← The God of the Left Hemisphere Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation
The God of the Left Hemisphere Chapter 3. The Myth of Genesis
Author: Roderick Tweedy Publisher: London, England: Karnac Books. Publish Date: 2022 Review Date: Status:⌛️
Annotations
47
Many suppose that before Adam the Creation All was Solitude & Chaos This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind.
—William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment Introduction: The myth of Genesis
48
according to Blake, the emergence of this dominating, rationalistic left-brain personality has also been recorded in many of the earliest “Creation” texts of human culture, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato’s Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Drawing together all of the points and connections made in this book, he affirms that the “God” portrayed in the Book of Genesis is in fact none other than the “Holy Reasoning Power”: the “God” of the left hemisphere. For that remarkable power, captured so vividly and so remarkably honestly by the early Hebrew writers, fulfils and embodies all of the fundamental activities, properties and even personality, of left-brain circuitry. This early “God” of the Bible presents itself, as does the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus and indeed all other rational abstract deities, as a “Creator” God, but through textual analysis it is evident that it “creates” solely by abstracting and dividing existence (an existence usually in fact acknowledged as being eternal and pre-existing in these texts, but in a state that appears to its rational programmed Deity as being relatively “chaotic”, void, and “formless”).
50
This is most clearly apparent in Plato’s Timaeus, which presents the apparently finite, rational universe (of left hemisphere programming) as a sort of imperfect “copy” of some forgotten, unknown, or eternal original: as Plato puts it, the Urizenic Demiurge “determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one. For before the heavens came into being there were no days or nights or months or years, but he devised and brought them into being at the same time that the heavens were put together” (Plato, 1965, [38] p. 51). The key word here is “ordered”: what all these allegedly “Creator” gods do in fact is just to impose order (though to be fair, this is an extraordinary cognitive and conceptual feat in itself), through divisions, differentiations, and abstracted delineations, onto pre-existing being (rather like a child does in making sense of the universe in order to function in it and to manipulate it). According to the Urizenic Demiurge, it does this because “before” its emergence and domination, “existence” was, or appeared to be, “chaotic”
and irregular—rather like the motion of subatomic particles appears to modern scientific eyes. The Demiurge’s initial act of “Creation” was
T H E M Y T H O F G E N E S I S 35
therefore essentially one of reduction and contraction: Plato’s God, in a telling phrase, “reduced” reality “to order from disorder”. For before his rationalistic Demiurge took control and gradually imposed this rational order, the elements of the universe were, Plato says, “in the disorganized state to be expected of anything which god has not touched, and his first step when he set about reducing them to order was to give them a definite pattern of shape and number” (ibid., [53] pp. 72–73).1
50
This process of reducing things to “order” and giving them a “definite”
(de-finite, de-fined) form, is indeed what all Rational Gods consider to be “creation”: it is their version of creation, creation made in the image of a computer program. And this is also clearly the sort of “creation”
that occurs in the Book of Genesis, another version of Reason’s account of the origin of its origin. “And the earth was without form, and void …
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
51
Here we have all the typical Urizenic left-brain activities at work: giving definition to a pre-existing formless or fluid existence (there is no genuine “creationism” in either the Hebrew Bible or in Plato’s Timaeus), using logos to delineate and separate existence (rationally enough, starting with the most fundamental conceptual categories of day/night, and hence the origins of every subsequent temporal-sequencing program), employing all the analytical, judgmental, evaluative processes of the left hemisphere in order to describe these new abstracted entities as
“good” (just as Plato calls his perfect triangles “good”), before setting to work dividing the rest of eternity into equally nice neat, ordered, Urizenic bits. As Damon notes:
The process of Creation is one of dividing up the original Unity.
Beginning with the separation of light from darkness, it proceeds through the six Days of Creation, culminating in the separation of man from God. [Damon, p. 94] 2
51
Plato’s version brings out especially well the hidden rationalistic nature of this “Creation” myth. The whole story is prompted by a rational question: how did the universe come to be how it is? As with the Book of Genesis, it is an attempt to provide reasons for everything. Reason cannot bear the idea that things happen for no reason or might happen spontaneously, or even just for fun, as bodily things tend to: it interprets all such behaviour as “chaotic” and illogical, and immediately converts
36 THE GOD OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE
it to functional interpretations which it can then understand and use, as with Darwinism (as we shall see later).
52
These secret rationalistic motivations are evident throughout Plato’s account of his “Creator” God.
“Clearly, of course, he had his eye on the eternal; for the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being and he is the best of causes.
That being so, it must have been constructed on the pattern of what is apprehensible by reason and understanding and eternally unchanging”
(Plato, 1965, [29] p. 41).
52
It is worth mentioning here that none of this is in fact logical, any more than are his bodies made out of triangles. It makes no sense to say the world is the fairest—there is no comparison—or that the creator must be a “he”, or that existence is the result of being constructed according to logic, or that to be eternal is synonymous with being unchanging: all of those are simply what reason would “like” to believe—they are emotionally charged.
God therefore, wishing that all things should be good, and so far as possible nothing be imperfect, and finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better. [ibid., [30], p. 42]
53
The important point here, apart from the wilful self-deception of the emotional needs of such reasoning, is the admission that such a rational Creator did not in actuality create the universe but rather imposed order onto a pre-existing world, one that it retrospectively presents as being in a prior state “not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion”, just as the “God” of the Book of Genesis finds the universe formless and void, and (like a good Rational activity) sets to work ordering and dividing it. This is the myth of “Creation”; and indeed, through its embodiment of left-brain story-telling, rationality, linear sequencing, and Logos, it is also the creation of myth. For if the emergence of left brain dominance was recorded in the earliest stories and myths of mankind—handed down in books of genesis, Greek myths, Norse mythology, Babylonian and Sumerian creation texts, Vedic cosmogony, and so on—then those stories themselves were the manifestation of this new god. Temporal and linear sequencing, combined with Logos and rationality, allowed the left hemisphere to develop all kinds of narrative sequencing and for story-telling itself to emerge, and some of the first stories it told were of its own emergence out of eternity. As Bolte Taylor observes:
T H E M Y T H O F G E N E S I S 37
One of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave stories. This story-teller portion of our left mind’s language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of information. [ JBT, p. 143]
54
The story of reason’s emergence as a god-like “Creator” (which is, appropriately enough, the very subject of many of the earliest written texts), can therefore be seen as not only describing the origin of this new power, but also as written by this power. In this sense perhaps they might truly be said to be the “word” of God, the direct product and pronouncement of the “Holy Reasoning Power”. There are, moreover, some similarities between the six central features of this Urizenic power and six of the seven “Eyes of God” (the seventh, as we shall see, is explicitly a non-rational aspect), explored both within the Hebrew Bible and in Blake’s prophetic verse, each representing significant stages of the fall into “division” of man, and his gradual process of reawakening.
54
Thus, for example, the abstracting and dividing power of the left hemisphere corresponds remarkably closely with what the poets of the Tanakh referred to as “The Ancient of Days” (complete with his golden compasses); the judging, moralising aspect seems strongly linked to the “Elohim” (usually translated as “the judges”); the left-brain “I am” ego-centre with “Yahweh”; the rational linguistic activity with Logos, and so on.3 Nor is the association of these Gods with human brain states and functions as unprecedented or unusual as might at first appear. In Norse mythology similar connections are to be found: for example, on the shoulders of the god Odin sit the ravens Huginn (“Thought”) and Muninn (“Memory”), while the ancient Greeks explicitly referred to their gods as brain functions. In Critias, for example, Plato invokes “memory” as a sort of deity: “I …
must call on the gods, adding the goddess Memory in particular … For my whole narrative depends largely on her” (Plato, 1965, [108], p. 131).
Indeed, their entire pantheon resembles a modern neuroscientific textbook. If the Book of Genesis does record the emergence of left brain dominance, then it has a wonderful monument.4
62
Most commonly, the character of our right mind has been ridiculed and portrayed in an extremely unflattering light, simply because it does not understand verbal language or comprehend linear thought … . our right hemisphere personality is depicted as an uncontrollable, potentially violent, moronic, rather despicable ignoramus, which is not even conscious, and without whom we would probably be better off! [ JBT, p. 132]
This is of course entirely in keeping with the character of Urizen. For the “Holy Reasoning Power” can accept no other ways of seeing, no other graven images or Gods, no right hemisphere alternative realities.
“I am God alone/There is no other!” he declares in Milton ( Mil 9:25–26, p. 103).
62
It is to this usurping, inhibiting, accusing and domineering aspect of Urizenic rationality that Blake gives his most shocking and revealing name: “Satan”.8 Indeed, the nature of the emergence of left hemisphere dominance is profoundly similar to that of the traditional desire of Satan. As Damon observes: “The cause of Urizen’s downfall
T H E M Y T H O F G E N E S I S 43
into the state of Satan or error was that of the traditional Satan: the desire for dominion” (Damon, p. 419; Mil, 11:10–13, p. 104). It was this desire that precipitated man’s original “fall” into division, according to the early texts, and which resulted in the severing of the rational from the imaginative in man. “He aspired to be throned in the North (Reason would rule the Imagination)” (Damon, p. 420).
63
According to Blake, man was originally an imaginative being, in touch with the divine and the eternal, able to perceive the infinite in everything, able to see “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” ( Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–2, p. 490). All this changed when the Rational Power within “the Human Brain” took control and became dominant, and Blake believed that the story of this emergence, or fall into division, depending on how one views it, was the basis of Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost.
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. [ MHH Plates 5–6, pp. 34–35]
In the contested interpretations of this event, the orthodox interpretation—that is, the version of events presented by the Rational God of the left brain—is that the “Devil” challenged Reason’s right to rule, and after a struggle, the former was cast out into the flames of Hell.
One doesn’t need to be Freud to see with Blake that “hell” here clearly denotes the body, and bodily desires, and that therefore heaven signifies the perfect, law-obeying rational angels, the computer programmers. “The history of this is written in Paradise Lost,” observed Blake,
“& the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah” ( MHH, Plate 5, p. 34).
64
It was the genius of Blake to counter this interpretation and to expose that in fact precisely the opposite took place: that it was “Reason” that was cast out of eternity (the right hemisphere reality), and that Reason, as we have seen in Plato’s Timaeus and the Book of Genesis, then emerged to present itself as the true “Creator” of linear time, the only
“God” of the human brain. Blake radically reinterprets Paradise Lost as an externalised account of the historical and psychological struggle between the rationalistic and the emotional, bodily and imaginative, for control of the human body. According to this reading, Milton’s text shows the expulsion of supposedly “demonic” and irrational, intuitive bodily energies from a controlling and ordered abstract heaven. But, Blake observes, this is history merely being written by the victor. The
“Devil’s account” is that it was Reason which fell from a previously
44 THE GOD OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE
existing imaginative consciousness of reality, and in seizing control of the human psyche the “Reasoning Power” both “usurps” its place and also eclipses this anterior state of being and perception, which it then suppresses into “subconscious” or bodily life.
64
The history of this struggle also seems to be contained in ancient stories concerning the battle between intelligent “Sky Gods” on the one hand (such as Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah, and Odin), and the Titans or Giants on the other.9 All of these sky gods share predominantly left-brain characteristics: they are powerful and intelligent, rational law-makers, upholders of moral codes, and they all fiercely impose order and functional discipline on the world. And they are all presented as being in conflict with very different sorts of beings: gigantic forms of energy, ones always associated with the body and with bodily desires.
65
Blake again provides the clue to their real significance: The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth. the causes of its life & the sources of all activity. [ MHH Plate 16, p. 40] 10
These “Giants” denote the non-rational bodily “sources of all activity”, the actual “creators” of life. As Damon has observed, they “symbolize the great primeval powers within us, though mostly hidden within our bodies of flesh” (Damon, 1988, p. 155). It is they that are the causes of such physical activities as digestion, sleep, reproduction, healing, bodily growth, amongst many others—processes which are entirely hidden from the “Reasoning Power”, which has absolutely no rational, willed control of, or immediate knowledge of, any of these titanic subconscious bodily forces within existence.
65
Blake’s own preferred term for the gigantic forming power within the body was not giant or Titan but “Genius” (most usually, the “Poetic Genius”, signifying its formative aspect), a term which is derived from the same root as the word from which we also get “genesis” and indeed
“genetic”.11 According to Blake it is this that gives each body its individual as well as generic “form”. He therefore maintains “That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius”:
Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius.
which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon. [ AllR
66
As we have seen, by “Angel” Blake here means the Rational Power (“Good is the passive that obeys Reason”), and by Demon or Devil the bodily or energetic power within man (“Evil is the active springing from Energy”). The traditional conceit of each person having a good and bad angel can in this sense be seen as a reference to what we understand today as each person having a lateralised left (rationalistic) and right (imaginative and bodily) brain and body.
66
A sense of the huge energy of these underlying, formative energies of the body, as apprehended through the right brain, is apparent in Bolte Taylor’s own experience, where her right mind allowed her to reconnect with this aspect of her being.
It seemed odd that I could sense the inner activities of my brain as it adjusted and readjusted all of the opposing muscle groups in my lower extremities to prevent me from falling over. My perception of these automatic body responses was no longer an exercise in intellectual conceptualization. Instead, I was momentarily privy to a precise and experiental understanding of how hard the fifty trillion cells in my brain and body were working in perfect unison to maintain the flexibility and integrity of my physical form. Through the eyes of an avid enthusiast of the magnificence of the human design, I witnessed with awe the automatic functioning of my nervous system as it calculated and recalculated every joint angle. [ JBT, p. 39]
She was, in effect, becoming a giant again. With access to this new awareness of her being, she noticed that the “energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.” Indeed, even more gigantic than a great whale, “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle … it was obvious to me that I would never be able to squeeze the enormousness of my spirit back inside this tiny cellular matrix”
67
( JBT, p. 67).13 This knowledge and indeed experience of herself as a giant form is clearly intimately bound up with her right mind understanding of reality; and the connection between this intuitive, bodily state and the “Giants” or “Poetic Genius” of Blake’s work is even more striking than that. For the word that Bolte Taylor repeatedly uses to describe this apprehension of the immense, constantly self-organising “matrix”
of her bodily life, is “genius”. “I was both fascinated and humbled,” she notes, “by how hard my little cells worked, moment by moment, just to maintain the integrity of my existence in this physical form.” And this
46 THE GOD OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE
“form”, she observes, is the living product of the activity of fifty trillion cells in her body, but fifty trillion cells being organised out of one integral form. “I was proud to see that I was this swarming conglomera-tion of cellular life that had stemmed from the intelligence of a single molecular genius!”
Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. [ JBT, p. 43; Bolte Taylor, 2008b, TED podcast]14
This gene-Genius is surely the true “God” of our genesis; not the abstracting and dividing usurping Rational Power, with his conceptual golden compasses and his book of commands and moralistic laws.
320
In the Book of Revelations, this final, fallen or “divided” form of Lucifer, the original Angel of the Divine Presence, is depicted as the Beast.
407
As Damon has noted, Blake’s work marks the instauration of a new way of understanding the universe, and therefore a new way of being.
“It is one of immediate sensuous and imaginative perception, not of geometrical logic; psychological, not material … Each individual is the center of his own universe” (Damon, p. 417). He adds that “the manifesto of this universe began a New Age [in the evolution of thought].
407
Blake audaciously dated it from his own birth”—1757, the year that Swedenborg had chosen to signal the revelation of a “Last Judgment”
passing over the earth (Damon, p. 262). What does this new revolutionary reality look like? Blake provides an example of it in his poem Milton:
Every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place: Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount
282 THE GOD OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE
Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe; And on its verge the Sun rises & sets. the Clouds bow To meet the flat Earth & the Sea in such an orderd Space: The Starry heavens reach no further but here bend and set On all sides & the two Poles turn on their valves of gold: And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move.
[ Mil 29:5–12, p. 127]
In other words, it is the universe actually perceived and experienced by ordinary people. It is not a conceptual world, such as Copernicanism, nor does it deny the reality of the things immediately apprehended, as in the Platonic and materialistic systems. Such a view of space places
“Man” where he belongs: at the centre of his universe.
408
Blake’s poetry is the ultimate grounding experience. “And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move”: this is about the coolest riposte to the alienated gyrations of Galileo that I have ever come across. Damon observes that in presenting this view of the nature of the universe (as neither geocen-tric nor heliocentric but human-centric, and indeed not even centric, but just human), Blake quietly aligns himself with Ptolemy and Copernicus. But in a sense Blake goes much further. Copernicus only changed the positions of the planets: Blake alters the position of man himself, and therefore of everything.
420
once reason understands itself—once these unconscious processes and programs understand that it is they themselves which are causing the suffering and the alienation from being—then “apocalypse”—the revelation of the non-temporal and non-linear—happens. This is what apocalypse means:
“un-covering”, the lifting or removal of the veil of unconsciousness. It is not an “ending” as such—not in the left hemisphere sense of ending the fiction of linear time: it is simply an uncovering, or unfolding. The removing of the “covering” program, or “Covering Cherub” as Blake calls it: the patina of egoic rationality which is preventing humanity from recognising its own divinity.
420
As we have seen, for Blake divinity is not an attribute or a “thing”, it is a mode of perception.
Damon notes that “the Covering Cherub is the final error, the last enemy to be slain”, and in Blake’s work this figure is sometimes represented by what he refers to as the “twenty-seven Christian heavens”
( Mil 37:60, pp. 137–138), or what one might also call the basic “God”
program: the “religious” and priestly operating system that is common to both R1 and R2 systems of belief, which shuts man out from eternity. The Covering Cherub is variously presented by Blake as the
“majestic image of Selfhood”, “the Antichrist accursed”, “a Human Dragon terrible”, his head enclosing “a reflexion of Eden all perverted” ( J 89:9–15, p. 248).
421
The names or aspects of this God program include, in Blake’s list, “Baal & Ashtaroth”, Molech, “Saturn Jove”, Chemosh, Dagon, Thammuz, Rimmon, Belial, and, in Egypt, “Osiris: Isis: Orus” (or Horus), the “Twelve Spectre Sons of the Druid Albion”
( Mil 37:20–34, pp. 137–138). It is notable that Blake lists Horus amongst these prominent Druidical aspects of Urizenic worship, whose disciples and followers, as we have seen, have played such a significant role in the shaping of human history for the last six thousand years, and whose cult appropriated even Jesus, turning him into the Mythraic
“Christos” born of the Virgin Isis.
421
More recently the same construct has taken over post-Enlightenment “Science”, transforming it into another relentless and rather dogmatic system of mathematic abstracting laws and ratios, “a fundamentalist belief system” as Sheldrake strikingly
C O N C L U S I O N 293
refers to it, and one that is largely run to reinforce “the prestige of the scientific priesthood” (Sheldrake, 2012, p. 257, p. 327). Once reason itself understands the insanity of the dissociated rational programs currently driving it, and the nature of its historical religious basis, Blake suggests that the full liberation of science—and therefore of human knowledge itself—can occur. Blake’s work suggests the presence of Urizenic rationalising programs within orthodox religion, before then also revealing the essentially “religious” aspect of purportedly secular post-Newtonian science.
422
Having uncovered the psychological basis of the structure of popular religion, Blake rolls away the foundation stone of modern science as well. This reduces the mind to a state of almost complete liberty. As Frye notes, referring to Blake’s understanding of the alienating and destructive nature of the orthodox, rationalising
“God” program currently driving the human operating system, “the essential barrier between man and his divine inheritance is the belief in a nonhuman God founded on the fallen vision of an objective nature.
This is what Blake means by ‘Religion’” (Frye, 1947, pp. 270–271).