The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom

the hemispheres are like two contrasting personalities within a single mind. The left half, she writes, ‘thrives on details, details, and more details about those details … [It] looks at a flower and names the different parts making up the whole – the petal, stem, stamen, and pollen.’ The right mind, by contrast, ‘creates a master collage of what t

The full experience of wu-wei occurs, not so much when we’re on autopilot, but when we integrate automatic activity with conscious attention. In terms of dual system theory, wu-wei happens when both Systems 1 and 2 are in smooth synchrony. As Slingerland describes it, ‘for a person in wu-wei, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful; the two sy

qi exhibits a continual interplay of polarities they called yin and yang. Yin represented softness, wetness, darkness and receptivity, while yang represented hardness, dryness, light and activity. We can understand yin and yang like the north and south poles of the Earth, or the positive and negative poles of an electric current. Each is an integra

How would you perceive the world if you were looking for patterns around you without interpreting them? How would you make sense of your present experiences if you were oblivious to their antecedents or future implications? Researchers have discovered that this is how the right hemisphere perceives reality. It focuses on spatial patterns between th

Like the Taoists, McGilchrist looks all the way back to prehistory, before even the emergence of language, for the earliest signs of this imbalance. ‘Was it the drive for power, embodied in the will to control the environment,’ he asks, ‘which accelerated symbol manipulation and the extension of conceptual thought?’ He notes that our mostly dominan

scientists have discovered a strong correlation between the strength of a person’s PFC and their success in life. However, goal orientation takes us far from the Taoist ideal of wu-wei. Zhuangzi, recognizing this, appropriately called the first chapter of his classic ‘Going Rambling Without a Destination’.22

Wu-wei, therefore, is different from the Western Romantic notion of simply ‘letting yourself go’ and acting spontaneously on your emotions. Rather, it’s the result of the disciplined cultivation of the connections between the ‘I’ and the ‘self ’, so that your entire organism is harmonizing both within and with the environment.

In the view of psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist, we can indeed understand the current state of our civilization in terms of a battle of the hemispheres. In his deeply researched The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he argues that the hemispheres are ‘involved in a sort of power struggle’ which