tony wright on the human condition

Tony Wright talks to Joanne Harcourt-Smith about his research into the human condition including his symbiotic theory of human origins and also our species wide insanity.  The story begins with his own experiences after he switched to a raw food 'primate like' diet including a lot of tropical fruit.  He noticed that his perceptions including visual, began to change.  At one point he awoke in the night with a a very different although familiar sense of self also experiencing pins and needles in his right side, indicating that the left hemisphere was not fully operational.  After substantial research and shamanic exploration he concluded that  something has happened to the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex which limits its function, whilst also causing it to be dominant (cerebral dominance) so that right hemisphere function is effectively restrained too.

He believes that humans have the innate capacity by their nature to live in a perpetual state of wonder and awe, in divine rapture.  The very fact that we, as humans, have devised techniques to access this state indicates this.  We have largely lost this on a day to day level, and living in fear, the most fearful (not the most illuminated) dominate.

Tony uses the analogy of lenses to describe the way the hemispheres of the brain facilitate conscious awareness.  At one time they worked together rather like lenses in binoculars but this is not longer the case and we live in a split sense of self.

Tony sees the steps we need to take as follows:

1. rebuild and restore the neural system

2. inhibit the sense of self from the lens that is not working so well i.e. left hemisphere through methods such as reducing speech and sleep deprivation

3.stimulate the right hemisphere with complex tasks such as music, singing and things that are too complicated for the left to deal with.

4, Compensate for loss of neurochemistry with neurochemical analogies including the plant medicine tradition.

We need a holistic approach. Our DNA is read optimally in the presence of tropical forest biochemistry.  We were plant-human hybrids.  We are now in a position to fly tropical forest foods around the globe.

Religion as we know it emerged as we shifted from the experiential to the conceptual and we began to run ourselves and our lives with belief systems.

We have a window of time to sort out our dilemma before the right hemisphere too degenerates.

Of all Tony's many recorded interviews this is the one I would currently recommend to anyone fairly new to his work as it covers the initial ground so clearly step by step.

tree and well

Odin

http://www.metahistory.org/guidelines/TreeAndWell.php

"Nordic mythology presents the same eternal image in the story of the poet-shaman Odin (or Woden), who must hang on the cosmic tree for nine days and nine nights to receive a sublime revelation. He ascends the Tree to surrender to the streaming of cosmic currents through its leaves and branches. Through this ordeal he acquires the runes, a secret alphabet composed of divinatory symbols. The runes represent the generative formulas of all possible languages, the bases of all verbal and written expressions in which human knowledge can be captured and transmitted. By his ordeal the "tree-hung" shaman acquires the magical power of language, but still needs access to the transcendent wisdom that will use language for its instrument. 

For this second endowment, Odin must descend into the underworld, to the root of the Tree, and drink from the miraculous Well of Mimir. The name Mimir is related to the Latin memor, hence Mimir’s Well has been called the “well of remembrance”. Ralph Metzner explains:
• It was said that to drink from this well would give one knowledge of the beginnings and origins of things — of humans, of life, of the worlds... In German translations, the term used to describe Mimir’s well is marchenreich, “filled with stories” — a clue that to drink from the well was an experience that involved both visioning and storytelling. Stories tell us about our past, and visions tell us about our future. To drink from Mimir’s well, then, is to enter into a state of consciousness of recollection, where we can remember our evolutionary origins, our relatedness to the realms of animals and plants, and our primordial nature as children of Earth...

. . Nordic myth says that when Odin came to the Well of Mimir, he was confronted with a test by its guardian. The giant demanded an act of surrender before allowing Odin to drink at the Well. To gain illumination by mystic memory, Odin must surrender one of his eyes. Hence this shaman became known as the One-Eyed Seer. 


The myth teaches that we must surrender our one-sided way of seeing and understanding, the preclusive rational mentation of the left brain, in order to realize the poetic-visionary faculties of the other eye, the right brain awareness. Curiously, the left-brained mentality, when surrendered, does not go away. According to the Icelandic Eddas, “when the giant Mimir, or other gods of knowledge-seeking shamans, drank from the well, they would see Odin’s eye looking back at them.”  Sunk to the bottom of the well, the sacrificed eye (the rational faculty, Odin's left eye) keeps seeing. 
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At this point it would appear that the higher teaching of the myth proposes an arresting thought: if we peer deeply enough into the well of ancestral wisdom, the rational, left-brain thinking with which we are so identified and in which we invest the sole validity for knowing how the world works, will be there peering back at us. Here the myth conveys a key survival lesson:rationality is not precluded from the deep-level transrational knowing of ancient seership, even though the rational limits of cognition must be surpassed for that deeper knowing to become experiential. This paradox was uniquely understood in the tradition of the Gnostics, pagan spiritual teachers who asserted the basic complementarity of rational and visionary knowledge.

John Lamb Lash

the god of the left hemisphere

It's not God creating in his own image - it''s the left hemisphere...

tony wright book signing

This is the story that first inspired Food for Consciousness all those years back.

loose cannon left hemisphere

This great paragraph from Joseph Chiltern Pearce"s 'The Biology of Transcendence' explains part of our predicament wonderfully.

"While our emotional or old mammalian brain has rich connections to the right hemisphere of our third brain, direct connections between the emotional brain and the left hemisphere are sparse.  Herein the plot thickens and grows hazardous.  Having no efficient connections of its own, the left hemisphere's reaction to the rest of the three-brain system is largely through the right hemisphere, which has much stronger connections to the brain as a unit.
A think neural band called the corpus callosum bridges the brain's two hemispheres, and it is through this that the left hemisphere has access to the right and to the processes of the rest of the brain.  This neural connection allows the left hemisphere to take material from the right, retreat from the unified scene, ad operate on the material in isolation- dissecting it, analyzing it, and putting it back together in novel ways without regard to the checks and balances of the rest of the system and without concern over how this new creation will relate to the whole...through all this action, the left hemisphere maintains its dynamic interaction with the prefrontal cortex, from which creativity and novelty spring."

cerebral dominance and symbiosis

Tony Wright gives a brief introduction to his symbiotic theory of human evolution presented in 'Left in the Dark'.  He describes how the limitations of cerebral dominance (left hemisphere in charge) affect our capacity to see the problem.  He then describes our symbiotic relationship with plants and how this is a key factor in our cognitive capacity.

"A lot of our complex traits have been shaped and sculpted by the chemistry of the plants, it's not logged in our DNA, it's not something we can do so you end up with a situation where our consciousness system, our neural system and much of our physiology becomes entirely dependent on the plants particularly fruit."

Separated from our natural environment, the non-seasonal tropics, our unique traits which are to do with this unique symbiosis, including cognitive function, dwindle.

Fruit compounds such as flavonoids have a triple effect on the way our DNA is transcribed or read. They affect transcription directly, they also affect the steroids which are the major players in terms of transcription and they affect the hormonal output of the pineal principally pinoline and melatonin which also affect DNA transcription.  We are not talking about subtle changes here, with changes to the neural system, we are talking about the potential to effectively experience a different sense of self.

Forging a relationship with the hormone rich sex organs of plants, as if in the uterus of the plants, led to less differentiation and longer windows of development, less differentiation meant more fluid neocortex and less difference between the brains of men and women. Take that away by losing our relationship with the fruit forest and we revert to a simpler mammalian type  - good at survival but it's the symbiosis with the humans and the fruit chemistry that produces the amazing neural system with all its traits.

tpv radio interviews tony wright

In this latest interview, Tony describes how a change from our archaic forest diet, which supported our incredible neurology, affected the build of the brain and led to the human condition that we experience today.  He talks about the way in which the left hemisphere has been affected detrimentally whilst ironically it now dominates our sense of self and experience.  This is what Tony describes as the 'biological origins of the fall from grace'.

If you are new to Tony's work this is definitely worth a listen.  I have a feeling that as time goes on these ideas will be increasingly accepted as self-evident.