A Beautiful Uncertainty

I was introduced to the work of Iain McGilchrist through, I think it was, Gary Lachman’s Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. And I’ve since listened to quite a few YouTube talks (the one I most recently watched was on the channel The Sacred) with Iain regarding both his The Master and the Emissary (published a decade ago) — which I’m halfway through — and his huge 2-volume tome released last year titled The Matter with Things that I plan to begin reading once I’ve completed Master.

I’m sure I will continue to write often about the influence Iain’s work is having upon me and how much I resonate with it but, in this moment, I simply want to say that my perspective of myself has shifted. I used to think I was quite left-brain oriented, what with my passion for reading, learning, and literature. However, I now realize that I usually didn’t stop with the ‘information gathered’ part (left hemisphere of certainty) and, instead of getting identified with or overly attached to an idea, I continued to explore and expand and, hopefully, integrate into my life and consciousness the ‘what’ and ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the material — all of which is using the right hemisphere (keeping present my own belief — albeit not a certainty — that the brain and its hemispheres are receivers or mediators through which consciousness/mind/soul acts). This process became more intense in my late thirties because with everything I ingested, I felt compelled to fully digest it and then contemplate how it impacted my perception of the world around me.

For example, after spending an intense and immersion-oriented nine months back in 2010 studying and being trained in the ancient health system of Ayurveda to become certified as a practitioner (in a bodily, very physical approach), I came out of it less affected by the details of the concrete methods and more impacted on a profoundly spiritual level of awe and wonder regarding life — our bodies, the world, all the energies and morphic fields we cannot see, the complexities and relationships and interactions we have in every single moment that we then pour outward again as attention and intention.

Most of us tend to get stuck in left-brain focus and part of that is because our society and civilization has become obsessed with it — with power, control, certainty, what is explicit — rather than consciously continuing the dance between hemispheres and fully embracing the value of both as necessary to wholeness. I’ve been called wishy-washy, a fence-sitter, flighty and/or inconsistent in my thoughts; in my younger years, therefore, I learned to say very little, but as the decades passed, I gradually became at ease with my embrace of the paradoxical middle and more likely to speak. I have beliefs, of course, but my path is to remain as open as possible to shifts or divergences (being merely human, I often remind myself of the value in uncertainty) that learn but return to holistic (right hemisphere) perspective. This applies to relationships, ideas, passions, health, and my connections with The Unseen, which is also why I try not to get mired in a particular system of divination according to how others see it.

This feels like a spiritual journey, the beautiful uncertainty within living.

The Book

While reading The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, I came across the following that struck me as pertinent to our divinatory process in relation to both the Book as symbol as well as the cards as Book:

“Perhaps an analogy would be the relationship between reading and living. Life can certainly have meaning without books, but books cannot have meaning without life. Most of us probably share a belief that life is greatly enriched by them: life goes into books and books go back into life. But the relationship is not equal or symmetrical. Nonetheless what is in them not only adds to life, but genuinely goes back into life and transforms it, so that life as we live it in a world full of books is created partly by books themselves.”

In the Lenormand card system of symbols, we find The Book. This symbol can express as: knowledge, secrets (like in a grimoire), confidentiality, and perhaps the changes that are inspired by the text. For a more mundane interpretation, it could be a writing project or compilation of data.

The book as symbol is also found in The High Priestess (La Papesse) of the Tarot. In that card, the book may mean the “ability to understand express ancient or traditional knowledge in words” [Ben-Dov] and/or that “the Seeker is one with powerful unconscious knowledge and that the Seeker must activate intuition to retrieve that knowledge” [Ben-Dov]

and, further, “in a psychological method of attribution, The High Priestess is associated with memory, the maintaining and processing of information within. She represents how we encode, store, and retrieve our experiences.” [Wen]

In addition, many consider the Tarot itself as a ‘book’ that we read: this might be the Akashic Records or one of the Unseen ‘dictating’ to us or a present life that, of course, changes dependent upon the context of the seeker or querent.

McGilchrist continues: “This metaphor is not perfect, but it makes the point. In one sense a book, like the world according to the left hemisphere, is a selective, organised, re-presented, static, revisitable, boundaried, ‘frozen’ extract of life. It has taken something infinitely complex, endlessly interrelated, fluent, evolving, uncertain, never to be repeated, embodied and fleeting (because alive) and produced something in a way very different that we can use to understand it. Though obviously far less complex than life itself, it has nonetheless brought into being an aspect of life that was not there before it. So the left hemisphere (like the book), can be seen as taking from the world as delivered by the right hemisphere (unconsidered ‘life), and giving life back enhanced. But, on the shelf, the contents of the book are dead: they come back to life only in the process of being read … but always becoming something else.”

In fact, I have found McGilchrist’s book to be enlightening for all aspects of my eclectic spiritual path as a truly holistic one. The way he understands how our brain hemispheres receive messages from Mind (incorporeal) resonates and reveals the ideal spiral journey (the dance from right hemisphere to the left and the necessity of reintegrating into the right) of how we experience the whole world when we don’t become stuck in dominant left-hemisphere certainty. This definitely informs my own path in reading Tarot and other oracle systems.

“The left hemisphere, the mediator of division, is never an endpoint, always a staging post. It is a useful department to send things to for processing, but the things only have meaning once again when they are returned to the right hemisphere.”

McGilchrist points out quite clearly in his book that he does NOT “mean to suggest that the brain causes human experience.” Indeed, he states that, “The restrictive bringing into being of something by the left hemisphere depends still on its foundation in something that underwrites it in the right hemisphere (and both of them on something that underwrites them both, outside the brain).” I emphasize this because one might tend to think his view is that of the reductionist or materialist (the left-hemisphere, as it happens) when that is absolutely NOT the case. His many video interviews reveal this a lot more clearly than does The Master and His Emissary. I do look forward to eventually reading his follow-up tome The Matter With Things as that book has a section specifically on The Sacred.

I hope you found this helpful. I’m a seeker, drawn to the questions even more than the answers, because the so-called answers merely lead me to further questions. If you’re reading this, I feel a kindred spirit near.

Circles and Spirals in Script

Sometimes when I look at my contemplative writing practice of the past, I wonder: where did it go? what has happened? how did I lose that profoundly simple ability to sit within a moment and glide easily into stream of consciousness? will it return? will I? From flowing essays on Spirit to the 120 reflective portals into Soul Cards, I used to just sit down and feel an incredible spiritual emergence in script. Maybe that was a temporary passage, meant only for those years?

Of course, back then, I was in a different phase of life as well as locale; the energies of person and place uniquely contrasted to here and now. Living in Arizona took a toll on my sense of comfortable familiarity; returning to my roots in Missouri shifted my entire perspective in other ways. In my attempts to regain my footing in these places, I sought to define and clarify in order to understand, however, as Iain McGilchrist points out, “the illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive” and that “clarity is bought at the price of limitation.” Drilling down into history and specifics, I sought clarity but “clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.”

Yet, I still write … out of curiosity and creativity. What will emerge today? What will tomorrow bring? How will the words become worlds? I’ve no idea. I’m the chalice, the inkwell. I’m the pen and the quill. I receive and transcribe from elsewhere, from a place of mystery and magic and inspiration, often from the Unseen.

“In order truly to see the thing as it is, attention needs to do something quite different. It needs both to rest on the object and pass through the plane of focus. Seeing the thing as it is depends on also seeing through it, to something beyond, the context, the ’roundness’ or depth, in which it exists. If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things and not later resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.” ~ Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

I believe I’ve reached the point where I’m beginning to see the depth, go into the beyond, open to the implicit as well as the explicit; now that the pressures I felt of being out of proper time and place are resolving, healing, dissipating, and allowing space for simply ‘being’, and ‘seeing through’, the sacred spirals are starting to dance again.

What an incredible journey our lives are!

Ambiguity as Sacred Strength

I’ve mentioned in past writing, for example in my post on “Falling into Fascination“, that I “fall in love” with people whose books, thoughts, and ideas, touch me on a deep and profoundly moving level. One of the most recent examples of this (I could name many more!) is my on-going ‘love affair’ with the remarkable Iain McGilchrist, who is definitely not a ‘materialist’ but rather a ‘panentheist’ who views consciousness as beyond matter yet infuses matter, so to speak.

Please read the above quote again and really let ‘second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole’ sink into your entire being.

I’ve watched many interview videos with this man — one that is particularly well-done is “Dividing the Brain and Perceiving the Sacred” but he’s brilliant in all of them I’ve come across — and his very expression of person is so engaging and appealing; he has a calm, gentle, centeredness when in discussion (that reminds me a bit of Rupert Sheldrake’s nature, and the video conversation between them is an absolute delight). Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise to me as he considered studying theology and attending seminary prior to deciding to focus on literature and philosophy only to then expand into becoming a doctor in neuropsychology — all of which are subjects I’ve self-studied (well, not the ‘doctor’ bit, of course, rather my passion for health and healing) for decades.

The thing is, his books may be daunting to many people; The Master and His Emissary is a sort of 500-page primer to his latest work which is the two-volume The Matter With Things. And I’ll be honest, at this point, I’m only a hundred pages into the amazing, incredible first book (watching videos of Iain talking with others helped provide an excellent overview of the topic that has made reading the book that much easier), but I’m taking my time and integrating the material with all the other subjects I’m interested in from the paranormal to consciousness, from nature to magic — although if one truly embraces a holistic relationship with living, of course they are connected. At the core of my concerns with where our Western culture is right now, is an apparent lack of respect for nuance, nature, and Source. I don’t want to make this post a long one so I will simply encourage exploration of Iain McGilchrist’s work and give him the final words (from The Master and His Emissary):

“In such a society as ours, any apparent inconsistency is treated as a sign of error or intellectual muddle. Ambiguity is no longer a strength, given that truth is known to be complicated and many-layered; it is a weakness, since truth is thought of as single and straightforward. It is therefore easier to accept the left hemisphere’s point of view, which is easily articulated and unambiguous and simply stands in contradiction to the right hemisphere’s view, than to accept that of the right hemisphere, which is more multifaceted and harder to articulate, and is already inclusive of the apparently incompatible left hemisphere’s point of view. This virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore dismissed.”

“I believe that reductionism has become a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth, which is blighting our ability to understand what is happening and what we need to do about it. My current thoughts are directed towards illuminating what I see as a truer picture, a more helpful and, I believe, a more hopeful way of seeing our situation here on this planet, while we still have time.”