“The Master and his Emissary,” authored by Iain McGilchrist, explores the divided brain. Context is everything to the right-hemisphere. As master, a bird sees more with a wide-angle view to avoid being eaten by predators. With the left-hemisphere as emissary, birds see less with tunnel-vision to spot and select seeds to eat.
Both hemispheres, simultaneously attend, but in a different way to everything we do. The RH comprehends you can’t do one thing only in the complex web of life, interconnected and interdependent. The LH apprehends you can do one thing only in taking, using and manipulating isolated parts in an either/or material world.
Facing a conundrum, how to eat without being eaten, the RH relies on imagination and emotion for a creative presence to seek meaning and understanding in the real world of life and living. The LH uses language to categorize things, fixed in place, for control to grasp what it wants.
Adapting in the real world of continual change, the RH sees a dynamic world of unfolding patterns and processes evolving in relationship within a complex whole. The LH sees a mechanical and virtual world of things; gears, spindles and levers arranged and focused, along a straight line toward narrow, but useful outcomes.
The RH responds to reality as a river, open, fluid and flowing with intuition and intention for exploring and generating new possibilities. The LH simplifies reality into a road map with defined boundary, fixed lanes, with entry, exit, stop and go directions for control.
Models, language, and our perceptions are abstract LH representations, not reality itself, for mapping the world without terrain. Human hubris of separation from and superiority to nature comes at the expense of being prey to our own predation. The right-brain reminds us, “The map is not the territory.”
Harold Honkola
Stillwater