What McGilchrist should do

What McGilchrist should do for the sake of truth, beauty, and goodness.

By Musclemonk, a gay biomechanical and musculosexual bodhisattva with something to say.

Did you ever feel like things are really really messed up but somehow you’re just powerless to do anything? Forces are acting on us because of technological change. We are unprepared to deal with it and we are reacting as best we can. We are either reacting with too much aggression and violence, fleeing from the problem however we can, or we are playing dead. This is basic animal behavior: fight, flight, or play dead. There is of course plenty of amicable interaction in the natural world. It is not all predation: them against us. But when under threat or even perceived threat we all react in these basic archetypes. With chronic stress or trauma after time all responses become exhausted and the system shuts down, little by little. Impassive, we end up playing dead until it’s real.

Lizards can play dead because their brains don’t need much activity. Warm blooded and large brained humans can’t tolerate this primordial coping mechanism very well. Even a a very low-grade chronic exposure to stress and trauma can have serious consequences for our physiology and brain health. Immobilization may be the most fundamental and universal pathology of the metacrisis.

The feeling of powerlessness that we have is often intertwined with some form of immobilization. This can be located in particular areas of the body. It can easily go unnoticed. It can happen in many different parts of the body but it will affect the core in some way. If we understand the body’s basic bony structure we can perceive and respond to this in time. Release is not difficult biomechanically speaking. It is actually a natural function of our animal intelligence. Animal spend degree deal of time taking care of their own bodies after all and some of that is instinctual release.

A feeling of powerlessness can remain abstract and mental. Or at least it is something that we can easily confuse as being purely mental. However if we are able to query the body in a simple and natural way, whether to get its opinion or its animal reassurance, this can more directly address the problem because it is not a purely mental approach.

The anatomical structure that we need to know in order to be able to intuitively and naturally query the inner self, the interoceptive sensory motor system, is not complicated at all. However it is a new form of attention and it takes a little time and practice to learn to maintain it more than momentarily.

When we stay within the mental, as we shall see below, we can reference the heart as that part of us which is within. This is really a consequence of self denial. The heart is a distraction because what it refers to remains so vague that it does not really take us out of intellectual dominance. It is a vaguely emotional organ. It doesn’t challenge the old perspective. For that we must get anatomical.

In this marvelous and very to-the-point interview, McGilchrist talks passionately on the idea that what we need to do in this collective situation is to return to our humanity and simple values like truth, beauty, and goodness. He passionately pleads that this happens in our hearts. In a way it is simple.

He is a neuroscientist and explains that this is what the right brain already does very well—but we worked very hard to build a world and and identity shaped by left brain dominance. This is a mechanist way of thinking and this is at the root of the problem. This way of thinking is not intrinsically bad but because of the oppression of the right hemisphere the left mechanistic mode has gotten out of control.

McGilchrist is clear and stands in a long line of tweed suit wearing English dons: it is already all there right inside of us. What he is saying is that it is natural and easy and anyone can do it. Change your heart.

However sincere, profound and logical he may appear, in the end McGilchrist is an intellectual. An Oxford scholar. A philosopher. A doctor. Literary historian. He can see the truth but he only sees it in his head, and his heart.

During the talk he says that he doesn’t like the word inner because he complains that it makes it feel like the inner and the outer have to be separate when they really aren’t. This is a classic complaint justification for denial. This is a silly thing for him to say and demonstrates that he does not think about the topic much. What this statement tells us is that he is in a state of denial—denial about his inner life.

But he is also being quite vulnerable and sincere. he is arguing for a profound shift in our inner life but he defines this as thinking. The idea that it is embodied on a very intimate and fundamental, even sexual level is difficult for him to accept. This denial that we see in McGilchrist himself is really only very good evidence for his theory, because the right hemispheric awareness he explains is atrophied in us includes our interoceptive sensory motor system. The right hemisphere is our animal intelligence. McGilchrist has a marvelously profound grasp of the truth as an intellectual. We feel it when we hear him talk but there is a single thin membrane he cannot pass through and that is the membrane of action and of self awareness. He would say that it is the corpus callosum but functionally speaking we know by now that it is embodiment.

He is making a really beautiful appeal that we change our attitude and think back to this kind of innocent humanity that believes in truth beauty and goodness. What he does not talk about is how that would happen in his own body, not just his head. He cannot talk about the body.

He never uses his body. He is very handsome and many gay men have a bit of a crush on him, not just me. But he is trapped in the conventional habit of the English scholar. Perhaps that is his biggest appeal. He is always sitting in a chair in front of a library, wearing a tweed suit. He has gray hair, eyeglasses and a beard. He is a talking head. It is very much a performance and it is both genuine and well done. But he does not ever go inside, does he?

As a gay man with a crush on him I would love to see him demonstrate his theories with his body through movement. As someone who loves how bodies move and knows that how bodies move is where the truth is, I would like to see him tell the truth with his body. Finally as a somatic social theorist and a serious scholar of anatomical embodiment, I would like to see him perform the truth with his body, to his own satisfaction, with the help of a dance and performance coach and movement therapist or choreographer. As Musclemonk, a biomechanical bodhisattva who wants to save the world with muscle, our deep core muscle system, I would like to see him exude the truth in redolent animal freedom.

I am quite sure that in the end his experience would be theoretical breakthroughs he did not know were possible.

This is why we must always…

Train Like a Bodhisattva