Right Brain Vs. Left Brain: The Vertical and the Horizontal

Occultists and mystics know much about the metaphysical significance of the 'image', but very little about the nature of the actual dialectic.

Conversely, relational psychoanalysts, self-psychologists and the field of interpersonal neurobiology, knows a great deal about the actual nature of the emergence of the self, but very little about the metaphysical nature of the 'image' that organizes perception, cognition, affect and experience.

Two fields; two perspectives; both dealing with the mind; but one without the other is metaphysical psychosis (the former); whereas the latter, although enormously edifying, doesn't realize how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Right Brain

Your right brain is the "house" of your images. It is the "non-ego" self, the part of us which "hooks" into the natural world, reflexively picking up, or "abducting" (abduction is Peirce's term for how perception contains inferences), qualitative conditions in the environment. It is our 'higher self', in the language of new agers.

At a neuroanatomical level, the right brain wiring looks just as you would expect it to; more fibres from this hemisphere feed into the brainstem, and thus, into the body (viscera and limbs), than the left. The reason for this has to do with the image: the right brain represents the homeostasis dynamics of your biophysical self-organization; it basically converts biomolecular fluctuation into 'parameters' that "mean something"; when we feel good and relaxed, this is an expression of the body's dynamics. The opposite states convey the opposite meanings.

At the same time, exteroception, or "sensation" from vision, audition, smell, taste and touch, are strongly lateralized to the right (particularly vision). Perception immediately activates feelings, which means that feelings states are a sort of 'summation' of the meanings associated with external facts, plus how your body is doing in the moment in its biodynamical processing.

The right hemisphere, in other words, is the "house": it is the world you "live in". It makes you what you are - that is, it presents, or represents, the interactions of your existence from conception to the present. It is the ecology of your relations.

Left Brain

The left brain, conversely, is heavily biased for language - both in receiving and processing it (wernickes area) as well as generating it (brocas area). Some overly dogmatic neurosciences can't seem to accept the inherent complementarity in nature, and so fail to appreciate how fundamental language is to the processing of feelings: the image, or the "whole", needs to be processed serially, linearly, in the limited containers of words and language.

The left brain connects outward at an explicit level: it is able to 'highlight' something with the gaze of its attention; and by highlighting an object, it possesses the wherewithal to extend the range of its consciousness, primarily through the intersubjective experiences of communicating and experiencing the feedback of other people.

The Vertical

On a spiritual level, the right brain is correlated with the concept of the 'vertical'. People who dabble in occultism are more or less interested in manipulating the 'images', or in the language of the Jungian anthroplogist Warren Colman, "omnitypes" (not archetypes i.e. they don't precede the evolution of the universe) which are associated with the intersubjective realities we co-construct with one another.

These images, because they are representations of "wholes" - the sensate, affective, and cognitive realities we engender - constitute the 'attractor' which organizes our actual biophysical functioning. Attractors are the 'summation', the "whole which is bigger than the parts", which manages to make sense of what is in fact a massively complex biomolecular jungle.

Since our observer awareness derives from the "origin" of things, people who 'dissociate' from their bodies (via trauma of some sort) are able to semiotically differentiate the "object" from the "observing", and so, come to achieve a state of perception conducive to magical practices.

Magical practice, as I have written before, is basically an expression of a point-counterpoint, or 'yin-yang' dynamic (and it is nothing more than this).

Emergence has led to a point where the 'organism' can now act upon its own structuring, not merely in its head - but - when the concept of the world as "self" becomes semiotically clear: the world as well becomes an extension of self. Cool, eh?

The Horizontal

Yet, the truth is, there is no "platonic forms". Plato assumed quite falsely that you could extricate an object from the series of relations it has with other external objects, or in other words, he imagined you could have a "separate" object with an ideal, mental existence.

This is not a coherent claim nor a plausible representation of how brains and minds self-organize as they do.

The horizontal correlates with the left hemisphere, and so, the 'functions and capacities' of an individual self are entirely a function of the body; or rather, being a self with capacities for regulation of self-experience seems to be a matter of having a body, being an individual, with a brain that is able to "make coherent" its experiences via the actual intersubjective connections it has with others.

Capacities for regulation of self-experience, in other words, seem to exist only in the form of being 'embodied' - that is, having an actual brain.

Doctor Strange

I can't quite say what the intention of the writers of the blockbuster movie Doctor Strange was, but I suspect, like me, they doubt whether 'the astral body' actually exists in any other way but as a potentiality of embodied existence.

The quark becomes the proton; the proton the atom; the atom the molecule; the molecule - now under way more complex conditions - becomes the cell; the cell becomes the slime mold; the slime mold, as the first "organism", evolves into an arthropod, which, overtime, develops a proto-social awareness, as fish, as amphibians, as reptiles, until, at a higher level, the myelinated neuron emerges, so that little mammals scurrying around under the feet of dinosaurs can 'warm' one another: the fear of the "big dinosaur" becomes the motivation for being fast; being fast means heat loss, which means the need to "share warmth" with conspecifics.

You can see where this dynamic ultimately leads. Warmth, care, and in humans, the concept of love.

This love provides the means for even higher attainments, many of which are well known, "siddhis", but ultimately, it expresses a function intrinsic to the human's functioning.

Love makes consciousness. Conscious = love. Without love, no consciousness, and so, no capacities for self-regulation.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Was there meant to be a link?

a reply to: liveandlearn

He just poops out threads he never responds to any posts.

Oh really?
Says who?

a reply to: Astrocyte

So very eloquent and concise in your explanations. You described some very complex concepts in ways that engaged both my right brain and left brain in such a way as to give me an intuitive understanding of what you were saying as well as a cognitive understanding. Thank you and well done.

So are the images in your brain(which likes the concept boundless) the logos?

Is there any truth to this other than the process itself.. like are things just reactions of things.. or is there a center in the brain for freewill?

You mentioned the occult.. is thier specific spots in the brain for magic?

What about enhancing drugs?

a reply to: Boundless1

The prefix ln the word "psychoactive" could be a clue .. ?

Brains, who needs em. Egyptian mummies didn't.

The brain is the false king, setting his thrown above the true king.

Yes but there fore to have a brain would be a challenge in open mindedness!

There is an illusion that rotates differently whether you visualize it from above or below.
May have an apriori gender bias.