"ALTERED STATES, #1"
| "ALTERED STATES, #1" | |
| The Ear that Remembered Throughout our entire history, humankind has devised and practised rituals to bring about altered states of mind. This begs the question, "Altered from what?" The only answer must be an alteration from the Left-Brain state in which we lead our daily lives. The right brain is often cited as being the seat of intuition, but what does this mean? Intuition can be described as a response to a pattern of circumstances of which we are not consciously aware. So how do these patterns eventuate? The brain has the ability to record events that come into our field of observation but which we do not consciously recognise. This may be graphically illustrated by the following story. In the summer of 1960 I had a friend who left to visit her family in Spain. On her return she was full of joy. Telling me of the earrings that her mother had given her as a parting gift, she turned her head from side to side in order to show them off to me. It was with some misgivings that I remarked that she was wearing only one of the pair. Her distress was immediate. Somewhere along the way she had lost half of the prized gift. With some misgivings, she agreed to an experiment. I hypnotised her, and began giving directions and asking questions. |
"You are on the train approaching Kingston. Can you feel both earrings jiggling about?"Together we went out of the house to the far end of the bridge. Searching the ground we worked our way forward. Less than halfway over the bridge we found the lost earring at the edge of the footpath. Her left brain, running ahead to our reunion, had been totally unaware of her loss. Her right brain, living in the here and now had recorded the earring dropping off, but had been unable to convey the message. Had it not been for the mind's ability to record otherwise unnoticed details, the earring would have been lost to her forever; or its whereabouts may have been revealed to her in a dream. |
| I must stress that I had performed no 'magical' act. What transpired on that afternoon was totally a product of the capabilities of her own mind. I just happened to be someone who knew the technique, and chanced to be there at the time. Had she been practised in the technique of communicating with her right brain at will, she could have done so without any intervention from me. It is this ability to subconsciously note details missed by the intellect, that is half of the basis of intuition. The other half is the unconscious mind's predilection for seeking patterns. At some stage of our daily life - generally accepted to be during our sleep - the inner mind sifts through the occurrences of the day, apparently scanning its events, seeking correlations, making patterns out of chaos. When a number of seemingly unrelated events, form a pattern that has relevance to our lives, the inner mind attempts to make this pattern known to consciousness. If the intellect is too focused on externals, the message is not heard. At times the message may appear in the context of a dream. If the message is not received, or not acted upon, the dream may be repeated more than once. Women are generally credited as being more intuitive than men. Be that as it may, I know from personal experience that men who spend time alone, away from the input of constant stimuli - hunters, fishermen, etc. - get an intuitive 'feel' about their environment. I tend to think that women have generally been obliged to live less stimulating lives than their men folk; relegated to jobs that demanded less of their intellect. Monotonously repetitive jobs provide little in the way of intellectual stimuli, but provide a set of circumstances wherein messages from the inner mind are more likely to get a fairer hearing than in the ceaseless chatter of the market place. |
| The Left Brain/Right Brain Dichotomy. Many disagreements between people are due to the general intolerance towards the fact that there exist many differing positions from which we may establish our world view. Two of these positions are far more diametrically opposed than those formed by current, external events such as politics, etc. They are dependent upon which of the two basic mindsets, Left or Right, from which we view things. This is the basis of the study of cerebral dominance which, in turn, is based on the recognition that people tend to 'lead' from either one or the other of these two brains. Each brain deals with the matters of perception and expression in a quite different manner. It can be a major obstacle to our ability to see things from another's point of view. |
The Left Brain thinks in sequential order, and processes certain kinds of reasoning, fabricates intellectualised models of the real world, and believes that this way of 'seeing' things is the 'correct' way. |
Logic | Analysis | Structure | Sequence | Reading |
Discipline | Time orientation | Detail | Language. | Writing |
The Right Brain looks for patterns, processing things holistically, fabricates emotionalised models of the real world, and believes that this way of 'seeing' things is the 'correct' way. FEELING -» ACTION |
Metaphors | Drawing | Spatial orientation | Pattern making |
Intuition | Emotional appeals |
| Singing |
LEFT BRAIN |  |
Left hand manipulation of shapes. |
| So each are operating from their concept of a true model of the world; which is how they expect the real thing to be, and how it 'must' function. Some models are well constructed, with all their validations, self written. Words of praise indeed! And some models are poorly assembled, poorly understood, or loosely integrated, and sometimes downright dangerous. But strongly defended all the same. One can see the problems that members of each grouping have in communicating with each other; so what chance, without awareness, of meaningful communication between such different viewpoints? Particularly when each of us has those two variant mindsets within ourselves. First we need to communicate with ourselves. Not a self-obssesion fest; that would be mind-hogging. A relaxed communication by both partners, in which each can see the other as having a valid viewpoint, and deciding which one, or mixture, is best suited to whatever the whole being is currently engaged in. "The modern physicist sees the world through an extreme specialisation of the rational mind: the mystic through an extreme specialisation of the intuitive mind...Neither of them is comprehended in the other, neither can either of them be reduced to the other...Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both". "Tao of Physics", Fritjof Capra. |
| Common during the 70's was the creed that the ego was something to be suppressed. Yet a truly holistic view of the being would see that the ego is just another part of the whole, one can no more justify its suppression than one could repress one's left leg. Without the ego there would be no great works of creativity, or very much at all in the way of human expression. But it is only a part of the whole, and, under true management each part would get its fair share of the play. Taken to extremes, total dominance by one brain over the other can lead to a very unbalanced personality. Total Left Brain dominance can result in behaviour that can present itself as very clinical, almost robotic, in its dealings with the common reality. Most people sense a lack of warmth in those who are emotionally impoverished or repressed. Such people can be seen as cold, often uncaring. Unless there exists a chemical malfunction, it is not that they do not possess emotions, only that feelings are too heavily filtered. John Wayne Bobbit, interviewed by Hester Lacey. "The Independent on Sunday" 8 Sept. 1996 |