Do You Have Two Brains?

Neuroscience tells us both that we have two brains and that we don’t.

Actually, just straight-out biology tells us that we have two very distinct halves to our brain, and it’s very up to debate exactly how those work.

If you see the brain as simply a machine, then you can hook electrodes up and give a person stimulus and find out what part of the brain gets activated.

This has been used to say that the idea of left-right brain asymmetry is wrong, is mistaken.

And that’s really, really good because that’s kind of the job of non-duality anyway, to say, nah, that’s probably not the way it works.

And it isn’t.

But if you study the actual experiences of people who either have strokes in a side of their brain or know how to access their brains in a different way, you find out that the story is very, very much different, that these sides of our brain give us different experiences.

Okay. Stick with me here.

This idea of two sides of our brain that give us very different experiences of life completely explains non-duality.

The fact that we have two brains explains the necessity of not two.

The thing is that we have two very different ways of viewing life, of viewing the world around us, but there is only one us.

One me, and there is only one world that we’re viewing.

Just because we have these two almost opposite ways to face things does not mean that two things exist.

There is only one thing happening.

We can just see it in two different ways.

And it’s way more than two. We can see the world in thousands of different ways, right?

People with different backgrounds see life differently. When you have different education, you see things differently.

Also, have you ever had a revelation about life where things just suddenly look different? Things just make more sense.

And in the end, that is what we’re looking for with non-duality, with studying non-duality. We want the world and our experience within the world to make more sense, to feel less divided.

So you have these two very different ways of perceiving life.

And one of the ways is a critical, analytical way that we split the world itself into bits. Our very language, English particularly, and all the languages that are related to it—Spanish, Russian, even Sanskrit, believe it or not—split the world into pieces.

We call those pieces nouns.

We think that things are separate things. That’s the way we’re trained to think. And so we skew our perception of life in that way.

The other way to think is to see everything in the completeness of wholeness, how everything is infinitely interrelated.

In our typical, divisive way of seeing everything, we see this critical mind as reality, and we see this mystical, connected way of seeing things as spirituality.

So we think spirituality is something we need to attain.

Eastern religions have made this more complicated too, because Eastern religions have made the mind, thoughts, the enemy.

And it makes sense why that happened. It’s because when that critical side of your perception calms down, then you can see the interconnectedness of everything, and it’s beautiful. It’s wonderful. That’s where bliss lives.

Confusion and angst live inside the divided left mind when you’re only seeing that.

Now, the state of enlightenment is where you’re exactly in the middle between these two things, and you realize that these are simply tools that you, the living human being, use to live.

It’s just that simple.

There’s nothing really unknowable about the way your life is livingness itself, when you have both of these things going together.

It’s very much like having two hands.

You have two hands, right? But you use the two hands to do things.

Most of us have a dominant hand. The right hand is usually dominant, and we use that more. But the undominant hand is the one that constantly supports it.

So you need both of these things, and it’s really, really useful having these two ways of perceiving things, because we need to be able to see detail, and we also need to be able to see the ultimate wholeness that we live in.

And proof of this is the fact that all animals have these divided brains. We all need it in order to be able to live our lives on Earth.

We need to be able to see the big broad picture that goes all the way to the horizon and contains dangers, but also beauty and interconnectedness and our ability to be social creatures.

And we also need this nitpicky way of dividing everything into pieces because that’s how we do things.

Notice how you can swing back and forth between those two. Once you understand they exist, you can literally just do that on purpose. You don’t even need to shut your eyes.

Go into your language brain. Feel what that’s like. Thoughts are racing. It’s often kind of uncomfortable, but it’s familiar.

Right?

So go there.

Now shift into the broad picture of everything. There’s no words there because words don’t need to be there. Words divide, but you can always step into the silence.

Let’s do it again.

Let’s go critical… into the details.

Now let’s go. Softness. Connection.

See how you can go from one to the other. They are both you. Neither is the enemy. Neither is the goal.

One big mistake in spiritual studies is thinking that we want to get 100 percent into the connection part. We want thoughts to go completely away. But that’s unbalanced.

So, go into the softness.

And then come back to thinking.

And now go to the middle.

In the middle, you are the master of everything that’s happening with you, and around you, and through you as well because you are completely interconnected to everything that way, but also engaged.