Brain hemispheres, masculine/feminine archetypes, and non-duality

Had the same thought when I read this this morning! (ie Apr 9th, when I drafted most of thread) I'd heard left side of the body as feminine & right side as masculine, and since reading McGilchrist I no longer think this is spurious! (Flip L↔R for hemispheres bc contralateral) t.co/Mn14IZXCef

Apr 20, 2020

Meanwhile for a fleshed out theory of how masculine & feminine archetypes relates to the brain hemispheres, check out The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. I haven't read it myself yet though. alphabetvsgoddess.com

I've also noted that there's a different remarkable resonance between the Aro / Dzogchen perspective & McGilchrist, where the left hemisphere might literally be the dualistic mind and the right hemisphere the non-dual perspective.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · May 14, 2019

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.

I don't yet have an integrated view of how those two resonances relate to each other. Off the cuff... - when masculine LH tries to dominate feminine RH, you get, uhh... *points at current fractal dumpster fire* 🗑️🔥 - when the LH & RH can khandro-pawo dance, 🕺💃🌱🌼🤩🚀

Workshopping this thread with @SarahAMcManus and she's like: > yeah, you might map "dualist & LH" and "pawo & LH" but I don't think it makes sense to map "pawo & dualistic". Perhaps pawo & "integrated discernment of difference"? Me again: Maybe two modes/attractors for the LH?

@SarahAMcManus again: > Yeah, there's a current default operating system for the left hemisphere that is dualist all the way down. There's maybe a more integrated, fluid operating system for the LH that is more aligned with the non-dual tantric pawo mode.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · May 25, 2019

Model: there are different cognitive OSes that run on different underlying architectures; recently the LHem architecture (linear, decoupled) got an upgrade that made it overpowered. Now we need a new OS for the RH architecture (nonlinear, contextual) so it can contain LH again.

(Malcolm again) So this is one lens on the apparent paradox where the LH needs to somehow learn to dance the RH's non-dual dance despite the RH being ineffable to the LH. The LH learns a different kind of trust than it's been using internally.

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jun 6, 2019

I have noted that the LH learning to trust the RH feels like surrendering to God, since RH is incomprehensible to LH. It seems that there's a sense in which that's not just a feeling, but basically just *true*. (The RH works in mysterious ways, from LH's perspective!)

My current best answer for "what framework/paradigm would most allow the LH to dance with the RH?" is...    Systems Thinking! Joanna Macy posits in Mutual Causality in Buddhism & General Systems Theory that "dependent co-arising" ≡ "systems thinking" twitter.com/BuildSoil/stat…