Left Brain – Right Brain
Two Brains. One You
We have established that it is perfectly okay to talk about dual things within a conversation on non-duality because the world is full of duality. We are trying to discover who we are. Our conversation doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to help us in our quest. That’s okay.
So, with that in mind, let’s examine some new things that have come to us from neuroscience.
This is information that traditional mystics throughout the ages did not have. So they couldn’t use this in their conversations. But we can use this in our conversations today.
The Real Brain
One of the exciting things that neuroscience has discovered is that we have two physical sides to our brain. They’re quite separate from each other. If you look at a picture of the brain, you’ll see that it can actually open up in the center. The left hemisphere and the right hemisphere are very separate physically.
Our experience of them are also very separate. It’s fascinating to explore ourselves this way.
A brain scientist named Jill Bolte Taylor has given us an amazing story about the brain. You can look her up on YouTube. And I highly recommend that you study everything that she said, and written because it’s fascinating. She did a Ted talk called My Stroke of Insight.
She was a brain scientist so she saw the world from that point of view. She was always fascinated by how the brain works. She had a stroke that took out a certain part of her left brain, the part that has to do with naming things, and thinking about things.
She literally had a physical situation, that happened to the cells of her brain. It took out that part of the brain that spiritual seekers are constantly trying to take out through meditation and spiritual practices. She went consciously into what she calls a full right brained experience.
When she was in this experience, she couldn’t name anything. Her hand was completely dissolved into the universe. All she saw was molecules. She couldn’t think of the names of anything. She couldn’t understand speech. She couldn’t speak. It’s really good to listen to her description of this because you can compare it to any mystical experience and see the similarities. Perhaps it’s similar to mystical experiences you have had, or stories that other people have given us. Perhaps it’s from this same section of the brain. The experiences sound similar.
What’s really interesting, when you think about it, is that the only thing that keeps us from accessing that mystical experience at any time is that our left brain, our yacky, yacky brain, is so loud that it drowns out the silence of the mystical.
You can access the same experience through meditation. Many people have discovered it through drugs. Right? If you take a drug that shuts down the talking part of your brain you’re suddenly in bliss. You’re in happiness. The meditation or the drug didn’t make the bliss happen. It was already there and it came uncovered. Suddenly you are one with the universe. You feel like you’ve just come home, like everything’s just gone beautiful. It’s all because the super loud talking brain has suddenly gone quiet.
Spiritual Seekers
So what does this mean for spiritual seekers?
We are going to work through some exercises throughout this course in the coming chapters to discover our own mystical brain. You can start to see now why you need to go through these chapters in order because each one is building on something that came before.
As this course continues we will go through exercises to discover that no matter how noisy and present your yakking yakking left brain may seem, the right brain is always there, equally present. All we have to do is realize that it’s always present.
What’s interesting is that this makes it easy to access the mystical experience anytime we want.
The Y
The Y
We have now reached the point where we are perfectly happy talking about dual things within a conversation on non-duality. That means we can have diagrams, and we can talk about left-brain and right-brain. I’m going to work through some simple ideas to help us learn to shift easily from the left brain to the right brain, and then back. Staying in the right brain isn’t the point. The skill is learning to consciously manage the shift.
Three Dots
Here we have a very fancy diagram with three dots.
Imagine that the single dot down on the bottom is you. This is your undivided consciousness. This is you. Specifically, this is the ‘You’ who can decide to shift from Left-brain experience to Right-brain experience.
That single point at the bottom is you. This is what we’re looking for in non-duality. A singularity. A consciousness without a second. One little dot.
Of course you are not a dot, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s say that dot is you. It’s there, all by itself. It’s you experiencing your brain. That’s. Those two other dots floating out in space there? They are not you.
The Y
In our next diagram we’ve joined our single consciousness with what we are calling our left brain and our right brain, because this is how our experience feels. We feel like we aren’t all alone in our brain. We have these perceptions going on all the time.
The line represents you (the dot at the bottom) looking out. It feels like you look outward and see all these thoughts and feelings in your mind.
The two dots at the top are your left brain and the right brain. We experience these two different aspects of our minds. You’ll find that sometimes one of these comes to the forefront, and then it will shift and the other speaks up.
For most of us our default is that our left brain is constantly going.
Unconscious shifting
On our diagram we have a left and a right dot. The left dot is what we hear most of the time. It’s the yacky yacky yacky brain of thought.
If we are good meditators we have certainly experienced the left brain out of control. Shut your eyes, try to meditate and all this comes up: worry, worry, worry.
Worrying is a good example.
Say some something bad happens in your life, or say you just happen to be conscious of what’s going on in the world, so you worry a lot. (That is probably a good thing.) This thing we’re calling the left brain is what’s giving you the dialogue. It seems like it’s going all the time.
If you manage to quiet that part of your brain what comes to the forefront is the right brain. For the sake of this conversation we are calling it the creative brain. It’s also going on all the time.
The Conscious You
What we are seeing with this Y is that it is ‘you’ having both of these experience. These two things are always happening at the same time.
What we usually think of as ‘consciousness’ is whatever is coming to the forefront of our experience as we live through our lives. What this means in relation to our diagram is that we lose the sense of that bottom dot (you) and feel that the top two dots ARE our consciousness. As if we actually become a different person when we switch between the two.
We have a sense that when we are in the left brain we are not spiritual. But when we are in the right brain, and having a spiritual experience, then we we think we are spiritual. The fact that we even have words for ‘spiritual experience’ show that we think this is a thing that occurs separately from our little ‘me’ dot down at the bottom of our diagram.
If that sounds like it is very difficult to describe… it’s because it is.
Mysticism is Not You
Mysticism is an exploration of our experience from inside. Thinking about it this why can give you an idea of how mysticism has gotten very, very confused. The only tool mystics have had is to attempt to describe what it is like to come from a singular point of view. It’s like we are trying to explain the top two dots on our diagram. Confusing.
Recently science has given us some new tools. Or more important, science has given us new tools and a more robust language to use to talk about the experience of being human. Our neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, happened to have an experience of her brain without left critical thinking. She had a stroke and her knowledge of brain science gave her a different way to experience and later talk about what happened. She was able to go, “Oh! This is what being completely without a left brain is like.”
It was the mystical experience.
Back to the Y
By the way, just to be clear, the thing I’m calling “The Y” is what we are trying to get rid of. The Y is a diagram showing division. The single point of you is experiencing reality with a seeming split because it is lost in the illusion that the actions of the brain are the self. We are looking for a single experience moving outward from the self in this awesomely uncomplex drawing below:
That is simply you looking out. It’s even you looking in. It’s the single point of you experiencing life with no division.
Mistake of the Mystics
Mistake of the Mystics
The only information, and words, that Mystics have had throughout time to talk about non duality, enlightenment and spirituality is their inner experience. That’s easily confusing.
Philosophy is talking about thoughts, ideas and concepts. Mysticism is talking about who is experiencing the thoughts. That can get confusing because mysticism can also be talking about the mystical experiences of the right brain. We often lose track of the fact that the ‘you’ experiencing your thoughts is the same ‘you’ having your mystical experience.
We now know that we have a critical thinking side of our brains. What is typically referred to as the left brain. And we also have a creative side of our brains. What is typically referred to as the right brain.
The Mystics often mixed it up. The mystical experience and the experiencer were often spoken of as the same. Who can blame them? It feels the same because when the noisy left side of our brain goes quiet, bliss exists. And when a person know who they are they can consciously use both sides and bliss exists.
Until Jill Bolte Taylor explained how it worked it seemed like the left brain had to go away for the right brain to be ‘heard.’ Mystics even have a word for it: Hari Om Tat Sat. Sound of truth. The Thief’s Sound. The hum of the universe.
Now we know that they are both always awake, happily engaged in life, and that we can shift our attention from one to the other.
We now have a different way to understand and experience ourselves because we are starting to understand how the brain works. It informs the way that we can talk about this.
In our last chapter we used a diagram with a Y showing that the bottom point is the singular you. A line comes up from that point showing our perception reaching out with a split at the top where you experience either of these two “realities” that seem to inhabit our consciousness.
The Y is a very simple diagram of your experience of your right brain and your left brain.
We know, from neuroscience and from Jill Bolte Taylor in particular, that you could find an unethical surgeon to slice into your brain and take out one exact part of your brain, and boom, you would be into this mystical experience. Don’t do that. You can learn to shift between the two.
The Nonduality Razor
Nonduality tells us that if you can see it, it’s not you. So, if these perceptions are in your mental field… that’s not it. That’s still not you! The true mystic is the one who steps beyond this illusion of perception.
Living forever in your right brain isn’t it. Even if you were totally in your right brain in a complete and total mystical experience… that’s still not it. It’s not awakening. It’s just a really wonderful super nice trip.
The mystical experience is not enlightenment though it has many similarities. Particularly when we try to describe it.
I understand how it’s so easy to mix the two things up. Being stuck forever in the critical left-thinking brain is awful. Being stuck there also makes it impossible to ever experience your true nature because thinking can’t get you there.
Mysticism does help. One of the things that has traditionally enabled a person to break through the illusion of their mind is to be able to become calm. To calm waaaay down.
The yakking talking mind, the thing we call the left brain, the verbal brain, is often loud but can go quiet. If you can calm that “sound” way down, then you instantly have an experience of unity because the mystical mind can then be experienced.
Four Steps from the Universe
Remember the exercise we did previously where we examined our perception of the universe. We cut our typical thinking process with the the razor of nonduality to move from the idea of oneness to ‘not two.’
Let’s go through that quickly again.
The first perception is that there is ‘me’ standing here, and there’s the universe out there. That’s obviously a perception of two things: Me here, the universe out there.
The second perception was me inside the universe. We moved the idea of the universe closer, so it wasn’t out there any more. It was enveloping me and included me. But we were still able to see that there are subtly two things. There is me inside the universe.
And then there’s the third one where you realize the universe is all around me and the universe is inside me. This third perception is the mystical experience. This is where thoughts dissolve and you’re completely dissolved in the world. But this is still not it.
Finally, there’s the fourth step of becoming the consciousness of the universe looking out through your eyes at the universe.
This fourth step is the one that mystics have a hard time explaining because it’s totally beyond words. The only tool they have had is their experience and the only words they have are words about experience.
The enlightened mystic has easy access to their right-brain mystical experience at any time. The words to describe enlightenment are the same words that describe the mystical experience so it’s super easy to mix them up.
I want to put this thought out there: so much of what we hear about in spirituality is an attempt to get to this mystical brain experience of oneness. This is both good and bad because this experience of oneness is a vital step before getting to what nonduality would call the “real thing”: Knowing who you are.
BUT it’s still not it.
Pro Tip: You can use a drug to have a mystical experience. When the drug wears off the experience goes away. Proof that it is just a brain thing, and not the real deal.
The Mystical Experience
Blissing out is worth doing, but don’t get trapped in it.
This is why so many spiritual teachers will say that the worst thing that can happen to you on the spiritual path is to have a full-blown, crazy-lights-flashing spiritual experience. If that happens to you then you spend the rest of your life hankering after that same experience rather than going for the next step.
That’s what we’re trying to do in this discussion. Bring you to this next step.
Don’t give up…
Keep reading my dear friend. It’s easy to give up in exasperation at this point… but this is where it starts getting fun. These past few chapters have been a longwinded way to show that the mystical brain is just as capable of delusion as the left critical brain. Once we are out of that trap the sky is blue.
We’ve busted through some myths that get us to the top of the mountain. Life and delight are on the other side.
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