What You See Depends on How You Look

Self-Brain Surgery School Lesson #9: Contemplate

You are using two different systems to view the world and navigate your way through it. You may not realize it, but you are.

The left side of your brain tells you a story that’s about things.

The right side of your brain tells you a story about context.

Iain McGilchrist, in his stunningly long (about 1,500 pages) book The Matter With Things, says: “To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.”

Over the next ten weeks, we’re going to the classroom to discuss on a deeper level each of the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery. This will prepare us for the operations we’re going to learn as we pivot into a very tactical approach for living lives of becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier through the smashing together of faith and neuroscience in the practice of Self-Brain Surgery.

But before we start, we need to be aware that each of us has a view of reality that is shaped by a number of things:

• Our genetics

• Our upbringing (this is environment, family of origin, culture, religion/faith, etc.)

• Our past experiences (trauma, tragedy, massive things, wins, losses, etc.)

All of these things create our worldview, our system of filters and lenses through which we see the world, whether we are consciously aware that we have a worldview or not.

Today, I want to make you aware of two systems you ARE using to create your worldview, so as to give you a starting place from which to begin making the mental shift you will need to make if you really want to unlock the full potential you have to change your mind and change your life.

And, since quantum physics teaches us that reality is shaped significantly by the manner in which we pay attention to it, you need to know that your brain has two different ways of determining what you think is real.

(Some readers will buck up here and say to themselves, “Not me. I see things the way they are. It’s other people who look at things in the wrong way.”)

To make a very complex subject fit into a short Self-Brain Surgery letter (again, McGilchrist’s attempt to explain this took almost 1,500 pages), let me just summarize those two systems with one example:

Let’s say that you realize that your spouse has told you a lie.

You’re devastated. You can’t believe it. And now you think, “I can never trust him/her again, because they’re a liar. They’re completely untrustworthy, and they’ve shattered my confidence in our entire relationship.”

You have collapsed an entire person into a two-dimensional object: He/She IS a liar. You’ve made them into a thing. A thing that tells lies. A thing that cannot be trusted. There’s no excuse for it, and they’ll never be anything to you but a person you can’t trust.

That collapsing of a whole person into a single characteristic (“Liar”) is the product of your left brain.

We have a tendency to use the left side of our brain to define other people and turn them into things.

A very interesting phenomenon happens, however, when WE tell a lie.

When you lie to your spouse (perhaps you never have, so maybe just apply this letter to someone else), you will in every case have a detailed justification in your mind as to why it was necessary. You will convince yourself that the lie was actually compassionate, to protect them from some type of harm the truth would cause them. You give yourself a very nuanced and carefully constructed excuse, don’t you? You’re the good guy in this story, and the lie was a necessary means to the right outcome.

You have expanded yourself from a dirty liar into a complex, three-dimensional, whole person whose actions have a lot of context and rationale. That’s the right side of your brain working.

Don’t misunderstand; I’m not saying the right half of our brain is designed to help us justify bad behavior and the left side serves to vilify others. What I’m saying is that the left side of the brain collapses the world into things, and the right side adds context, nuance, perspective, and rationale.

We need both in order to operate our lives in a flourishing, fully alive way.

We turn those hemispheric differences on ourselves often, too. We go through something hard and our left brain collapses our entire life into how we feel about it: “This is what my life is now, bereaved, abandoned, rejected, widowed, ____________ (Insert your massive thing here).” The the right side kicks in to develop a 3D explanation for why it’s compassionate and totally rational for us to drink ourselves to sleep every night because, after all, just think of all we’ve been through and that’s a reasonable response to such pain.

The problem is that we’ve hijacked the system, and we’ve come to believe that what we think or feel is real. Then the two halves of our brains work to either reinforce or excuse that belief.

The good news is, your mind can overcome the ways in which we’ve gotten the two hemispheres working against us, and make them work together and for our benefit instead.

It starts by simply recognizing that reality isn’t what it seems to be, but rather that we always see a mental picture of that our brains present to us as reality. It’s our job to use Self-Brain Surgery to learn to spot the ways in which our brains may be misleading us, and to square up our perception with reality so that we’re operating our lives from a place of truth.

(By the way, this is what II Corinthians 10:5 is getting at when it directs us to take every thought captive).

Starting next week, we will go through the ten most important directives I’ve learned from my career in neurosurgery and neuroscience that will help us in our quest to become healthier, feel better, and be happier. We will begin to see real progress in our lives when we learn to discern that ways in which our view of reality is shaped by brain images instead of by the truth.

For today though, just take some readings of your brain, and look for:

1. Places you’ve turned people (including yourself) into “things,” or 2D objects that you view as unchangeable. This is scanning for an over-attentiveness of left-brain activity.

2. Places where you’ve built a narrative excuse for yourself to perpetuate behaviors or attitudes that are not helping you heal, grow, get unstuck, or relate to others (even yourself or God) in better ways. This is learning to scan for an over-attentiveness of right-brain activity.

The system is designed to operate in balance, because the truth is usually somewhere in between the two extremes. We need facts, but we also need context. That’s what we’re going to learn in the coming weeks.

We’re more than halfway through All-In August. The message is getting out; the podcast episodes have been downloaded in 153 countries around the world over the last week. Let us hear from you if you’re all-in! You can click here to drop a voicemail or simply reply to this email and let me know!

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We’re going all in on believing that we have the tools to change our minds and change our lives. Living from a mind-down perspective changes everything, and it helps us harness the transforming changes to our lives that the Bible promises in Romans 12.

The neuroscience is on your side, my friend.

And the good news is, you can start today.

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Lisa and I are praying for you.

Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),

Lee

Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")

From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA

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