By Way of Introduction
W.B. Yeats in the first song of the "Two Songs from a Play" abruptly summarizes the plight of human action, the scholar's included:
Dionysus, as you will remember, was the "twice born" son of Zeus. As Zagreus, born of Zeus and Persephone, he became his father's favorite and placed above all the gods of Olympus. The Titans envied him and planned his death. They waited for one of Zeus' absences and under the pretense of bringing gifts to the divine child, they entered Olympus disguised as ghosts, their faces painted white. Among the gifts offered to Zagreus was a mirror. The child fell for it and, at the moment of his fascination with the forms appearing therein, the Titans attacked him. Zagreus tried to escape by hiding under those forms, first a lion, then a tiger, a horse, a snake and finally a bull. By the time Zeus returned, the child was dead. Angry, he pulverized the Titans with his thunderbolt. From those ashes humans were born, but also Athena found the still- beating heart of Zagreus. Zeus took the heart, ground it up, put it in a drink, and gave it to mortal Semele to drink. Of this union Dionysus, the " twice born", the god born of the heart, the son of god, the god of death and resurrection, the child-god, the one that enters into Heaven ( Matthew l8, l-6), came into being. But the Titans came back and buried this heart under layers and layers of ethical simulacra. Who can rescue the original, beating, individual, immortal heart?
In trying to frame a context for human acting after the year 2000 a host of questions arise in view of the literature of the past, and the human desensitization of the present. Let's try some. Given the fact that Christianity, for example, the greatest propagandist of our current ethics, took literally from earlier literatures the god of death and resurrection, the immortal human-divine god of the heart, why did it not take from these earlier cultures also the literature of the heart as real but took it instead as a mere metaphor? And does it make sense that when the Jesus of Christianity is grafted to the mind set that invented the ethics of the head He had to be given a genealogy that in order to be legitimate had to link historically, in an uninterrupted line of sperm transmission, to another human, like David, or a God, like Yahweh? ( Was Yahweh the father of Jesus? And is this also the reason why in Christianity women were relegated because they have no soul- sperm?) And why did our head-ethics claim an original and exclusive Revelation in proclaiming the Ten Commandments as the fountainhead of our ethics when in fact these commandments are the creative summary of the earlier Law Code of Hammurabi, c. 1792-1750 B.C.? (Is there a connection between our ways of thinking and the ethics we proclaim as revelation?) And if we were borrowing from the mythic past why did we not go a lot earlier, to around 3.000 B.C. to the Egyptian Pantheon and borrow the 42 declarations, negative confessions, of an Egyptian weighing his/her heart against the feather of truth of Maat:
Compare again these heart confessions to the goddess Maat to those vengeful commands of the patriarchal gods of later on, like Deuteronomy 28:15-68. In view of the unethical behavior in history of the followers of the ethics of the head, in view also of the fact that our traditional ethics do not hold our human behavior in synchronicity with others or within ourselves, isn't it time to look at least once at the possible ethics of the heart? Isn't it the heart, love, the origin we claim, of our Religions, our families? There are, also, other more important questions we could be asking. What does this mythic heart have that it becomes the origin of the gods, from the Indic Rig Veda to Plato, the fire-pit (zagra) from where gods are born, the chamber where humans find again immortality, once they are reborn? And why, if the heart is the only door to immortality, of the path of the gods, do we, so often, choose the path of the fathers, as the Rig Veda chants, of the spiral of descent through that other door through which we chase form after form as we see them in the mirror of the mind-head? Is life a debate about which is the best play, or a reenactment of gods in death in the ground-up center of our own heart and head? Which is the story the writer tells, the story of the heart or of the head? But is the story of the heart real, or a is it just a simple, sentimental tale? Can the head tell the story of the heart without a heart? Where shall we go for help, outside, inside?
Our Present Predicament
It is not sufficient to realize that in our effort to disseminate head-ethics the center does not hold. The next step is to look for those responsible and blame some one. The strategy to be followed is to start with the realization that "ethics" is a mind set and that any solutions to our present predicament is to correct, enlarge, balance this mind set rather than blame any particular person or institution.
When we talk of Ethics our language and our habits of mind lead us directly to the Medievals first, Aristotle second.
For the Medievals Ethics --using the Mirror of Nature-- was a norm established a priori on the individual. This norm was a selection of universals imposed on individual behavior previous to their own birth and action as humans. Do not do this, do not do that, and if you do, you are no good. The Medievals claimed these laws of behavior had a foundation in the things themselves, that they were abstracted from things, or Nature. However, recent developments in neurobiology show clearly that with rare exception the left hemisphere of the neocortex -- our so called rational faculty-- has no direct access to things, the world. The left hemisphere of the neocortex --our propositional language center-- has access only to itself or to the right hemisphere of the neocortex. It has also established that it is not even a faculty, but a simple instrument of translation elevated to the category of kingship by the other inhabitant of that left region of the neocortex, the "interpreter module." This minute center of cortical activity is the center of rationalizations for anything we want. Name it, and the interpreter module will find a reason, any reason, to accept, reject, or elevate it to the realm of kingship over the other intelligence centers of our brain. Being blunt, no human ethics, can be based on the dictates of the left hemisphere of the neocortex. It is not only not ethical to do so -- after all this brain does not develop till after the age of seven in humans-- but it is not even rational and worse of all given its birth, its location, and its justification, this brain, this intelligence center, is so covered by layers and layers of ideology that it is impossible to bring out clearly the pure, uncontaminated ethical act. On this Aristotle was right. The field of head-ethics is the political. To try to act ethically in a political world makes it impossible to even clarify the ethical act given the massification of action that politics has in mind when taking control of a population.
When we move to the moderns our help from Philosophy is as limited as it was before.
Descartes' neurophysiological error ( Damasio l994) of presupposing one mind,
one brain, in humans has led the global thinkers to cover the global village
with one universal metaphorical blanket: global ethics. For these policy makers
humans are defined by ethics, personal, social, global. BUT THESE ETHICS ARE
ONLY OF THE HEAD: HEAD- ETHICS, as described above. You behave as the latest
written rules demand. Ethics is a movable feast. And if humans
dare to question this premise it is already too late. The ethical standard becomes
the political standard in the already printed word, as a code of ethics or of
legal behavior. The distinction between head-ethics and legality blurs the closer
one comes to examine the actual human behavior of citizens. Political correctness
takes care of the massification of the gaps. Ethics has become epistemology,
a way of knowing and acting in every particular context without doubts. (My
students used to say with academic pride that " ethics has become the epistemology
of the stupid"). However, these are ethics one must learn from the outside.
And if not, one becomes disenfranchised, isolated, marginal or defiant, violent,
territorial, desensitized.
When I caught ten students, out of a class of three hundred and fifty, plagiarizing the final paper, and rewarded them with an F, two of them came to me to make their case. I should reconsider their grade for, while the other eight plagiarized the same paper by photostating it, they had taken the trouble to plagiarize it copying it by long hand, and this effort deserved a higher grade. Ethics had suddenly become legalism. Was this a symptom or the disease? Where did we go wrong? Let's go back to the beginning.
From the Gods of the amygdala to the God of the Heart
By which criteria does a man, a woman, behave in the world? How does a man,
a woman, stand on free, solid land to perform free, not conditioned acts? What
came first, Ethics or chaos? The intelligence centers of the right hemisphere
or those of the left? Several brains or one? Reason or heart? Is ethics, philosophy,
human action possible without a heart?
Contemporary discoveries in perceptual psychology (d'Aquili 1979), brain-chemistry
Berlyne,l973), brain evolution(Laughin Jr. l974),brain development ( Routtenberg
l980), ethology, cultural anthropology, the work of MacLean on the structure
of the brains (l986), the work of Gazzaniga (l978) on the role of the "interpreter
module", have become the foundations of a new paradigm ( See Appendix 1)
on human cortical information processing, called by its discoverer, Dr. M. Colavito
( l995), " the biocultural paradigm", that sheds new light on the
metaphorical use of brain and mind by Descartes and subsequent philosophers
and social scientists and should shine an even brighter light on the ground
of ethics and human acting, not to mention on understanding the accuracy of
the Wisdom Literature of India and our own founding cultures of Greece in pointing
out and solving the same problem.
This new paradigm shows that biology ( Nature) and culture (Nurture) act on
one another as the conditioning parameters of neuro-cultural in-formation. Through
mutual interaction biology in humans becomes bio-culture and viceversa, culture
becomes hard wired biology as culture opens and stimulates the neural passages
of the brains, accounting thus for the varieties of brains in humans and also
for cultural diversity. Culture conditions and stimulates biology, while biology
conditions and makes culture possible. Cultures and brains may be distinguished
from one another through identification with certain functions or combination
of functions that are exercised habitually, or become neural hard-wire through
repetition, or habit. Our habits are literally habits of mind, depending on
which brain, intelligence center, has been formed or is activated by them. However,
the single fact that is most important for any consideration of ethics is the
fact that our human neural-cultural activity begins with us even earlier than
birth with the development of the reptilian brain, to be followed immediately
by the development and formation of the limbic brain and only later by the right
neo-cortex. These developments coincide with the three brains of the right hemisphere
and their primary criteria for identification: reptilian-kinesthetic, limbic-
auditory, right neocortex-visual, or as Dr. Colavito calls them: the maia, mythos,
right-brain mimetic types. Up to this stage of our human development, namely
up to the age of eleven, the brain and the faculty by which we create reason
and ethics of the type we have come to know today, has not yet appeared in the
human brain. Yet, by this stage of development, if the child has been properly
exercised he/she is already kinesthetically, limbically-affective, and visually-imagisticaly
linked to the whole of creation, divine, social and individual. The child, if
his/her brains are developed through exercise, familial or social, is already
ethically linked to him/herself, and the world; the child acts, has likes and
dislikes, makes decisions. It is only by age eleven, when these other links
are already in place, that the two brains of the left neo-cortex open up: the
left-brain mimetic brain, translating the right hemisphere's input into symbolic
language, or into the digital, logomaquic world of names and recognition of
such, introduced in the species through writing, and identified as the "interpreter
module," or, as Dr. Colavito calls them, the left brain mimetic and the
logos phase types. These five brains, five intelligence centers, maia, mythos,
right-brain mimetic, left-brain mimetic and logos form five invariant epistemologies
on which all human acting and human knowing is based.
There are two other elements in the formulation of the paradigm that are of
the utmost importance for understanding our thesis. One is the intelligence
system of the heart, the main intelligence system within the mythos- type bioculture,
and the other the amygdala, the most powerful element in the maia-type bioculture.
It is in the amygdala that we find all the memories of the new born for the
fist three years of his /her life with the added corollary that it is only by
the age of three that the hippocampus, the sit of conscious memories in each
one of us, opens and begins to form, but this conscious seat of memory does
not have access to the memories and life of the amygdala previous to its own
formation. Only the heart with its powerful electromagnetic force can correct
this blind spot, these previous lives, this conditioning of the mother, these
fears of other peoples' lives, this terror of our own face before we were born
(in our own consciousness), this fear of the vengeful gods that are waiting
to destroy us. (Carter, Rita l998)
In short, the ethics of reason we live under, based on a child that becomes
a reasonable human at the age of seven is, in its own formulation, already unethical.
It superimposes a shadow of theory on an ethical reality already in existence.
This theoretical ethics is not imposed on a depraved world, or on ourselves
with no idea of what is right or wrong, but rather, it is imposed as a program
of ethics on the world and ourselves on the false assumption that the criteria
by which we previously judged, interacted, loved, hated, did right, avoided
wrong, etc. are false and we should learn new ones. These new ones being not
only of a different kind to those we were accustomed to, but demand that we
cancel those we previously had and adopt the new ones, even if this means that
we become invisible, as individuals, to ourselves and others. We are now ciphers
of a theoretical world where only ciphers live. We have ethics, but we have
lost our heart and thus our individual selves.
Recent neurobiological experiments show clearly that what determines a human
life is the beating of the heart, separating in this manner a mass of living
cells from dead ones, defining thus a human life. Where a heart beats, a human
is already alive. And this heart has already an intelligence system all its
own, 45 to 60 times more powerful than the neocortex and what we call the rational
faculties. The heart, has been shown, contains its own nervous system and nerve
ganglia that process information and send it to the neocortex. It is a hormonal
gland producing its own neurotransmitters, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine,
the catechlomines, which affect the kidneys, the adrenal gland, the circulatory
system and the neocortex. The heart generates from 45 to 60 times more amplitude
electrically that what we call the brain, plus the emotions alter the heart's
electrical field. Electricity emanating from the heart of person A can be detected
and measured in the brain waves of persons near or touching person A. Cellular
memory resides in the heart cells, as has been seen in transplant cases. DNA
can be altered in the hands of a person practicing head/heart "entrainment"
or what we call yoga or meditation (Heartmath.com). These recent discoveries
in neurobiology are only confirmation that the sages of old, The Wisdom Literature,
India's in particular, was right, in neurobiological modern terms, in proclaimed
the heart as our primary guide for action. This same Literature knew of the
ways of the amygdala, that we, each one of us, is the victim of memories stored
in the amygdala that do not belong to us and to which we have no access. That
is why Buddhism was born, and the ancients talked of the laws of karma,
of reincarnation, of life regression, of the link between the heart and the
amygdala, for it is only the heart that if entrained can liberate us from the
conditioning of fear of the gods of the amygdala.
Why did humanity step back into the ethics of the neocortex when we were so
close to liberating our selves from the panic of the amygdala? The discovery
of a new brain and its technologies took over .We formed religion based on this
new technology. Where entrainment of the heart was the aim of all education,
the new technologies of the left neocortex introduced in the species the split
of the mind/mind, and also the mind-body split, right brain- left brain, and
thus they bypassed the heart intelligence and behaved with all the immaturity
of a new born, proclaiming this new technology as the supreme brain with the
power of control and dominance over the rest (Colavito, l995). It is no accident
that the first code of head- ethics dispensed on humans came by the hand of
those who discovered and introduced writing and the left brain, who proclaimed
external gods, and who started their laws by the denials of the world already
existing: " Do not do this!, Do not do that!" It must have been an
extraordinary epiphany when those who introduced into the species the technologies
of the left brain discovered its operation. We are still intoxicated by the
power of its abstractions. We were so intoxicated that in its name we annihilated
most of the environment and each other to the point that we proposed to remedy
the situation by becoming ethical.
It is, however, true that not all our brains develop equally in all of us and that even in us we are not always in love with the surrounding environment or ourselves. Thus, on occasion we forget our hearts, or our hearts are silent. Therefore, we need rational ethics. Not as a substitution for the heart, but only for those moments when the heart is not functioning, or asleep, or simply silent. But the ethics we formulate cannot be theoretical, that is following mathematical models that in no way include the human, biological element. We need a model based in bio-cultures, the family being the largest unit of abstraction, taking into account human bio-cultural interconnections. In other words, our models must be grounded in the concreteness of our bio-cultures and must include human bio-cultures. But then, again, in order to accomplish this we must forget the intoxication of theorizing and bring thought back again to "experience", human or divine. For after all, the gods of the amygdala are blind, the left brain has access only to the right hemisphere and to its own substitution systems, not to the world, or the God of the heart, as neuroscience has confirmed. Why sustain the fear of the gods of the amygdala? And why sustain those gods, give them life, with fear?
The Wisdom Literature
The Classical texts of Asia, India's in particular, the Wisdom Literature, composed
at a time when the humanity that composed those texts gave primacy to experience
over reading, had not yet developed the faculty and technologies of the left
hemisphere of the neocortex, that is the faculty of reason as we know it since
the seventeenth century, and who knew the Sanskrit manas, the mind, as
one more of the senses, shared with modern science the knowledge of how the
brains worked, though not the language of laboratory experimentation by which
they came to the same result. It is only when the texts of ancient Asia, India
in particular, were written down that the interference of the left brain became
visible. External gods, like Indra, are introduced, ritualism and priesthood
freeze the moving world of Rita and external laws substitute for the inner laws
of love and charity. In fact, the texts at our disposal show clearly that they
were composed by the first primary brains of the right hemisphere: the Rig Veda
(2.500 B.C.) being kinesthetic-auditory, the Upanishad, auditory-limbic, the
Gita and Early Buddhism, mythos- right-brain mimetic-visual. It is only with
the arrival of the Sutras or commentaries that the left brain makes its appearance,
and even then the left brain is used with a corrective capable of leading it
back to experience. One clear example is the Indian great philosopher Sankara
( A.D.788-820).
For Sankara Reality is One, indivisible, unknowable, let's call it Brahman.
The world, since it is not one, is false. All atomic entities, like souls, bodies,
subjects, objects, are non-differentiated Brahman (the Real). As One, Bhrahman
is not knowable, but may be experienced as an intuition. It is not therefore
within the scope of philosophical inquiry but it is rather the origin and end
of all philosophical inquiry. ( It is beyond philosophy, not the philosopher).
For the wisdom Literature, philosophical inquiry, as well as for Sankara, is
concerned with the logical multiplicity of linguistic superimpositions (adyasa)
between the subject and the object. Superimposition, for Sankara, is the apparent
presentation to consciousness, by way of remembrance, of something previously
observed in some other thing or context. Thus, the subject is superimposed on
the object in such phrases as "That I am," or "This is mine,"
whereas, when we say " I suffer," or I wish," the object is superimposed
on the subject. For, according to Sankara "Reality" is non-dual, that
is, is not many, though he does not say it is One. This unity is not the object
of philosophical inquiry, but philosophical inquiry may lead to the perception
of unity in some intuitive-experience caused in the acts of philosophically
inquiring. The games we play with language today, Sankara would call them ":pragmatically
real," which means, illusory or self deceptive.
It is on this hermeneutic background that the literature of Asia must be read
and interpreted. The Upanishadic experience of I ( conscience) and the experience
of That (consciousness) are (almost) simultaneous. The Rig Vedic One
(Tad Ekam) has many names; the One and the Many follow
different paths. There are over a hundred instances in the Hymns on how to travel
the path of the heart. We humans have a problem and a decision to make in every
act of perception. We may decide in favor of That-I-Am, and view the "I"
as a shadow of That, a corrective to be exercised as a life program of liberation
through the many yogas. Or we may decide in favor of the formula I-am-That,
a life long superimposition of a conceptual That on the shadow "I"
that we inflate to the size of an empty globe covering the vibrating reality
of That. The choice we inflict on ourselves has nothing to do with the world,
or God, or other humans. It is always an internal choice of inner technologies
we decide to use, most times one inner technology against the others and at
their expense. The gunas act against each other and against the wisdom
and harmonizing role of the heart.
The Mahabharata brings us, in its initial and closing chapters, face
to face with the problem we are facing today. Are we going to follow the head
or the heart, the legitimacy of sperm or that of the heart? The field of the
Kurus is where Arjuna and Krishna meet and teach/learn the path of the
many yogas to open the heart. And it is here also that the battle between Pandavas
and Kauravas takes place. What few realize is that it is in this same field
where those families of Pandavas and Kauravas were once cursed and no matter
what the outcome of the battle narrated in the Gita is, both families will be
destroyed, that is, will remain mortal. The reason for this curse was the presence
of a dog, Sarama's son, at the snake sacrifice taking place in the Kuru field.
(The Snake sacrifice was a repetition in ritual of the primacy of semen over
heart (the dog) in the continuation of the family). So, Sarama's son complains
to his mother and his mother curses the participant in the snake sacrifice and
their descendants. While this story prefaces the Mahabharata, the end
of this same narrative has a similar twist in the scene where Yudhisthira is
about to enter into heaven. When Yudhisthira was ready, according to Krishna,
to enter into heaven, the noble warrior refused to do so without bringing with
him his faithful dog. Krishna consents and Yudhisthira becomes immortal, in
his own earth-body without having to die as it had happened to the others of
his family, because he brought with him his heart, his dog. Plato would formalize
this later on by adding that only what is imprinted in the heart determines
our mortality or immortality. Little did he know then that this was literally
true.
Buddhism took a different path. It knew of the heart and the dismembering of
images as it was chanted in the Rigveda, but it also knew that the visual images
used in ritual and the forms of the culture were conditioning activities and
not conducive to nirvana-moksha, at the hands of the
priests. The priests did not realize that all life is conditioned, including
their rituals, since images are an activity of the visual neocortex, that is,
a holographic summary of the previous vibrational languages of the reptilian
and limbic brains. Furthermore Buddhism realized that the greatest conditioning
begins even before we can identify ourselves in and through memory, that is,
before the hippocampus is developed in us. Therefore, Buddhism focuses all its
attention to overcome conditioning in the life we have before we become conscious
of ourselves, that is, our life in the amygdala. Of the twelve preconditions,
or dependent origination, samsara, eight of them deal with life in the
womb: vijnana, the birth of individual life, nama-rupa, name and
form as differentiated by the khandas, perception as discreet; sad-ayatana,
formation of six sense organs; sparca, concomitant sense of individuation
in sense experience; vedana, individuated sensations; trishna,
the birth of desire; upadana, individual life in the womb; and bhava,
life as an individual feat. Then comes rebirth and life, decay, death: the wheel
of samsara grounded on the ignorance, avidya, of how our conditioned
lives work.
We have to travel through the many paths of Sufism, Pythagoras and Plato to come up with these insights again. Why did we bury them and based our religions on the conditioned and conditioning amygdala of the mother, our Holy Mother Church? Nor can Mother Church bring the Christian mystics as her witnesses, Teresa de Avila, Ignatius de Loyola, Juan de la Cruz. They were Christians, it is true, but rode the free ride of the Spirit with the Inquisition at their heels up to the eve of their canonization.
The Return to the Heart Through Yoga or Plato
The Philosophical Tradition
Whitehead might be a good lead to Plato. He said: " The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Plato, naturally, is himself a footnote to previous cultures. Thus the reader should be prepared to include as Philosophical Tradition, other earlier cultures, like Buddhism, Hinduism, the I Ching and so on. But what about Plato, does he contribute to our possible return to the practice of Philosophy in such a way that we retrieve our heart? This is exactly where Plato fits in the practice of Philosophy with his five epistemological pillars upon which his methodology stands. In the Seventh Letter Plato writes:
And which are these five steps according to Plato? : They are names, as in
the Cratylus or
The Euthydemus, definition or description, as in Charmides, Laches,
Euthryphro, Statement, Symposium, Republic, image, to make worlds visible,
as in the Timaeus, contemplation, as in the Apology, Crito,
Gorgias, Critias or the Ion, Phoedrus, Philebus, and finally equilibrium
or the use of the four classes of previous objects to arrive at the fifth, as
in The Republic, Sophist, Symposium, Laws. Or as Plato himself writes
in his Seventh Letter 344c-d:
In case we still have doubts about the Tradition, remember what Diogenes Laertius wrote repeating Phythagoras:
It is here, at this juncture of what the reader understands by reason that one must exercise caution. We inherited the name reason from the Medievals who swore they were following Aristotle who was the most famous disciple of Plato. Well, the Medievals were wrong and the Social Sciences that followed this Tradition were also wrong. Aristotle writes in his Physics, Book 11, Ch. 3:
We all know that this `why' are the four causes that constitute a substance, material, formal, efficient and final. These four causes are the epistemological bases of the universals, so important in science, in the justification of moral behavior, in the standards of the "normal" in Social Sciences. But, according to Aristotle, there are causes that do not fall within the sphere of this universal knowledge, and this is precisely the individual human:
The methodological difference between Plato's and Aristotle's followers as
to what each
understands by reason is essential to enter any discussion or any form of therapy.
And though this might appear evident, it requires pause and discrimination,
and if this is not done our talk becomes one more ideological tool. For even
according to Aristotle, those who use universals for the knowledge and therapy
of an individual human, as it happens in the Social Sciences and even in the
Humanities, are doing so by forcing the individual to fit a conceptual, universal
norm pre existing and pre dating the individual. This disqualifies ideologies
like Marxism, Theology, Psychology etc. from dealing with individual therapy
or care. And thus the need to return to Plato.
What I am suggesting here I already developed in my book Habits of Mind,
a program of education where all the brains are kept active and developing and
where decisions are based on finding a balance, a harmony, among the competing
brains. This, by the way, was the original meaning of philosophy coined by Pythagoras
and later on developed by Plato: a search for the knowledge of knowledge, based
on the knowledge of one's self. For how can I know if I do not know the subjective
biases through which I know? However, the more we talk about these things the
more we are prone to follow the path of the substitution systems created by
the left brain. Instead, what I will do now is use some examples of the Wisdom
Literature and its methods hoping to bring the reader from thought to experience,
or at least to the desire to open his/her heart.
From the Rig Veda down, the earliest texts of humans confirm that perception
is a most complex activity in humans. It can activate the hidden memories of
the amygdala, it can bring conscience and consciousness to balance in every
act of perception, it can discard the above and go for the substitution systems
of the left hemisphere, or it can resolve the whole problem by focusing on the
"I" that appears in perception. Well, modern neurobiology has confirmed
that the "I" we call ourselves, is a shadow without a substance, an
illusion, for this self, this "I", is no more, as the ancients knew,
than a delayed mechanism in the act of perception itself. We perceive holistically
with the right neocortex, first, then the left neocortex selects what to focus
on and what to reject. This is the "I" shadow sitting on perception
and it may be corrected.
Consciousness as witness is as old as the Rig Veda.
Then, suddenly, liberation:
The individual- self does not submerge with the witness- Self. They follow different paths. The individual-self wanders, lost in thoughts. The true Self is in the heart. When one is active the other is canceled out. And this insight is as well known to the Christian mystics as to the Hindu Upanishads:
The firmness of this activity is what we know as the discipline of yoga, or the modern entrainment of head and heart, or the meditation of the mystics.
Many Westerners have tried this path, yoga in the morning, yoga at night; they have found it too long, too arduous. They forget that even a god, Indra, took one hundred and one years to learn this secret at the hands of another god, Prajapati, as narrated in the Chandogya Upanishad. (Did you ever wander what was wrong with his mother?) Never mind! One can always meander into Zen. The method is gentler and directed to a different brain center.
It is not easy for us in the West to see the difference between enlightenment
or simply
an exercise in moving thought from the left brain to its origin in the right.
I used to tell this story to my students:
It was easy then to pass from " the duck in the bottle" to the story of the two monks and why my students could not understand why I would wear a tie to teach Buddhism.
On the first day of class on Buddhism a student raised his hand to ask me why was I wearing a tie to teach such a hip subject. The silence that followed this question from the rest of the class of three hundred plus made me realize the question was important to them. I promised the student then that I would give him an answer the last day of class, provided he reminded me of the question and reminded himself if the question continued to make sense to him as the course proceeded. To no one's surprise the question was raised in every class till we came to the last day. The expectation awaiting the answer seem to grow with the passage of the course. The whole class took up the question in chorus:
"Let me preface my answer with this story about two monks and a beautiful woman." I started. The students had never been so attentive. " Two Buddhist monks, one old one young, came to the banks of this river when a flood had destroyed the bridge and made it very difficult to cross. As they were getting ready to wade across, this woman, young and beautiful, approached them. "Sirs," she said, "I must cross to the other side where my family is waiting for me. Can you help me?" The old monk approached the young woman. Lifted up her skirt, held her in his arms and made his way through the muddy waters to the other side. The young monk followed them at a distance lost in his own thoughts. When the old monk arrived to the other side, put the young woman down of firm ground, bowed and continued his journey followed by the young monk. Twenty miles down the road the young monk let out a cry and stopped the old monk. " How could you do that!" he said. " What," replied the old monk. " Take that woman semi-naked in your arms and carry her across the river. You are a monk, have vows of chastity, promised never to touch a woman and now this... How could you do it, at your age?" The old monk stared at the young one, shook his head and addressed him with infinite compassion. " My young brother," he said " What did I do? I took the woman with me in my arms across the river because she had no other means of transportation and I left her there... If I left her there, why are you still carrying her in your arms?" The class seemed to understand by their nods and sighs and side commentaries. " And now," I continued " about my tie." I addressed the student who asked the question originally : " If I wear my tie and it bothers you, then..." I could not answer him. The whole class took up the chant: " why are you wearing it?"
And finally, is it not this revelation of the heart that Christ taught in the New Testament hoping to bury for ever the Old Testament's gods of the amygdala? Who can sustain an open heart in today's life and not recess to the darkness of blind fear?
Concluding Remarks
We have traveled a long journey within our own brains. Five intelligence centers
define our potential, not just one. But the key to this potential is defined
primarily by the beating of our heart and this heart is supreme in balancing
the five brains, unless we substitute its intelligence system for the less powerful
and blind left brain, plus the fears of the unreachable amygdala. Within these
options of seeing and acting we make our lives, either authentically through
the heart's intelligence system, or in authentically through the ethics of the
head-left-brain. Modern neuroscience has confirmed the options we have which
the Wisdom Literatures of India and the New Testament already voiced earlier.
We know in the heart, we are lost and groundless in the substitution systems
of the head. These basic truths, that we already knew through the studies of
earlier cultures, and of which Plato is a footnote, have been now verified by
the sacramental language of neurobiology, laboratory experimentation. And it
could not be otherwise for the left brain can only verify what is already experienced
in the right brains, either as vibrations in the reptilian, limbic brains or
images in the right brain of the neocortex. The left brain has no direct access
to the world.
Philosophers should take up this challenge, leave the Cartesian inertia, and
tread new paths in the style of Pythagoras, Plato and even Aristotle, who reminds
us in his Posterior Analytics and in the Metaphysics 11,5 that
his categories are not to be superimposed on particular humans, for they do
not apply to them. And they should read Plato's Phaedo,107d again where
he summarizes the scope of Philosophy as being an imprinting of structures on
the soul, the only thing we carry with us into eternity, if we are lucky to
enter there. And that these same structures
produce in the soul the taste of knowing, or knowing itself as we may read in
The Seventh Letter. And they should also remember that is this same Plato
who excludes Trasymachus from the conversations in the building of the Republic.
How can you analyze language if you are not aware of your own self structures
that biases the whole analysis? How can you study, describe, give language to
the world (Aristotle) if you do not know the subjective structures through which
you know, describe, give language ( Plato)? Thanks to the clear and complete
description of "biocultures" as the subjective structures of knowing
it is now possible to do philosophy with all its implications. It is a time
to make language, not to analyze it blindly, to discover its origin, not to
presuppose it. To make images, and dismember them, not to freeze them in eternal
rituals. This is a time when analysis, systematic thinking and phenomenology
should discourse together to build the city-soul, not to destroy one another.
For any effort of one group to impose itself on the others is not only cultural
imperialism but of its very nature it is un ethical. All knowledge is mediated
through subjective structures. Know thyself first, then do philosophy, or do
philosophy so you may know thyself. Thus you will not confuse or substitute
geometries for forms, images for concepts, experience for definitions. For as
Plato reminds us let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here. For it is
now, in our century when geometry (Nature) and forms (Nurture) interact and
give life one to the other; when thinking in concepts is not enough and the
philosopher is asked to think in paradigms, or at least be aware of them as
the source of his/her multiple discourses. This is the time to be a philosopher
and rescue the Virgin from the hands of priests, social scientists, New Age
gurus, and logomachic "trashers."
There is always the temptation, however, when it comes to policy making, of going to the extremes. Right brain dominant cultures would have us suppress all desire to reach liberation, nirvana:
Similarly, there are those left brain dominant cultures asking us to suppress all desire by silencing the heart and letting our lives be lit only by the neon lights of concepts and names sacrificing the flesh at the altar of ever shifting theoretical gods. We live in vain. Theories live through us at the expense of family, friends, love, memory, body and will. The answer is somewhere in between. It is up to each one of us to find the way to open the heart. We need to cultivate those technologies that open the heart in the style of the Philokalia, or Phythagoras/Plato, or the mystics, or the rishis of Ancient India, and experience knowing from the inside. Only then can we build an ethics of the heart we can all recognize, even when our hearts are deficient or lost in silence. The rest is just a matter of discipline, education and the various options of the frontal lobes.
Head Ethics, on the other hand, are not enough and no one will keep them or
feel joined to the rest of us, if the ethics of the heart are buried before
they can become alive and not given legitimacy in our society. Besides, without
the heart and the other cognitive centers of our biocultures philosophy as a
practice lacks epistemological foundation and therefore it lacks its own reason
for being. Furthermore, the repository in culture or in us of those other cognitive
centers of knowledge besides the left brain mimetic are to be found exclusively
in myth, and therefore the need to study other cultures. The "other"
is "we", "I", the individual or the community sharing the
same biocultural pilot. Meanwhile we can freely associate in exercises and pass
from one chamber of the brain to the other while celebrating our enormous human
potential for freedom. The Law of charity and love, rather than the dehumanizing
rules of external global behavior, might then be the living ground of our human
relations, down to the walls (membrane ) of every living cell in our hearts.
They are, after all, our only passport to a joyous immortality.
And for those of us disheartened by the sorry condition of the world and ready
to give up on heart ethics as a hopeless enterprise, please, look around, a
new generation of new born babies is waiting in the wings. All we need, to start
with, is one mother at a time to open the heart of that little child. Hopefully,
an educational system will follow that will allow the adolescent to open his/her
frontal lobes to be able to make rational, heart-balanced, ethical decisions
for themselves and for the rest of us.
References
1. Berlyne,D.E. and Madsen,K.B. eds.(l973) Pleasure, Reward, and Preference: Their Nature, Determinant, and Role in Behavior. Academic Press.
2. Blackemore, C. (l977) Mechanics of the Mind. Cambridge University Press.
3. Carter, Rita (l998) Mapping the Mind. Un. of California Press.
4. Colavito, Maria M. (l995) The Heresy of Oedipus and the Mind/Mind Split: A Study of the Biocultural Origins of Civilization. Lewiston,N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press.
5. Children, Doc and Martin, Howard (1999) The HeartMath Solution. Harper San Francisco.
6. Damasio, Antonio R. (l994) Descartes' Error: Emotion,Reason and the Human
Brain.
New York: G.P. Putnam' Sons.
7. d'Aquili, E.G., Laughlin Jr. C.D., and MacManus, J., eds. (l979) The
Spectrum of Ritual:
A Biogenetic Structural Analysis.Columbia University Press.
8. de Nicolas, Antonio T. (l976) Meditations Through the Rg Veda. Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
-- (1976)Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy through the Bhagavad Gita.: Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
-- (l982) "Audial and Literary Cultures." Journal of Social and Biological Structures 3:2l9-225.
--(1989-2000) Habits of Mind. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, with Edited Texts.New York: Paragon House. And iUniverse.com
(l994) The Bhagavad Gita. Introd. Trans. Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
(1998) "The Biocultural Paradigm: The Neural Connection between Science
and Mysticism." Experimental Gerontology, Vol.33, Nos. ½
, pp. 169-182. Elsevier Science Inc. New York.
9. Gazzaniga, Michael S. (l978) The Integrated Mind. N.Y. Plenum Press.
-- (l987) " Cognitive and Neurological Aspects of Hemispheric Disconnection in the Human Brain," Discussions in Neurosciences. FESN.
--(l992) Nature's Mind:The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence.New York: Basic Books.
10. MacClean, Paul )l986) "On the Evolution of the Three Mentalities of
the Brain,"
Origins of Human Aggression.Ed. Newman, G.N.Y. Human Sciences Press.
11. Olds, J,. (l977)Drives and Reinforcements: Behavioral Studies of Hypothalamic Functions. Ravens Press.
12. Pearce, Joseph Chilton (l992) Evolution's End. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
13. Uttal, William R. (l978) The Psychobiology of Mind.New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
14. Yeats, W.B.(l983) The Poems of W.B. Yeats. Macmillan Publishing Company. New York
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opinion formation, ideology, fundamentalism, agnosticism |
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* secondary biocultures (adult only)
Copyright 1999 - Dr. Maria Colavito. All Rights Reserved.
Antonio T. de Nicolas was educated in Spain, India and the United States, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University in New York. He is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Dr. de Nicolas is the author of some twenty- seven books, including Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy through the Bhagavad Gita,a classic in the field of Indic studies; and Habits of Mind, a criticism of higher education, whose framework has recently been adopted as the educational system for the new Russia. He is also known for his acclaimed translations of the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning author,Juan Ramon Jimenez, and of the mystical writings of St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. John of the Cross.
A philosopher by profession, Dr. de Nicolas confesses that his most abiding philosophical concern is the act of imagining, which he has pursued in his studies of the Spanish mystics, Eastern classical texts, and most recently, in his own poetry.
His books of poetry: Remembering the God to Come, The Sea Tug Elegies, Of Angels and Women, Mostly, and Moksha Smith: Agni's Warrior-Sage. An Epic of the Immortal Fire, have received wide acclaim. Critical reviewers of these works have offered the following insights:
from, Choice: "...these poems could not have been produced by a mainstream American. They are illuminated from within by a gift, a skill, a mission...unlike the critico-prosaic American norm..."
from The Baltimore Sun: "Steeped as they are in mythology and philosophy these are not easy poems. Nor is de Nicolas an easy poet. He confronts us with the necessity to remake our lives...his poems ...show us that we are not bound by rules. Nor are we bound by mysteries. We are bound by love. And therefore, we are boundless"
from William Packard, editor of the New York Quarterly: " This is the kind of poetry that Plato was describing in his dialogues, and the kind of poetry that Nietzsche was calling for in Zarathustra."
Professor de Nicolas is presently a Director of the Biocultural Research Institute, located in Florida.