Buddhism and the right brain

About 10 years ago when I first started getting into yoga, some trippy things happened to me. It wasn't like I had to practice intensively to have these experiences or to go to some sacred place or remote retreat, either. It was like yoga just opened up my mind to the trippiness that was there all along, apparently (according to Jill Bolte Taylor's book A Stroke of Insight) in the right hemisphere of my brain.

In 1999, I was stressed-out, bored and lonely in my first teaching job at Hamilton College in Clinton NY, a tiny college town with one coffee shop, one artsy gift shop, and one restaurant serving the worst Chinese food I ever had in my life. The weekly yoga class I happened into was held above the gift shop in a bare room decorated with industrial carpeting and not much else. My yoga teacher, Nathan, was just an ordinary sensitive-new-age-guy who had been trained at the Kripalu Center in Lennox, MA, which meant that his method was informed by Vedic (Hindu) spirituality and emphasized a gentle, contemplative style of movement. This was the first time that yoga had worked for me: my body didn't have to struggle with the poses and as my breathing and movement came in sync, my mind relaxed and opened up to new insights.

That year, I began to free myself from many of the thoughts that were making me miserable by testing Buddhist theories about the nature of reality and the self. For me, one of the great appeals of Buddhist philosophy is that it is very pragmatic and empirical. As my Tricycle Magazine Twitter feed reminded me today, the Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense." And so, what I want to relate here is an experience that I understand through reason and common sense, but I don't expect you to believe what I believe unless you have experienced it yourself. You might want to believe Dr. Taylor, the neurologist, though!

Nathan invited another teacher to join his class one night, and at the end of yoga practice, when we were all breathing full breaths, when our bodies were relaxed and our minds were calm, the guest teacher had us lie down on the floor. As we concentrated on our breathing and being present in the moment, her fingers traced a line on the floor all around our bodies. Nathan had warned us that this teacher had a powerful spiritual energy and that we might have some sort of unusual experience, but I was skeptical of anything that smacked of mysticism.

However, as an empiricist, I would of course try the exercise, and what I perceived was that those fingers were erasing my ego as they traced around me. Then when the circle was complete, the instant her fingers again reached the top of my head, I had an out-of-body experience. Not the kind where I was floating and looking down on myself, but one where suddenly I was pure consciousness, detached entirely from the material world. Part of me was aware that this wasn't really happening, but at the same time, another part of me knew that I was tapping into some other kind of truth that was just as real as what normally comes from my physical senses.

At first, I giggled to myself and wondered what other spirits were out here that I could zoom off and encounter, but then I realized that there were no "others" and in fact, my lingering sense of self was in fact a false belief left over from my many years of material existence. Having lived for so long with an ego, this total loss of identity then felt a little scary and I made my way back into the physical, wiggling my toes and fingers with glee. However, those physical sensations were just as concrete to me as the realization that beyond our physical existence, we are all inseparable parts of a dancing cosmos.

It seems that what this exercise did was to allow me to give some screen time to my normally suppressed right brain. This is what happened to neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor when she had a stroke that gradually disabled much of the functioning of her left brain. Her sense of time, causality, and identity started flickering in and out, and she was awash in a blissful sense of oneness with the universe. As I read descriptions of her "stroke of insight" last week, they strongly recalled my own experience that evening in yoga class. Taylor writes:

My entire self-concept shifted as I no longer perceived myself as a single, a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. I understood that at the most elementary level, I am fluid. …Everything around us, about us, among us, within us, and between us is made up of atoms and molecules vibrating in space. …My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea. For many of us, thinking about ourselves [this way] slips us just beyond our comfort zone. But without the judgement of my left brain saying that I am a solid, my perception of myself returned to this natural state of fluidity.

This sense of fluidity extended to Jill's physical perceptions as well: without the discernment of her left brain, she was unable to distinguish colors, distance, edges, sounds, or differences of many kinds, such as a perception of time or of a sense of loss, which almost killed her. Fortunately, her left brain retained enough functioning to raise the alarm and keep her thinking linear enough to call for help. So although Jill's experience of reality through her right brain was pleasurable and liberating, clearly we need both sides of our brain in order to survive.

My goal during this process of recovery has been not only to find a healthy balance between the functional abilities of my two hemispheres, but also to have more say about which character dominates my perspective at any given moment. I find this to be important because the most fundamental traits of my right hemisphere personality are deep inner peace and loving compassion. I believe the more time we spend running our inner peace/compassion circuitry, then the more peace/compassion we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace/compassion we will have on the planet. As a result, the clearer we are about which side of our brain is processing which types of information, the more choice we have in how we think, feel, and behave not just as individuals, but as collaborating members of the human family.

The way Jill describes how she exercises the circuitry of her right brain bears a strong resemblance to the language Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han uses to describe how one can cultivate peace and compassion in daily life:

We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending on the strength of these seeds within us. 

When the seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us every day, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence, and fear in us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace.

Buddhist practice is about exercising the right brain. Makes sense to me.

Outsiders and Cultural Heritage

I am currently working on a research project about globalization and intangible culture heritage (what is that? See my post on this concept). In the realm of culture, globalization homogenizes culture by making bland Western pop culture ubiquitous, but it also diversifies by giving people in any part of the world the opportunity to develop a taste for the exotic (which I mean in the literal sense: "from the outside").

However, economic globalization and its predecessor, industrialization, have created structural conditions that threaten cultural diversity. Wage labor draws young people away from traditional culture producing occupations, markets for traditional cultural objects shrink as people aspire to consume foreign-produced goods, local handicrafts cannot compete with cheap plastic imports, and so on. When one generation cannot pass on its knowledge about how to make these objects and its esteem for their value, tradition dies and local communities become more dependent on those from the outside. Choices become more limited, not more diverse.

While reading The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Nepal: Future Directions, I came across this analysis: "Training in traditional craftsmanship or skills is taught through 'learning by doing' within the family and traditional workshops…the skill transfer is inter-family and inter-caste and normally takes place within this closed circle." So far, so good. Then the author goes on to juxtapose the culture as it exists now (integrated into the daily lives of the older generation) and how it might be preserved in the future:

"Having said this, there is still a need for reinterpreting and successfully communicating elements of ICH [intangible cultural heritage] knowledge and skills to younger generations. The modern way of learning and living has to see the value in ICH so that the younger generations continue to practice these precious elements of heritage. Traditional artists are often local farmers, who are heavily involved in their occupations. Hence their folk performances are mainly enacted during seasonal rituals, or spontaneous moments of singing and dancing in the villages. Folk performances are still often not taken seriously as an 'occupation,' and with the breakdown of tradition training models and funding, young artists are often unable to obtain professional opportunities, including scholarships for training. Therefore, many traditional performing arts are not consistently transmitted, nor adequately promoted to younger generations."

Singing as one works and performing rituals as part of special celebrations is the very essence of traditional culture, while folk performance as an "occupation" seems to be a contradiction in terms. Responding to the threat to traditional culture in this way is a bit ironic: the way to save traditional culture is to institutionalize or professionalize it. This can be extreme, resulting in what anthropologists and folklorists have called "frozen cultures" or "the museumification of culture:" preserving tradition for posterity's sake by removing it from its social context. This is a notion that is associated with modernity, with a Western romanticism that has spread along with globalization. It seems to me that viable solutions for the problem of threatened cultural diversity need to be based on models of sustainable economic development, even if those models are also imported "from the outside."

One of the interesting things you find if you do research on globalization is how important international organizations have become in both expanding and mitigating the effects of globalization. For example, a recent story on Fergana.ru features a family who are reviving the art of basket weaving they learned from their parents. When wage labor failed them, they turned to selling these baskets made from cheap, locally available materials. In the interview, Shakhodat Khamidova said that she and her brother "made a promise to our ancestors to keep it up in the family so that it won't be forgotten." But apparently that promise was not easy to keep since there wasn't much demand for the kinds of baskets they knew how to weave, so Khamidova made a global connection:

"I made a trip to Bishkek to learn the art of European weaving from Forgan Sandor of Hungary. The Association NAU from Khujand contacted me on my return. It was with its help that I … toured distant [villages] to meet with girls and young women there and teach them what I had learned. I have more than 300 pupils now. They phone me with words of appreciation almost every day. What really counts is that these people will find their own road in life now and find life itself all the more interesting."

Nau is apparently a non-governmental organization (NGO) funded by international donors to do development projects in northern Tajikistan. It is heartening to see donors supporting economic development through the arts. When I first started to research this topic in 2002-2003, economic development programs in the former Soviet Union were almost exclusively targeted to agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure. Outsiders play a role here mainly behind the scenes. The Khamidovs, using the knowledge and materials they already had, and with a little economic support from outsiders, seem to provide a good example of sustainable traditional craft production, one that integrates the transmission of traditional knowledge and values into the ever-changing reality of daily life.

The Aesthetics of Blind People

The front page of today's Boston Globe featured a picture from the Perkins School's prom. The article began,

WATERTOWN - By 5 o'clock, two hours before prom time, the clouds of hairspray had grown so thick inside Fisher Hall, they'd wafted into a courtyard. Inside the women's residence hall, Leslie Gruette was getting her hair styled and makeup applied before the biggest social event of the school year.

"Something pretty, but simple," requested Gruette, 20, who'll graduate later this month from the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. Bronze shimmer? Sure, she said. Lipgloss? Why not.

Thursday evening's prom was the fourth Gruette has attended during her eight years at Perkins, the oldest school in the United States for young people who are blind.

Someone at my kitchen table made a comment about the seeming irony of blind people caring about their appearance, but I started wondering: what are the aesthetics of blind people? If I were blind, would I pick a prom dress because its fabric felt special? Because it made a swishing sound when I walked? Or because my Mother told me it looked good on me? I am aware of a good deal of sociological research on the deaf sub-culture and its subwoofer-heavy aesthetics, but what of blind culture, if such a thing even exists?

It turns out that reviewing research on the aesthetics of blind people was no simple task. I put the search terms "blind people aesthetics" into Google Scholar and got no relevant hits on the first page, so I switched to the catalog of Harvard's library system, Hollis, and searched for "blind aesthetics," which mostly turned up books on metaphorical and literal blindness in literature. One thing that most of the items these searches turned up was that they were either not about actual blind people, or they were studies that viewed blind people as targets for intervention, not as subjects of aesthetic judgments. So far, I had found no research asking blind people, "So, what do you like?"

I went deeper into Hollis, looking for disabilities studies journals, but most of those dealt with developmental disabilities. However, I did find the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, which (with the help of my handy Harvard ID number) led me to a much older article that I couldn't access electronically. This article apparently describes how the aesthetics of blind and sighted children differ in judging sculpture, so it would probably be right up my alley if I could find it, but I can't without diving into the library stacks and answering this question isn't quite worth it to me. However, the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness also led me to the American Foundation for the Blind (its parent organization) and to Psychological Abstracts (via PsycInfo), which indexes its articles.

Using PsycInfo, blind + aesthetic turned up 79 articles, most of which were irrelevant because "blind" in psychology often refers to an aspect of experimental design. I discovered some oddities such as a tellingly named Russian journal called Дефектологиа (Defectology). I also came across several studies of how visual art can be translated into tactile art in such a way that blind and sighted people can have aesthetically equivalent experiences, but these were oriented towards aesthetic education of visually impaired students, not to the, so to speak, native aesthetics of blind people.

So, what do you think I'm missing? Perhaps aesthetics was the wrong search term? Perhaps I should look not to research but to memoir? Sadly, in the end, I have no clearer idea of whether or not blind people share a common culturally- or cognitively-derived aesthetics, and I still don't know what a blind girl wants in a prom dress.

Research review summary
Results: unsatisfactory.
Difficulty: difficult.