Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.ġ2. Likewise, for a new self to be born, hardship is necessary. The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth.
Suffering and pain are part of this process, as the first of the rules here illustrates.ġ1.
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Mindfulness or ‘wisdom’ is not about escaping the world, or about avoiding pain: it is about learning how to integrate our inner and outer worlds so as to be able to engage more directly and actively in them, and to understand our position in the world. In his remarkable visionary poem Jerusalem, William Blake refers to this secret theological system in which the universe is mapped onto and aligned with the occult meaning and structure of the human body (Adam Kadmon, or Microprosophus): “You have a tradition, that Man anciently contain’d in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth”. “You have a tradition, that Man anciently contain’d in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth” (Blake, Jerusalem) Kether is the crown of the Prototypic Head and refers perhaps to the pineal gland Chochmahand Binah are the right and left hemispheres respectively of the Great Brain” ( The Secret Teachings of All Ages this work was written in 1928, which makes the observation even more striking). Interestingly, in esoteric or mystical Kabbalah (which has historical links to Sufism), the central symbol, the Tree of Septhiroth (a diagrammatic representation of the process by which the Universe came into being), is also divided into a Left and Right side. As the scholar Manly Hall notes, “The Sephirothic Tree is sometimes depicted as a human body, Adam Kadmon.
“What we know had to come into being first for the right hemisphere, since by definition at first it is new, and the right hemisphere delivers what is new as it ‘presences’- before the left hemisphere gets to re-present it”. It is for this reason that in his ground-breaking work on brain lateralisation McGilchrist refers to the right hemisphere as the ‘master’ and the left as the ’emissary’ ( The Master and his Emissary). The right hemisphere, he observes, has precedence not only in terms of “primacy of experience” (whatever we encounter that is new is experienced first by the right brain), but also in terms of “primacy of wholeness”, “the primacy of the implicit”, “primacy of broad vigilant attention”, “primacy of affect”, and “primacy of the unconscious will”. They can perhaps best be seen as an aid or companion to a mindfulness practice – a way of shifting the human brain from its current ‘left hemisphere’ mode (linear, functionalist, literal, useful but unreal) to a more right brain or ‘whole brain’ state – one grounded in the neurological and ontological primacy of the right hemisphere, which is the side of the brain that apprehends and delivers a more contextual, bodily, relational, and intuitive understanding of the world.Īs psychiatrist and author Iain McGIlchrist notes, “one hemisphere, the right hemisphere, has precedence, in that it underwrites the knowledge of that the other comes to have, and is alone able to synthesise what both know into a usable whole”.
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