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 😂) vajrayananow.com/liberating-per…
Reading Dzogchen's liberating perception through McGilchrist's hemispheres
15 tweets · July 2023 · 75 likes · 3 retweets · read on Twitter
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
> 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: vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cu…
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"
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
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
"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
> 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
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
imo a sane version of this practice would incorporate THAT as well—not 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