I have been tuning into the latest misadventure of our President with more horror than usual. His reading of the events in Charlotteville is plain and simply wrong. His being our President makes the wrongness even more egregious. Once the painful response to the wrongness of his position settled down, I turned to all the comments about the situation coming from the media of all stripes. that is from “both sides.” What I see is more evidence of the unreality of public (and probably much of private) life in America today. The reality of Charlottesville is that Nazism is absolutely… Read More
Continue ReadingContext and the Brain
The divided brain model suggests that the two worlds that show up in our brains display many opposing features. Today, I want to focus on just one pair: contextual (right) vs. decontextualized (left). Flourishing arises from a contextual perception of the world, one that exposes the relationships of the actor to the world. Context is the source of meaning. It relates the content of whatever shows up in the conscious field to one’s historical experience. Meaning is basically historical. It arises in the temporal flow of living. A mere snapshot of what is out there is simply a collection of… Read More
Continue ReadingFlourishing and the Right-brain
After a much longer time than I had planned, I have sent off the heavily revised manuscript of my new book to the publisher. I consider the time well spent because I was able to integrate materials from McGilchrist’s, The Master and his Emissary, the book about the divided brain I wrote briefly about in my last blog. While its findings about the brain did not affect my basic theses about flourishing, it provided much additional evidence in support. It made clear that flourishing is fundamentally about living in the present moment under the influence of the right brain. It… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Master and his Emissary
I mentioned I had come across a very interesting book that has enabled me to ground my arguments in my new manuscript even further than I had previously. I did not mean to keep the book a secret. I was waiting until a better time to discuss it. The book is *The Master and his Emissary; The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World* (Yale University Press), by Iain McGilchrist. The author is a British psychiatrist and Professor of English. The book is an amazing amalgam of his scientific thinking and ability to present ideas that challenge one’s… Read More
Continue ReadingI Am Fine, But the World Is Not
I know I haven’t been posting for several months. I have been hard at work on my book, making revisions to the manuscript. I have been reading a very interesting book that has both solidified my arguments, but also forced me to do some serious editing. I will be discussing the book shortly as I plan to start my regular posting schedule again. I am very tempted everyday to write about the political situation, but there is very little to say that isn’t being said elsewhere. I do not think a lot of repetition is a good idea as, if… Read More
Continue ReadingAn Important Insight about Scientific Truth
I found myself reading an old (1944) paper by Erich Fromm while I was digging into one of his books, The Sane Society, I have just discovered. Having read a lot of Fromm, who is one of my prime sources of inspiration, I was delighted to find yet another equally meaningful work. I won’t comment on the book’s main theme here, but will say that his questioning the sanity of societies like ours is as valid in 2017 as it was in 1955 when the book was published. The following excerpt comes from an earlier paper of his that Fromm… Read More
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