Whole-brain as inner and outer awareness
Excerpted, revised and adapted from “More than brush strokes” (1999) by Diana Edwards — https://9doc.org/document/zwvw9gjl-more-than-brush-strokes.html
Jung (1964, 174) writes about the shadow side all human beings share. This is a part of ourselves we have learned to reject, hide or project outward onto other people. How did we learn this? We each learned this thru socialization, language, culture etc.
We all have an inherent ability to be creative. We were created; and in tum, are meant to create (Rollo May, 1976).
The two ways of knowing:
- One where the knower is separate, apart and distinct from what is perceived, and
- One where the perceiver and the perceived remain united.
The process of discovering inner dimensions of ourselves through expressive, creative encounters, can be described as a series of ever-widening, deeply felt, experiences which transcend a separated, onlooker-style knowledge; which, can only be either theoretical or intellectual. The importance of experiential learning lies in how it transcends the kind of separated, onlooker-style knowledge.
In left-hemisphere knowledge and awareness, each person is locked into the attitude of a detached observer. He/she is partly dissociated from the wider, deeper, real experience inside himself/herself. Experiential knowledge, where perceiver and perceived are united, is found:
- In Spinoza’s highest form of knowing: intuition,
- In Bergson’s “creative consciousness,”
- In Maslow’s “being cognition” (Fromm, 1960. 11 1) and
- Rudolf Steiner’s Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.
Each of these describe awareness and learning transcending knowledge where subject and object remain split.
We connect to our inner resources and our intuitive nature through spontaneous creativity. For example, almost any child can compose a song, or a poem, or a dance, or a painting, or a game — spontaneously without previous planning. In watching children dancing or athletes performing, we see demonstrated the ease with which right and left hemisphere intelligences can be converged] (pg 30).
For millennia, women and men have been socialized to control, reduce and restrict the twofold nature of healthy awareness, their lower and their higher, their creature-like-ness and their God-like-ness. Most philosophies and religions make these two into a polarity. They teach the way to go higher, is to renounce and control the lower. This is only partial truth.
Neither can be repudiated; the two can only be integrated . . . we already have in creative culture, abundant examples of what two intelligences can do when converged and working collaboratively: great artworks of every kind, in every medium, including dance and theater (pg 21)
Knowledge gained thru reasoning awareness is one type of knowing. It comes from analyzing perceived bits of information into a more useful whole. Yet this is only one-half of what our awareness can do. In our right hemisphere, knowing from Intuition, Inspiration and Imagination emerges from everything we are, can be of deep feeling, can arise from many internal levels. Half of our intelligence is associated with our mind, with left-hemisphere. The other half is associated with our feelings and our body. Eastern tradition never assumed the body and mind were separate (Suzuki, 1960, 15). (pg 29)
Western science in its left-hemisphere, mechanistic, positivistic phase, promoted ignoring right hemisphere and gut-brain intelligences. All emphasis was on left-hemisphere reasoning alone, the calculating, controlling mind. Feelings and the body — along with Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition — -were considered secondary; or even, as waste.
I grew up in this period. We were taught to seek out only objective knowledge, everything must start from an objective point of fact. Knowledge gained thru subjective awareness was considered unreliable. The paradox here is our five senses depend on our body and our feelings (our subjective experience). Our sensing and feeling supply the “reading of nature” which provides the evidence on which left-brain reasoning is based!
It is as though human awareness is divided into two parts, an external and an internal self. The inner is intuitive, playful, spontaneous, feeling, risking and immediate. In opposition stands a critical, realistic, purposeful, calculating and controlling self. The objective has been to have our outer objective self command and control our inner self (so our irrational inner self does not take over). In this way, we are taught to use one part of our will against another part of our will. No wonder so many cultural assumptions are contradictory and confused. We are asked to both be — and — not be. Only left-hemisphere can tolerate such a mad dichotomy (pg 32).
Creative expressions lead us to deeper meaning and fuller understanding of our two ways of knowing. One knowing separates the me from the not me, separates the seer from the seen. The second kind of knowing does not divide nor wish to conquer anyone nor anything (pg 176).
Left-hemisphere knowledge and awareness works very well for managing external resources in our environment. Because we are often doing violence to Nature, external materials and laborers, its an advantage to dissociate our feelings from work. We divide what we manage — from ourselves managing it. This works well in all contexts where wealth is being extracted from Nature or from other people. However dissociating from our materials, works not at all for listening to, understanding and managing our inner world.
Education
1650–2008(?), traditional left-hemisphere education perpetuated internal separation to an extreme degree. By concentrating on only one-half of our intelligent awareness, to manage the external world we live in, we were taught to dissociate all feelings, morals, ethics and values from the violence we did to Nature, Earth and workers.
In Business School, to excuse toxic male perpetrators from feeling guilty about the violence they were being taught to commit, subject and object, of necessity, were kept separate. This internal conflict is a big reason college education declined, decayed and corrupted into mere cancel culture and woke politics especially after 2001 (175–176).
The solution? My perceptions lead me to sensory awareness of our external world is itself a creative process. Five-sensory perceiving is a creative interplay between percepts coming in from outside; and, what comes from inside, Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. In the left-hemisphere, intellectual mind, these are illusions we are not allowed to indulge in (because they are likely to awaken the Shame Within).
In the Western world, it has been all-important to keep oneself separate from what one looks at. This mandate truncated one-half of education, one-half of our aware intelligence. In 2023, we wish more than ever to foster capacity in citizens to evaluate news media critically for oneself, to see what is present on all levels, not to see only what one is told to see. It must then follow we should educate younger generations to use both halves of their aware intelligence. Current mainstream K-college education is about switching OFF one-half of our natural aware intelligence. We must also understand and honor subjective awareness, otherwise left-brain-only objectivity is in peril of great distortions (185–186).
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/12785/1/NQ45669.pdf
