Chapter Two — Double Vision And The Parallel Minds

Double Vision

“ --- note to myself -- replace with quote from Joe Campbell about role of artist in Western society ---”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, by Bill Moyers, 1992???

Joseph Campbell says that the flower of Western culture is the individual, that is to say we place our highest value upon individual achievement. Campbell proposes that the artist in the West is the highest expression of individuality through his focus on creative expression.

Eastern culture recognizes duality as the essental nature of the world we live in, and strives through the suppression of the individual to the collective to obtain the bliss of nirvana, a state in which individuality no longer has any meaning or existence.

Duality is expressed everywhere in nature, from the pairing of genes, to the male and female of most species, to the two halves of the human brain. We often talk of being of two minds; we talk romantically of finding our better half, our soul mate. The aim of most spiritual practices, whether of the West or of the East is to come to a oneness or wholeness — the union of our basic dual nature into a whole unit.

This duality also is operating at a subconsious level in the human psyche. Most people today seem to have a kind of scientifically unrecognized “schizophrenia”1 ; consisting of two distinct selves: an adult self and an inner child. These two personas develop as a kind of coping mechanism during the process of attaining maturity in this society.

The child is the more natural. original self; it is the self that started with the birth of the individual. For a time during childhood it is the only person. Its response to the world is pure and direct in its approach. This child persona, alternately called the “inner child”, is where creativity resides. This self never grows up or dies; it exists in a kind of timeless state. The child self may be further divided into two distinct personalities, reflecting the childlike and the childish.

The adult is the self that develops as a necessary result of the pressures of socialization. In this person is found two sides as well: the rational and the irrational. The adult person that we develop is usually modeled upon the adults that we had around us growing up. In a real sense the parent person that develops inside us replaces the parent outside at some point in our lives — usually long before the death of our parents.

Just as our parents are our natural guardians, so the original purpose of the adult person is that of guardian as well. This self grows as a kind of shield — imagine a shell around an inner nut — to protect and nurture the natural self, or inner child.

It is in the child self that all true creativity originates, not in the adult. The adult self merely provides a safe place and a structure for creative expression. The child provides inspiration and the adult makes manifestation possible. “The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.” — Stephen Nachmonovitch

Another common term for the inner child is spirit. It is from the inner child or spirit that creativity naturally flows. The child self as spirit is also capable of providing inspiration and even direction for the healthy individual. The role of the healthy guardian-adult is as a kind of personal assistant for the spirit; taking care of all the details that make manifestation possible.

Although the expression of these two selves often veers towards the neurotic, this partnership of selves in the average individual is functional to a greater or lesser degree. The problem is that through fear, distrust, and misunderstanding, the original protective and nurturing guardian often turns into a tyrannical guard. The protective shell of the guardian hardens into a cage of the guard, keeping the creative inner child prisoner.

There are only two emotions at the base of all human motives: that of love and that of fear. Every other emotion may be distilled down to these two. The emotion of fear causes closure, resistance and at its extreme, violence. The emotion of love causes openness, relaxation, and at its extreme, creativity. All human activity may be gauged upon a scale emotional motives, with fear and closure at one end; and with love and openness at the other.

The two sides of the person: child and adult establish an ongoing internal dialog that often becomes an argument or even a battle for supremacy over the control of the self. As the adult becomes more irrational and tyrannical, the child reacts in progressively more and more childish behavior. “I won’t do it, you can’t make me!” Or worse, the child, not allowed natural expression, finds ways to sabotage the best efforts of the adult.

An example of this is the dieter who makes a morning resolution to lose weight. The tyrannical adult self practices “self-discipline” by not eating anything more than a tiny salad during the day. At midnight, the child self revolts against this unnatural discipline by eating a whole gallon of ice cream, excusing herself by saying “I’m starving!” or “Its OK, it has milk in it, and milk is good for me.”

The adult self responds to the tantrum by feeling guilty after the ice cream is consumed, and resolves to not eat anything again the next day, “You have eaten all your allotted calories, you can’t have any more food. You deserve to go to bed hungry!”, she says to the sulking child.

By this time, the authority of the adult person has been so eroded by its own reactionary and irrational approach, that neither believes that she is capable of carrying out any of her resolutions. The child person has achieved her dubious reward of subverting the “good intentions” of the adult, but is not truly happy anyway. And so on, ad nauseum. It is comical, isn’t it? The worst of it is that the battle of the two selves is an enormous waste of energy that could be better spent creating what you want in life.


It Takes Two Complete Halves To Make A Whole

The first challenge of the creative individual, as I see it, is to get back to the healthy expression of each of selves. A whole individual integrates the rational guardian with a childlike self. A healthy adult self provides the inner child a safe place to play, and the child feels safe to create freely, joyously.

When these two personas are functioning properly, the thoughts, desires, words, and actions of the individual are congruent. The inspiration of a creative desire from the inner child is smoothly carried out by the adult self into full manifestation. No energy is wasted in useless inner arguments, or in wavering between multiple choices. The path from creative desire to attainment of that desire is direct, and effortless, and life feels joyous and free.

It seems to me that if there is a purpose to life, it is to live up to one’s full potential, in whatever form one finds oneself. As humans, we are uniquely gifted magicians, and creators. We modify and create our environment. This is our talent and our gift; our inheritance from a creative universe.

How does one align the desires of the inner child with the rational self? It is a matter of redirection, not a matter of resistance or denial. Rather than saying no, try simply redirecting attention, rechanneling it into a different direction. The healthy use of one’s energy becomes a preference after a while.

You don’t have to deny yourself anything anymore. Know that you are giving yourself everything you ever wanted, now. It is as the inner child learns that it will no longer be ignored or denied, that it suddenly or slowly starts to want what is good for it and for you as an individual. It takes healthy to recognize healthy. Simply get out of your own way and allow yourself to be what you really are, a healthy complete individual.



PARALLEL MINDS

What is true creativity and how does it relate to the normal functioning of the human brain?

Eminent scientist and neurosurgeon Richard Bergland — “You have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists now know that your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words ... Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain: it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things’, and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words.” 2

“The right brain exhibits the following dominant processes: rhythm, spatial awareness, Gestalt (holistic comprehension), imagination, daydreaming, colour, dimension. The left brain excels in: words, logic, numbers, sequence, linearity, analysis, lists. It has been noticed by researchers that when the left cortex is engaged in its dominant functioning, the right cortex is more in the ‘alpha wave’ or resting state.” 3

While it is easy to draw the conclusion that creative function is “right brain”, it is important to note that all highly creative people develop and use both sides of the brain. It is an integrated, functional and healthy mind that this book wants to encourage.

According to scientific experiments, “...when people were encouraged to develop a mental area they had previously considered weak, this development, rather than detracting from other areas, seemed to produce a synergetic effect in which all areas of mental performance improved. Professor Zaide ... discovered that each hemisphere contains many more of the ‘other side’s’ abilities than had been previously thought, and that each hemisphere also is capable of a much wider and much more subtle range of mental activities.”4

In this book, I will refer to the more general functional classifications of the two brains: the left as the brain which is logical and linear, and the right as the side which is creative and intuitive.

The right brain — intuitive, holistic, preverbal — is analogous to our definition of the inner child. This is raw creativity. The left brain — rational, linear, verbal — is the equivalent in our analogy to the adult person.

For our purposes, we may say that the right brain is creative inspiration, while the left brain is analysis and execution. For the accomplished conscious creative, the left brain is like the personal assistant or executive branch of the government: it uses data and learned skills to execute the concepts of the right brain and bring them into form.

An artist constantly shifts between right and left brain function, she doesn’t spend her time exclusively in one or the other. Following is the typical path of my creative process when I am making visual art:

Stage 1: Right Brain: Exploration / Brainstorming
Stage 2: Left Brain: Choose strongest direction (determining preference)
Stage 3: Left Brain: Set parameters
Stage 4: Right Brain: Go play! (within the limits determined by left brain)
Stage 5: Left Brain: Analysis of right brain actions (painting, etc.)
Stage 6: Repeat stages 3 and 4 as often as necessary
Stage 7: Both Brains: Incorporate / Communicate / Allow
Stage 8: Left Brain: Cleanup / Finish / Frame

This process may well be different for different individuals. In writing poetry, I often just start with a phrase and the thing seems to evolve on its own. The end product is often very different than what it was when I started. Writers talk about characters suddenly emerging, developing a distinct voice, and sometimes even taking over the direction of the entire novel. This sounds very right brain to me. I have paintings and videos that do that. In any case, both brains have to be involved, no matter the actual path that the creative product takes.

Parallel Processing

No matter what you think may be happening, you are always thinking with both brains. In computer lingo, this is called “parallel processing” — when the harddrives of two computers work in tandem to execute a task at double speed. This term has been imported into the study of the human brain to explain what is happening with the two sides, but the analogy fails when trying to describe the working and the complexity of the human brain, especially the holistic right brain.

Unlike the parallel processors of the computer, which work on the same task in tandem, each brain may be focused on entirely different things. You even may be ignoring the thoughts and information coming from one whole half of your brain — the right side. Left brain development often doesn’t recognize the value of right brain thinking. Continuing this way is analogous to running your four piston car engine on only two pistons; it is an extremely inefficient use of your potential.

One may have a realization in the right brain that isn’t recognized until it hits the left brain: the “aha” or epiphany of synthesis seems to need words to be “real”. So the information from the right brain is sometimes useless to the individual unless “translated” by the left. Unless there is this communication between the two brains, the individual is not truly whole and functional.

Our society tends to recognize only the left brain mode of thinking. It puts intuition and “psychic” abilities into the questionable category of human activity.

Although much information comes from the right brain; the average person is not even aware of it. Most people don’t understand anything that cannot be translated into words. The left brain citizen regards most intuitive knowledge as undependable because we have been taught to distrust anything that is not quantitative or capable of being expressed verbally. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein


Creativity is not problem-solving.

In the world of a highly creative person, problems do not exist, everything is simply a material, tool, or toy to play with. The conscious creative replaces the word “work” with the word “play”, the word “problem” with the word “inspiration”. The thing that others perceive as a problem is simply a new jumping-off place for a “somersault of thought”, a leap of logic, the center of a new universe unfolding.

Why is pure creativity not problem-solving? The mere perception of something as a problem sets it up in the left brain as a challenging obstacle that it alone must conquer. The left brain tries to solve or defeat the obstacle, in the process shutting off the right brain; any input from that side is ignored as nonsensical and impractical to the linear, quantitate left brain.

Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” Notice that he is saying that it is the mind itself that has created the problem; what he is referring to is the left brain specifically. Problems simply don’t exist in the right brain; whatever is perceived there is either a tool or inspiration, and these are for play, not for problem-solving.

There is a great deal of information and knowledge that comes from the intuitive side of the brain. The form that this knowledge takes is amorphous and often unrecognized by the left brain because it is not in a form that that brain recognizes: i.e. verbal or quantitative.

The information from the right brain is often delivered as an intuitive hit or as “silent knowledge”. The right side excels at deriving new combinations from seemingly unrelated perceptions, sensorial input, and ungrounded data. This synthesis of thought and perception is creative activity. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” — Carl Jung

How to properly integrate the two sides of the brain? The first step is to release the hard grip of the left brain. The left brain in the average adult is a true control freak; most control freaks have at base a lot of fear. Control translates to a kind of self-protection. The left side has to be convinced first, that it safe to let go, and then it has to be convinced that the whole individual will benefit from the information in the right brain.

The whole process of transformation starts with awareness, awareness of what is, acceptance of what is, and a conscious confirmation of a true desire to change. The exercises in this book are designed to work on more than one level, releasing the energetic / mental / emotional blockages to a creative life.

Left brain exercise: bring all thoughts / beliefs up to the surface. Keep a journal tracking all the judgments you have during the day; good or bad, it doesn’t matter, these are the thoughts you haven’t been aware are there. This is a kind of internal dialog which goes on incessantly, almost subconsciously. Because of the way we talk to ourselves, we are often not even aware of the insidious way this internal conversation leads us to conclusions about our world. These judgments keep us inflexible, and impervious to change. They keep us from having new thoughts, or new experiences.

Some of our internal dialog is inherited from the people around us — our parents, teachers, friends, etc. — some is self-generated. When I started keeping a journal of my thoughts / judgments, I found myself saying the most ridiculous things to myself; things that limited me, and kept an outmoded belief system alive. We all have thoughts that do not serve us. No matter what your thoughts are, they are what is creating your reality, as I will explain in detail later. For now, just find out what they are; do not judge yourself for having them. The healthiest thing to do is to recognize them as mere thoughts, and realize that your thoughts are not you. Don’t identify with your thoughts: this is the first step to what the Buddhists call “detachment”, and the pathway to real clarity.

Right brain exercise: allow for the idea that you are naturally creative. Playfulness and a light attitude are the beginning of your life as a conscious creative. Once you have released the death grip of the left brain, it becomes possible to play with the world around you, especially with your own perceptions. Try looking at everything “upside down” for a day. I have taken this idea literally (most people are not ready for this!), but you can just shake up your left brain by questioning some basic ideas and allowing your right brain free rein. Allow imagination to take over. For example: suppose we suddenly found out that, collectively, all vegetation had awareness, and that their collective consciousness was superior in intellect to humans. What might ensue? How might this knowledge affect social organizations and individuals?

Upside down thinking is key to many creative activities, including humor and conceptual art. We did it as children — I remember laying stomach down on a hassock and contemplating the ceiling of the living room as if it were the floor and all the furniture were stuck on the ceiling. This simple, “childish” observation is the kind of thing we should revive if we are to access the inner child of lightness and creativity.

---> more to come

-- copyright Aliyah Marr

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