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๐งต Thread (27 tweets)
reflections on this Liberating Perception article, aiming to just kind of think out loud about how I interpret it (which is kind of funny given that it's in part about non-interpretive response ๐) https://t.co/8AklxeUb3c
it still seems to be quite precisely apt to me to understand all of what's being said here in terms of what Iain McGilchrist says about the brain hemispheres which feels to me like it gives me a really good handle for what a bunch of this stuff is about https://t.co/73SEHWJOK6
1/ Reading Spectrum of Ecstasy (thanks @QiaochuYuan & @Meaningness!) ...and the parallels between it and Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain model are... like 100%? If it weren't for the fact that IM doesn't use the term "non-dual", these pages could literally from IM's book. https://t.co/ZMiAFSgIvx
> To liberate interaction from pattern, redirect attention from mental contents to perception, and respond as beneficent space. using McGilchrist's model, we could describe this as redirecting attention from the LH's model to the RH's embodied & open experience
the LH does a lot of things through scripts and autopilots and oversimplified models this is great for trying to carry out habits or solve certain kinds of procedural or algorithmic questions, but not so great for situations where deep listening & improv is needed
> For Dzogchen, we are always already nothing other than beneficent space. This is not obvious, because we think we are our mental contents. I see this as a shift in identity from the LH to the RH! we are always already beneficent space because we are not just our LHs!
there's a question of how it was we came to identify with our left hemispheres in the first place. why did that happen? how long has that been true of humans? is it a meme, or is it genetic? in either case, when & how & why did it evolve?
the best answer I've seen yet to this question is that about 10kya, humans developed, refined, & spread a ritual for becoming aware of recursion as a meme, thus aware of the thinking mind, thus the ability to refer to self-ness at all more details here: https://t.co/P4UIPPlAMz
this shift introduces self-consciousness ...why does that term connote awkwardness? it's that rather than fluidly responding from beneficent space or whatever, as interconnected participants, we're self-concerned & trying to deal with eg "good and evil" https://t.co/CZ6IyCkcsc
I haven't really seen buddhist attempts to address this origin question at all (link me!) but it seems very relevant to understanding what's going on here in my view, these practices are all ways to try to become whole again given that we live in a based on soul-shattering memes
@Malcolm_Ocean check out Jainism imo, they have rather more coherent seeming metaphysics compared to the Buddhists, who are kinda postmodern in their ontologies, if you compare the two as parallel threads, Jainism seems to generally have more grounded and realism based views on a lot of things.
I could go into a lot more depth on that front, and will, but for now this onepager is probably a pretty good place to start, and if you want more you can check out the Snake Cult stuff and David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity https://t.co/ZrWqviCCPq
Malcolm, explain the evolution of consciousness right the fuck meow, in one breath, standing on one foot (reply below if you see your work (or play!) as being within this field, whether research or application!) https://t.co/ynnPXzWWuH https://t.co/cbieK8ApHC
"mind is considered one thing awareness does" "primary and natural mode of being" "the continual presence of awareness" the RH doesn't stop being there doing its thing even if attention has gotten lost into the LH's fixations for a bit https://t.co/gHxKz3mlkn
> Responding as beneficent space, not from your personal psychology, is not something you can do. It is something you allow, or find, by getting out of the way. RH is always there, but the LH can inhibit it from *responding*! and often does https://t.co/YaXnLG90Ft
@jonnym1ller @SarahAMcManus > "LH needs to allow it to do that job" could sound prescriptive, and it sort of is, but it's also just highlighting that 70% of the corpus callosum is inhibitory, so the RH literally *can't* do it's job if the LH won't let it (& vice versa)
I broadly quite like this instruction, especially the encouragement to practice it in low-stakes situations to get a taste but ALSO sometimes afaict the LH mind patterns are storing wisdom in the form of distrust, and it's vital to listen to those too in one's responding https://t.co/c6Ev0ieZAP
imo a sane version of this practice would incorporate THAT as wellโnot just a gradient of higher-stakes situations, but a gradient of situations that involve various kinds of distrust that one can learn to fluidly incorporate while staying expansive! vs RH inhibiting LH too much
I speak here from TREMENDOUS experience I spent years trying to inhabit a fluid way of being, and the method I was originally using to do that involved repressing my distrusts, and this resulted in a ton of oscillation and internal schisming https://t.co/qHyU2tsAAq
@Malcolm_Ocean - it's downstream of language - timelines are hazy but civilization and what we had to do to ourselves to maintain it exacerbated the split - primarily memetic modulated by genetic disposition - it's complicated
@Malcolm_Ocean if it is culturally driven (as McGilchrist seems to suggest) then it may be that we are initiated into stuckness in an interaction pattern with left hemisphere perceptions, by the interpretation standards ร la mode in typical interaction patterns, reinforced continually
@abhayance mmmm, mhm. one thing I'm a bit confused about is the difference between some of the more recent changes that McGilchrist is mostly on about, and whatever much earlier shift might have been responsible for agriculture & the axial age, if @AndrewCutler13 (EToC/snakes) is at all apt
@Malcolm_Ocean imo the LH/RH model is a bit in error I think, and there are actually "three hemispheres" partly because of recursion and partly because the more embodied parts of the nervous system evolved much earlier, whereas the right hemisphere is more "modern creative brain"
@slimepriestess okay I'm gonna need to unpack that. it's all very relevant to my interests I'm familiar with the triune brain breakdown as well and also find it useful, although of course the older brain parts have still been evolving the whole time in parallel with the new ones
@Malcolm_Ocean I'm familiar with Mcgilchrist, this is sort of building on that notion further. It's also not exactly the Id/Ego/Superego model though, more like Id/creative_self/analytic_self.
@slimepriestess oh interesting, I hadn't thought of triune brain mapping onto id/ego/superego, more like instincts/emotions/thoughts I've been getting gung-ho lately about something vaguely id/ego/superego-like after reading The Snake Cult of Consciousness https://t.co/P4UIPPlAMz https://t.co/5LEk1cQ4gg
@Malcolm_Ocean My current model of consciousness doesn't really have anything resembling a superego in the traditional sense, although you can point to certain structures and go "yeah that's something that would get called a superego in some contexts"
@slimepriestess the thing I'm calling "superego" here maps onto memeplexes/egregores/social expectations, which does seem like a layer of human mind systems they are now very numerous and in a state of high competition for host control https://t.co/JusH5UDbVI
don't ever let memes tell you: - that more suffering is better than less (for you or others) - things that contradict your own senses - that you aren't free to relax FULLY for even a single moment if you accidentally let memes do this, flush superego with cold water immediately
@Malcolm_Ocean Ahh yes, the halo https://t.co/AcOC4adEXV