Being in Our Right Mind

Serving Nuclear War on Thanksgiving

Between Tucker Carlson accusing our dear leaders of escalating the Ukraine situation into nuclear war, Biden blathering about ‘Armageddon’, Putin blustering and Zelenski calling for a ‘pre-emptive strike’, you might have a wee bit of trouble finding that thankful feeling while stuffing the turkey. Instead, you might be yelling ‘get stuffed’ and stomp out of the kitchen.

You could say that the combination of nuclear war and turkey makes for an unpalatable dish, though I was looking forward to having lively discussions about all of the above when my family gets together this weekend. But we might end in total disagreement. When you add it all up, there is an uncanny feeling about this crisis because while acknowledging it, neither the USA nor Putin seem interested in finding a peaceful solution. Instead, the US went ballistic and blew up Nordstream, as Biden had promised earlier this year and Putin keeps threatening to escalate. Things are bad, but when we can’t agree how bad, it’s worse. The stench of bad faith and chaos is undeniable.

And so is the the relentless numbing onslaught of self-righteous, aggressive war propaganda. There’s too little of the nuanced, empathetic, big picture thinking only the Right Brain—or the Right Mind—is capable of. We used to call it ‘being in our right mind’, meaning a balanced, reasonable and sane way of looking at things. Clearly, we’re not in that blessed state.

Demeter, the goddess of grain and harvest abundance

Be that as it may, Thanksgiving is here, while in the background, attempts to ‘normalize’ nuclear war continue to fester. We should expect calls for nuclear drills and building bomb shelters in our back yards. Amazon has already stocked up on Iodine, just in case, as have the Ukrainians, who are a little too close to take any chances. Yeah, you got this, said some woman promoting these ideas on a now defunct American video. Takes us right back to the good old days of the Cold War, doesn’t it. At that time, we grasped that nuclear war has dire, end of days consequences. Now, I keep hearing about the smaller, cuter, more accurate nuclear warheads. They got this, yes, they have. We are once again being manipulated and sold down the proverbial river of no return. I would argue that now is the moment to be clear about where we are and where we are headed. Before it’s too late. I suspect that you, like me, prefer to be in your Right Mind and alive after Thanksgiving.

However. To do that, we need a much deeper understanding of what the right brain actually does and how it works. For too many of the really clever thinkers, the Right Mind is foreign territory, terra incognito. It’s a conundrum because we all use language—a left brain speciality—to communicate. But none of our leaders bother to take our left-brain chatter into the domain of our right mind, the place where context and meaning live. They are not making speeches about the ‘big picture’. Stuck in the left brain, with its partial view and self righteous attitudes. Only the right brain knows the gestalt and it alone understands the true horror of what the left brain chatterbox calls ‘nuclear war’ with such glibness. Which is why I believe listening to people who know the hidden power of being in our Right Mind is crucial.

Aside from Dr McGilchrist, the sage of the divided brain, there is Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained brain scientist who can tell us exactly what it’s like in the world of the Right Brain. Taylor suffered a massive left-brain stroke but recovered. Her 2006 book, My Stroke of Insight, was published eight years after an event that left her unable to speak, read, plan, or indeed remember who she was. Everything that the Left Brain does well—plan, categorize, and number—was disappearing as it was drowning in blood. Oddly enough, while she was ‘mentally disabled’, she was not unconscious and understood that she was in mortal danger. It was just that she had lost all sense of her normal self. A completely different self had emerged:

I was not only an oddity those around me, but on the inside, I was an oddity to myself.

Even odder, though she was suffering from pain and trauma, she also became aware of being deeply connected to the cosmos—and being at peace in a way that was entirely new. Here is how she describes this newly discovered mental state in the final chapter of her introduction:

…the stroke was the traumatic event through which the insight came…it’s about my brain’s journey into my right hemisphere’s consciousness, where I became enveloped in a deep inner peace…my consciousness shifted away from feeling like a solid, to a perception of myself as fluid—at one with the universe. (my bolding)

This isn’t how top, Harvard trained scientists typically talk; it’s what we expect to hear from mystics like Sadhguru or devout Christians. Strangely, quantum physicists also sound like this. They have discovered that at a certain level, ‘reality’ is not solid; that Heraclitus was correct when he surmised that ‘everything flows’. The physicists have proven that everything—the entire cosmos--is indeed connected and flows at a fundamental, subatomic level. Also, that our idea of ‘objectivity’ is wrong because we cannot take us, the observer, out of the experiment. And at the quantum level, there is only uncertainty and emerging probability. Which is why Schroedinger’s Cat should be a better known creature. I don’t pretend to fully understand this thought experiment, but I trust you do. The question of whether the cat is alive or dead kind of reminds me of our current thought experiment re nuclear war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s_cat

According to Dr McGilchrist, all the hard sciences have accepted this paradoxical sounding view of reality—with the sole exception of the biologists, who remain convinced we are badly made machines.

Dr McGilchrist has lots to say about Right Brain attitudes as opposed to the Left Brain and I recommend listening to his podcasts at McGilchrist Channel on YouTube. It’s rather like discovering a new exoplanet, a sublime, bold and exhilarating mix of neuroscience, philosophy and quantum physics. I think it shows a path out of the intellectual and spiritual wasteland the western world is stuck in. Really.

Some of the more notable things Dr M says:

In the consciousness of my right mind, we are laced together as the universal tapestry of human potential, and life is good and we are all beautiful—just the way we are.

My right mind character is adventurous, celebrative of abundance, and socially adept. It is sensitive to nonverbal communication, empathic, and accurately decodes emotion. My right mind is open to the eternal flow whereby I exist at one with the universe. It is the seat of my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer. My right mind is ever present and gets lost in time.

Clearly, giving thanks happens in our Right Mind. And whether you conceive of the sacred as a Christian, a Muslim or a Pantheist, the recognition that we are part of an ordered, divine cosmos is an insight as old as mankind. We just have enormous difficulty explaining it in words because that is a left hemisphere thing and the recognition of the divine is situated in our Right Mind. So, when we try to put it into words, we stumble, we get lost. And we argue. I think that the old Israelites got it right; they insisted that Yahweh, the name of God, was unutterable. Perhaps we should humbly admit that words are not an adequate medium here. It certainly is a conundrum for me; I am not a Christian yet I do recognize that the cosmos is sacred, something vast of which I am a tiny part. For me, the arts are the gateway to the divine, but clearly, there are numerous others. As far as I can tell, everyone has to discover their own path.

Furthermore, says Dr. M,

… freed from all perception of boundaries, my right mind proclaims “I am part of it all. We are brothers and sisters on this planet. We are here to help make this world a more peaceful and kinder place.”

Dr M makes a point of separating the left brain rational mind, Descartes’ I think therefore I am, from actual reason, which is a broader and more inclusive human faculty that includes both hemispheres. It includes imagination, empathy and a sense of the sacred. Pure rationalism reeks of doctrines right out of the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Hunts. Or of Wokism, the modern version. All of these deplorable mindsets were and are driven by extreme left-brain dominance and its delusions.

It is not something to be grateful for. But we can change our mind. If we give our Right Mind the floor, good things start happening. As Dr M says,

One of the natural functions of my right mind is to bring me new insight in this moment so I can update old files that contain outdated information.

My right mind is open to new possibilities and thinks out of the box. It is not limited by the rules and regulations established by my left mind that created that box. …my right mind is highly creative in its willingness to try something new. It appreciates that chaos is the first step in the creative process.

Perhaps the current chaos is the beginning of a fundamental reshuffling of how we perceive our world, how we believe, how we act. We could give thanks for our ability to adapt, reform, and above all, rethink what we were just thinking yesterday. It is humanity’s greatest gift, this ability to make our world new again, to see things differently. To admit that there is always a new insight, a different viewpoint.

We, the West, have done it before: during the Napoleonic wars, between 1796 and 1806, a handful of philosophers, poets and playwrights in an obscure university town called Jena in pre-Germany, created a Romantic New World Order. It elevated the individual to centre stage, and ranked poetry, emotion, spirituality and science at the apex of human endeavour. It was a direct challenge to the Enlightenment, to Descartes’ sundering of nature and humanity. And they sound rather a lot like Dr M and Dr Bolte and the quantum physicists. Its most brilliant and youngest member, the ‘philosopher of oneness’, Schelling, dared to say that the world was untuitively knowable and that ‘Mind is invisible Nature, Nature visible mind’. Where Descartes divided the world into mind and matter, Schelling insisted that it was all one. Andrea Wulf’s new book, Magnificent Rebels, the first Romantics and the invention of the Self, is a fascinating account of this group that counted the likes of Goethe, Schleiermacher, Schiller and Fichte among them. They were the greatest minds of the age and Wulf says that they insisted that ‘neither priests nor nationality nor moral arguments paved the way to faith…all that was needed was imagination’. They were not talking about organized religion but a kind of universal spirituality. At the centre of this group stood Carolina Boehm Schlegel Schelling. She was their charismatic Muse, an astonishingly brilliant, fiercely independent woman who lived as she pleased at an age when women had few rights. Poetry was her forte: she was the first to translate Shakespeare into German, counting out the meter with her co-translator and second husband, August Schlegel.

So I am going to give the last word to one of the great living poets, Bob Dylan, and You gotta serve somebody. To me, it sums up the choice we face. Instead of talking about right and left brains, he talks about the Lord and the Devil. Maybe it’s the same thing. The song says you may be a great somebody, but even you have to serve. I take that to mean you have to believe in something greater than yourself.

But you’re going to have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re going to have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re going to have to serve somebody

It is a decision that we, as a society, also face. We must decide between what the German Romantics knew 200 years ago and what Dr McGilchrist and Jill Taylor Bolte, among many others, know today and the dead, mechanistic, oppressive doctrine of Descartes’ I think therefore I am. We have to decide who to serve. I hope we decide to serve our Right Mind. It is peaceful, holistic and loving. It is on the side of life, which is sacred.

Happy Thanksgiving.