Today’s Post
Last week we continued our decomposition of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’ model of universal evolution into how the dynamic at work in this spiral is manifested in human life as we advance our evolution through the transition from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ behavior. We took a look at how the two brain lobes, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ hemispheres, are associated with ‘intuitive’ and ‘empirical’ modes of thinking and how for a fully human approach to such thinking, they must be used in balance with each other. In the words of Jonathan Sacks:
“Think of ‘right’ and ‘left’ not as precise neuroscientific descriptions, but merely as metaphors for different modes of engagement with the world.”
As he notes, most human dysfunctionality can be placed at the doorstep of dualities in which existence is understood in terms of opposites (love-hate, life-death, rich-poor, we-they, etc). Advancing our evolution, therefore, calls for us to overcome these dualities by understanding the ‘noosphere’ as the single, integrated thing that it is, and this requires us to see it in a single integrated manner.
This week we will extend our look at the human thinking system from the neo cortex to the other two brain segments which contribute to our awareness, and thus extend our view to ‘the whole brain’.
Thinking With the Whole Brain
The neo cortex brain is clearly the most recent product of evolution, and one unique to humans, but there is yet another dimension to the task of ‘thinking with the whole brain’. We have addressed this facet several times in this blog, but to recap: the limbic and ‘reptilian’ brains contribute significant stimuli to the neo cortex brain that we discussed last week. In the human, the two lobes of the neo cortex brain are located ‘above’ (in evolution as well as vertical position at the top of the spine) the limbic and reptilian brains. As we have seen many times in this blog, we are never without the stimuli of these ‘lower’ brains, which wield great influence over our ability to make sense of life. As we saw six weeks ago (April 11), not only are these stimuli powerful, they are active in our personal growth, at work very early in our life and long before our neo cortex brain brains mature. As a result, their stimuli is in play much earlier than our reasoning process can mature.
Further, their stimuli makes its way to our neo cortex much quicker than our neo cortex can formulate a reasoned response. Add to this the factor the fact that their stimuli are capable of producing the pleasurable effects of dopamine, and it is easy to understand why it can be difficult to ‘being reasonable’. This necessity for the neo cortex brain to formulate an objective decision in the face of powerful and more immediate stimuli from the lower brains is an aspect of the long (in comparisons to other animals) gestation of humans. As we mature, for a comparatively long period of time, our ‘volitional’ skills lag our ‘instinctive’ responses.
It’s not that we have to learn to ignore these two ‘lower’ sources of stimuli, as their activity is essential to human evolution, but it is necessary to develop the skill of consciously and objectively dealing with them for us to be able to effect our own evolution as human persons. Trusting our instincts, evolved over two billion years, is necessary for a full life, but the ability to modulate them when necessary is essential to the objective thinking that underpins our continued evolution.
As Richard Rohr puts it:
“If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the ‘reptilian’ brain), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development.”
As we have noted several times in this blog, the term ‘spiritual’ is not to be understood as other-worldly or supernatural, but as Teilhard understood it as the flow of evolutional energy by which we (and everything in the universe) is lifted up the convergent spiral to a higher levels of complexity. In his words,
“Fuller being in closer union.”
So, ‘thinking with the whole brain’ not only involves understanding our ‘noosphere’ in an increasingly integrated manner, using both our instinctual and empirical ‘modes of engagement with the world’, but being able to modulate ‘lower brain’ stimuli (such as the ‘fear-based preoccupations of the reptilian brain’) as well.
The Next Post
This week we took a second look at a model of the unique human brain as a step to addressing a more comprehensive skill of using the evolutionary gift of human thought as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s ‘winds of the Earth.”
Next week we will take a deeper look at the skill of using the ‘whole brain’ to assess the ‘noosphere’ and further understand our place in it and how we can develop the skill necessary to cooperate with the flow of evolutional energy as it rises through the human species.