The West and East Lives in Your Brain

“Logic can take you from A to Z. Imagination can take you anywhere.” —Albert Einstein

There is no logic without nonsense, no reality without imagination, no future without past, no something without nothing, no woman without man, no you without another. There is no hot without cold, no dark without light, no energy without matter, no good without evil. There is no left without right, and no West without East. And there is nothing without your brain to decode it.

You can only imagine if you conceive things to imagine about, and you can only conceive things that have opposites. Continuums, with extremes, are the basis for your reality. You understand awake because you understand sleep, and vice versa. If you didn’t experience both being awake and being asleep, you wouldn’t be alive. Not only does your brain create absolute reality, but relative reality also. Good and evil are a part of most people’s worlds, even though they’re not a part of nature.

A lion is not evil because it kills a deer or even another lion, but man is not lionlike. He doesn’t want to survive; he wants to thrive, or why would suicide and addiction rates be so high? In early history, man used local slaves and now he uses global slaves and technology to maximize his leisure. In nature, this would be the equivalent of a lion using other lions and lion-made technology to get his food and make him lots of beautiful homes to roar in. Of course, this will never happen with any lion on the planet, so why has it happened to humans?

As we know, there’s no work without play and vice versa. This is the reality of our relationship with nature, yet our modern system has moved a ton of people closer to games, entertainment, and play. Work hasn’t disappeared from the construct of global society though. Look around your house and count the items and parts that were “Made in China.” Hard work happens, but well-to-do Americans don’t typically see it anymore. We simply go online, click some digital images, put pictures of things in our cart, check out with a credit card, and wait for our items to be delivered.

Luckily, reality is more interesting than the conceptualization of two static extremes. It has a dynamic built-in regulatory function. The Greek Philosopher Heraclitus called this enantiodromia, whereby extremes are opposed by nature to restore balance. When anything gets too extreme, along a reality continuum, it turns into its opposite. Carl Jung wrote, “this characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.”

Imagine a time of rising interest rates, exponentially rising debt, and impending recession-depression.  The stock market is bid up $4T in less than two months, with $1.3T in seven biggies. None of these companies have anything to do with food, water, shelter, energy, or natural resources…nothing we need to survive. But all of them depend on an ever-increasing, artificially-cheap supply of energy and natural resources, which we need to survive, with a population-supply ratio that’s rapidly shrinking.

This August there will be a summit of the BRICS alliance, where the total countries have reached 41, up 22 since April. At this summit, the BRICS will launch a new world currency connected to gold, lessening its dependency on the debt-backed dollar as the world reserve currency. The biggest event in the monetary system since 1971, when Nixon temporarily abandoned the gold standard, yet it’s largely being ignored by Americans. It’s no wonder the East wants something different; the debt-loving dollar system has enslaved their countries far too long, forcing them to accept worthless paper in exchange for their valuable resources and labor.

Now go a little deeper in your imagination. You are living in a society dominated by leisure. The overuse of technology has destroyed most people’s right brains. Only a small portion of the population can still think with the right hemisphere, and people are being enslaved under an elitist left-brained cult that’s trying to manage a shrinking supply of resources and exponentially growing debt with the delete-ignore button on their computers. You are one of the few people on earth with a fully functioning right hemisphere who can help solve this problem. What do you do?

In this exercise, you may ponder how the brain thinks and why it’s divided into two hemispheres at all. You understand how each hemisphere has the capacity for extremism on either side of the brain, and you wonder how you can use this to your advantage. Your first task is to keep yourself from being captured under a left-brained totalitarian regime that wants to put a chip in your brain and turn your body into an asexual hybrid machine. Your second task is to override their solution to decrease the population and fertility.

History has demonstrated that when someone’s brain fails to divide properly into the right and left hemispheres at birth (a condition known as holoprosencephaly), he/she is completely incompetent. I suspect the same applies to a society that uses only half their brains. Severely affected children with holoprosencephaly don’t usually survive beyond early infancy, although I know of a young man who is now 21 years old. He cannot speak, sit up, walk, or do anything by himself. He’s completely dependent on a caretaker. What he does do is smile and laugh.

So why isn’t the brain one big blob? What’s the point of having two hemispheres? Iain McGilchrist tackles this question in his book, The Matter with Things: Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. It was evolution, he thinks. In order to survive, animals needed to do two things at once. A small bird for example, needed to find nesting materials and food to eat, while simultaneously protecting itself from prey. I think he’s correct from a left point of view, but I also think it has something to do with the right relationship, more so than with the individual parts.

The two hemispheres of the brain procreate individuality like a man and woman procreate a child. In relationship with each other, the creative right brain and the logical left brain are meant to work in tandem. They represent two extremes on a spectrum of thought. One side is wild, free, and unconstrained, while the other side is accurate, cold, and hard. They communicate with each other to solve problems that neither can solve alone. But when one side takes over, the other side is suppressed, and an unhealthy relationship emerges that leads to an imbalance in the reality of nature.

All mammalian brains are divided into two hemispheres. In general, the right hemisphere controls the left side, and the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, but they are interdependent, cooperating via a central structure called the corpus callosum. Without cross-talk between the two regions of our brain, we would not be able to perform basic cognitive tasks like language and emotional processing, except in certain situations where one side of someone’s brain is removed or disabled (after its development) to arrest epilepsy. Neuroplasticity can then takeover.

The differences between the two hemispheres are many, but in general the left brain sees pieces and parts, whereas the right brain sees the whole. The goal of the left is to manipulate and mechanize, while the right wants to relate to things and make sense of them. The left brain grabs information in parts, while the right brain puts it all together into a collective whole. McGilchrist believes the right brain is superior, critical to humanity, but notes that society is now dominated by a left-hemisphere reduced ideological view of the world.

In Episode 278 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Peterson presents a religious parallel. After the story of Cain and Able, there were two negative outcomes. The first was Noah and flood, which represents the catastrophe of the natural world. The second was the Tower of Babel, or the catastrophe of the bureaucratic state. Peterson explained, Babel’s attempt to replace the heavenly hierarchy by human creation resulted in a breakdown of communication and scattering of humankind. Like the left-brained takeover, Babel attempted to replace the relationship between man and nature (or man and God), with Man. In other words, man wanted to be God.

In my mind, Western and Eastern worlds mirror the hemispheres of the brain. The Western hemisphere thinks it’s omnipotent, still in control, having used the Eastern side for so long. The West sees its methods as supreme, correct, and unilateral. It is global, all-conquering, above nature. It takes what it wants and eliminates what it doesn’t. It censors, silences, removes, and destroys whatever gets in its way. If a body part doesn’t work the way it should, cut it out! If a country is causing problems, bomb it. It enslaves people and captures nations, resources, corporations, media, etc.

There was a time for the West, but that time is over on the continuum between work and leisure. While we see the West from the seminal lenses of Classical Greece and Ancient Rome, from Christianized Germanic peoples, the West is not geographical anymore. Thanks to globalism, the West is embraced more by the world’s youth than by its territories. The West is the dominant left-brained empire of techno-narcissism, symbolized by trillions of selfies in front of all the majestic mysteries of the earth. It is the ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, the destructive cycle of human beings in their pursuit of evermore power and leisure.

The East has a different approach to the world; it is yin-yang, a philosophical concept that describes opposite but interconnected forces. It is the right brain. It respects the other, and knows it needs the other. It is monistic, believing that everything is one. The true East focuses on truth in reality instead of purpose and destiny for self. It’s driven by community, not individualism. The East is subdued, obscure, and weak until the ouroboros takes the last bite of its tail. When the West finishes gobbling up all the cheap energy and resources, the East will come into full view and shine.

This is normal. Explosion and implosion are natural phenomena. The finest example is the death of a star. When a star’s core surpasses a certain mass (the Chandrasekhar limit), it begins to implode. Neuron stars, the smallest and densest class of stellar objects, are formed in this implosion. At some point, the implosion bounces back off the core and expels the stellar material into space. This forms a spectacular supernova, which can outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than the sun will in its lifetime of 10 billion years.

In the last decade, it was also discovered that when two dense neutron stars spiral into each other that gold and silver are made. My left brain knows that stars create gold, but my right brain connects stars to the financial system and ancient money. It helps me understand balance in the relationship between matter and energy, humanity and nature, and what sustains life. I imagine the East is clashing with the West and bringing gold back to our sick economic system, exploding the gigantean debt into trillions of pieces, as two neutron stars colliding. Supernovas are said to vibrate and emit an audible hum before exploding, and I suspect we will too.