The Global Brain is the Monkey Mind

The “Global Brain” refers to what is called the “distributed intelligence” (caveat there) constituted by the global internet. The term “Monkey Mind”, which you probably have heard, comes from Buddhism and refers to the inner chatterbox that is our ordinary, everyday mind, leaping from one fragmented thought, feeling, image, dream, fantasy, memory to another and basically recites our routine, fragmented belief system to us over and over again — the mental merry-go-round. Jung refers to that as “associative thinking”, which physicist David Bohm referred to as memory-based thinking as distinct from “intelligence” per se — which is the mode of insight. Iain McGilchrist, in his description of the functioning of the brain’s left-hemisphere, also uses the phrase “house of mirrors” to describe what Buddhists would call “Monkey Mind”. This is one of the great benefits of studying McGilchrist’s work on neurodynamics — the insight it provides into the workings of the Monkey Mind.

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Gebser and McGilchrist

A brief remark on some striking similarities between Jean Gebser’s history of consciousness structures and Iain McGilchrist’s neurological discoveries.

Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

This post builds and expands upon a brief comment I posted below the post remarking on the similarities between Dr. McGilchrist’s take on the divided brain and some elements found in the Seth material. Although Dr. McGilchrist might flinch a bit at having his work compared to that of an “energy personality essence no longer focussed in physical reality”, what they both have to say about the divided brain and its different modes of perception and attention is remarkably similar and very relevant to the central themes of The Chrysalis.