2012 and the Right Brain, Left Brain feud
7-K’an
The 2012 message needs to be understood in the context of… the relationship between ego and the divine self. This is from John Major Jenkins, in an essay called ‘The Origins of the 2012 Revelation.’ The tension between the ego and the divine self has been with us from the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve and the fall from grace has been described as a loss of innocence archetype, and a metaphor for the defeat of the divine self by the ego.
To say that the ego is from the left brain and the divine self is experienced in the right brain is a huge oversimplification. The left and right brain are in constant communication. It is true, however, that for the vast majority of us, the language centers live in the left brain, and that includes the voice in our head that we associate with the “I,” the constant monologue that keeps reminding us that we are who we think we are. This ‘I-thought’ is the ego, and is so dominant that people can be born, live and die seemingly not suspecting there is more to our minds than this nagging, sometimes petty, tip of the iceberg.
John Major Jenkins reminds us of Aldous Huxley’s book ‘The song of God, the Bhagavad-Gita,’ and his rules of religion: human beings contain two selves, the limited ego-self… and the divine self, over-identification with ego gives rise to a forgetting of the divine self, and the divine self cannot be conceived of or understood by the rational intellect, but it can be directly experienced.
Mystics of every tradition have attempted to silence the ego and step out of its illusion of time and separation to experience the divine. Theresa of Avila, writing in the sixteenth century, described her ego voice: the noises in my head are so loud that I am beginning to wonder what is going on in it… My head sounds just as if it were full of brimming rivers.’ Benedictine monk Laurence Freeman, Director of the World Community of Christian Meditation, calls says “our usual mental state is like a tree full of chattering monkeys.” He goes on to state “the great problem in prayer is the complex and distracted mind… Meditation makes us aware of how much the ego fears God.” (from L Freeman, Jesus: the teacher within).
The shared experience has been that there is a part of our brain that experiences the physical world and defines us as separate and isolated entities and a part that experiences the divine, one with a flow of divine energy, and in the development of our culture, and perhaps our species, the dominance of the ego has won out. However, in the crowded and exploited and polluted world we have created, the very beings we evolved to be, and the product of natural selection in an earlier world, are now our own worst enemies. We have been bred to put our own survival over everything else, even the survival of the planet.
There is a book I recommend to everyone called ‘Stroke of Insight,’ and written by a PhD neuroanatomist named Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. As a young scientist, Dr Taylor experienced a sudden hemorrhage and catastrophic stroke that closed down the entire left half of her brain. After nearly a decade of rehabilitation, she was able to write about the experience. She was in a liminal space, caught between an awareness that she was seriously, perhaps mortally ill, and not wanting to let go of the experience of the divine she had plunged into.
‘Via our left hemisphere language center, out mind speaks to us constantly, a phenomenon I refer to as “brain chatter,’ writes Dr. Taylor. ‘One of the jobs of the left hemisphere language center is to define our self by saying “I am”… Our left brain manifests the concept of time whereby our moments are divided into past, present and future… There are cells in our left hemisphere’s orientation association area that define the boundaries of our body, where we begin and where we end, (but) the present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one. Life and death occur in the present moment. The experience of joy happens in the present moment. Our perception and experience of connection with something greater than ourselves occurs in the present moment. To our right mind, the moment of now is timeless and abundant.’
The following passages which I have knitted together I consider a found poem. They are from Dr. Taylor’s book, a memory of that place where she waited, unable to speak or understand speech, unable to make sense of objects she saw, unable to stand or walk, and unable to recall details from one moment to the next. It is worth reading all of this. It is in no particular order, as it was composed in a place outside of linear time.
“I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace… My consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a being at one with the universe… The brain chatter was delightfully silent… I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle… It felt like the good road home and I liked it… I could no longer discern the physical boundaries of where I began and where I ended… I sensed the composition of my being as that of a fluid rather than that of a solid… In that moment I knew ‘my gosh, I’m having a stroke!’… In the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, ‘wow, this is so cool!’… This body functioned like a portal through which the energy of who I am can be beamed into a three-dimensional external space… This cellular mass of my body had provided me with a marvelous temporary home… I wondered how I could have spent so many years in this body and never really understand that I was just visiting here… Every moment seemed to exist in perfect isolation… I was completely entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience… A piece of me yearned to be released completely from the captivity of this physical form… I found myself floating from isolated moment to isolated moment… I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain… I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive… I understood that I am a fluid… My soul was as big as the universe… I was in the flow… It was impossible for me to distinguish the physical boundaries between objects because everything radiated with similar energy… An unforgettable sense of peace pervaded my entire being… For all those years, I really had been a figment of my own imagination!”
And so here we are, reading virtual characters of a computer screen, each in a world we have created, figments of our amazing imaginations. More than four hundred years ago, Theresa of Avila wrote ‘years ago I came to understand that thought (or, to put it more clearly, imagination) is not the same thing as understanding… the important thing is not to think much, but to love much.’
In the tradition of the mystic Theresa, the monk Laurence Freeman teaches meditation as a way of quieting the ego so that the right brain can be experienced: “the stillness of the present moment is the only moment where knowing God is possible… Meditation is the process of coming home to the here and now.” True medication of this sort is a lifestyle and discipline, often involving an hour or more each day for decades.
Native peoples have used sacred drugs to facilitate their vision quests and shamanistic access to the divine. The Johns Hopkins University has recently been researching psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms.’ Mushroom stones have been found in Mayan temples and Aztec tombs. The Aztec (Náhuatl) name for the psilocybin mushroom was a conjunction of the words ‘god’ and ‘mushroom,’ literally, the divine mushroom. In his essay ‘The Origins of the 2012 Revelation, John Major Jenkins says “sacred plants (are) a temporary circumvention of the control systems of ego.”
Johns Hopkins researchers report that “the active agent in sacred mushrooms can induce mystical experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.” Researchers in Switzerland have compared PET scanning, a measure of glucose metabolism and brain activity, in newly diagnosed and hallucinating schizophrenics and persons ingesting psilocybin. The schizophrenics exhibit ‘hyperfrontality,’ increased metabolism in the frontal brain, and psilocybin also induces hyperfrontality, but ONLY on the right side.
Another way to unhook the ego from an experiential state is to look at the experience of dreams. This is not true of every dream or most dreams, of course. The possessions of the ego mind, our fear, desire, envy and anxiety, often fill our dreams, but dreams can be pulled from a deeper well. When creative artists use their dream images to access the ‘subconscious,’ they are describing a place beyond linear time where we are connected to a greater reality.
The next Mayan age will come just as surely as the next Gregorian year. Just as we said in an earlier essay that the end of our destructive duality would not be the death of the Jungian shadow, it is equally true that any better life we are hoping for will not follow the death of the ego self. I am writing this on the day 7-K’an. The K’an nahual is K’uk’ulkan, the feathered serpent, creator of the universe. This therefore is a day for planning, planning with compassion. The very act of planning implies a time line. The act of harvesting seed and planning another crop is a function of the left brain.
If we do survive as a people, however, it will require a sacrifice of ego. For the shadow-self, the end of duality involved bringing shadow into the light, and embracing it. For the left brain ego-self, it involves giving up control. It involves a poverty of the possessions of the mind that weigh us down and burden our spirits, and keep us isolated in our ego illusions. When Jesus said ‘blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he was pointing us there. In his day, this was a radical option. In our day, there are simply too many of us to continue living as though the ego’s “I” is the only priority, and still survive.