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“ ‘Many suppose that before [Adam] <the Creation> All was Solitude & Chaos This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind.’ —William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment
In my book The God of the Left Hemisphere (Routledge, 2013), I suggest the ways in which the activities, values, and functions associated by Blake with the figure of “Urizen” correspond remarkably closely with the properties and processes of what modern neuroscience calls the “left hemisphere” of the human brain. Or to put this more succinctly, it argues that the left brain is “Urizen”. The emergence of this extraordinary complex of processes and powers in human history, through left-brain dominance in Homo sapiens, is surely one of the most important and profound developments ever to have taken place on Earth. For it is the dominance of this “Reasoning Power” that has shaped, controlled, and defined every stage and aspect of human consciousness.
As the book indicates, Blake was virtually unique in his time in regarding “reason” not as some isolated, neutral, calculating function (as it had usually been regarded), but as a forceful complex of activities and values, all rooted in a shared interconnection, combining language, linear-sequencing, moral codes, law-making, conceptual abstraction, a powerful ego-centre, and instrumental rationality itself. It is no overstatement to say that this “Reasoning Power” has made us what we are.
And according to Blake, the emergence of this dominating, rationalistic left-brain personality has also been recorded in many of the earliest “Creation” texts of human culture, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato’s Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Drawing together all of the points and connections made in this book, he affirms that the “God” portrayed in the Book of Genesis is in fact none other than the “Holy Reasoning Power”: the “God” of the left hemisphere.
For that remarkable power, captured so vividly and so remarkably honestly by the early Hebrew writers, fulfils and embodies all of the fundamental activities, properties and even personality, of left-brain circuitry. This early “God” of the Bible presents itself, as does the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus and indeed all other rational abstract deities, as a “Creator” God, but through textual analysis it is evident that it “creates” solely by abstracting and dividing existence (an existence usually in fact acknowledged as being eternal and pre-existing in these texts, but in a state that appears to its rational programmed Deity as being relatively “chaotic”, void, and “formless”).
This is most clearly apparent in Plato’s Timaeus, which presents the apparently finite, rational universe (of left hemisphere programming) as a sort of imperfect “copy” of some forgotten, unknown, or eternal original: as Plato puts it, the Urizenic Demiurge “determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one. For before the heavens came into being there were no days or nights or months or years, but he devised and brought them into being at the same time that the heavens were put together” (Plato).
The key word here is “ordered”: what all these allegedly “Creator” gods do in fact is just to impose order (though to be fair, this is an extraordinary cognitive and conceptual feat in itself), through divisions, differentiations, and abstracted delineations, onto pre-existing being (rather like a child does in making sense of the universe in order to function in it and to manipulate it). According to the Urizenic Demiurge, it does this because “before” its emergence and domination, “existence” was, or appeared to be, “chaotic” and irregular—rather like the motion of subatomic particles appears to modern scientific eyes. The Demiurge’s initial act of “Creation” was therefore essentially one of reduction and contraction: Plato’s God, in a telling phrase, “reduced” reality “to order from disorder”.
For before his rationalistic Demiurge took control and gradually imposed this rational order, the elements of the universe were, Plato says, “in the disorganized state to be expected of anything which god has not touched, and his first step when he set about reducing them to order was to give them a definite pattern of shape and number”.
This process of reducing things to “order” and giving them a “definite” (de-finite, de-fined) form, is indeed what all Rational Gods consider to be “creation”: it is their version of creation, creation made in the image of a computer program. And this is also clearly the sort of “creation” that occurs in the Book of Genesis , another version of Reason’s account of the origin of its origin. “And the earth was without form, and void … And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Here we have all the typical Urizenic left-brain activities at work: giving definition to a pre-existing formless or fluid existence (there is no genuine “creationism” in either the Hebrew Bible or in Plato’s Timaeus), using logos to delineate and separate existence (rationally enough, starting with the most fundamental conceptual categories of day/night, and hence the origins of every subsequent temporal-sequencing program), employing all the analytical, judgmental, evaluative processes of the left hemisphere in order to describe these new abstracted entities as “good” (just as Plato calls his perfect triangles “good”), before setting to work dividing the rest of eternity into equally nice neat, ordered, Urizenic bits. As Damon notes: ‘The process of Creation is one of dividing up the original Unity. Beginning with the separation of light from darkness, it proceeds through the six Days of Creation, culminating in the separation of man from God.’
Plato’s version brings out especially well the hidden rationalistic nature of this “Creation” myth. The whole story is prompted by a rational question: how did the universe come to be how it is? As with the Book of Genesis, it is an attempt to provide reasons for everything. Reason cannot bear the idea that things happen for no reason or might happen spontaneously, or even just for fun, as bodily things tend to: it interprets all such behaviour as “chaotic” and illogical, and immediately converts it to functional interpretations which it can then understand and use, as with Darwinism. These secret rationalistic motivations are evident throughout Plato’s account of his “Creator” God. “Clearly, of course, he had his eye on the eternal; for the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being and he is the best of causes. That being so, it must have been constructed on the pattern of what is apprehensible by reason and understanding and eternally unchanging” (Plato).
It is worth mentioning here that none of this is in fact logical, any more than are his bodies made out of triangles. It makes no sense to say the world is the fairest—there is no comparison—or that the creator must be a “he”, or that existence is the result of being constructed according to logic, or that to be eternal is synonymous with being unchanging: all of those are simply what reason would “like” to believe—they are emotionally charged. ‘God therefore, wishing that all things should be good, and so far as possible nothing be imperfect, and finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better’ (Plato).
The important point here, apart from the wilful self-deception of the emotional needs of such reasoning, is the admission that such a rational Creator did not in actuality create the universe but rather imposed order onto a pre-existing world, one that it retrospectively presents as being in a prior state “not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion”, just as the “God” of the Book of Genesis finds the universe formless and void, and (like a good Rational activity) sets to work ordering and dividing it.
This is the myth of “Creation”; and indeed, through its embodiment of left-brain story-telling, rationality, linear sequencing, and Logos, it is also the creation of myth. For if the emergence of left brain dominance was recorded in the earliest stories and myths of mankind—handed down in books of genesis, Greek myths, Norse mythology, Babylonian and Sumerian creation texts, Vedic cosmogony, and so on—then those stories themselves were the manifestation of this new god. Temporal and linear sequencing, combined with Logos and rationality, allowed the left hemisphere to develop all kinds of narrative sequencing and for story-telling itself to emerge, and some of the first stories it told were of its own emergence out of eternity. As Bolte Taylor observes: ‘One of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave stories. This story-teller portion of our left mind’s language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of information.’
The story of reason’s emergence as a god-like “Creator” (which is, appropriately enough, the very subject of many of the earliest written texts), can therefore be seen as not only describing the origin of this new power, but also as written by this power. In this sense perhaps they might truly be said to be the “word” of God, the direct product and pronouncement of the “Holy Reasoning Power”. There are, moreover, some similarities between the six central features of this Urizenic power and six of the seven “Eyes of God” (the seventh, as we shall see, is explicitly a non rational aspect), explored both within the Hebrew Bible and in Blake’s prophetic verse, each representing significant stages of the fall into “division” of man, and his gradual process of reawakening.
Thus, for example, the abstracting and dividing power of the left hemisphere corresponds remarkably closely with what the poets of the Tanakh referred to as “The Ancient of Days” (complete with his golden compasses); the judging, moralising aspect seems strongly linked to the “Elohim” (usually translated as “the judges”); the left-brain “I am” ego-centre with “Yahweh”; the rational linguistic activity with Logos, and so on.3 Nor is the association of these Gods with human brain states and functions as unprecedented or unusual as might at first appear. In Norse mythology similar connections are to be found: for example, on the shoulders of the god Odin sit the ravens Huginn (“Thought”) and Muninn (“Memory”), while the ancient Greeks explicitly referred to their gods as brain functions. In Critias, for example, Plato invokes “memory” as a sort of deity: “I … must call on the gods, adding the goddess Memory in particular … For my whole narrative depends largely on her” (Plato). Indeed, their entire pantheon resembles a modern neuroscientific textbook. If the Book of Genesis does record the emergence of left brain dominance, then it has a wonderful monument.
This is an excerpt from 'The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation' (Routledge, 2013). To read reviews and find out more about the book, please click here:
The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation
www.karnacbooks.com/product/the-god-of-the-left-hemisphere-blake-bolte-taylor-and-the-myth-of-creation/32946/
In my book The God of the Left Hemisphere (Routledge, 2013), I suggest the ways in which the activities, values, and functions associated by Blake with the figure of “Urizen” correspond remarkably closely with the properties and processes of what modern neuroscience calls the “left hemisphere” of the human brain. Or to put this more succinctly, it argues that the left brain is “Urizen”. The emergence of this extraordinary complex of processes and powers in human history, through left-brain dominance in Homo sapiens, is surely one of the most important and profound developments ever to have taken place on Earth. For it is the dominance of this “Reasoning Power” that has shaped, controlled, and defined every stage and aspect of human consciousness.
As the book indicates, Blake was virtually unique in his time in regarding “reason” not as some isolated, neutral, calculating function (as it had usually been regarded), but as a forceful complex of activities and values, all rooted in a shared interconnection, combining language, linear-sequencing, moral codes, law-making, conceptual abstraction, a powerful ego-centre, and instrumental rationality itself. It is no overstatement to say that this “Reasoning Power” has made us what we are.
And according to Blake, the emergence of this dominating, rationalistic left-brain personality has also been recorded in many of the earliest “Creation” texts of human culture, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato’s Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Drawing together all of the points and connections made in this book, he affirms that the “God” portrayed in the Book of Genesis is in fact none other than the “Holy Reasoning Power”: the “God” of the left hemisphere.
For that remarkable power, captured so vividly and so remarkably honestly by the early Hebrew writers, fulfils and embodies all of the fundamental activities, properties and even personality, of left-brain circuitry. This early “God” of the Bible presents itself, as does the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus and indeed all other rational abstract deities, as a “Creator” God, but through textual analysis it is evident that it “creates” solely by abstracting and dividing existence (an existence usually in fact acknowledged as being eternal and pre-existing in these texts, but in a state that appears to its rational programmed Deity as being relatively “chaotic”, void, and “formless”).
This is most clearly apparent in Plato’s Timaeus, which presents the apparently finite, rational universe (of left hemisphere programming) as a sort of imperfect “copy” of some forgotten, unknown, or eternal original: as Plato puts it, the Urizenic Demiurge “determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one. For before the heavens came into being there were no days or nights or months or years, but he devised and brought them into being at the same time that the heavens were put together” (Plato).
The key word here is “ordered”: what all these allegedly “Creator” gods do in fact is just to impose order (though to be fair, this is an extraordinary cognitive and conceptual feat in itself), through divisions, differentiations, and abstracted delineations, onto pre-existing being (rather like a child does in making sense of the universe in order to function in it and to manipulate it). According to the Urizenic Demiurge, it does this because “before” its emergence and domination, “existence” was, or appeared to be, “chaotic” and irregular—rather like the motion of subatomic particles appears to modern scientific eyes. The Demiurge’s initial act of “Creation” was therefore essentially one of reduction and contraction: Plato’s God, in a telling phrase, “reduced” reality “to order from disorder”.
For before his rationalistic Demiurge took control and gradually imposed this rational order, the elements of the universe were, Plato says, “in the disorganized state to be expected of anything which god has not touched, and his first step when he set about reducing them to order was to give them a definite pattern of shape and number”.
This process of reducing things to “order” and giving them a “definite” (de-finite, de-fined) form, is indeed what all Rational Gods consider to be “creation”: it is their version of creation, creation made in the image of a computer program. And this is also clearly the sort of “creation” that occurs in the Book of Genesis , another version of Reason’s account of the origin of its origin. “And the earth was without form, and void … And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Here we have all the typical Urizenic left-brain activities at work: giving definition to a pre-existing formless or fluid existence (there is no genuine “creationism” in either the Hebrew Bible or in Plato’s Timaeus), using logos to delineate and separate existence (rationally enough, starting with the most fundamental conceptual categories of day/night, and hence the origins of every subsequent temporal-sequencing program), employing all the analytical, judgmental, evaluative processes of the left hemisphere in order to describe these new abstracted entities as “good” (just as Plato calls his perfect triangles “good”), before setting to work dividing the rest of eternity into equally nice neat, ordered, Urizenic bits. As Damon notes: ‘The process of Creation is one of dividing up the original Unity. Beginning with the separation of light from darkness, it proceeds through the six Days of Creation, culminating in the separation of man from God.’
Plato’s version brings out especially well the hidden rationalistic nature of this “Creation” myth. The whole story is prompted by a rational question: how did the universe come to be how it is? As with the Book of Genesis, it is an attempt to provide reasons for everything. Reason cannot bear the idea that things happen for no reason or might happen spontaneously, or even just for fun, as bodily things tend to: it interprets all such behaviour as “chaotic” and illogical, and immediately converts it to functional interpretations which it can then understand and use, as with Darwinism. These secret rationalistic motivations are evident throughout Plato’s account of his “Creator” God. “Clearly, of course, he had his eye on the eternal; for the world is the fairest of all things that have come into being and he is the best of causes. That being so, it must have been constructed on the pattern of what is apprehensible by reason and understanding and eternally unchanging” (Plato).
It is worth mentioning here that none of this is in fact logical, any more than are his bodies made out of triangles. It makes no sense to say the world is the fairest—there is no comparison—or that the creator must be a “he”, or that existence is the result of being constructed according to logic, or that to be eternal is synonymous with being unchanging: all of those are simply what reason would “like” to believe—they are emotionally charged. ‘God therefore, wishing that all things should be good, and so far as possible nothing be imperfect, and finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every way better’ (Plato).
The important point here, apart from the wilful self-deception of the emotional needs of such reasoning, is the admission that such a rational Creator did not in actuality create the universe but rather imposed order onto a pre-existing world, one that it retrospectively presents as being in a prior state “not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion”, just as the “God” of the Book of Genesis finds the universe formless and void, and (like a good Rational activity) sets to work ordering and dividing it.
This is the myth of “Creation”; and indeed, through its embodiment of left-brain story-telling, rationality, linear sequencing, and Logos, it is also the creation of myth. For if the emergence of left brain dominance was recorded in the earliest stories and myths of mankind—handed down in books of genesis, Greek myths, Norse mythology, Babylonian and Sumerian creation texts, Vedic cosmogony, and so on—then those stories themselves were the manifestation of this new god. Temporal and linear sequencing, combined with Logos and rationality, allowed the left hemisphere to develop all kinds of narrative sequencing and for story-telling itself to emerge, and some of the first stories it told were of its own emergence out of eternity. As Bolte Taylor observes: ‘One of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave stories. This story-teller portion of our left mind’s language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of information.’
The story of reason’s emergence as a god-like “Creator” (which is, appropriately enough, the very subject of many of the earliest written texts), can therefore be seen as not only describing the origin of this new power, but also as written by this power. In this sense perhaps they might truly be said to be the “word” of God, the direct product and pronouncement of the “Holy Reasoning Power”. There are, moreover, some similarities between the six central features of this Urizenic power and six of the seven “Eyes of God” (the seventh, as we shall see, is explicitly a non rational aspect), explored both within the Hebrew Bible and in Blake’s prophetic verse, each representing significant stages of the fall into “division” of man, and his gradual process of reawakening.
Thus, for example, the abstracting and dividing power of the left hemisphere corresponds remarkably closely with what the poets of the Tanakh referred to as “The Ancient of Days” (complete with his golden compasses); the judging, moralising aspect seems strongly linked to the “Elohim” (usually translated as “the judges”); the left-brain “I am” ego-centre with “Yahweh”; the rational linguistic activity with Logos, and so on.3 Nor is the association of these Gods with human brain states and functions as unprecedented or unusual as might at first appear. In Norse mythology similar connections are to be found: for example, on the shoulders of the god Odin sit the ravens Huginn (“Thought”) and Muninn (“Memory”), while the ancient Greeks explicitly referred to their gods as brain functions. In Critias, for example, Plato invokes “memory” as a sort of deity: “I … must call on the gods, adding the goddess Memory in particular … For my whole narrative depends largely on her” (Plato). Indeed, their entire pantheon resembles a modern neuroscientific textbook. If the Book of Genesis does record the emergence of left brain dominance, then it has a wonderful monument.
This is an excerpt from 'The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation' (Routledge, 2013). To read reviews and find out more about the book, please click here:
The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation
www.karnacbooks.com/product/the-god-of-the-left-hemisphere-blake-bolte-taylor-and-the-myth-of-creation/32946/