The Master and his Emissary

Books or essays that answer each others' questions

• The Master and his Emissary answers on a really deep level questions (that I don't know where they're raised) like:
  • why do insights end up getting all goodharted & stale?
  • why is it so hard to put certain common experiences into words?

• The Master and his Emissary relates to Spectrum of Ecstasy in that nondual awareness seems to be characteristic of the right hemisphere
  • So you could say that The Master and his Emissary answers these questions one might have reading Spectrum of Ecstasy
    • "In what sense, concretely, is the nondual view "always already there"?"
      • it's your right hemisphere's perspective
      • and it's important to note that just because you (when you're in LH mode) are not consciously aware of how your right hemisphere is perceiving and operating, it's still entirely involved in every moment of operating
    • "What's going on neurologically when someone shifts from a dualistic to non-dualistic view?"
      • this isn't answered very precisely, but it's clearly something about a shift in the relationship between the hemispheres
  • The Way of Effortless Mindfulness by Loch Kelly is also very related to this topic.
    • If, reading The Master and his Emissary, you have the question "what sort of thing might I do that would shift my experience into a more right hemisphere mode?" then The Way of Effortless Mindfulness has dozens of exercises for this.
      • This is all part of Adyashanti's school, btw, which is part of Mahamudra which is a close cousin of Dzogchen. See pages about these on HowToHuman (troubleshooting guide for the human condition)

• Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse seems to me and others to be pointing at two stances of the world that map onto McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model as described in The Master and his Emissary

January 21st, 2022

• maybe even a The Master and his Emissary thing going on there, though I'll say no more than that here

Podcast summaries

• Keywords - brain hemispheres coercion what is coercion? productivity scapegoat Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing Conversation As Medium make shared or different frames explicit shared train of thought do people naturally self-regulate how deep they're willing to go? commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets dream mashups Unlocking the Emotional Brain IFS partswork what might a healthy community look like? doing community well The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere Behavior: The Control of Perception Perceptual Control Theory Hemisphere DharmaChange doesn't just happenHemispheres & Self-improvement left hemispheres aren't made for interfacing with other people Perceptual Control Theory control systems

• 56:30 - 1:10:40 - Why is Ian McGilchrist's work important? Is his work factual or more metaphorical The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere

August 28th, 2021

• on a call w people talking about The Master and his Emissary brain hemispheres model, and struck by how easy it is to pattern-match thinking that rejects other thinking onto the discussion of limitations of the left hemisphere
  • although in principle McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model could allow us to get less dogmatic and judgmental about certain patterns of thought, because they can be understood as good functioning of a system rather than as intrinsically problematic
  • Michael Ashcroft > "thinking isn't bad, but going thinky, ie losing track of the rest of the world to have a thought, is bad"

June 19th, 2021

• proposal of giant annotated version of The Master and his Emissary in Roam
  • intending to import the whole book for annotation
  • where we'd make the graph available only to people who send us a selfie of them holding the book
  • people to invite: Sarah McManus, Michael "Valentine" Smith... Conor White-Sullivan himself
    • NNY
  • Exploring import
    • okay, can make a new user with the name Iain McGilchrist (author) or The Master and his Emissary or whatever, and then if you import stuff with that user's user/uid