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.