Ancient World

We’ve just finished the cult-philosophy-classic novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig, an excellent read, and one of the big thoughts standing out afterward is this: that without a larger philosophical, metaphysical or spiritual frame of mind supported by or mostly based in the right brain hemisphere, the left hemisphere will gradually try to construct something on its own premises – which it is in no way capable of doing – and in Pirsig’s case this led to obsessions, mental illness and eventually years of hospitalized madness and electroshocks.

It’s somewhat unsettling to follow Pirsig’s mind journey into his deeper probing of the transcendent value questions but seemingly slowly drawn into a linguistic trap of using the LH’s compulsion for analysis and precise definitions in the process. It creates an inwards spin that consumes him. And by habit or perhaps long term cultural conditioning and pressures, even when he briefly discovers that an idea of “Quality” should not be defined, it soon glides over into the LH and becomes literalised and loses its depth, even as he is fully conscious of this process and tries to resist this change. Which might suggest an involuntary strength of his LH, that has over time grown and become beyond his control. But this is where a balanced culture might have helped with overall structures, stories, little reminders in our environment, norms, an ethos that promotes RH conditions and apprehensions of the world, and a more balanced understanding of one self and one’s mind. To some extent the ZMM sounds like a cry out of a culture where the LH has already too much control, and where this is reflected in Pirsig’s own journey and struggles through life.

This also points to a much larger historical scale, about modernity in the last 500 years, and arguably from the roots of the LH’s march towards control and dominance in the old Nominalist debates at the University of Paris in the 11- and 12-hundreds. When an insistence on literalism gradually eroded a part of the world of the RH, where concepts and ideas and intimations of the mystery and the Beyond had been referred to with metaphors and allegorical words. When this was gradually blocked through a LH dominance over words, something deep and valuable and important, if not essential, might have been lost for centuries to come.

Pirsig’s quest and endeavour for balance and unity of the two worlds of technology and humanities, or the “classic” and “romantic” worlds, seems to partly become blocked by this lack of framework or ability to include both a part that is certain and firm, and a part that is uncertain, unknown and ambiguous. Which is something that the RH is naturally very comfortable with. And the RH could also easily unite the three areas he is expressing a wish to unify: that of the Arts, the Sciences and Religion. This was already done in historical periods when the LH was not dominant. It was there before Nominalism, and it is there in an endless abundance in earlier poetic works like the Divine Comedy by Dante. But it will not be accessible through a literal LH reading of it. And it could take years to change the mind and the brain, to gradually rebalance the hemispheres and rediscover the wealth and beauty of the knowledge and wisdom we have to some degree lost, but which is still there, all along.

Pirsig’s book is a fascinating story but could also be seen as a warning about the limitations of the LH, and at the same time point to our natural inclination to try to establish a deeper understanding of the world, but in the domain of the RH. And for that, we need to elevate and learn to use the RH more. Reading Dante or learning from Iain McGilchrist could be an excellent start in that journey – both for oneself, and for the wider culture as well. It’s how a rebirth can happen.

We’re half way through the cult-philosophy-classic novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig now, and it’s a fascinating read, especially through the lens of the brain hemispheres and the work and research of Iain McGilchrist.

The main character in the book recounts much of his earlier life story and how there is a constant tension between the “classic” and “romantic” ways of apprehending and experiencing the world, largely corresponding to the old cultures of sciences and the humanities in the Universities.

But what makes it especially fascinating is how Pirsig by intuition and introspection also discovers the battle between his own hemispheres, and increasingly understands the natures of the two. And then we see how his aspiration becomes to try to create a balance and unification of the two worlds.

Being on page 220, Pirsig is starting to find his way into the right hemisphere by relating to concepts that can be shown to exist, but cannot be clearly defined, focussing on the word “Quality”. And in some ways this beautifully parallels so many sacred traditions where the Divine cannot be named without diminishing it. What is experienced and understood intuitively, spiritually and emotionally with the RH, cannot be grasped by the words and language of the left hemisphere, without changing it into a linguistic representation, which is something else. And arguably the way to unite and unify the worlds will go through the RH, but necessitates to some extent a relation to something Sacred, the ineffable Beyond, or at least an openness to the Mystery of existence or something Divine.

In ancient wisdom the key to true enlightenment comes through intellectual humility, as a starting point for new learning and for receiving deeper insights. And then the process of unifying could gradually start melding together the two worlds of the hemispheres and create a new whole, in something that might at times resemble the nature, of a new rebirth.