Hodgepodge

Theosis and the reconciliation of opposites


So, what the heck is Theosis?



Interesting. A union of opposites or, what did he call it? Coincidence of opposites? There are a few other terms for it too. Reconciliation being another one. It's one of the big ideas running through philosophy, and seems to be at the core of the human mind.

I've mentioned several times that creation myths have a tendency to be about opposites—more specifically the becoming aware of opposites. This is because of the central division of the brain hemispheres and the way they work—the right brain (essentially the unconscious) sees things as a unity. It's holistic and unitive, whereas the left brain is divisive, likes to break things apart to study the pieces. Left-brain sicence likes to cut things apart and analyze them (I know not all science works this way, this is why I said left-brain science), whereas synthesis is the putting-together of things, the studying of them as wholes. Rather than dissecting a rabbit to see how its innards work, you study a den of rabbits in their natural habitat. Ultimately we need both ways of thinking. And fortunately, the fact that we do have both hemispheres, and that they're in perpetual dialogue with each other, allows us to have both viewpoints and continually go back and forth between them.

What's apparently known as Theosis in Orthodox Christianity, or at least the aspect of it involving the reconciliation of opposites that Pegeau was talking about, is what Jung called the Transcendent Function. This was one of his earliest theories (discoveries), I think coming shortly after his break with Freud—so, shortly after he began experiencing his own inner theosis that resulted in the writing of his monumental Red Book, and led to all his great discoveries.

It begins with a problem—an inability of the narrow and over-structured left brain to relate two seeming opposites. In other words you have a problem in your life, of a particular type—you need to accomplish something, and yet you're blocked. Two apparent opposites are involved, like for instance you need more time, but you have no time. Or maybe you need to think deeper into the problem, but thinking (of the conscious variety) fails to get you anywhere. You're butting your head against a wall and getting nowhere.

But then a solution arises. One that's perfect, seems to have always been there but unseen, and comes from the mysterious unconscious. It arrives in the form of an intuition or a dream, or maybe it occurs as you're thinking about some strange dream that makes no sense but you woke from it feeling exhilarated and triumphant. And suddenly you realize the things that seem to be opposites really aren't and never were, it's just your limited and divisive left-brain thinking that made them seem that way. Because what we perceive from the limited left-brain perspective as opposites are really each others' complements. They complete each other. Hot and cold are just two ends of a spectrum, as are dark and light, up and down. Neither really can even exist without the other. So rather than being discreet opposites, they're halves of a whole. As one increases the other is diminishing. It's right-brain thinking that inherently understands this, and always has. Only the left brain could confuse itself so fundamentally and get so caught up in its own illusions of dividedness and separation.

So, to get back to Jung and his idea of the transcendent function—what happens when you wrestle with a problem of seeming opposites is, you struggle, maybe you sleep on it or the unconscious goes to work on it in the back channel, and suddenly it throws up an image. By which he meant an actual mental image, a small piece of a dream or vision, that arrives fully formed, perhaps dim but clearly there in your imagination. And along with it comes the solution, and that solution is merely a new, more unified way of looking at the problem that includes the fact that opposition itself is an illusion. In some way what you've been seeing as opposites really aren't, they're different aspects of the same thing. Jung was a really strong visual thinker, a visionary in fact, and apparently his thinking always came in visual form. For many of us that isn't the way it works, so instead we might get just an idea, possibly some words spoken in a voice inside your head or in a dream. Or you see something happen in the world around you and realization dawns—the problem you've been wrestling with resolves itself into a new more three-dimensional form , and you can now see the solution was always inherent in the problem, you were just unable to see it.

Jus discovered this channel today. I've seen Castaway. It was a decent movie, but I had no idea there was any depth to it.

I finally got Iain McGilchrist's latest book, The Matter with Things. I should have been getting his books all along, not sure why I never did. He's a brain scientist at the cutting edge of the latest data, and I keep running into the kind of deep information I've been utterly unable to find online, where pickins are slim and shallowness is the order of the day, unless you discover some kind of specialty blog or site.

One thing I've been really curious about for some time is whether animals share the brain hemisphere asymmetry with us or not. I assumed they did to some extent, at least what we call the higher animals, who think somewhat similarly to us. Turns out they do indeed, all the way down to creatures like the smallest insects and the most primitive worms and slugs. Anything that has a recognizable brain has it divided into two parts that are structurally different, because apparently the ongoing dialectic between what we know as the conscious and unconscious minds is a feature of any living thing on our planet with what passes for even a rudimentary brain. Those differences are profound and affect everything, all the way down to the density of cell structure, size of synapses, amount of white versus grey matter, etc.

Good to know.

Correction—McGilchrist is not a brain scientist. I assumed that because he said he was a scientist and has obviously deeply studied brain science. Apparently he's a psychiatrist. But he's spent many years immersed in the latest studies relating to the differences between brain hemispheres and how they interact.

The right hemisphere (unconscious mind) is the predator alarm system. It uses a specific kind of attention—very diffuse and widespread—to always keep an eye out for sudden movement or change in our surroundings that might indicate a predator. That was its original purpose anyway, and of course it still does that. But it also uses that same broadly diffused attention to seek to understand the unknown, aka chaos. The attention of the unconscious is low resolution but complete, it studies everything all at once, and is made to notice anomalous things, things that don't belong or that seem suspicious. Very useful in solving puzzles and crimes.

The left hemisphere, aka the conscious mind (more or less, of course it's more complicated than that) uses a very strongly focused sort of attention to more closely study that which we're already familiar with. It uses language and it constructs facsimiles of the information the right brain has pulled out of the unknown. It can only process one stream of information at a time, because it puts it into much higher resolution, is able to see it in much greater detail. But it begins where the right brain leaves off, meaning it works from constructs. Maps if you will. You've probably heard that what's familiar to us becomes essentially invisible? That what we see every day we no longer actually see? It would take way too much processing power to render the familiar in high resolution every time we pass by the same area, so the left brain instead whips up a quick map or image of our surroundings and we assume it's as it always is, until suddenly something springs out at us as different from how we expect it to be. Is there smoke coming from all the windows and doors of that house? Then we turn our full attention on it, including the right brain attention, and focus strongly on it in an attempt to make the sudden outbreak of chaos familiar again. To remove it from the realm of the unknown that it suddenly fell into.

This actually happened to me once—a house I passed by all the time at the end of my street had massive amounts of smoke emerging from every opening in the front wall as well as the chimney. I ran up and knocked on the door and a woman opened it drying a dish. She seemed pleasantly unaware that her house was on fire. I excitedly told her it was, to which she replied that no, actually they were just making a fire in the fireplace and the flue was stuck closed, they had been jimmying it and finally got it open. I don't think she had any idea how terrifying her house looked from the street. Her glib carefree attitude contrasted powerfully with my unconscious alarm system, ringing all its bells in my ears. But once the situation became known to me it quieted down again and the house once again became a known thing. The outside facade of it anyway, and now I had met one of the people who lived in it, so I had a little more information to add to my understanding of it. As well as one thing it might mean when you see smoke pouring from all the openings of a house. But I seriously doubt that will allay my unconscious alarm system next time I see such a thing. It doesn't do to assume there's nothing wrong when you see signs of a predator or a fire or some other disaster.

Anyway, this seems to be an evolutionary explanation for why the two hemispheres do what they do. I'm struck by the similarity between their functions and the similar functions of the focused vision and peripheral vision systems of the eyes. Again, one is diffuse and sees a large area all at once, noticing movement or change, and the other is very narrow and focused like a spotlight beam, and is used to focus tightly on whatever your attention is drawn to in the moment and see it in much higher resolution. This allows the ponderous conscious mind to dissect and study the situation at its leisure, and determine whether the chaos alarm was justified or not.

I've always understood the left hemisphere sees things as parts rather than a whole—trees rather than a forest. But it's way more than I imagined!! For several chapters now, McGilchrist has been talking about split-brain patients, who have had the corpus callosum severed, often as treatment for really bad epilepsy, or people who have suffered lesions or strokes in one hemisphere. The data is bizarre!!

People with damage to the right hemisphere lose the ability to see things holistically at all, and see ONLY parts. Not only does the left hemisphere see parts, it fragments what it sees, and whatever it doesn't see functionally does not exist as far as it's concerned! But it gets worse.

The body is cross-wired to the hemispheres, meaning everything on your left side goes directly to the right hemisphere, and vice versa. But it's a bit different with the eyes. It isn't that the left eye connects to the right hemisphere, but that the entire left half of your field of vision connects to the right hemisphere. And get this (mind-blowing!)—people suffering certain kinds of damage to the right hemisphere, such that the fields of vision are affected, can't see anything in their left-side field of vision at all. More than that—they don't think anything exists there at all!! And they make up confabulations to explain this away.

A right-hemisphere stroke can cause paralysis of the left side of the body, while at the same time severely inhibiting right-hemisphere (holistic) functioning. Many people in this condition report that there's nothing wrong with their paralyzed side, that it's working perfectly well, and if asked to do something with their left hand, they'll do it with the right and believe they used the left. This is so strange—their thinking is normal for the most part, they're able to carry on perfectly lucid conversations, but some of them believe something really bizarre has happened to their left half. Like it was sawed off and stolen by somebody. Or it's been replaced with wooden planks that don't move. It doesn't affect perception, but cognition concerning the perception. It affects the way they think at a very basic level, and they're totally unaware of it.

When asked to draw something symmetrical, like a clock face, they draw the right half of a circle and put all the numbers in that half, or only put in the numbers that belong in that half.

And some of them, with more severe damage to the right hemisphere, imagine their bodies are dead or inanimate, and being fragmented constantly. They see bodies as collections of body parts, and they don't see them as being connected together or functioning as a whole.

No such problems occur with left-hemisphere damage. The right hemisphere is able to do its own work and fairly well approximate the work of the left hemisphere, but the left can only do its own work. One very striking statement he made was that the left hemisphere is the predator brain, and the right is the prey brain. It makes sense—a predator needs a laser focus on fleeing prey and needs to dehumanize (de-animalize?) it in order to do its work, while a prey animal needs to be able to scan the entire surroundings (holistic) and detect any movement (predator).

And finally, when the right hemisphere is out of commission, the person has absolutely no empathy or sense of connection with other people. All that humanity is contained entirely in the right hemisphere.

More and more I'm thinking of the left as the materialist hemisphere, the dissecting hemisphere, and the right as the religious/spiritual hemisphere.

Oh, well this makes sense! I was re-thinking the idea that he's only a psychiatrist, judging from his extensive knowledge concerning the brain, and it turns out he's been working as a neuroimaging researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The right hemisphere doesn't lie, it reports things exactly as it sees them. The left hemisphere frequently lies, often to cover the embarrassing lack of information it has about the body or its missing field of vision. People with left-hemisphere damage tend to feel excellent, expansive, and be in very good spirits, while people with right-hemisphere damage tend toward depression, aggression and irritability, and make up unbelieveable stories that they expect people to believe, in order to cover for their inability to do the right-hemisphere work.

I've posted this video before, but it perfectly illustrates many of the hemisphere differences:


I've heard many times that the left brain is essentially the ego—the self-centered, egotistical, anxious, irritable part, and the right brain is the calm, relaxed, meditative, centered part. All the research on split-brain and hemisphere-damaged patients completely backs this up. Basically it's the angel on your right shoulder and the little devil on the left.

Only the right brain is capable of seeing in depth—both depth of visual field and emotional depth. The left brain sees things as totally flat. People with right-hemisphere damage, even if fully trained as artists, are incapable of drawing in perspective. In fact their attempts end up looking very cubist or futurist. One way of deepening your connection to the right hemisphere is to draw in perspective a lot and paint. It's also only the right brain that can really see well in color.

For these and several other reasons, the left brain tends to see the world and everything in it as a flat image, in fact really more like a schematic diagram. It really doesn't see what's there, but creates flat simplified images to represent what's there. It's thought (possibly only by me) this explains why many scientists, intellectuals and other people who don't have good visual imagination skills (right-brain), will so easily believe that we live in a hologram or an illusion. If you're predominantly left-brained, the world appears to be an illusion with no depth, and nothing in it feels real to you. They tend to feel disconnected from reality and from other people. To a large extent anyway—of course normally we use both hemispheres, though each of us leans harder toward one or the other. And I suspect we tend to favor one or the other for different tasks too. It's definitely possible to shift from one to the other, such as when meditating. When you shut off the words in your head you're shutting down much of the left-brain activity and allowing the right brain to become more active. When you think strictly in words you're doing the opposite. Though you can definitely work a tight-wire act, where you let the right brain lead while engaging the language centers to write as you do so. I think it would take a lot of practice (freewriting) and be difficult to maintain, because the left brain has a tendency to want to take over control. It's tyrannical and exploitative, whereas the right is mellow and kind and benevolent.

Here's a video that nicely presents some of what I've been talking about:

Christ of the Cubicles

Wow!! I found it!! Well, sort of. Christ of the Cubicles is a stopmotion short I saw years ago and have never been able to find since, but I made a concerted effort and discovered this on IMDB:



Just a :47 clip. But it's enough to prove it was real, I actually saw it, and it exists. Made by Brad Schaffer, who apparently made actual television shows, including the Venture Bros. Not sure, but I think he did a special stopmotion segment of it or something.

That's actually some pretty intense cinematography for a stopmotion film. They made a ceiling, with lights in it!! Just so they could do a low-angle shot. As a stopmotion animator I understand how much attention to detail (and just plain work) that really entails.

Since this blog serves largely as my online journal where I sometimes just record my thoughts and musings, I decided to put it here.

I haven't been able to find anything else about it yet.

I'm reading through the Look Inside for McGilchrist's first book The Master and His Emissary.

It's becoming clear that much of the pop wisdom concerning the right/left hemisphere dichotomy is very wrong, including much of what I've always said about it. Both hemispheres for instance are deeply involved in language and imagery, though certain aspects of both are specialized into each hemisphere. Many of the earlier ideas have been debunked, but the science has continued. It's just fallen out of popular sight because it's gotten really complicated and nuanced. Not the kind of stuff that makes for simple water cooler talk.

McGilchrist seems to have made this his life's work, deeply studying and presenting this information. He also writes a LOT. A REAL lot. He seems to like to write in circles, going round and round every aspect of what he's going to present several times, then presenting it, and then telling you what he's presented. A few times. But hey, repetition is how we learn, and this stuff is not easy to remember (some of it).

It's actually a lot more fascinating, to me anyway, than the older ideas, which always felt so shallow and simple. But that's probably because I got them from simple sources rather than from books going into great depth. I'm actually glad of that, because now that I am going into depth I have the right book for it. And McGilchrist seems to be the right teacher.

It's a bit painful at times to discover some of my favorite ideas around this topic are wrong, but learning the real science is fascinating.

A great talk with Iain McGilchrist where he boils down his work quite succinctly (he has a tendency to take far too long to say things if allowed to):



The way he explains how he came up with the name for his first book—The Master and his Emissary—reminds me of the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge—a minor usurper god who took over the throne of the creator god and came to believe he actually was the creator. They were obviously having some insight into the left hemisphere with that one!

Another great video, brief and to the point. McGilchrist explaining the differences in brain hemispheres and what we got wrong about them in the 70's:

And this largely explains what I've tried to put my finger on many times that made the 60's and 70's so much better than the decades since—we were much more in touch with the right hemisphere then. More intuitive, more creative and loving. I can see the shift in the music and movies, the TV shows, and the art. People were far more tolerant then politically (and tolerance is one of the hallmarlks of the right hemisphere). Today everything has become black and white binaries with no middle ground. That's a hallmark of the left hemisphere.