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| Ram Dass (1931-2019) |
“One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom, you must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.”
— Ram Dass
— Ram Dass
Compare this with what McGilchrist argues in his books.
In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I aimed to dispel the unscientific fiction, popular at the time, that there was no significant difference between the hemispheres. This misconception was just as popular, and just as absurd, as any of the myths about supposed differences that were, and for all I know still are, being peddled in management seminars, and to which it was a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, as anyone who has worked with neurological and psychiatric patients knows, there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds. The question was not whether there was a difference – that was clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt – but why there was, and of what kind it might be.
My argument was, and is, that the nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The character and sheer extent of that difference, as well as its significance for the future of our civilisation, formed the subject of that book. And that difference could be seen as rooted in a difference in attention . . . .
Science is now used to many fine ends; but, alas, inevitably much of the time in the service of the subjugation and destruction of Nature.
Some journalists, especially younger ones, ridicule the idea of objectivity as a “view from nowhere” and call for replacing it with “moral clarity,” by which they seem to mean their own political values.
His populism brought the cynical cruelty of Jersey Shore to national politics. The goal of his speeches was not to whip up mass hysteria but to get rid of shame. He leveled everyone down together.
N.B. I didn't to back to the book to attempt to ID who the "his" in "His populism" is because we all know, don't we?
Biologist David Sloan Wilson captures this concern in his Evolution for Everyone, in which he describes how a young graduate attempting to apply the insights of evolutionary theory to other fields ran into a wall of opposition based on many of these negative presumptions when he tried to discuss his newfound interest with his professors and peers: [He] quickly learned that when [he] spoke of human behavior, psychology and culture in evolutionary terms, their minds churned through an instant and unconscious process of translation, and they heard “Hitler”, “Galton,” “Spencer,” “IQ differences,” “holocaust,” “racial phrenology,” “forced sterilization,” “genetic determinism,” “Darwinian fundamentalism,” and “disciplinary imperialism.”
The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom’s conditio sine qua non, is never the conditio per quarn that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the “beginner” to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—creatio ex nihilo—abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as “thinking the unthinkable.”
The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes.
