Grasping and Letting Go Mind

On the weekend, the Venerables talked about the difference between Buddhist understanding and Buddhist practice. I think the discussion made me wonder why this difference exists.  Why is it that simply listening to a concept and mulling it over isn’t the same as practice? Where is the disconnect between understanding and practice?

            From a Western psychology perspective, I have read this described as a dualistic notion of ‘two minds’, the most common variety being the split between the rational ‘left’ brain and the ‘trans’ rational, intuitive right brain. In a book called Synchronicity and the Self, Jean Shinoda Bolen compares the left brain to the right when she remarks, “The left hemisphere contains our speech centers…and uses the logic and reasoning of linear thinking to arrive at assessment or conclusions.” (p.7) In contrast, the right side of the brain “knows through intuition what the totality of a picture is, and also experiences a sense of what something emerged from and what it may become.” (p.8) She goes on to suggest that the right brain is able to observe and contain ambiguities and opposites, whereas the left side of the brain tends to reason using dualistic thinking. The idea behind it is that what we arrive at logically is never quite true, simply because there is always something that is somehow eluding logical or rational thinking.

Yet it seems that the rational paradigm has dominated a lot of educational circles. Reading Bolen, I believe that ‘understanding’ from a purely logical and rational perspective can be a bit dangerous, because I often can arrive at a rational insight that doesn’t match with my true feelings and behavior. In that sense, the concept hasn’t yet gotten down to the marrow, and I haven’t formed real direct contemplation of the concept itself.

            I think that one clue as to why this arises is that left brain thinking is often couched in the metaphors of grasping or holding onto something, or even ‘getting it’.  How often have I heard the expression “I get it”, to mean that I understood something? If I ‘get’ something, does that also entail that I can lose it as well? That seems to give rise to the fear of losing what I have learned in the past. It is something that leads us to collect bits of knowledge and accumulate models, for fear that they will get lost… or somehow the mind will wear down if I don’t somehow exercise certain faculties.

            Conversely, when we think about the right brain, we start to think about wholes, and being able to behold or contain opposites. I think this is perhaps akin to seeing and letting go at the same time. It is sometimes comparable to pictures which contain scrambled pixels./ In order to see the scrambled pixels form a totality, I need to let go and see at the same time. This is easier said than done, because it doesn’t mean that one slackens or has no thought whatsoever. But habitually, for someone who uses rational thinking or instructions a lot, there is a temptation to want to find some way into that through some instruction or direction.

            The problem with relying only on rationality, even from a neuroscience perspective, is that the left brain is only one function of the total body. It does not seem to control other functioning or even influence what other parts of the brain are doing, at least according to research. The challenge then is to be able to translate codes of reason (especially what we think is reasonable to do, based on logic or morals) into action. It is not so easy because as long as I operate only from this function, I don’t experience mind as a whole.  So there is a certain violence in making reason or rationality a kind of ‘ruler’, without the complementary practice of letting go to reveal the total mind.

           

 References

Bolen, Jean Shinoda, (1979) The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self. San Francisco: Harper