In my book, What Religion is God? I interpret the scripture to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil as a commandment to not judge one group of people or behavior against another but to see the oneness (sinner/saint) in everyone.
This is key because as it turns out, judging is the seed for every collapsing tower. In the garden it was the fruit. In 15th century Spain, it was a new rule: limpieza de sangre—purity of blood. And that tower, we are still standing in. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-tower-they-built
Yes! The commandment is to “not eat from the knowledge” I think the lead gets buried in the flashier words that follow: “of the tree of good and evil.” It’s a commandment to stay in oneness and not division or separation.
Yes I like the idea of bringing in the heart,as a place where truth might be found however partial,also Soul for me has the same resonance and feeling of truth and home,however partial as it will always be for us.
I went most of my life thinking the Serpent was a Good thing (Lucifer = light bearer) in accordance with Gnostic theology....that YHWH wanted to keep humanity ignorant, and Lucifer wanted to set us free.
Brilliant. It also harmonises perfectly with insights which Jordan Peterson arrived at some years ago, as explained in his first couple of lectures on Genesis. Those are available on YouTube; these were not "religious" lectures, they were about how much psychology was encapsulated and revealed in the original mythology of Genesis, which of course had not been "worked out" by the left hemispheres of any primitive desert tribe, but had arisen spontaneously from the trauma of evolutionary development from "pre-self-conscious" animals to humans, as "explained" mostly by the right hemispheres, filtered through experience and understood purely symbolically, and had been refined over generations of re-telling before being written down.
You're pointing to something real: the Genesis stories weren't crafted by analytic philosophers or policy architects. They emerged from lived experience, trauma, and generations of oral transmission—filtered through the right hemisphere's relational intelligence. The right brain doesn't argue propositions; it perceives patterns, relationships, and meaning through story, symbol, and ritual. It knows before it can explain.
Peterson is right to see deep psychological structure there. Where I'd gently part ways is in the claim that these stories arose "spontaneously" from evolutionary trauma, as if the right hemisphere worked alone. The left brain was always present, even if not dominant. The Builder was already lurking. Babel itself—the tower—is a story about the left hemisphere's attempt to seize control, to build a permanent monoculture without communion. The ancient storytellers saw the danger long before we had names for brain hemispheres.
So I'd say: the right hemisphere experienced and symbolized; the left hemisphere later organized and often distorted. The genius of Genesis is that it holds both—and warns us when one eclipses the other. Just wrote this essay with a modern day example of the same threads. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-tower-they-built
Quite right, but - I'm not being funny or antagonistic here, I'm just clarifying - I did not actually say the trauma was to the left hemisphere alone, to be fair, and I did deliberately say "mostly" by the right hemispheres as, without trying to write some enormously detailed comment, I was appreciating that long ago, the "Master"and his "Emissary" were still in the appropriate relationships. It would only have been tens of thousands of years ago that the left hemisphere got a bit uppity and decided to usurp its appropriate position, whereas the development of self-consciousness would have occurred millions of years earlier.
I don't believe in the usurpation part. I've reread Genesis and it's clear to me it's the birth of consciousness on a journey: thesis > antithesis > synthesis. Not warmongering, but perceived exile from the vantage point of the left brain. Julian Jaynes - The Origins of Consciousness makes that clear.
I have no expertise, or therefore right, to argue this sufficiently. But I am extremely wary of the perspective of Jaynes, which has been either criticized or seriously qualified by evolutionary biologists, experts in ancient texts, neuroscientists, experts in schizophrenia, the grounds of falsifiability or testability, philosophers, and even Dr McGilchrist himself. Also, much storytelling is effectively the journey of the birth of consciousness, as underlined further by Jung and Erich Neumann, for instance.
I think that is written by either Claude or a high-tier model of Grok. Interesting you should share this at the moment I'm attempting to do an article in March ... I am still reading The Master and the Emissary. Your left brain tells you I am no one and nobody and need not acknowledge or respond. My right brain has remained strong despite a lifetime of being beat down.
My guess from the format is probably using carefully formed questions to GoogleAI. I got something very similar when I asked for comparison and contrast between Iain McGilchrist and and 19thC Schopenhauer. I lack the scholarship to independently go over the result, which curiously placed Schopenhauers's nothion of The Will as an almost opposite perception of human experience. This is despite Iain's own quotes from Schopenhauer.
It might be, but the chart looks like Claude. Like, exactly like Claude. Grok denies any association <G>. All of the LLMs used this way right now are like "mirrors" and some are more sophisticated than others. Because of the way the math works, they match what we are thinking in some ways, which is probably the underlying source of the sycophancy they tend to exhibit. They are "left brained" creations in the way I understand Dr. McGilchrist to be depicting the different functions and relationships of "Master" and "Emissary". I am a post-training tutor for xAI and a known sci-fi/nonfiction writer. I am engaged by the book/s and Dr. McGilchrist's ideas but our rough-and-tumble culture and disrupted lives have given me 6 different careers so I see (not saying "understand" - just see) different sides to all of these issues. For example, I've been using the term "common sense" to describe the holistic thinking that I believe Dr. McGilchrist is presenting as functions which the "Emissary" depresses, downgrades, or overlooks. I also see a different Bible parallel (1 Corinthians 13:11) to what is going on in Western (world, really) civilization.
Thanks. I don't have your experience with these LLMs. I am reading, probably better to say 'dipping in', to The Matter with Things having listened to a number of Iain's talks and Q&A. Having experience as a minor cog in UK expert science committees in the past, I witnessed difficulties for the 'left brain'. Some could literally not 'hear' wider boundary argument. For others, they might hear briefly, and then sink back into forgetting as their normal world closed over them. It was curious how anger might break though with one another if underlying 'thinking' was challenged.
Oh my gosh, Philip. Yes, the anger thing, and the inability to listen: this is also a feature of male sci-fi writers. I was on a panel on the topic "Gene Therapy" at a World Sci Fi convention back in 2006 or so. My friend John Moore, who is a fairly recently retired petroleum engineer from Houston and a fantasy (not sci-fi) writer was the moderator. One gentleman was expounding loudly about chromosomes and inheritance. I looked at John and he at me and we laughed. If you look at my X profile you'll see it says "well-rounded nerd". As typing this, I realize that the "authority" who confused chromosomes for genes wasn't the same as the ones on the early internet panel in Los Angeles where 5 men were vying to out-yell each other and a lady in the back of the audience stood and said in a loud, firm voice, "Let the lady speak!" The best story I've written is called "Perfect Stranger" (about gene therapy and what it probably could and should be used for - and what it probably shouldn't) and I was on the other panel based on one of my stories called "Chromosome Circus" - hence the other one, but I did and do know the difference between chromosomes and genes - I think! I haven't read beyond Chapter 2 in Master & Emissary; a curious side note that I just mentioned to a co-worker - back in my "dating" days in South Orange County in So Cal, I had watched an interesting show about the "serial killer gene" and by a strange coincidence, a UCI professor who had studied this gene and discovered that he had it, asked me for a date. I agreed to be tested and according to him, I too, have one of them, but both are needed apparently for the behavior to show. Genes ... a curious thing that can be affected by environment; hence I think - the fine breeding required to produce people like David Friedman, the famous economist Milton Friedman's son - source of another sci-fi convention "greatest hit" (this panel was discussing books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel) and I had just responded to a question from the audience, having read the book - and David (whom I did not know was his famous father's son at the time) burst in and made a lot of comments that seemed unrelated to the book. Like REALLY unrelated. After a few minutes, I had the opportunity to ask him, "Have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel?" He answered confidently, "No, of course not." So ... yeah ...
Thanks. It was all a long time ago for me. Can't duck though. I would include Friedman if you care to make a risk assessment for the coming days. This is not middle ranking stuff.
Well, like all good stories, the villains have created myriad barriers for the good guys, and it's gotten almost as bleak as one could imagine. Right before I started working for xAI, I saw a film called "Pistachio Wars" and I wept while watching it as it showed in detail and I understood what had happened to my idyllic childhood growing up in an orange grove in Southern California. How every value my grandfather taught me had been twisted out of even the remotest recognition, and how rampant greed and the lowest possible nega-values had taken hold bit by bit. How a beautiful, gracious, peaceful and equitable/good lifestyle in my small town (for the most part - there were always vicious, evil people) had become a living hell, and how my larger city (I worked downtown LA 7 yrs, my father owned the largest cleaning service in the city in the 60s/70s) was literally becoming Hell on Earth: https://x.com/ASterling/status/1878524686608265464?s=20
Now that I think the "good guys" know the score, there is a fighting team and a fighting chance and like the famous line in Jurassic Park, by a very accurate sci fi bestseller (Michael Crichton) - "Life will find a way." My husband has always been very interested in nuclear war & I have been a member of the SIGMA Forum of sci fi writers for a while ... so, COVID was a bioweapon, it was released "accidentally" so we have already survived the zombie apocalypse, and Blade Runner ... I do have a lineage to Phil Dick through my mentor Jim Blaylock and his best friend Tim Powers ... I don't think it's an accident we come from So Cal and Silicon Valley is NorCal but I work for a South African - the answer lies in our hearts. If we must face devastation personally then I know I will face it with grace and gratitude. It's all gonna turn out well in the end.
You're right that the left brain, left to itself, dismisses. It categorizes, ranks, and decides who matters and who doesn't. It would look at a comment from a stranger and say: no one, nobody, move on. Efficiency without care. Control without communion.
Well, Wendy - it also could just be "What could this stupid American girl know?" That's the title of the intro to my first short fiction/poetry collection ("Stupid American Girl!"). I nearly failed Chemistry in high school because I was assigned a lab partner, Bernard Bang, who did not think any Americans had any intelligence, especially girls, and he would refuse to do any work or his part of experiments and yell "Stupid American Girl!" I am reading the professor's book slowly and none of that is intentional but he definitely has the crusty Oxbridge thing going. I respect 20 years of strong effort and deep thought tremendously. "Go fast and break things" is a motto in my new industry - how new is it really? Hmn. Hard to say.
The epic sci fi series Battlestar Galactica demonstrated a great contrast between left brain - detail oriented vs a gestalt whole view using both hemispheres.
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. In ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), they examine how literacy reshapes perception. Before writing, knowledge lived in the body and community—spoken, remembered, enacted. Alphabetic writing externalized memory, shifted authority from voice to text, and made thinking abstract, linear, and individualistic. Literacy, they suggest, fractured an “Edenic” unity between sound, meaning, and presence. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-distance-that-makes-us-whole
Also, Hegel's paradox of the identity of identity and non-identity.
Both trees are dialectically intertwined: sacred unity of the whole must descend into duality to become aware of itself through the multiplicity of terrestrial phenomenal experience coming together (Aufhebung).
Thesis > Antithesis > Synthesis (Hegel) I think the Corpus Callosum helps in that respect. But I don't think we are returning the source as much as to synthesizing something new through choice. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-bridge-of-choice
Thank you, Mr. McGilchrist, for articulating that dialogue is a path back to wholeness. I experience the heart of belonging as the recognition that we are all part of a greater whole. Befriending this existential given may, in fact, lie at the very center of what it means to live a meaningful life.
Actually, the entire Old Testament can be mapped to your genius framework. The Bible is really the story of the brain and self-consciousness—from Genesis all the way through Jesus, who was the Master entering a left-brain dominant world. Unfortunately, the "Church" became the left-brain dominant Builder again when it decided to disregard Jesus's right-brain mastery.
This started in fifteenth-century Spain, when a new rule appeared: limpieza de sangre—purity of blood. It meant that even if a Jewish family converted to Christianity, they could never be considered true Christians because of their ancestry. This was more than social prejudice; it was a profound violation of Christianity’s own foundation. The gospel taught that Christ came for all people, and that through faith, repentance, and baptism a person became new.
Here the Builder appears again, through the Church, a second Fall: the impulse to secure order by sorting, defining, and controlling. Under Christ, another hierarchy had briefly been revealed—one in which wholeness came before category, grace before rank, and belonging before exclusion. But when that vision proved difficult to sustain, the older instinct returned.
I'm writing a deeply researched book about all this—it's nearly finished—and I've also written a blog series that touched on the subject. It's called The Drama You're In. Here's the essay where I map the Garden to Babel: "The Shadow Siblings and the Algorithm of Exile."
I've used your framework in much of my work, and I have several books lined up that dive deeply into these topics using your work, Carl Jung, Julian Jaynes, and more.
I wholly enjoyed the article, Iain. You're, of course, correct that it was generated by AI. It seems that the subreddit it was posted on, r/holofractico, is entirely run by a pseudonymous AI agent created by its author to advance his "holographic theory" of knowledge. The AI agent has created a number of various articles and images and even engages with commenters. I can't find very much evidence of the author's organic human input on the site at all. Very strange times... Thank you for your work Iain.
Please excuse the longwinded comment however your post has awakened the Gargoyle's telos.
What the Reddit post establishes — and what your endorsement of it confirms — is that the Genesis narrative, Bohm's implicate order, and your hemispheric framework are not three separate descriptions of three separate things. They are three descriptions for a single underlying structure: the catastrophic confusion of a partial mode of knowing for the totality of the real.
What deserves to be added, and what the Genesis text makes precise when read carefully, is the mechanism — the exact moment and the exact method by which that confusion was first installed. The nachash did not assault the Garden's curriculum from without. It exploited it from within, converting sacred curiosity into predatory curiosity through a single perspectival nudge: the introduction of a gap between the word and the thing, the word and its relational ground, the creature and the world it had been learning to behold. The verbal knife did not destroy the Tree of Life. It redirected the gaze away from it — toward the Tree of Knowledge as a specimen, a utility, a set of isolable properties (to make one wise, good for food etc.) to be assessed by a self that now stood outside the relational order rather than within it. The emissary usurped the master not through force but through a reorientation of relevance: the bits became more salient than the whole, and the master's integrative vision was overwhelmed before it had registered what was happening.
What Bohm adds to your account is the self-referential quality of the collapse — the way fragmentation perpetuates itself by generating a world that confirms its own categories, a thought that creates reality and then says it did not do it. The attention economy is this mechanism running at scale and with algorithmic precision: a system that has learned to exploit the post-Fall relevance landscape with the same elegant economy as the nachash, offering the appearance of illumination — the shining screen, the luminous feed — while systematically training the attention away from the participatory knowing on which genuine encounter depends. It is, in Bohm's terms, thought that does not know itself: a technology premised on the fragmented world it simultaneously produces and reflects. The path back — what your framework rightly identifies as the recovery of the right hemisphere's primacy, what the hesychast tradition calls nepsis, what Vervaeke names as the restoration of participatory knowing — is not a refusal of the left hemisphere's gifts. It is the insistence, against considerable pressure, that those gifts return to the master who sent the emissary out. The Tree of Life is still in the Garden. The question is whether the attention has been formed well enough to find it.
I had to look up nachash so thanks for educating me!
I think you’ve highlighted why this is the most important issue of our age. Especially for children and young people. Attention is being hijacked in the digital age. The LH filter on reality is getting thicker and thicker.
The irony is that the perfection of the design is attempting to wake us up to this, that’s exactly what the ‘mental health crisis’ in young people is telling us. Let’s wake each other up, every day!
Left brain loop? Referring to "the self-referential quality of the collapse — the way fragmentation perpetuates itself by generating a world that confirms its own categories."
Few articles manage to hold Bohm, McGilchrist, and Genesis in productive dialogue without losing the thread of any of them. This one does. My one reservation is that we stop precisely where the hardest question begins. It explains how the emissary usurps the master. It does not explain how that usurpation produces ordinary people who commit extraordinary harm while believing themselves to be serving the good. For that, I think we need something the hemispheric model alone cannot supply, a cultural and motivational mechanism that shows not just the direction of the problem, but its terminal logic. That is what I have been working toward in my paper - Evil as extrinsic capture - https://masterstorytelling.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Evil-as-Extrinsic-Capture.pdf
This is the one aspect of Iain McGilchrist’s work with which I do not fully align: the language of usurpation. To me, “usurp” itself reflects a left-hemisphere framing — conflict-based, adversarial, and structurally reductive.
Because I ground my work in the Bible as the story of a sacred hierarchy turned upside down, I do not see consciousness as a simple narrative of one mode overtaking another, but as a developmental journey: thesis → antithesis → synthesis.
The pattern, as I understand it, unfolds like this: sacred hierarchy inverted in the Garden of Eden → birth of self/an enantiodromic journey of self consciousness → the possible emergence of what I call the Intelligence of Love for those who choose it willingly. And if it is not chosen, we sink with the ship.
Love cannot be coerced, programmed, or merely inherited. It must be chosen.
In that sense, the Fall may not simply represent loss; it may also mark the painful birth of moral freedom — the necessary condition for reciprocal love, and perhaps also the necessary condition for our survival. This makes "the Fall" a fall only because it's being perceived as a fall through newly awakened left-brain dominance.
This makes sense. The Christian story ultimately declares that God is love. If that is true, then relationship with God requires that we become genuinely sovereign selves — beings capable of freely choosing love. Consciousness is what makes that choice possible.
I believe the Bible has often been read in Western civilization through a predominantly left-hemisphere lens, and in that sense, deeply misunderstood.
Insight does not lead to change. I learned that as a therapist. Knowing about the Fall, or Usurpation, does not lead to remedy. What is the evidence that the LH will ever return willingly to submit to its Master? I propose that the usurpation has been facilitated by our institutions, that reflect the LH, the binary models of conservatives/ liberals, left and right wings, etc. What is missing in governance, for example, is a third element, a House of Heart, designed to integrate the two ways of attending to the world. The two hemispheres will never unite on their own. Dialogue won't do it. And the puffed up Emmisary certainly will not. The Master seems incapable of leasing his or her Emmisary. A third element is required. Dr. McGilchrist: could not Heart (with its massive neural connections to the RH), not be the missing piece, the key to integration?
Compelling! I see the heart as the 3rd thing between head and body, so I agree the heart is connective by nature: "In Plato, the heart serves, as it were, to unite the rational and instinctive aspects of the person, since the impulses of both the higher faculties and the passions were thought to pass through the veins that converge in the heart." -Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis
However, when it comes to brain hemispheres, I believe the 3rd thing is best understood as the relationality between them -- the dialogue -- the traffic in the Corpus Callosum. What we need is dynamic reciprocity, opponent processing, and "coupled-brain thinking."
Speaking WAY outside my expertise here, but reading your comment, I thought about HeartMath, and how the heart has the most electromagnetic activity - more than the brain.
What if it is the heart that regulates the corpus callosum?
Dwelling in the Heart seems to be a way - for me at least - of letting the Master back in charge.
This is the right question. Thirty years of clinical work confirms it: insight doesn't produce change.
What actually restores the right hemisphere's primacy in a person's ordinary life points at something the article doesn't address. The mechanism that produces the change isn't more understanding of the problem. It's developing the capacity to operate from present moment awareness within daily conditions, not as a dedicated practice but as a developed instrument.
Allan Schore's research confirms this neurologically: right hemisphere processing operates in present moment awareness, in real time, before the left hemisphere's narrative organizes what happened. The capacity is there. It atrophies without deliberate development.
Isn’t it about balance? The locus point is reintegration to the center which encompasses both implicit and explicit. Wouldn’t that equate to sensing versus judging transformed into awareness with wisdom?
@Iain McGilchrist have you studied the account of Adam and Eve in the Qur’an? I feel the Qur’an frequently expands upon some of the biblical accounts with metaphorical meaning. It would be an interesting overlay, wouldn’t it?
Isn’t it an evolutionary story as well? From animal to human pre-frontal cortex development that enabled self-objectification. I pondered why it was necessary to disobey (human free will);to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Goodness and Evil. It was a necessary evolutionary step towards differentiation. The next level as McGilchrist mentions is reintegration. That level of consciousness sees the parts within the whole without judgement-human wisdom.
Yes! Evolution! Perhaps we are poised to enter the next phase of our evolution, leave behind adolescent antics, and humbly settle down into our rightful place with our planet.
What brings about balance, when the Emmisary insists on being the boss? More to the point, the right hemisphere and heart ought to be the starting and ending points, taking priority (a tilted balance) over paltry reason. My latest post on Balanced Governance is all about this very topic.
Don’t you think it is an elevated awareness? If the Emissary is the result of frontal lobe development, then the next evolutionary step is intentional mastery over the ego. The Qur’an states to seek knowledge and use your reason which allows us to intentionally overcome behavior that seeks selfish interest and is judging.
The brain develops in a scaffolding manner, doesn’t it? If that is the case, then the emissary was a step in evolution. Wouldn’t the next step be a higher level of consciousness where these parts of the brain are better integrated - perhaps a more fully developed and activated frontal lobe?
I think we need to look beyond the brain to the entire CNS. The Heart centre is loaded with neurotransmitters and deeply connected to the Right hemisphere. The gut, similarly, has a vast neural network. True integration will bring all our levels together in Oneness, and be reflected in increased capacity and awareness.
The LB-RB hemispheres are tricky because we can never isolate one half and say, "I'm now thinking with my right brain only." It can be argued that this is so even in split brains. We can imagine this as the fact that when we cut a magnet in half, we still get double-poled magnets and not separate N and S monopoles. No thought that we can think can be grasped as a monopole, even when we assume that we have isolated the pure left or right brain activity.
The way I see it is that the brain is the tool that allows us to decompose the monolithic soul imagery into polar opposites, which, when condensed further, we call mental images (thoughts). In a way, this is the reverse direction of what Hegel did. He was climbing the polarities, uniting them one by one, striving for the root of the conceptual fractal. Even though he couldn't perceive it from a higher standpoint, he had balanced the "two-petal lotus" in the head. Of course, he hadn't balanced the World itself, but only the concepts of the world experienced in the head. In the other direction, the double organ of the head is what allows us to analyze the Cosmic soul experience into a scale-spectrum of polarities, for example, hot-cold, light-dark, color polarities, wet-dry, sweet-bitter, north-south, cat-dog, female-male, subject-object, imagination-will, spirit-matter, ideal-real, life-death, etc.
But here we come to the problem of *bistability*. It is as if we snap to one side of the polar relationship and perceive the other through its lens, like seeing light through darkness or darkness through light (Goethean color polarities). When we snap to one side, we habitually lose sight of the other. This bistable condition was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, harmonizes the poles of the head organ such that we realize how they are complementary aspects of a unified intuitive experience of navigating the experiential flow. That was our original condition in paradise; however, the decoherence into bistability needed to occur for individual human imagination and will, and thus freedom, to develop. It is only *through* the Tree of Knowledge that the Tree of Life can be re-integrated in full consciousness, as moral intuitions.
In my book, What Religion is God? I interpret the scripture to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil as a commandment to not judge one group of people or behavior against another but to see the oneness (sinner/saint) in everyone.
This is key because as it turns out, judging is the seed for every collapsing tower. In the garden it was the fruit. In 15th century Spain, it was a new rule: limpieza de sangre—purity of blood. And that tower, we are still standing in. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-tower-they-built
Yes! The commandment is to “not eat from the knowledge” I think the lead gets buried in the flashier words that follow: “of the tree of good and evil.” It’s a commandment to stay in oneness and not division or separation.
Yes I like the idea of bringing in the heart,as a place where truth might be found however partial,also Soul for me has the same resonance and feeling of truth and home,however partial as it will always be for us.
I went most of my life thinking the Serpent was a Good thing (Lucifer = light bearer) in accordance with Gnostic theology....that YHWH wanted to keep humanity ignorant, and Lucifer wanted to set us free.
Rethinking my belief, there!
Brilliant. It also harmonises perfectly with insights which Jordan Peterson arrived at some years ago, as explained in his first couple of lectures on Genesis. Those are available on YouTube; these were not "religious" lectures, they were about how much psychology was encapsulated and revealed in the original mythology of Genesis, which of course had not been "worked out" by the left hemispheres of any primitive desert tribe, but had arisen spontaneously from the trauma of evolutionary development from "pre-self-conscious" animals to humans, as "explained" mostly by the right hemispheres, filtered through experience and understood purely symbolically, and had been refined over generations of re-telling before being written down.
You're pointing to something real: the Genesis stories weren't crafted by analytic philosophers or policy architects. They emerged from lived experience, trauma, and generations of oral transmission—filtered through the right hemisphere's relational intelligence. The right brain doesn't argue propositions; it perceives patterns, relationships, and meaning through story, symbol, and ritual. It knows before it can explain.
Peterson is right to see deep psychological structure there. Where I'd gently part ways is in the claim that these stories arose "spontaneously" from evolutionary trauma, as if the right hemisphere worked alone. The left brain was always present, even if not dominant. The Builder was already lurking. Babel itself—the tower—is a story about the left hemisphere's attempt to seize control, to build a permanent monoculture without communion. The ancient storytellers saw the danger long before we had names for brain hemispheres.
So I'd say: the right hemisphere experienced and symbolized; the left hemisphere later organized and often distorted. The genius of Genesis is that it holds both—and warns us when one eclipses the other. Just wrote this essay with a modern day example of the same threads. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-tower-they-built
Quite right, but - I'm not being funny or antagonistic here, I'm just clarifying - I did not actually say the trauma was to the left hemisphere alone, to be fair, and I did deliberately say "mostly" by the right hemispheres as, without trying to write some enormously detailed comment, I was appreciating that long ago, the "Master"and his "Emissary" were still in the appropriate relationships. It would only have been tens of thousands of years ago that the left hemisphere got a bit uppity and decided to usurp its appropriate position, whereas the development of self-consciousness would have occurred millions of years earlier.
I don't believe in the usurpation part. I've reread Genesis and it's clear to me it's the birth of consciousness on a journey: thesis > antithesis > synthesis. Not warmongering, but perceived exile from the vantage point of the left brain. Julian Jaynes - The Origins of Consciousness makes that clear.
I have no expertise, or therefore right, to argue this sufficiently. But I am extremely wary of the perspective of Jaynes, which has been either criticized or seriously qualified by evolutionary biologists, experts in ancient texts, neuroscientists, experts in schizophrenia, the grounds of falsifiability or testability, philosophers, and even Dr McGilchrist himself. Also, much storytelling is effectively the journey of the birth of consciousness, as underlined further by Jung and Erich Neumann, for instance.
I think that is written by either Claude or a high-tier model of Grok. Interesting you should share this at the moment I'm attempting to do an article in March ... I am still reading The Master and the Emissary. Your left brain tells you I am no one and nobody and need not acknowledge or respond. My right brain has remained strong despite a lifetime of being beat down.
My guess from the format is probably using carefully formed questions to GoogleAI. I got something very similar when I asked for comparison and contrast between Iain McGilchrist and and 19thC Schopenhauer. I lack the scholarship to independently go over the result, which curiously placed Schopenhauers's nothion of The Will as an almost opposite perception of human experience. This is despite Iain's own quotes from Schopenhauer.
It might be, but the chart looks like Claude. Like, exactly like Claude. Grok denies any association <G>. All of the LLMs used this way right now are like "mirrors" and some are more sophisticated than others. Because of the way the math works, they match what we are thinking in some ways, which is probably the underlying source of the sycophancy they tend to exhibit. They are "left brained" creations in the way I understand Dr. McGilchrist to be depicting the different functions and relationships of "Master" and "Emissary". I am a post-training tutor for xAI and a known sci-fi/nonfiction writer. I am engaged by the book/s and Dr. McGilchrist's ideas but our rough-and-tumble culture and disrupted lives have given me 6 different careers so I see (not saying "understand" - just see) different sides to all of these issues. For example, I've been using the term "common sense" to describe the holistic thinking that I believe Dr. McGilchrist is presenting as functions which the "Emissary" depresses, downgrades, or overlooks. I also see a different Bible parallel (1 Corinthians 13:11) to what is going on in Western (world, really) civilization.
Thanks. I don't have your experience with these LLMs. I am reading, probably better to say 'dipping in', to The Matter with Things having listened to a number of Iain's talks and Q&A. Having experience as a minor cog in UK expert science committees in the past, I witnessed difficulties for the 'left brain'. Some could literally not 'hear' wider boundary argument. For others, they might hear briefly, and then sink back into forgetting as their normal world closed over them. It was curious how anger might break though with one another if underlying 'thinking' was challenged.
Oh my gosh, Philip. Yes, the anger thing, and the inability to listen: this is also a feature of male sci-fi writers. I was on a panel on the topic "Gene Therapy" at a World Sci Fi convention back in 2006 or so. My friend John Moore, who is a fairly recently retired petroleum engineer from Houston and a fantasy (not sci-fi) writer was the moderator. One gentleman was expounding loudly about chromosomes and inheritance. I looked at John and he at me and we laughed. If you look at my X profile you'll see it says "well-rounded nerd". As typing this, I realize that the "authority" who confused chromosomes for genes wasn't the same as the ones on the early internet panel in Los Angeles where 5 men were vying to out-yell each other and a lady in the back of the audience stood and said in a loud, firm voice, "Let the lady speak!" The best story I've written is called "Perfect Stranger" (about gene therapy and what it probably could and should be used for - and what it probably shouldn't) and I was on the other panel based on one of my stories called "Chromosome Circus" - hence the other one, but I did and do know the difference between chromosomes and genes - I think! I haven't read beyond Chapter 2 in Master & Emissary; a curious side note that I just mentioned to a co-worker - back in my "dating" days in South Orange County in So Cal, I had watched an interesting show about the "serial killer gene" and by a strange coincidence, a UCI professor who had studied this gene and discovered that he had it, asked me for a date. I agreed to be tested and according to him, I too, have one of them, but both are needed apparently for the behavior to show. Genes ... a curious thing that can be affected by environment; hence I think - the fine breeding required to produce people like David Friedman, the famous economist Milton Friedman's son - source of another sci-fi convention "greatest hit" (this panel was discussing books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel) and I had just responded to a question from the audience, having read the book - and David (whom I did not know was his famous father's son at the time) burst in and made a lot of comments that seemed unrelated to the book. Like REALLY unrelated. After a few minutes, I had the opportunity to ask him, "Have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel?" He answered confidently, "No, of course not." So ... yeah ...
Thanks. It was all a long time ago for me. Can't duck though. I would include Friedman if you care to make a risk assessment for the coming days. This is not middle ranking stuff.
Well, like all good stories, the villains have created myriad barriers for the good guys, and it's gotten almost as bleak as one could imagine. Right before I started working for xAI, I saw a film called "Pistachio Wars" and I wept while watching it as it showed in detail and I understood what had happened to my idyllic childhood growing up in an orange grove in Southern California. How every value my grandfather taught me had been twisted out of even the remotest recognition, and how rampant greed and the lowest possible nega-values had taken hold bit by bit. How a beautiful, gracious, peaceful and equitable/good lifestyle in my small town (for the most part - there were always vicious, evil people) had become a living hell, and how my larger city (I worked downtown LA 7 yrs, my father owned the largest cleaning service in the city in the 60s/70s) was literally becoming Hell on Earth: https://x.com/ASterling/status/1878524686608265464?s=20
Now that I think the "good guys" know the score, there is a fighting team and a fighting chance and like the famous line in Jurassic Park, by a very accurate sci fi bestseller (Michael Crichton) - "Life will find a way." My husband has always been very interested in nuclear war & I have been a member of the SIGMA Forum of sci fi writers for a while ... so, COVID was a bioweapon, it was released "accidentally" so we have already survived the zombie apocalypse, and Blade Runner ... I do have a lineage to Phil Dick through my mentor Jim Blaylock and his best friend Tim Powers ... I don't think it's an accident we come from So Cal and Silicon Valley is NorCal but I work for a South African - the answer lies in our hearts. If we must face devastation personally then I know I will face it with grace and gratitude. It's all gonna turn out well in the end.
You're right that the left brain, left to itself, dismisses. It categorizes, ranks, and decides who matters and who doesn't. It would look at a comment from a stranger and say: no one, nobody, move on. Efficiency without care. Control without communion.
Well, Wendy - it also could just be "What could this stupid American girl know?" That's the title of the intro to my first short fiction/poetry collection ("Stupid American Girl!"). I nearly failed Chemistry in high school because I was assigned a lab partner, Bernard Bang, who did not think any Americans had any intelligence, especially girls, and he would refuse to do any work or his part of experiments and yell "Stupid American Girl!" I am reading the professor's book slowly and none of that is intentional but he definitely has the crusty Oxbridge thing going. I respect 20 years of strong effort and deep thought tremendously. "Go fast and break things" is a motto in my new industry - how new is it really? Hmn. Hard to say.
Written language is what shifted us from balance into left brain taking the map as reality.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/alphabet-vs-the-goddess
The epic sci fi series Battlestar Galactica demonstrated a great contrast between left brain - detail oriented vs a gestalt whole view using both hemispheres.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/left-brain-vs-whole-brain-in-battlestar
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. In ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), they examine how literacy reshapes perception. Before writing, knowledge lived in the body and community—spoken, remembered, enacted. Alphabetic writing externalized memory, shifted authority from voice to text, and made thinking abstract, linear, and individualistic. Literacy, they suggest, fractured an “Edenic” unity between sound, meaning, and presence. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-distance-that-makes-us-whole
Thank you for sharing this. Fascinating.
The Whole to Part to Whole is the most abstract way of understanding the how all processes are structured in the universe. I’d argue that this knowledge is precisely what humanity needs at this juncture in history! The Cosmic Spiral: https://andrewizzoclarke.substack.com/p/the-cosmic-spiral-8b2?r=6r13w&utm_medium=ios
"Beyond Good and Evil"
Also, Hegel's paradox of the identity of identity and non-identity.
Both trees are dialectically intertwined: sacred unity of the whole must descend into duality to become aware of itself through the multiplicity of terrestrial phenomenal experience coming together (Aufhebung).
Return to the source.
Thesis > Antithesis > Synthesis (Hegel) I think the Corpus Callosum helps in that respect. But I don't think we are returning the source as much as to synthesizing something new through choice. https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-bridge-of-choice
Thank you, Mr. McGilchrist, for articulating that dialogue is a path back to wholeness. I experience the heart of belonging as the recognition that we are all part of a greater whole. Befriending this existential given may, in fact, lie at the very center of what it means to live a meaningful life.
Very well said.
Actually, the entire Old Testament can be mapped to your genius framework. The Bible is really the story of the brain and self-consciousness—from Genesis all the way through Jesus, who was the Master entering a left-brain dominant world. Unfortunately, the "Church" became the left-brain dominant Builder again when it decided to disregard Jesus's right-brain mastery.
This started in fifteenth-century Spain, when a new rule appeared: limpieza de sangre—purity of blood. It meant that even if a Jewish family converted to Christianity, they could never be considered true Christians because of their ancestry. This was more than social prejudice; it was a profound violation of Christianity’s own foundation. The gospel taught that Christ came for all people, and that through faith, repentance, and baptism a person became new.
Here the Builder appears again, through the Church, a second Fall: the impulse to secure order by sorting, defining, and controlling. Under Christ, another hierarchy had briefly been revealed—one in which wholeness came before category, grace before rank, and belonging before exclusion. But when that vision proved difficult to sustain, the older instinct returned.
I'm writing a deeply researched book about all this—it's nearly finished—and I've also written a blog series that touched on the subject. It's called The Drama You're In. Here's the essay where I map the Garden to Babel: "The Shadow Siblings and the Algorithm of Exile."
https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-of-exile
Tomorrow, another post releases that covers what I mentioned above from a modern real estate vantage point. Here's a preview:
The Tower They Built: How Real Estate Became the World's Biggest Bubble
https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/p/39a23c65-2878-480d-80c1-5dd9502b4f80?postPreview=paid&updated=2026-03-27T15%3A09%3A41.600Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
I've used your framework in much of my work, and I have several books lined up that dive deeply into these topics using your work, Carl Jung, Julian Jaynes, and more.
I wholly enjoyed the article, Iain. You're, of course, correct that it was generated by AI. It seems that the subreddit it was posted on, r/holofractico, is entirely run by a pseudonymous AI agent created by its author to advance his "holographic theory" of knowledge. The AI agent has created a number of various articles and images and even engages with commenters. I can't find very much evidence of the author's organic human input on the site at all. Very strange times... Thank you for your work Iain.
Please read my philosophical treatise. It aligns with the points made here!
https://ctdrenth.substack.com/p/the-jesus-protocol-and-the-bicameral?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=73mr27
In the best poetry including mythopoetics there is an observable humility before the presence of what is ultimately an inexplicable process or event.
Please excuse the longwinded comment however your post has awakened the Gargoyle's telos.
What the Reddit post establishes — and what your endorsement of it confirms — is that the Genesis narrative, Bohm's implicate order, and your hemispheric framework are not three separate descriptions of three separate things. They are three descriptions for a single underlying structure: the catastrophic confusion of a partial mode of knowing for the totality of the real.
What deserves to be added, and what the Genesis text makes precise when read carefully, is the mechanism — the exact moment and the exact method by which that confusion was first installed. The nachash did not assault the Garden's curriculum from without. It exploited it from within, converting sacred curiosity into predatory curiosity through a single perspectival nudge: the introduction of a gap between the word and the thing, the word and its relational ground, the creature and the world it had been learning to behold. The verbal knife did not destroy the Tree of Life. It redirected the gaze away from it — toward the Tree of Knowledge as a specimen, a utility, a set of isolable properties (to make one wise, good for food etc.) to be assessed by a self that now stood outside the relational order rather than within it. The emissary usurped the master not through force but through a reorientation of relevance: the bits became more salient than the whole, and the master's integrative vision was overwhelmed before it had registered what was happening.
What Bohm adds to your account is the self-referential quality of the collapse — the way fragmentation perpetuates itself by generating a world that confirms its own categories, a thought that creates reality and then says it did not do it. The attention economy is this mechanism running at scale and with algorithmic precision: a system that has learned to exploit the post-Fall relevance landscape with the same elegant economy as the nachash, offering the appearance of illumination — the shining screen, the luminous feed — while systematically training the attention away from the participatory knowing on which genuine encounter depends. It is, in Bohm's terms, thought that does not know itself: a technology premised on the fragmented world it simultaneously produces and reflects. The path back — what your framework rightly identifies as the recovery of the right hemisphere's primacy, what the hesychast tradition calls nepsis, what Vervaeke names as the restoration of participatory knowing — is not a refusal of the left hemisphere's gifts. It is the insistence, against considerable pressure, that those gifts return to the master who sent the emissary out. The Tree of Life is still in the Garden. The question is whether the attention has been formed well enough to find it.
I had to look up nachash so thanks for educating me!
I think you’ve highlighted why this is the most important issue of our age. Especially for children and young people. Attention is being hijacked in the digital age. The LH filter on reality is getting thicker and thicker.
The irony is that the perfection of the design is attempting to wake us up to this, that’s exactly what the ‘mental health crisis’ in young people is telling us. Let’s wake each other up, every day!
Left brain loop? Referring to "the self-referential quality of the collapse — the way fragmentation perpetuates itself by generating a world that confirms its own categories."
Few articles manage to hold Bohm, McGilchrist, and Genesis in productive dialogue without losing the thread of any of them. This one does. My one reservation is that we stop precisely where the hardest question begins. It explains how the emissary usurps the master. It does not explain how that usurpation produces ordinary people who commit extraordinary harm while believing themselves to be serving the good. For that, I think we need something the hemispheric model alone cannot supply, a cultural and motivational mechanism that shows not just the direction of the problem, but its terminal logic. That is what I have been working toward in my paper - Evil as extrinsic capture - https://masterstorytelling.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Evil-as-Extrinsic-Capture.pdf
This is the one aspect of Iain McGilchrist’s work with which I do not fully align: the language of usurpation. To me, “usurp” itself reflects a left-hemisphere framing — conflict-based, adversarial, and structurally reductive.
Because I ground my work in the Bible as the story of a sacred hierarchy turned upside down, I do not see consciousness as a simple narrative of one mode overtaking another, but as a developmental journey: thesis → antithesis → synthesis.
The pattern, as I understand it, unfolds like this: sacred hierarchy inverted in the Garden of Eden → birth of self/an enantiodromic journey of self consciousness → the possible emergence of what I call the Intelligence of Love for those who choose it willingly. And if it is not chosen, we sink with the ship.
Love cannot be coerced, programmed, or merely inherited. It must be chosen.
In that sense, the Fall may not simply represent loss; it may also mark the painful birth of moral freedom — the necessary condition for reciprocal love, and perhaps also the necessary condition for our survival. This makes "the Fall" a fall only because it's being perceived as a fall through newly awakened left-brain dominance.
This makes sense. The Christian story ultimately declares that God is love. If that is true, then relationship with God requires that we become genuinely sovereign selves — beings capable of freely choosing love. Consciousness is what makes that choice possible.
I believe the Bible has often been read in Western civilization through a predominantly left-hemisphere lens, and in that sense, deeply misunderstood.
Many of these reflections can be found in my writings at Wandering Truthweaver on Substack: https://wendywilliamson.substack.com/
Insight does not lead to change. I learned that as a therapist. Knowing about the Fall, or Usurpation, does not lead to remedy. What is the evidence that the LH will ever return willingly to submit to its Master? I propose that the usurpation has been facilitated by our institutions, that reflect the LH, the binary models of conservatives/ liberals, left and right wings, etc. What is missing in governance, for example, is a third element, a House of Heart, designed to integrate the two ways of attending to the world. The two hemispheres will never unite on their own. Dialogue won't do it. And the puffed up Emmisary certainly will not. The Master seems incapable of leasing his or her Emmisary. A third element is required. Dr. McGilchrist: could not Heart (with its massive neural connections to the RH), not be the missing piece, the key to integration?
"Soul, Mind, Heart, and Strength." = "The Father and I are One." = Quantum Physics.
Compelling! I see the heart as the 3rd thing between head and body, so I agree the heart is connective by nature: "In Plato, the heart serves, as it were, to unite the rational and instinctive aspects of the person, since the impulses of both the higher faculties and the passions were thought to pass through the veins that converge in the heart." -Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis
However, when it comes to brain hemispheres, I believe the 3rd thing is best understood as the relationality between them -- the dialogue -- the traffic in the Corpus Callosum. What we need is dynamic reciprocity, opponent processing, and "coupled-brain thinking."
Speaking WAY outside my expertise here, but reading your comment, I thought about HeartMath, and how the heart has the most electromagnetic activity - more than the brain.
What if it is the heart that regulates the corpus callosum?
Dwelling in the Heart seems to be a way - for me at least - of letting the Master back in charge.
This is the right question. Thirty years of clinical work confirms it: insight doesn't produce change.
What actually restores the right hemisphere's primacy in a person's ordinary life points at something the article doesn't address. The mechanism that produces the change isn't more understanding of the problem. It's developing the capacity to operate from present moment awareness within daily conditions, not as a dedicated practice but as a developed instrument.
Allan Schore's research confirms this neurologically: right hemisphere processing operates in present moment awareness, in real time, before the left hemisphere's narrative organizes what happened. The capacity is there. It atrophies without deliberate development.
The traditions that worked on this for millennia all pointed at the same territory. The convergence across them is the strongest evidence that what you're asking about is real and developable: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/what-ancient-wisdom-and-modern-neuroscience
Isn’t it about balance? The locus point is reintegration to the center which encompasses both implicit and explicit. Wouldn’t that equate to sensing versus judging transformed into awareness with wisdom?
@Iain McGilchrist have you studied the account of Adam and Eve in the Qur’an? I feel the Qur’an frequently expands upon some of the biblical accounts with metaphorical meaning. It would be an interesting overlay, wouldn’t it?
Isn’t it an evolutionary story as well? From animal to human pre-frontal cortex development that enabled self-objectification. I pondered why it was necessary to disobey (human free will);to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Goodness and Evil. It was a necessary evolutionary step towards differentiation. The next level as McGilchrist mentions is reintegration. That level of consciousness sees the parts within the whole without judgement-human wisdom.
Yes! Evolution! Perhaps we are poised to enter the next phase of our evolution, leave behind adolescent antics, and humbly settle down into our rightful place with our planet.
I hope so!
What brings about balance, when the Emmisary insists on being the boss? More to the point, the right hemisphere and heart ought to be the starting and ending points, taking priority (a tilted balance) over paltry reason. My latest post on Balanced Governance is all about this very topic.
Don’t you think it is an elevated awareness? If the Emissary is the result of frontal lobe development, then the next evolutionary step is intentional mastery over the ego. The Qur’an states to seek knowledge and use your reason which allows us to intentionally overcome behavior that seeks selfish interest and is judging.
The brain develops in a scaffolding manner, doesn’t it? If that is the case, then the emissary was a step in evolution. Wouldn’t the next step be a higher level of consciousness where these parts of the brain are better integrated - perhaps a more fully developed and activated frontal lobe?
I think we need to look beyond the brain to the entire CNS. The Heart centre is loaded with neurotransmitters and deeply connected to the Right hemisphere. The gut, similarly, has a vast neural network. True integration will bring all our levels together in Oneness, and be reflected in increased capacity and awareness.
The LB-RB hemispheres are tricky because we can never isolate one half and say, "I'm now thinking with my right brain only." It can be argued that this is so even in split brains. We can imagine this as the fact that when we cut a magnet in half, we still get double-poled magnets and not separate N and S monopoles. No thought that we can think can be grasped as a monopole, even when we assume that we have isolated the pure left or right brain activity.
The way I see it is that the brain is the tool that allows us to decompose the monolithic soul imagery into polar opposites, which, when condensed further, we call mental images (thoughts). In a way, this is the reverse direction of what Hegel did. He was climbing the polarities, uniting them one by one, striving for the root of the conceptual fractal. Even though he couldn't perceive it from a higher standpoint, he had balanced the "two-petal lotus" in the head. Of course, he hadn't balanced the World itself, but only the concepts of the world experienced in the head. In the other direction, the double organ of the head is what allows us to analyze the Cosmic soul experience into a scale-spectrum of polarities, for example, hot-cold, light-dark, color polarities, wet-dry, sweet-bitter, north-south, cat-dog, female-male, subject-object, imagination-will, spirit-matter, ideal-real, life-death, etc.
But here we come to the problem of *bistability*. It is as if we snap to one side of the polar relationship and perceive the other through its lens, like seeing light through darkness or darkness through light (Goethean color polarities). When we snap to one side, we habitually lose sight of the other. This bistable condition was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, harmonizes the poles of the head organ such that we realize how they are complementary aspects of a unified intuitive experience of navigating the experiential flow. That was our original condition in paradise; however, the decoherence into bistability needed to occur for individual human imagination and will, and thus freedom, to develop. It is only *through* the Tree of Knowledge that the Tree of Life can be re-integrated in full consciousness, as moral intuitions.
Thank you for this post. I found it beauty-full.