A Three Brain Approach to Understanding the Human Being

For millennia humans have been trying to figure out the nature of the human condition. What exactly makes us, us? How is the human being best described? If you’ve been along to my Settling Sail introductory course you’ve heard me ramble on about our body’s three brains and how it’s beneficial to view ourselves as a bunch of processes, not as a fixed and permanent Self. In this system I literally mean to think of ourselves as a set of three individual process-driven machines made of cogs and wheels and connecting processes that require constant attention and balancing. This view is skilful because it helps bring about the realisation of non-self – it undermines the story of the singular version of you – and it does this by promoting the intentional attending to these Three Yous. 

This model puts forward three experiential levels to the human being: The left brain, the right brain and the body brain. These are three internal voices or feelings, three lenses of experience through which we engage with the world. If you intentionally turn inside and get to know these parts of yourself, you will see how they are connected, see who’s calling the shots, see who needs what, and slowly but surely integrate them. This creates a more balanced, stable and aware you. I know this might be a tough sell, so let me tell you the story of how I got here… 

—

When I was 30 I had a life-changing experience. I was three years into my meditation journey and I was becoming more in tune with that voice in my head. When before the appreciation of my inner monologue seemed almost peripheral and nonessential, its importance was now coming to the fore and the influence of unmitigated thoughts on my behaviour could be felt. I had an appreciation that the inner monologue sometimes felt like a dialogue, but at that stage I had never considered that there might be more than one experience of me.

One weekend I booked myself a cabin in the Waitakere Ranges where I planned to spend three days and nights on an introspective journey. This was to be the first time I intentionally used psychedelics to promote internal growth and development. This might seem strange to some readers, but the renaissance of psychedelics in relation to personal development is now well established and the links to Buddhism and meditation are strong (if you’re interested in further reading on this subject check out, amongst others The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys by Dr. James Fadiman). I had been reading a lot of this literature and now was time to experience these psychedelics in a completely new way. With me to my cabin that weekend I took a small supply of LSD, MDMA and ketamine. The plan was simple: take the substances, look inside and see what happens. 

On the drive out I listened to a podcast a friend had recommended. The podcast was about getting to know the two sides of ourselves: A masculine go-getter and a feminine receiver. The meaning or etymology of these two labels is difficult given what’s not being referred to is the biological sex of the two sides, but perhaps an accurate interpretation is that “feminine” refers to receptive, integrative and generative energy, while “masculine” refers to directive, differentiating and articulating energy. Importantly, what was being emphasised is that balancing and integrating these sides of our psychology is important to our spiritual progression. 

I reflected and interpreted this information in relation to meditation. At this time I was starting to understand the two key modes of meditation: samadhi (concentration) and vipassana (insight). Samadhi meditations use focussed attention on something like the breath to train concentration, which brings about peace and bliss. To me this focussed attention correlated to the active, “masculine” energy being described. Conversely, vipassana meditations, such as those taught by the School of Vipassana or Zazen of Zen schools, untilise a broad, open-monitoring type of attention, to me correlating to the “feminine” ‘sit back and see’ type of attention. I interpreted the masculine/feminine not as two genders within the psycho-physical make-up, but as two different modes of attention that can be used when approaching the internal or external worlds.  

Driving through the Waitakere ranges I took a right off the Piha road to arrive at a cabin nestled amongst regenerating native bush. There was a small, single room with a bed on one side and a bathroom and a simple kitchen on the other. The cabin opened to a north-facing deck that was larger than the building itself and home to an outdoor open fireplace, a heated bath. The whole site was fully enclosed with maturing kauri trees. It was a beautiful spot. 

On the first night of my journey I took a combination of MDMA and ketamine. MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy) floods your body with serotonin and makes you feel like you love everything and can conquer anything. It is a real opener to your inner landscape and layers your experience with compassion, understanding and acceptance – metta. Because of this it has attracted a lot of recent attention in therapy circles, and is now a go-to treatment for PTSD in many parts of the world. Ketamine is classically known as a dissociative because it encourages disentanglement with your sense of Self. It breaks down the imaginary boundary between you and the world around you and allows significant insight and growth. Ketamine is now used to treat depression across the world, including here in New Zealand. The combination of the two is very therapeutic and that evening I lay naked by the open fire just understanding and accepting the way things were and had to be. 

After breakfast and coffee on day two I said a few words of encouragement to myself – a karakia of sorts – and took my planned dose of LSD. My intention was always to use the standard therapeutic protocol of laying down, eyes lightly blindfolded and headphones playing curated, lyricless music. This method helps access deeper mental formations such as ingrained habits and beliefs by limiting distractions and encouraging letting go. However, plans don’t always go to plan, and a little way into the session I found that I couldn't settle into the method. Something compelled me into the surrounding nature and I removed my blindfold and headphones and took a more ‘me hanging out on acid’ approach. Oh well, what’s meant to be is meant to be.  

I walked in the bush, journalled, and in the evening I found myself laying on the deck, gazing upward into the branches of the kauri trees in the fading light. Recently I had learnt that toward the end of a trip accessing the breath can be very soothing. It helps settle the mind after what is usually a pretty hectic day. This is, of course, just a gentle, open-eyed meditation. So I lay there on the deck, eyes open and gazing upward, just breathing. 

At first I didn’t really notice anything different from usual, but soon enough, with my heightened sensitivity, I saw that every so often something about my experience would suddenly change. It was mostly visual, but not related to an object or a shape or anything that you might call a hallucination – it was the hue of my visual experience. Every two to twenty seconds the leaves on the trees, the branches, the sky – everything – would almost imperceptibly, but definitely and suddenly, alter in colour. It was as if the thinnest filter was being applied to my experience, then quickly and continuously changed. It felt like a lightning quick cross-dissolve on a movie screen. Along with this subtle change to the visual field the internal environment would also gently shift. 

I was mesmerised by the experience and I lay there watching it for hours. At the time I had no thought, just observation, and in the following days I concluded that my experience was being filtered through different versions of me, which were acting like lenses to my consciousness. I spent weeks obsessing about how many ‘mes’ or levels of me there were that could play host or filter to my experience. At the time I didn’t connect it to the dualistic idea presented in the podcast because it actually felt like many more mes than two. The important thing is that this is the first time it had ever experienced something that undermined the idea of a single me. 

Eventually, from the melting pot of conditions arose the hypothesis that the answer must be two: two mes. Two was enough to adequately explain my experience, and two aligned with my meditation journey, two was enough for an inner conversation, and two was the simplest possible number (in biology the simplest answer is usually the right one). So I had a new theory: there were two of me. But could I find any hard science to back that up? 

 —

The internet eventually led me to Dr. Ian McGilchrist, a physician, psychiatrist, researcher, philosopher and author of The Master and His Emissary, a 700 page door-stopper of a book that thoroughly examines the discrepancies between the two hemispheres in the brain. In the book McGilchrist paints a picture of the right brain as the “Master” and the left as the “Emissary” and is quick to dispel the oversimplified pop-science of the ‘70s that suggested left equals rational and right equals emotional (he is also quick to dispel the idea of different genders in the brain*). 

McGilchrit’s work shows how right hemisphere attends to life with a broad, vigilant, bird’s eye view. Its interest is context and the connections and relations between things. It feels the world as an oily flow without boundaries that does away with categories. It embraces ambiguity and undefined edges. It intuits solutions from a sea of possibilities, relying on its holistic knowledge of relationships and space. It is embodied – it lives presently, here and now. 

The left brain – the Emissary – is the body’s specialist, the one who gets stuck in the weeds doing the dirty work. The left brian has precise attention – it hones in on specifics and doesn’t worry about what’s happening outside the necessary scope. To aid in this it has the ability to cognitively abstract – to perform mental manipulation and shape, change and analyse ideas and concepts to bring about learning and development. Importantly, it does all this linearly and mechanistically, deducing solutions from starting points using empirical reasoning (this is where the logical/rational categorisation comes from). The left brain also loves to fix things into place. This process of categorisation is essentially the presentation of information gathered through the senses onto an internal map of reality. Because this information is re-presentated (i.e. the map is only mental) this categorisation is inherently not-present, nor embodied. 

In McGilchrist’s view, the right brain should provide the overall direction of one’s life, while the left is employed and maintained for specific tasks. The second half of the book is dedicated to a discussion of how overzealous use of the left brain’s mode of attention has lead to a modern society that is inherently individualistic, separated and competitive. It’s a very interesting (and dense) read. 

Overall, the important thing is the fundamental difference between how the two hemispheres attend to, or come at, the world: the left being focused and abstracted and the right being vigilant and holistic. These modes of attention, which create our bare experience of life, are irreconcilable, they never meet in the middle. This irreconcilability presents itself as felt duality within the body-mind and, at times, as dis-ease, unsatisfactoriness or suffering - it simply doesn’t feel nice to have two irreconcilable points of view. 

So here was what I was looking for. McGilchrist’s thesis agreed with my felt experience that there are two versions of ourselves up in our heads: the Two Yous.

Wait, you said three…? 

More recently, my journey has led me to a second conclusion: the combined neurology of the body acts as a third agent of experience within the human being. This agent may not be as clever, dominant and assertive as the other two, but again, when you pay close enough attention, you’ll notice its presence, how common its needs are, and in fact, how important it is. The body is almost like the child of two parents. It’s simpler, more animalistic and not concerned with the convoluted stories the hemispheres use to create meaning in your life. The neurology of the body is geared for direct survival, right here, right now.

No matter which angle you come at your research from, all threads point towards the importance of the body. Two books I have read in the last few years and often wax lyrical about are The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. The first discusses when trauma is not processed healthily, the memory of that trauma becomes stored in the body. Traumatic memories may not be conscious – indeed, many sufferers of trauma completely remove the conscious memory of the event from their mind – but the remnants of that struggle will be present in the body as stored, embodied memory. Sufferers of traumatic events can, when certain triggers present themselves, relive their trauma, either physically acting out things like violence, protective action and self harm, or reliving the horrible physiological effects. These physical and biophysical behaviours are automatic and uncontrolled – they do not originate from conscious thought in either of the hemispheres. When the right conditions present themselves, they arise from deep down in the neurology of the body. 

Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender takes a similar, but broader approach to our personal development. The synthesis of the book is this: every one of our emotions has a corollary physical sensation in the body. Next time you are very emotional about something see if you can drop down into the body and sense for yourself the physicality of the emotion, it’s always there somewhere. Dr. Hawkins discusses how when emotions are either suppressed or repressed and not allowed to run their natural course (e.g. you stop yourself from crying and greiving because it’s “weak and childish”), they will again become stored in the body, like a library of all the incomplete processing. 

They key to getting past emotions that are holding us back is to let them run their natural course. If this processing happens, difficult emotions will transmute into more pleasant, skilful emotions that allow development and growth. The key to this processing is in feeling the emotion, and the way that you feel emotions that you’ve long ago shoved aside and forgotten about is by accessing the physical counterpart in the body. While you may have consciously forgotten about that thing, your body hasn’t.

This idea is taken a step further by the school of Vipassana Meditation. Vipassana teaches that alleviation of suffering (i.e. processing of brain narratives) is achieved by equanimous (un-attached) attention to the body and its sensations. It says that every single thing you have ever done (and so the corresponding life narrative) has corollary physical counterparts in the body. Because the journey to enlightenment is actually a redressing or unfolding of the life-narrative/mental formations that we have created, and because all of that stuff, the whole story, is stored as memory in the body, the unfolding of your story will take place only through allowing all of the sensations in the body to run their course. By equanimously observing sensations across the body, mental-formations and their associated stored habitual energies, escape the mind-body continuum and so no longer control us. (For a deeper read on my understanding of Vipassana and my journey through it check here.) 

So the body is the third brain, and importantly, because it is removed from those narratives (lenses) of the hemispheres, it is a much more accurate representation of your life than your brains will ever come up with! 

When we bring this back to our meditation journey the lesson is that sensing the body is the process of integration. I often reference Sangharatchita’s Path of Regular Steps, which details the process of the spiritual journey. Of the four steps to the spiritual life, the first is integration, which happens, in particular, through meditations such as the Mindfulness of Breathing. When we focus on our breath what are we focussing on? It is our body of course, its movements, its sensations, its sounds. Here, the body is actually acting like a common language or translator between the two hemispheres. The hemispheres can’t understand each other, they never will, but if they both shut up and listen to the body, they will find themselves on the same page. This is integration of your psycho-physical machine, this is the work. 

—

So these are our three brains. In my experience, the healthy processing of life’s events takes the coordinated attention of all three. The body must be open and willing to be read, the left brain must be pliable and willing to be taught, and the right brain must be present and not feeling hurt. When these systems are all talking to each other (which again, I stress, happens through the body) you will find yourself on the path to liberation because you have started to undermine the idea of a single, enduring self. And it really is so simple. Every time you find yourself stressing about something, feeling hurt, or dealing with any emotion that should needs to be processed (i.e. every time you find yourself caught up in a story about how things could, should or would be), drop down into your body. Stop thinking and feel yourself! Feel your muscles, feel your bones, feel your brains. This is the process of getting out of your own way and allowing the beauty of your journey to flourish.  

*There is no evidence for the two hemispheres being different genders. However, I believe to interpret those labels (which come from people like shamans and indigenous philosophers) too literally, and not simply as neurological archetypes of traditional gender roles is the core mistake of any analysis that dismisses the idea. It is interesting to me that in the recent ignition of the gender discussion, labels such as “bi gender”, “multigender” and “splitgender” have arisen (or at least arisen to the common consciousness). It seems entirely possible to me that, if gender is subjective, the two brains literally feel they are different genders from one another.