My neuroscience knowledge is limited to Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary, so I known enough to know it's a very complex issue, and while I agree with the left/right dichotomy, I'm loathe to rest too much on the theory, for the same reason I'm loathe to assume too much a spiritual view of Quantum Mechanics – I simply don't know enough.
I'm listening to McGilchrist now, on
YouTube – but already I've picked up on the right brain more attuned to the sense of humour, poetry, fables, narratives and rituals – or rather the interiority of such communicative forms – and we've become focussed on the exterior and superficial form of the thing ...
Jumping ahead, he speaks of 'embodiedness' (a right brain thing) and that is entirely my theology – that in Christ we have the embodiment of the Divine, and I read Scripture through that lens – the union of spirit and nature, the unity of spirit and nature, as it was originally intended.
I might argue then that the Fall (Genesis 3) perfectly sums up the emergence of the Left Hand Sphere, and furthermore the temptation that Eve underwent: "And the woman saw that the (fruit of) tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold" (Genesis 3:6) is exactly what the Left does – it sees surface and superficial, but fails to comprehend the depth, the meaning, of the act?
Exactly.
I see this as the root of the 'new atheism'.
I do wonder if perhaps the Ancients were more balanced than we are today – that the physical world was more permeable to them than to us, as if they saw the particle, but simultaneously sensed the wave pattern ... but this is probably my romance of the past ...
I'd agree – I rather think gnosis is more about 'being' than 'knowing'. In the highest realms of gnosis, there's nothing to know, there is no object of knowledge ... it's being in the flow, not facing the fact (a rather advaita comment, I think!)
although I think the Ancients had just as effective means, if perhaps not moreso ...
The non-manifesting
Logos as such, prior to its bringing into being the differentiated myriad
logoi?
D'you know Eriugena's "Fourfold Division of Nature"?
His claim is that “nature” (
natura): "the general term for all things that are and all things that are not” (I.441a), including God and creation, is divided into four species:
that which creates and is not created (ie., God);
that which creates and is created (ie., Primary Causes or Ideas);
that which is created and does not create (ie., Temporal Effects, created things);
that which is neither created nor creates (ie., non-being, nothingness, Beyond-Being).
The four are not strictly a hierarchy in the usual Neoplatonic sense of higher and lower orders, rather, the first and fourth both refer to God as the Beginning and End of all things, and the second and third may be thought to express the unity of the cause-effect relation.
The division is an attempt to show that nature is a dialectical coming together of being and non-being. Creation is normally understood as coming into being from non-being. God as creator is then a kind of transcendent non-being above the being of creation... Its discussion runs into five volumes.
absolutely. "And Mary said: My soul doth magnify the Lord" (Luke 1:46) – there is a classical Catholic theory that Mary's God-bearing is an embodied archetype of the union of spirit and matter ... whether we amplify the coherence, or whether the underpinning coherence becomes more visible is possibly a matter of semantics.
Illuminate all of nature, you mean, and not just the intellect/soul ... I absolutely bloomin' think so!
So do I.
Pax vobiscum.
