Dear Tom. Thank you for penning an interesting and thoughtful read. Some disparate points before sharing my opinion: you probably are aware but I have to shout him out. Rupert Sheldrake has spent decades on the topic of everyday telepathic experiences. Denying that they exist is as baffling as suggesting your left arm isn't yours but someone else's (there's a hint here!). I urge your readers to familiarise themselves with his tireless efforts to bring fringe phenomena into scientific discourse.
On your non verbal autist / savant section: McGilchrist's work candidly suggests that autism resembles a right hemisphere deficient experience of the world. The number of people with severely autistic children who wrote to him after the publication of The Matter With Things in particular I believe, sharing their thanks that he brought this information to light and agreeing in the veracity of his works' claims is telling. What isn't clear, and McGilchrist goes to pains to state this, is whether autism is a result of the hemispheres being too siloed or too connected - it isn't clear. He does speculate in his podcast (which is a must listen if you enjoy his work) whether the key to understanding these conditions better might lie in exploring the corpus callosum specifically (for the reason mentioned previously).
My own opinion is that I respectfully disagree that an awakening is underway or around the corner. This isn't to suggest that I am writing it off entirely because I believe parents especially have an outsized role to play in re-engaging the future adults of the world to the tethering and fulfilling consequences of community, connectedness to nature, and a respect for the sacred/divine. It is more a critique on the deeply pervasive, entrenched and narrowly focused, quantitative manipulation that the left hemisphere affords us. Instagram is a denial of time as flow (insta is the tell), Facebook is a denial of the locality of community etc. AI pursuits in their present forms resemble the epitome of the left hemisphere (LLMs, data gathering, power requirements) including the signature extra digit error in renderings of human hands.
There is a great deal more to say and I apologise if the length of the comment is unwanted. Thanks once again and I look forward to reading more of your work.
I love this response thanks! I was confused in encountering the savant/non-verbal left hemisphere hypothesis: as in The Matter With Things I thought it was the opposite. But then I did some superficial, non-expert digging this week and there does seem like there's evidence (footnoted) that this specific kind of autism is LH deficient. I asked Dr McG over email and await an update! Like I said: this is all WILDLY SPECULATIVE. If it proves to be wrong on a macro level, I am not overly concerned as the personal benefits of taking this approach to life are their own reward.
Sheldrake is also fantastic and featured once again in episode 6 of the Telepathy Tapes, which I suspect you'll enjoy! Thanks again.
Perhaps a shift, unsetling like the the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, or the man dreaming to be a butterfly(or the butterfly dreaming being a man)(or both or neither)
I love the Woo rating or "warning" It is a great idea to let people know what they are in for. Yes authoritarian systems reward and wire us for left brain thinking, but some of us are able to open our third nostril, and smell when we have stepped into some dysfunctional poo! Thank you for offering several points of view and ways to reboot our conciousness!
Thanks Jim! Hopefully it demonstrates a little humour/self awareness. Having discernment when you’re at the edge of what’s currently acceptable is difficult. Especially when you’re not an expert in anything. Third nostril is an epic epithet.
Nice bunch of synchronicities here, with meeting other people recently who have read The Matter with Things, and then listening to a contemporary (not religious) philosopher who was meeting semi-secretly on a boat with a group of AI / indigenous / healer / basically cool people who implied that they all believe a genuine paradigm shift is going to happen rather abruptly, and relatively soon, ie, the disruptive surprise to the left-dominated people is not the recent election result, but something far bigger and more impactful that we simply do not have the language to express. Said the grace of DJT's clear mandate is we have more time to prepare to live/love differently without, I guess, having to deal with more chaos on this level first. My antennae are certinaly up. Love talking / reading/ experiencing this stuff so thank you very much for your post. Feel less crazy already :)
Thank you! I feel like New Agey people are continuously talking about paradigm shifts, and scientific people basically never. So there has to be a senseible middle ground! TBH though, I simply FEEL it coming. Not scientific at all, but hey.
Agreed. The New Agey people can sound tiresomely repetitive, but of course they'll be proved right if/when it happens. But then a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day... As for the scientific dogmatists...the less said.
Putting all that aside, however, I can feel the paradigm shift coming too, this year as never before. It's almost palpably in the air, in the collective vibration, or whatever we want to call it, and in that sense it's not so much coming as it is already upon us.
Thanks for doing your part to facilitate its arrival!
What a great article in so many ways for me. I work in the quantumn field and it’s so good the way you have delicately with respect to all things weaved it into a beautiful piece of work . I love it so thank you .
Thank you so much for this read. As things tend to go, I had saved this quite some time back, forgotten about it and in the interim found McGilchrist, been reading the Tao and some other hemispherical based work. Reading this last night in many ways felt like a mirror and weaving together of my own thoughts and studies but with so many more resources and interesting paths to now travel to. Thank you!
I had a question that I was hoping someone might be able to help with. For many years I would find myself in a kind of mental induced paralysis or "stuckness". I would know that I needed to get out of bed, or off the couch, but it would sometimes take me an hour or more to do so, where I'd mostly just be stuck in my mind. (This is something quite commonly reported within the neurodivergent community). Alternatively, pure force and willpower while somewhat effective also felt deeply damaging on some level. Last year, I figured out that wiggling my toes somehow seemed to override that system and help me get into my body, and get moving. At some point in reading the Tao, I synchronised toe wiggling with my best attempt at Wu Wei. Consequently over the past 6 months or so what had been a really big, embarrassing and annoying problem has almost completely resolved. I can still very easily get stuck in my mind, but I can just as easily switch to a state where I can easily get things done, without any of the crippling anxiety and even without any toe wiggling. This morning, observing this switch, I could almost feel my brain hemispheres switching, and I was wondering if what I had maybe taught myself was switching from left to right brain? Any thoughts on this would be deeply appreciated.
Wow- that's amazing. I have myself been struggling with my tendency to dissociate into abstract ideas, especially on my phone. I've focused on blocking apps and creating affordances. But this focused embodiment seems worth trying. Excited for you to read my piece tomorrow on Gurdjieff!
Yes. After too many years of cellular addiction (let's call it what it is..) I've found with mine and for me that there is no level of moderation as soon as video and image are involved. Deleting all apps permanently, and keeping myself logged out and using my laptop to access when I need to has changed my life for the better in so many ways. I find it fascinating now how quickly I can get completely absorbed as soon as I do log in, which has been a very nice change to the years of self judgement. Understanding UX design and some neuroscience also helps! (Sorry for the very wordy reply!)
I'm so enjoying digging into your work, looking forward to the read as well!
I’ve been trying to work out what an 11 is. Flat earth? Dragons and unicorns? Sadly things I would have said a few years ago I’m now not sure: aliens, Atlantis, crystals….
If you have nothing to say about it assume you didn’t get it. I was intuitive and raw so I get it. However it is breakthrough level synergistic anatomy with profound consequences for consciousness—completely coming from left field admittedly. Can you tell me what I should change?
Thanks for replying Tom. I describe a new body part and a new kind of body part that is the basis for right hemispheric cognition and so is a fundamental shift in self awareness. I will try to be a little more clear. No one expects a physiological and sensorimotor solution to left hemisphere imbalance but an anatomical solution makes a lot more sense to me than than a philosophical one. It’s a lot of totally new thinking for most people.
Fascinating post. A couple years ago I read Christof Koch's The Feeling of Life Itself and first learned about IIT. The connection you make between this potential scientific revolution and IFS is something that kind of struck me, but I couldn't articulate it. My wife is a therapist who applies IFS, even the woo woo stuff. I appreciate you making this connection for my her and I. We haven't seen our work as "overlapping". This is a post, including references, that I am going to be coming back to. There is alot to chew on! Thank you!
I love what you're doing! Thank you! Ah, synchronicity — today I read that specific chapter of the Tao Te Ching :D
Also, thank you for sharing The Telepathy Tapes on X. Incredible accounts! Definitely gave a boost to my faith in the whole. It'll probably make me invincible if I ever encounter this phenomenon myself aha! I do have some experiments in mind... :)
I have just been learning about the quantum field, and diving into all the everything (and all the nothing) and this read helped me with understanding more. Thank you.
Dear Tom. Thank you for penning an interesting and thoughtful read. Some disparate points before sharing my opinion: you probably are aware but I have to shout him out. Rupert Sheldrake has spent decades on the topic of everyday telepathic experiences. Denying that they exist is as baffling as suggesting your left arm isn't yours but someone else's (there's a hint here!). I urge your readers to familiarise themselves with his tireless efforts to bring fringe phenomena into scientific discourse.
On your non verbal autist / savant section: McGilchrist's work candidly suggests that autism resembles a right hemisphere deficient experience of the world. The number of people with severely autistic children who wrote to him after the publication of The Matter With Things in particular I believe, sharing their thanks that he brought this information to light and agreeing in the veracity of his works' claims is telling. What isn't clear, and McGilchrist goes to pains to state this, is whether autism is a result of the hemispheres being too siloed or too connected - it isn't clear. He does speculate in his podcast (which is a must listen if you enjoy his work) whether the key to understanding these conditions better might lie in exploring the corpus callosum specifically (for the reason mentioned previously).
My own opinion is that I respectfully disagree that an awakening is underway or around the corner. This isn't to suggest that I am writing it off entirely because I believe parents especially have an outsized role to play in re-engaging the future adults of the world to the tethering and fulfilling consequences of community, connectedness to nature, and a respect for the sacred/divine. It is more a critique on the deeply pervasive, entrenched and narrowly focused, quantitative manipulation that the left hemisphere affords us. Instagram is a denial of time as flow (insta is the tell), Facebook is a denial of the locality of community etc. AI pursuits in their present forms resemble the epitome of the left hemisphere (LLMs, data gathering, power requirements) including the signature extra digit error in renderings of human hands.
There is a great deal more to say and I apologise if the length of the comment is unwanted. Thanks once again and I look forward to reading more of your work.
I love this response thanks! I was confused in encountering the savant/non-verbal left hemisphere hypothesis: as in The Matter With Things I thought it was the opposite. But then I did some superficial, non-expert digging this week and there does seem like there's evidence (footnoted) that this specific kind of autism is LH deficient. I asked Dr McG over email and await an update! Like I said: this is all WILDLY SPECULATIVE. If it proves to be wrong on a macro level, I am not overly concerned as the personal benefits of taking this approach to life are their own reward.
Sheldrake is also fantastic and featured once again in episode 6 of the Telepathy Tapes, which I suspect you'll enjoy! Thanks again.
Attractor(s) ,morphic resonance, platonic forms. Michel Levin, Elan Barenholtz, Jim Madden and so many others…..
Perhaps a shift, unsetling like the the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, or the man dreaming to be a butterfly(or the butterfly dreaming being a man)(or both or neither)
Tom,
I love the Woo rating or "warning" It is a great idea to let people know what they are in for. Yes authoritarian systems reward and wire us for left brain thinking, but some of us are able to open our third nostril, and smell when we have stepped into some dysfunctional poo! Thank you for offering several points of view and ways to reboot our conciousness!
Thanks Jim! Hopefully it demonstrates a little humour/self awareness. Having discernment when you’re at the edge of what’s currently acceptable is difficult. Especially when you’re not an expert in anything. Third nostril is an epic epithet.
Dr David Hawkins
Paul Levy
Robert Falconer IFS
Jerry Marzinsky
Meister Eckhart through the Bhagavad Gita
All embrace the Divine / The way /the morphic field ( Rupert sheldrake)
When we drop down into the ground of our being we don’t look back.
“When we drop down into the ground of our being, we don’t look back.”
Wow. That just leapfrogged me through a few coaching/therapy sessions.
thank you, Fiona 💛
Nice bunch of synchronicities here, with meeting other people recently who have read The Matter with Things, and then listening to a contemporary (not religious) philosopher who was meeting semi-secretly on a boat with a group of AI / indigenous / healer / basically cool people who implied that they all believe a genuine paradigm shift is going to happen rather abruptly, and relatively soon, ie, the disruptive surprise to the left-dominated people is not the recent election result, but something far bigger and more impactful that we simply do not have the language to express. Said the grace of DJT's clear mandate is we have more time to prepare to live/love differently without, I guess, having to deal with more chaos on this level first. My antennae are certinaly up. Love talking / reading/ experiencing this stuff so thank you very much for your post. Feel less crazy already :)
Thank you! I feel like New Agey people are continuously talking about paradigm shifts, and scientific people basically never. So there has to be a senseible middle ground! TBH though, I simply FEEL it coming. Not scientific at all, but hey.
Agreed. The New Agey people can sound tiresomely repetitive, but of course they'll be proved right if/when it happens. But then a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day... As for the scientific dogmatists...the less said.
Putting all that aside, however, I can feel the paradigm shift coming too, this year as never before. It's almost palpably in the air, in the collective vibration, or whatever we want to call it, and in that sense it's not so much coming as it is already upon us.
Thanks for doing your part to facilitate its arrival!
What a great article in so many ways for me. I work in the quantumn field and it’s so good the way you have delicately with respect to all things weaved it into a beautiful piece of work . I love it so thank you .
❤️
Thanks so much Fiona!
Has your right integrated with your left? If so, how much? If not, why not? Or is this the wrong question.
I think so: mostly because I let my curiosity tell my intellect what to focus on next, and with more faith.
Yess dropping in the ground of your being… the dance begins
Thank you so much for this read. As things tend to go, I had saved this quite some time back, forgotten about it and in the interim found McGilchrist, been reading the Tao and some other hemispherical based work. Reading this last night in many ways felt like a mirror and weaving together of my own thoughts and studies but with so many more resources and interesting paths to now travel to. Thank you!
I had a question that I was hoping someone might be able to help with. For many years I would find myself in a kind of mental induced paralysis or "stuckness". I would know that I needed to get out of bed, or off the couch, but it would sometimes take me an hour or more to do so, where I'd mostly just be stuck in my mind. (This is something quite commonly reported within the neurodivergent community). Alternatively, pure force and willpower while somewhat effective also felt deeply damaging on some level. Last year, I figured out that wiggling my toes somehow seemed to override that system and help me get into my body, and get moving. At some point in reading the Tao, I synchronised toe wiggling with my best attempt at Wu Wei. Consequently over the past 6 months or so what had been a really big, embarrassing and annoying problem has almost completely resolved. I can still very easily get stuck in my mind, but I can just as easily switch to a state where I can easily get things done, without any of the crippling anxiety and even without any toe wiggling. This morning, observing this switch, I could almost feel my brain hemispheres switching, and I was wondering if what I had maybe taught myself was switching from left to right brain? Any thoughts on this would be deeply appreciated.
Wow- that's amazing. I have myself been struggling with my tendency to dissociate into abstract ideas, especially on my phone. I've focused on blocking apps and creating affordances. But this focused embodiment seems worth trying. Excited for you to read my piece tomorrow on Gurdjieff!
Yes. After too many years of cellular addiction (let's call it what it is..) I've found with mine and for me that there is no level of moderation as soon as video and image are involved. Deleting all apps permanently, and keeping myself logged out and using my laptop to access when I need to has changed my life for the better in so many ways. I find it fascinating now how quickly I can get completely absorbed as soon as I do log in, which has been a very nice change to the years of self judgement. Understanding UX design and some neuroscience also helps! (Sorry for the very wordy reply!)
I'm so enjoying digging into your work, looking forward to the read as well!
If telepathy is your thing, and pushing the envelope of consciousness of interest, then The Testimony of Light is essential reading.
https://alanheeks.com/testimony-of-light-by-helen-greaves/
What happens when you break the 10/10 woo threshold? Will you start posting images of ceramic bowls, or perhaps become a cobbler in rural Ireland
I’ve been trying to work out what an 11 is. Flat earth? Dragons and unicorns? Sadly things I would have said a few years ago I’m now not sure: aliens, Atlantis, crystals….
Really good. And brave.
Brave/stupid. Thank you Mark.
LOL, hardly, humble, though.
Speaking of brave stupid…. https://the-constitution.beehiiv.com/p/in-the-beginning
I provide a podcast response at : https://substack.com/profile/142077933-musclemonk/note/c-90647752?r=2cl819&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Great listen thanks!
If you have nothing to say about it assume you didn’t get it. I was intuitive and raw so I get it. However it is breakthrough level synergistic anatomy with profound consequences for consciousness—completely coming from left field admittedly. Can you tell me what I should change?
It isn't clear to me how that core truth manifests or how we increase our sensitivity to it? What else was there to "get"?
Thanks for replying Tom. I describe a new body part and a new kind of body part that is the basis for right hemispheric cognition and so is a fundamental shift in self awareness. I will try to be a little more clear. No one expects a physiological and sensorimotor solution to left hemisphere imbalance but an anatomical solution makes a lot more sense to me than than a philosophical one. It’s a lot of totally new thinking for most people.
Spectacular piece; rings all the right bells with me.
♥️♥️♥️♥️
Fascinating post. A couple years ago I read Christof Koch's The Feeling of Life Itself and first learned about IIT. The connection you make between this potential scientific revolution and IFS is something that kind of struck me, but I couldn't articulate it. My wife is a therapist who applies IFS, even the woo woo stuff. I appreciate you making this connection for my her and I. We haven't seen our work as "overlapping". This is a post, including references, that I am going to be coming back to. There is alot to chew on! Thank you!
Thank you! It has pushed me to take on IFS myself next week. Like to write about things I’ve done!
I love what you're doing! Thank you! Ah, synchronicity — today I read that specific chapter of the Tao Te Ching :D
Also, thank you for sharing The Telepathy Tapes on X. Incredible accounts! Definitely gave a boost to my faith in the whole. It'll probably make me invincible if I ever encounter this phenomenon myself aha! I do have some experiments in mind... :)
Ha- I wish I was invincible. But at least we may reincarnate after we die...
My essay inspired by your article, Tom.
https://johnstokdijk.com/2011-on/my-essays/about-love-posted-november-12-2024/
Oh this is so rich! I'm glad you did more digging on this because it really deepens my understanding.
I have just been learning about the quantum field, and diving into all the everything (and all the nothing) and this read helped me with understanding more. Thank you.
Thanks Denny! My mind always stops working around all things quantum. But I’m hoping to get smarter over time.