Reddit reviews The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Both of what you describe hearing from the neuroscientist and ex-nun sound much more like a few off the cuff anecdotes than actual well researched positions that you should count on as meaningful in deciding whether you personally continue with the practices described in TMI.

To start with the ex-nun. In what sense is she a meditation expert and what is her understanding of TMI? As has been already stated elsewhere on the thread TMI is not a novel system that has been dreamt up complete with trademarks and a mystical backstory. It's a modern synthesis of very well established meditation approaches from both Tibetan and Theravadan schools that have a long historical pedigree. Mindfulness of breath, body scanning, metta, walking meditation and the like are all staples of Buddhist meditation across the world. In that regard stating that there is no enlightenment to be gained by following it really needs some further clarification on her part. What about the system makes enlightenment impossible?

On the neuroscience front maybe Minsky is considered outdated, I have no way of knowing personally, but I do know that the attention/awareness distinction is what Culadasa considers the core of how his approach differs from others. If your ex boss failed to comment on that then I'm sceptical he's given the book a thorough reading. The scientific backing for attention and awareness being separate but related in the way Culadasa describes is discussed in great detail in The Master and his Emissary so you could look into that if you want.

What role science can or should play in your decision is seems very important to you. Some of the blurb for TMI may have bigged up the science side of things a bit much. Certainly prior to the recent unpleasantness that was the main criticism that we heard about the book and Culadasa. However, those of us who are familiar with the system know that TMI is a meditation book that also contains some very well thought out theoretical models to explain what you experience if you follow the meditation instructions. Currently science has great things to say about the benefits of basic levels of mindfulness but is not ready to endorse ideas around awakening. If you want to do practices that are rigorously evidentially backed up then you can take a course like MBSR or MBCT. However, these courses are short and they do not offer a detailed long term progression. In fact, the aim is that at the end of them you go off and seek out your own personal practice. You'll also note if you take a course that they are teaching you the same basic techniques you find in TMI: mindfulness of breath, body scan, metta and so on.

The scientific speculation that is in TMI is useful insofar as it can help demystify the experiences that occur in deep meditation and thus help people find a clear and well mapped route through the territory. Ultimately the book has become popular through word of mouth because it delivers on what it promises and so each copy sold inevitably leads to a high number of personal recommendations to others. If you want to pursue the benefits of advanced levels of mindfulness then it is still one of the best options out there despite Culadasa's recent controversial behaviour.

Thank you for taking the time, really fascinating to see.

"Rather, aging is an opportunity to express a more rounded out personality as the tug towards becoming authentic becomes more persistent and real."

How does aging cause re-align our switch to authenticity? Does reflection on aging ground our perception of becoming? Are there daily aspects of life we can focus on to improve our consciousness and its awareness of aging/becoming?

I'm sure its one a lot to pick apart. For anyone interested in neuroscience regarding the hemispheres of our brain (and it relates to authenticity a tad bit: https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western/dp/0300188374 and I'm reading 'Presence' currently and its diving into the authentic self---but nothing in the context of aging and becoming.

Came expressly to post that link.

His book The Master and His Emissary is illuminating and presents compelling arguments.

None of which, as far as I can see, is at odds with this study.

Meditation goes against our survival instincts; it requires your left-brain to let down its guard for long enough that your right-brain can widen/deepen your awareness. The left-brain sees this as a completely "pointless" and potentially dangerous task and so puts up a fierce resistance. (And even the right-brain would rather be scanning for external threats than experiencing internal bodily sensations – which explains the 'monkey mind' worrying that tends to rush in to fill the void of threats.) See: McGilchrist's The Divided Brain: Book; [Video] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI):

>I don't understand spirituality. Feeling of oneness and such. What does it mean? It doesn't make sense to me.

There's a school of thought in cognitive science that your mind has two gross modes of apprehending reality roughly corresponding to the left and right hemisphere - the right deals with the bigger picture and helps orient your attention to things that might be important, and the left thinks in a way that's closely tied to language and that constantly divides things up, categorizes and puts borders around things.

In the West, and especially in any technical field - basically, if you're part of any demographic that reddit skews towards - our education, careers, philosophies and so on have all worked together to train us to approach the world more in the second way: we want everything to have crisp conceptual borders, to be binnable into classical categories, and if you can't describe it with language, well, it's probably not really all that real.

The way most people describe spiritual experience is on the opposite end of the spectrum, so much so that to even call the usual ways of talking about it "descriptions" can seem too generous to people that prefer to look at the world in strictly rational and linguistic terms. The talk tends towards vague feelings, abstruse metaphor, "I know it when I see it", "I can't really describe it to someone else who hasn't also experienced it", and so on. In view of the rational vs. big picture cognitive dichotomy, that might be because this different way of thinking actually takes place in different parts of the brain that are mutually inhibitory with your linguistic faculties.

If you've managed to craft a life for yourself where you get by on your rational faculties, it might be hard to even picture why being able to see the world in the fuzzier and less linguistically mediated way would be useful, so maybe I can illustrate with an example:

Picture a young male redditor 20-24 who's in or recently out of college with an engineering degree, trying to find his way in the world. He's done everything right, focused on school, got good grades, asked for and followed career advice he got online. He's reasonably fit and maintains a fairly disciplined lifestyle. Maybe he's even in his first career-type job, making decent money... but he comes to /r/meditation complaining about anxiety and maybe some underlying feelings that he's not sure of his place in the world. His relationships suck and he has a hard time talking to women. Sometimes he comes off as argumentative, pedantic or excessively detail-oriented and totally misses why this might interfere with attaining the social life he so desperately desires.

Sound familiar?

There are lots of approaches to address any one particular facet of what's wrong with this young man, but one way to take a broader view is to see that he's spent the greater part of his life developing his ability to pick things apart and categorize them and give them linguistic labels, and in so doing he's left behind his ability to relax, to be OK with necessarily imperfect and incomplete explanations for the world and everything that happens in it, to take the broader view, to paint his experiences in colorful metaphors and so on. In other words, he's highly mentally developed and spiritually underdeveloped.

Meditation can make up some of the steps on the road to fixing this. So can traveling, building a new relationship to music, taking time off and living aimlessly for a little while, learning to express yourself artistically, and other favorite pastimes of liberally educated baristas that reddit tends to enjoy looking down on.

I need to do some reading to see how scientifically valid the idea about the two thought systems is, since they tend to be presented in a left-brain/right-brain dichotomy which I know many popular sources overstate the importance of. The wikipedia page on it seems to be pretty well cited, though maybe not explicitly for spirituality versus rationality. There's a book The Master and His Emissary about it that I'm meaning to read that might be interesting if you want to read more about these ideas. If you can't tell though, a lot of the above description cribs from my own life. There's personal truth in it even if that hasn't shown up on fMRIs and in longitudinal studies yet. See if it resonates.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Also, I second The Power of Now.

I'll have to check out The Master and His Emissary some time. It was mentioned in 79 - Professor Andrew Gurevich. They also discussed The Alphabet Versus the Goddess which I've read and enjoyed. It relates neurology and linguistics.