Schumacher's "Perplexed" Meets McGilchrist's "Master"
“Does E.F. Schumacher’s appreciative discussion of Edgar Cayce concern you?” I asked Fr. Schall at lunch.
It was a fair question. Schall’s Another Sort of Learning strongly recommended E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed.1 Perplexed, in turn, approvingly quoted and cited New Age spiritual icons Edgar Cayce and P.D. Ouspensky.2
By application of the transitive property, this made Schall a New Ager, which conflicted with everything I knew from working with him on a magazine. The Schall I knew was sensible, loyal to the Church, and deeply appreciative of traditionalist Catholics like Hilaire Belloc.
Schall responded that Schumacher was merely trying to point the reader to another way of seeing things. I wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but Schall clearly didn’t think the subject merited much elaboration, so I dropped it.
Schumacher was Trying to Explain What the Saints and Sages Have Always Seen
But for years, I considered that idea: “an other way of seeing things.”
What “other”?
I’ve learned over the years that saints, sages, and scribes have provided many great answers.
Pascal’s “the heart has reasons the head doesn’t understand,” for instance. Or Paul’s counsel to stop approaching things with the “flesh.” Or Taoism’s chuckling cynicism at all attempts to capture reality through words and concepts. Or C.S. Lewis’ gentle advice to stop seeing things through the refracting lens of pride and, instead, seeing them with humble disinterestedness. Or Jack Kerouac’s quest to see the world with the innocent eyes of the child. Or Aldous Huxley attempts to get past the ordinary door of perception.
And now, Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis.
McGilchrist Approaches the Other with Neuroscience
Iain McGilchrist, using a shocking assortment of evidence, argues that the “other” way of seeing things involves reasserting the right hemisphere of the brain over the rebellious left hemisphere.
The thing is, it shouldn’t be “another” way of seeing or learning. It ought to be the way of seeing and learning because the right hemisphere of the brain opens us to transcendence (“communion with the flowing reality of consciousness” is how McGilchrist would probably phrase it).
The left hemisphere, on the other hand, tends to turn off the transcendental spigot because its role is to preserve the body, to survive, and to strive in the physical world. As a result, the left hemisphere prioritizes utility and canalizes (narrows) consciousness toward what is useful. It also tends to “go rogue” and, getting obsessed with its survival function, demands all the mind’s attention, especially in the modern world, which is a “Left Hemisphere Gone Wild” world.
If we subdue the left hemisphere—put it on a leash, as it were—and get good at putting our right hemisphere in its rightful role as master, the left hemisphere will stop occupying our field of consciousness. It will stop turning off the transcendental spigot, and we will start seeing things as informed by transcendence.
We’ll start seeing a whole new reality.
We’ll start seeing in another way.
Did Edgar Cayce See in Another Way?
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) was an American clairvoyant known as the “Sleeping Prophet.” Stenographers made over 14,000 records from statements he made during a kind of sleep, during which he answered specific questions from over 6,000 people. He correctly diagnosed and gave helpful medical advice to people, some of whom lived hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Was he a fraud? It’s a fair question and open to debate, but many grateful contemporaries were helped by his advice. Much of his specific medical advice was perhaps “snake oilish,” but his basic health recommendations have a lot of parallels to the “Medicine 2.0” wave that is gaining traction in America through the work of doctors like Peter Attia and Casey Means. Cayce recommended fresh and locally sourced fruits and vegetables, organic meats, meditation, proper hydration, daily stretching, and massage therapy.3
Cayce never profited from his gift. He lived simply and modestly, occasionally in poverty. He found his gift a heavy burden, not one to be exploited.
It would appear that he was a man with his left hemisphere thoroughly subdued, which allowed his right hemisphere to access areas of consciousness that are shut off to the rest of us. Here’s how Cayce put it:
Apparently, I am one of the few who can lay aside their own personalities [set aside the grasping ambition of their left hemispheres] sufficiently to allow their souls to make this attunement to the universal source of knowledge [to free their right hemispheres to connect to transcendence]—but I say this without any desire to brag about it. . . . I am certain all human beings have much greater powers than they are ever conscious of—if they would only be willing to pay the price of detachment from self-interest [the price of subduing their left hemispheres] that it takes to develop those abilities. Would you be willing, even once a year, to put aside, pass out entirely from, your own personality?
We Know One Thing: We Don’t Even Know One Thing
How does hypnosis clear skin conditions? How do placebos work? How is it possible that quantum particles change merely by being observed? How do a schizophrenic woman’s visual EEG readings go blank when her blind split persona takes over? How does a severe bout with the flu reveal areas of consciousness (e.g., memories) that we have long suppressed?
What, in general, is this odd mish-mash of matter/brain/mind/soul . . . and how does it interact with the world?
These things are still being explored and pondered. At this time, we know only one thing: we don’t know even one thing. We only know there is a reality out there that can’t be measured, that defies language and logic, that can’t be conquered. It avoids us and escapes us, but constantly calls us and warns us not to ignore it.
Cayce might have been in touch with it. Schumacher got in touch with it and converted to Catholicism a few years before his death. McGilchrist is now trying to get the rest of us in touch with it.
Endnotes
Endnotes make the primary text “an easier read,” permitting “a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story.” David Foster Wallace
It’s one of the eight books that Schall recommended for anyone “who begins to wonder and to think”:
Allan Bloom’s translation of Plato, The Republic, with his interpretive essay.
Henry Veatch, Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation
Herbert Deane, Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine
E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
J.M. Bochenski, Philosophy: An Introduction
Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages
Josef Piper, The Silence of St. Thomas
Ralph McInerny, St. Thomas Aquinas
Perplexed recommends sages and seers from across the religious landscape, including these two individuals revered by New Agers.
Contrast that with a few conventional medical advice from the early 1900s. Google it or check out this scary list from Mental Floss.