If you want to inherit the kingdom, look with the eyes of the little child. Or maybe drink a few cocktails.
Here's the thing about kids: Their prefrontal cortexes aren't developed. Their PFCs don't fully develop until their early twenties.
PFCs control analytical thinking. It is often said that they perform "executive functions" (see below).
So even though the PFC exists in both hemispheres, I'm guessing it leans left, so to speak, with the result that patients with focal strikes in the left prefrontal cortex outperform normal people in creative problem-solving tasks that require breaking away from rule-based thinking. The Matter with Things, 259
If we weaken the PFC, we weaken the left hemisphere's grip. We can weaken the PFC by cultivating the mind of the child. By doing so, we keep ourselves young, which means we keep ourselves flexible and creative.
These are good things.
I can see why Cosmo Landesman admires people who are like that.
Cosmo Landesman
The problem is, he equates it with "drunks and stoners." There's a lot of truth there, but we don't have to be a drunk or stoner to keep our PFC in service to the right hemisphere instead of letting it become a foot soldier in the left hemisphere's efforts to usurp the right hemisphere's rightful reign.
We can cultivate the eyes of the child in all sorts of ways. Christ, after all, wasn't suggesting his followers drop acid in order to inherit the kingdom.
Any efforts to weaken the PFC's left-hemispheric sway over our brains help us cultivate the eyes of the child.
Mindfulness meditation (see McGilchrist video below).
I'm bummed this video didn't expand into any explanation McGilchrist may have provided about psychedelics. The questioner asked the question but he limited his response just to the mindfulness part of the question (or the video cut off before he got to psychedelics).
Related
Includes audio. Go to 32:00 to hear quoted material below.
In their earliest years, children are dominated by the right hemisphere. "As children get older, the left hemisphere matures. It starts showing its talent for spoken and written language, and school curricula move away from areas where the right hemisphere is really in its element. 'There is a kind of westernization, or left hemispherization, of the way we approach the world.' . . . 'The development of a kind of technical, problem-solving attitude to our lives, certainly in education. Almost everybody on the planet now goes to the same kind of school, and your life trajectory is determined by how good you are at that kind of learning. . . . [A left hemispheric imbalance] is institutionalized, it's in the bone marrow, of our eduction.'"
