently and deeply. You use very little of it when making the low-resolution maps of outlines or story notes or thumbnail sketches or head studies. You need to do all of it or you're not going to get anywhere. But it's important not to get stuck too much in one aspect of the process and ignore the other.

Actually it's more complex than that.

I'd say a deep study thread includes a lot of discovering new territory and exploring it, through reading or deep thinking or videos or whatever, and then making some simplified maps of that so you don't forget it. So that's important—discovering aspects of reality you weren't aware of and figuring out how to include them to some degree in your work or (and) your world-view.

Without the deep dives into the formerly unknown (the discovery sessions known as study threads) I'd just be working from my own over-familiar maps of reality. That way lies formulaic-ness. You need to step outside of the realm of the familiar quite frequently or it isn't really art, it's just craft. Though I suppose you also discover new realms of reality while writing because you're mining memories of how people interact. Of course those memories might themselves be degraded and simplified maps. I think the trick is to find ways to break out of always working from the familiar.

Ok, you can't write directly from reality, but you can work from right-brain mode. This is a new way of thinking for me, I need to explore it. Are you unable to access language in right-brain mode? I don't think so. McGilchrist is making me reconsider all the old ideas about the hemispheres and how they function. Some of it was right, to a degree, but it was too simple. It doesn't seem to be that each hemisphere does different things, but that they think in different ways. The right apparently does everything all at once, and the left does one thing at a time, with a tight focus.

Just as the best art is drawn from life, the same can be said about writing. And while you can't ask people to argue in front of you so you can observe their interaction, you can remember. And if you're able to do that in right-brain mode (don't ask me how), you should be able to tap into a lot more detail. Maybe we just do it that way at times? Or maybe it's a matter or dropping into a different mode of being, of experiencing life. When you write without editing, you shut off the inner critic (left-brain mode). I do freewrite sessions most days before I start in on writing, where I start with a lot of gibberish and rhyme and song lyrics and silliness, just playing around and sometimes deliberately breaking normal sentence structure. Just to access the more creative (right-brain) part of the mind. Things can get pretty wild in the freewrites, but usually once I start in on my story a lot of that creativity is lost. Of course—you can't have your actual story filled with gibberish and random rhymes (unless you're James Joyce). What I was doing a while back, and will start doing again, is to write somewhere in between those two modes. Not pure gibberish and silliness, but looser and more carefree than I often write. I hope to hit the right mode where I can relax the strictures enough to open up creative mode more.

And maybe it's more a matter of how you write, or how you think? Worth playing around with.

Some more notes from the discussion—

The left hemisphere seeks internal consistency in a set of ideas—it's good at creating narratives, but it doesn't really care if they match reality or not. In fact it has a tendency to spin off on its own away from reality unless checked by the right.

The left hemisphere apprehends, the right comprehends. Meaning you need the right in order to make sense of things, to make sure your ideas are grounded in reality. People used to believe the right was the dreamy, hippy-trippy creative hemisphere and that the left was logic and language. Not true. Actually the right is much better at being right (according to reality) while the left likes to confabulate, to spin those ungrounded narratives.

I guess as I watch my way through I'll stop every so often and write some things down here. It really helps you remember what you've heard, and I'd like to be able to remember this.