Mediation Work

Some relationships are continually recycled. Giles Deleuze, in his magnum opus entitled Difference and Repetition, explains that very often one term in the relationship works to add inherent complications while the other term is implicated explicating the first.  The bicameral mind functions in a similar fashion. Our intuition, chochmah, (since it sees the whole of an experience registering it in a single glance) is always being drawn into our understanding, binah, in a way that builds (boneh) its complexity. I cannot understand or comprehend the entirety of the matter all at once–if ever. I capture it piecemeal. But the whole is always implied.

For our discussion, we should also consider how intuitive insights (chochmah) relate to the letter Yud of the Tetragrammaton which equals ten, while the logico-linguistic center of understanding (binah) relates to the first Hei of this Divine name, which equals five. So we have a ratio of 10 to 5 which reduces to 2:1 or what Rabbi Avraham Abulafia calls the secret of whole to half (shalem v’chetzi). This ratio most commonly comes up with regard to the words ish (man) and isha (woman) in Hebrew in that both contain the letters alef-shin which spells aish (fire) and are only differentiated by the Yud (10) of ish (man) and the Hei (5) of isha (woman). In other words, we are dealing with an ‘essentialized’ masculine/feminine ratio.

From this the kabbalists assert that the seminal insight (the mentality of father or chochmah) sees the whole just as cognitive psychologists such as Iain McGilchrist emphasize that the holistic approach resides in the right hemisphere of the brain. On the other hand, the kabbalists would concur with McGilchrist that the tendency to process the world in parts (the halfness or incompletion that breaks experience down in order to render it comprehensible and expressible in the vessels of thought) is primarily the task of our left brain’s analytic understanding (binah, the mentality of mother).

Being that we have already located the events of the Garden of Eden within human psycho-dynamics in a previous articles, it follows that the entire Torah can be internalized as the story of cognition. If so, then what would the archetypal exile in Egypt represent? Egypt (Mitzrayim), as it is commonly explained, signifies a state of constriction or limitation (maitzarim) within the soul. In Kabbalah, there are commentaries which locate ‘Egypt-as-constriction’ with the left brain itself. The primary exile, cognitively speaking, is the exile of the right brain within the left. The whole feels confined by the part. Intuition gets crushed and lost within the bounds of logico-linguistic understanding. In short, re/presentations can be confining. My directly intuited experience may be dis-placed by the concepts with which it is deposited.

Are we a slave to re/presentations? The ‘left brain as the bondage of Egypt’ suggests that the constructions of that hemisphere fall victim to building pyramids for the idols of the mind. Jewish thought has long noticed the intrinsic knot woven around the words ‘idea,’ ‘ideal’ and ‘idol.’ The idol is the vain attempt to re/present the unrepresentable in totality and to control it. To replace or exchange the real world for an idol/ideal re/presentation is the mistake of the unredeemed left hemisphere. When the left asserts control over the right, when it tries to assimilate all of the right into the left, we descend into Egypt. This is not to say that the left is not loaded with treasures. In fact, the Torah states the greatest worldly wealth was/is in Egypt. Thus, in our cognitive schema, we can maintain that the left has much to offer. We only run into trouble when the left subsumes the right or is disconnected from the right. Once again, the left explicates the right. It also employs the right in order to make the bricks and mortar as well as to facilitate the construction of the buildings of the left. Representational thinking would never get off the ground if not for the right mind fertilizing it first.

What do we make of this world which has become so dominated by the left hemisphere? Keeping in mind that this world is also our inner world, we must ask how we have lost our intuition–our feeling at home in the world–and become strangers in a strange land of formal scientific, logical and linguistic paradigms. Reading the textbook definition of persons, places and things that we encounter in everyday life, we often experience a disconnect, an unsettling, a foreignness. Our intuition is stripped from us. How can we reunite the sensible and the intelligible once again? Asking this is already searching for redemption.

McGilchrist’s central thesis is that we have collectively moved into a logico-linguistic dominated world whereby “…the balance of power has shifted where it cannot afford to go – further and further towards the part-world created by the left-hemisphere. (p.274 The Master and His Emissary Kindle Edition). Furthermore, he asserts that the pathology of this left-hemispheric bias, which we are likening to a mental Egypt of constricted consciousness, has resulted in a condition whereby:

“…it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand.” (p. 282 Ibid. Kindle Edition)

In light of this, we can reinterpret the midrashic history that claims that prior to the exodus, no slave ever escaped Egypt alive. When re/presentation turns into an idol and passes off claims to being absolute it closes thought in on itself. The idol/ideal is a virtualization that forces its hand on the rest of reality. No exit can exist. The domination of the left leaves no place for true participation of the right.

To spin this another way: we could also maintain that intuition is a form of pure thought (chochmah which is pre-linguistic) while our understanding functions as speech within the mind. The speech of the mind embodies the ‘pure’ thought or intuition of the mind or at least it attempts to. Relocating speech within the left hemisphere of the mind and contrasting it with pure thought in the right hemisphere permits us to consider this incorporation as a kind of dressing up. Logico-linguistic conceptualization mask the immediate datum of pure thought–a sentiment which shows up in the thinking of philosophers such Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his work Wittgenstein and Judaism Ranjit Chatterjee illustrates this as follows:

“As the Tractatus has it, ‘Language disguises thought. So much so, that the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes’ (4002, emphasis added). This passage is built on the trope language is a body with different layers, including a superficial one which is like clothing on this body. According to Abraham Abulafia, who flourished in the twelfth century, the word for ‘this form which the kabbalists call ‘clothing’’ is malbush.” (p.122)

Can the left brain provide tailor made clothing for the right? Can the right be allowed to appear naturally in the vestments of the left? Can the garments of metaphor carry us the distance from re/presentational thinking back to the original intuition? Perhaps. Much of history has been a process of trying to rehabilitate the left. If the left is to be rectified, then it has to do media-mediation work for the right. A proper media-mediation should offer adequate re/presentation. In this case, it should join the virtual and the real.

These questions will once again be taken up in Part Seven as our series continues.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-executive-system-cognitive-science-and-kabbalah-part-7/ 

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