David Baum here, from Seattle, Washington, USA. My group, Collapse Club, was included in the directory. (Thank you very much! Honored!)
McGilchrist is, to me, the summit of human thought. Personally, I extend his hemisphere hypothesis into a ‘theory of two minds’: Consciousness (which is primary) manifests as two principles roughly analogous to Yin and Yang — specifically, “flow mind” (RH) and “machine mind” (LH). Both principles operate immanently in the eternal now, giving rise to the manifested world and our experience of it (which are distinguishable but not separate).
My work in the real world is to create safe and structured spaces where people can share their experience of collapse (i.e. the “metacrisis”) to metabolize their grief and discover “what is theirs to do.” Inner work is the foundation for outer work. Collapse Club holds two meetings per week, supervised by ‘Conveners’ who ask the questions: “1) What are your feelings about collapse?, 2) Are you making changes in how you live?, 3) What are you discovering by living in a new way?”
I am thrilled to encounter this community of people of intelligence and good-will! I look forward to learning how I and Collapse Club can contribute to the important work being done here.
Personally, i think the hemispheric approach can be seen as a 2d projection of a more complex helical evolution in cultural stage theory (if you project a spiral down onto a line you get oscillation back and forth).
Teach in Seattle, live 50 miles south. Other points of overlap - I’m currently finishing The Master and his Emissary. Also done a lot of work lately on collapse theory and change processes.
By way of contrast with your group, although I’m nostalgic for the vanishing/vanished world of my childhood (Puget Sound of the’50s and ‘60s), I’m way on the far side of any grief process about that. Mostly I’m focused on catalyzing or orchestrating whatever comes next. One part of that is I have a generally Gebserian sense of overlapping, interlocking temporal cycles, so anything that ever was still is and everything that ever will be, already is. So my Seattle landscape lies at the ocean floor, is buried in thick sheets of ice, is covered in old growth forests, hosts a smattering of cedar longhouses, still has Denny Hill and the original Skid Road, has no freeways at all, has freeways choked with impassible traffic, is currently hosting an international exhibition on the World of Tomorrow (along with the Alaska Pacific Exhibition), is popping up skyscrapers like invasive species, which lie in ruins more or less as depicted in season two of the Last of Us. All of that. All the time.
Cool! Yeah, the “block universe” idea where everything exists all the time in an eternal, holographic wholeness sounds pretty good to me. McGilchrist prefers a Bergsonian “unfolding” of spontaneous creativity.
My big question is if the Universe is “open” or “closed,” in the sense of being an eternal out-flowing of novel creativity or, on the other hand, being a perfect, unchanging unity, never born and never dying. When we get back where we started, is it the same place?
The prior Supertramp cut is my right-brained response. This one will be for left-brain consumption.
My sense of divinity (or fundamental reality, (if that terminology is more congenial) is of being beyond space-time as perceived though our ape-like facilities. So whatever IS, is more than we can imagine. I’d generally follow a sort of neo-Platonist cum Sufi cum Bahá’í model of emanation in which the One manifests creatures as embodiments of divine attributes. The One, as such, is beyond conventional human categories such as changing or unchanging.
Concur! McGilchrist likes to quote Augustine to the effect that: “If you think you’ve understood God, what you’ve understood is not God.” The left hemisphere cannot reach The One!
Love this, brings back very specific memories from 1979! Same year as Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, and feels to me on a similar theme. Around this time I joined Education Otherwise in the UK… home schooling organisation, but sadly missed out on home schooling my own children.
David B.