Dancing light of grace

Yesterday, I spent some time on Rafaello Palandri’s Weblog who’s a Buddhist Priest and fond of McGilchrist whose name is new to me. My feedback on his article stirred some counters by him. Here’s a link https://raffaellopalandri.wordpress.com/author/rpalandri/

to his weblog if you want to visit our conversation. I was at work and didn’t have access to quiet personal computer to describe in detail what might sound like frivolous banter to some. The article with title beginning with “Neurological Frameworks” is the one where I showcase internal martial arts to Palandri.


Though it might sound like ad hominem: Buddhism is atheistic as far as I know. A Buddhist Priest is a paradox. Who does he intermediate to if there’s no absolute authority and plethora of gods admitted by Shakyamuni are no better than loan sharks. Within the brackets are excerpts from Palandri’s article and below them my comments which as per “blogging etiquettes” taught in WordPress blogging 101 alumni course suit better to such articles rather than wasting someone’s comments trail by hijacking it. I used to engage in such conversations when I first started accessing internet in 2005. Time and degeneration : how it gives weightage to your excursions and rambling ( look what I did again in the name of Dharma! }]

[Within this framework, attention operates not merely as a spotlight but as an architectonic force that configures the landscape of perception itself. Attentional mechanisms are asymmetrically distributed across cerebral hemispheres, and herein lies the crucial insight advanced by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. The left hemisphere tends toward focused, linear, abstract, and decontextualized attention—useful for manipulation and categorization. Conversely, the right hemisphere offers a holistic, contextual, and embodied mode of awareness—one more attuned to relational depth and novelty.]


1.Left Right Hemispheres
The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, each controlling opposite sides of the body and processing different types of information. The left hemisphere is typically associated with language, logic, and analytical thinking, while the right hemisphere is linked to creativity, spatial awareness, and intuition.

Research has shown that both hemispheres of the brain are used equally and work together, rather than one being dominant over the other. A study involving 1,000 participants found no evidence of overall left or right brain dominance.
While specific functions may be more prominent in one hemisphere, such as language processing being more dominant in the left hemisphere, both sides of the brain are involved in most tasks.

The idea that people can be classified as left-brained or right-brained is a popular myth. The brain’s hemispheres do have different specializations, but they function as a cohesive unit, and the brain uses both sides for most activities.

In summary, while the left and right hemispheres have distinct roles, they work together to perform various cognitive functions, and there is no evidence to support the notion of overall left or right brain dominance.
[ An AI generated answer. Please verify the critical facts. ]

[ Attention shapes what is salient. Neural networks—especially those involving the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Central Executive Network—compete and collaborate to stabilize our sense of what is real. The implications are staggering: even so-called “objective reality” is filtered through a nexus of selective neural processes.

The attentional bias of the left hemisphere can lead to a reductive world of fragmented parts, while the right’s open stance supports integrative, experiential meaning. Thus, reality becomes neither entirely subjective nor objective, but an emergent product of dynamic neural modeling. ]

2. That’s a weak premise and a lot of presupposition when experiments as suggested upthread have shown that there’s very little proof to validate this left right brain dominance. To take an ongoing research as a solid substance to create a cult like master and emissary is just that : another cult.



[ From Kant’s transcendental idealism—where space, time, and causality are categories of mind—to Husserl’s phenomenology, which sought to bracket the world and return to the structures of consciousness itself, the history of philosophy reveals a recurring awareness: that we see not the world itself, but a world as mediated through us. ]

3. As stated elsewhere on WordPress Husserl and Heidegger are a lot of pseudo Philosophy.

[ Heidegger‘s notion of being-in-the-world (Dasein) further expands this paradigm by dissolving the subject-object dichotomy: reality is disclosed through modes of attunement or moods—existential ]

4. Moods? Hahaha, maybe Heidegger personally suffered from insomnia and bipolar disorders. Why make a philosophy out of it? Why not.

[equivalents to cognitive frames. Language, too, is not a mere vessel of expression but the horizon of disclosure. Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy articulates this insight through his concept of language games, where meaning arises not from intrinsic semantics but from rule-bound uses within forms of life.]

5. Wittegenstein ok because Russel said so. And Russel won Nobel Peace Prize. And Rajneesh Osho said they were brilliant as a professor and pupil.


[ To draw from McGilchrist‘s profound synthesis:

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
Iain McGilchrist

This deceptively simple statement captures the core of both neuroscientific and philosophical insights: our conceptual apparatuses do not neutrally reflect a pre-given reality but construct and delimit what counts as reality in the first place. The very framing of a question prefigures its answer.]

6. UG Krishnamurthy used it ad infinitum ad absurdum ad nauseum. And even Socratic dialogues point to the same. I neither consider it profound nor synthesis. All Indian schools of Philosophy use this question and answer model to promote conversation until it rests in silence.

[ When Descartes adopted the method of doubt, he unearthed a mechanistic dualism; when Spinoza emphasized immanence and necessity, he found a pantheistic monism.

What they saw was shaped by how they looked. ]

7. Yes, similar to Son of Gilchrist and UG and others.

[ CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES: EPOCHAL SHIFTS IN ATTENTIONAL MODES
Historical epochs are undergirded by dominant modes of attention and cognitive orientation. ]

8. Alright.

[ The axial age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern era each instantiated not only new ideologies but also new cognitive dispositions. The Enlightenment, for example, privileged the left-hemispheric mode: clarity, abstraction, atomism, and control. Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian physics reinforced a mechanistic ontology that demanded manipulation over communion.

In contrast, indigenous epistemologies and oral traditions have often preserved right-hemispheric modes: integrative, relational, cyclical, and embodied understandings of reality. These systems were not less “rational” but engaged with the world through a different cognitive ethos—one that saw knowledge as something lived, not just represented.]

9. Argument does seem profound in favor of those traditions but if they were enough you wouldn’t be using these technologies. Similarly, when you start defending your essays against some perceived counter arguments like mine you use what you call language, logic or left brain technologies instead of letting it rest in silence and resolving itself in the way of Dao or Wu-Wei.

[ Modernity’s legacy—via industrialization, digitization, and algorithmic governance—has exacerbated left-hemispheric dominance. Surveillance capitalism, behavioral nudging, and quantified self-metrics disembed us from qualitative immediacy and immerse us in abstracted feedback loops. Cultural attention is increasingly transactional, externalized, and fragmentary. What becomes real is what can be measured, categorized, and commodified. ]

10. It’s only when we try to criticize the record keeping in a more accurate format that we start looking at drawbacks of technology. I have two other suggestions to offer:
Look at it as work in progress where a very small fragment raises caution. To explain it: chaos is not allowed but a fragment of a whole which is working fine. After all that’s essence of mantra “Om Mani payme hum” or “Padme Hum”
As an aside: etymology of money comes from some Latin word for mint but this Buddhist mantra clearly recalls mani or shining head of a naga or lover of reality or elephant or enlightened jewel being equivalent to wealth which is translated as material wealth or currency in the modern context.
This is merely a conjecture, an imaginary suggestion which is only supported by intuitive art: similar to Nick Bostrum’s Simulation Hypothesis: all this technology is merely past signatures of a very highly evolved civilization which has been in existence since forever. Most of our species as homosapiens or maybe our entire ecosystems including animals and plants etc are being tested for next stage.
I think Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Pan-audicon ( I propose that for all senses) help you with surveillance capitalism because surveyors are also being surveyed which brings you to consciousness looking back at itself or transcendental opulence.

[ This cognitive colonization has led to what McGilchrist calls a “hall of mirrors”,Stoi where abstraction reflects abstraction, and we become strangers to the texture of lived experience. Reclaiming our right-hemispheric capacities thus becomes not only a psychological imperative but a cultural resistance to epistemic impoverishment. ]

11. I think no matter how much you try these models point to the biological organism of man-model or Purusha Sukta of Vedas. Is it really freedom to associate yourself with any form no matter how superior it sounds. Left brain, right brain, balance, then what? Lizards love their forms as much as you love yours .

[ STOIC INTERPRETATIONS: ATTENTION AS RATIONAL ASSENT AND INNER FREEDOM
In Stoicism, the shaping of reality is an ethical and epistemological act.

The Stoics, particularly Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, emphasize that what disturbs us is not events themselves but our judgments about them. This Stoic axiom—“It is not things themselves that trouble us, but our opinions about things”—anticipates cognitive-behavioral insights and aligns with the notion that attention and interpretative frameworks co-construct reality.

The Stoic practice of προαίρεσις / prohairesis (moral will) is precisely the active modulation of one’s attention and judgment. For the Stoics, the λόγος / logos—universal reason—pervades all existence, and wisdom lies in aligning one’s rational faculties with this cosmic order. ]

13. Even with failed attempts as in trial and error it happens. Even sustained attention without palpable action is action. Stoicism or Shakyamuni Buddha’s fable of sending a disciple Anand to bring water from a puddle which was dirty as a test of patience to bring about clarity point towards same thing.

[ Attention becomes a disciplined gaze that filters out externals and focuses on what is within our control. Thus, perception is always already moralized: how we see is how we live. ]

14. Even machines which carry out their tasks properly do the same. You use this art of attention eventually to teach holistic health or natural state way of living. Machines are capable of multitasking and brilliantly devoting themselves to the task at hand. I don’t see how attention is special in human subjects or meditation practitioners who experience Samadhi because earlier the same energy was devoted to multitasking and seemed insufficient to specific profound tasks of finding solutions to great problems.

[ This attention to internal framing allows for psychological resilience and freedom. In a world governed by fate, our one sovereignty lies in our evaluative stance. The Stoics did not deny reality; they reconfigured it by refusing to attend to it on terms dictated by impulse, fear, or desire. Their cognitive framework was one of serene realism, affirming the structure of the cosmos while modulating the self’s relation to it.]

15. I understand it as a practical everyday reality. It’s similar to an old man who is slow to react compared to a young man who has no profundity. Sometimes a combination works. But as a machine this is only being unable to cope with puzzling evolution or reality at everyday existence where I translate this introversion or rest as sleep or death or looking back at oneself but without anything external to it.

[ BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVES: MINDFULNESS, EMPTINESS, AND NON-DUAL AWARENESS
In Buddhism, particularly within the Madhyamaka and Zen traditions, the very notion of an independent, self-existing reality is deconstructed.

All phenomena are empty (शून्य / śūnya)—not in the sense of non-existence, but as devoid of inherent, independent essence. Dependent origination (प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद / pratītyasamutpāda) reveals that things arise in interdependence; thus, what we perceive is conditioned by our mental formations (संस्कार / saṃskāra), attention or mental efforts (मनसिकार / manasikāra), and वासना / vāsanā or संस्कार / samskara, the karmic imprints.

The role of attention is paramount.

In Satipaṭṭhāna (the Four Foundations of Mindfulness), mindfulness is not mere awareness but a precise, ethical, and transformative act of seeing things as they are—without clinging or aversion. This disciplined attention reveals the constructed nature of experience. We do not perceive a pre-given world; we enact a world through craving, aversion, and ignorance.

Zen further radicalizes this by emphasizing non-conceptual awareness (wu-nien, 無念)—a mode of cognition that precedes linguistic and dualistic structuring. Reality, in its suchness (tathātā), can be seen only when the delusive constructs of the discriminating mind are set aside. ]

16. Yes, repeated emphasis on attention actually borders on obsessive compulsive disorder as if it wasn’t enough to save one’s life already. A type of paranoia. Since attention actually is distributed and maintained via internal feedback loops associated with environmental awareness which goes beyond mere personal training it’s not really useful to strain your nevers beyond a certain point.

[ Here, the “model” that McGilchrist refers to is precisely what must be suspended to awaken to unmediated presence.

Thus, in Buddhism, cognitive frameworks are both the veil and the gateway.]

17. Veils and gateways. Nice models.

[ Deluded perception traps us in samsara; rightly attuned attention leads to awakening. By transforming how we attend—through meditation, ethical conduct, and wisdom—we transform the world, not by altering phenomena, but by dissolving the illusory reifications that bind us.]

18. And the machine runs smoothly. Utilitarian machine. Irony.

[ The Ethical Imperative of Cognitive Framing
To understand that our modes of attention shape the world is not a call to solipsism but an invitation to epistemic responsibility.

19. It is to realize that reality is co-authored by our neural dispositions, philosophical premises, historical inheritances, and moral attitudes. Whether through the scientific models we choose, the philosophical systems we inhabit, or the ethical practices we undertake, we are perpetually writing the world into being.

Reclaiming right-hemispheric attention, embracing mindful presence, cultivating rational judgment, and engaging cultural memory are not separate endeavors. They are harmonics of the same deeper insight: that how we attend is what we become.

Indeed, as McGilchrist reminds us, the model determines the find, not merely epistemologically, but ontologically. The real is not out there, awaiting discovery, but here, emerging within the very act of attention.]

20. Neither here nor there. Funny that a model which talks of transcendental wisdom sticks to the biological basis of consciousness which is still unsubstituted as the foundation of reality.

– to be continued…

21. Since this article might garner some attention from Buddhists it might explain how seemingly overnight post COVID Wikipedia had Hinduism with more number of followers compared to Buddhism. I haven’t come across anyone who admitted that let alone refuting that in the  pre COVID years Buddhism was the third most followed religion after Christianity and Islam.