The Secret Teachers of the Western World

In order to understand the world intellectually, the left brain has to distance itself from it and turn it into an object.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

For those who have a sense of this invisible, other reality, the answers to life’s mysteries offered by modern science are inadequate and unsatisfying. They are unable to accept them and they find themselves seeking something else.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

As McGilchrist argues, the Renaissance was a time when the two rival hemispheres came together briefly, that is, they “integrated,” and formed a creative union that produced remarkable works of art and architecture.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, modern science has focused on the kind of “facts” that can be grasped by the senses and proven by measurement. It abandoned the religious explanations for the world, which posited an unseen God behind the universe; accepted only that which it could see and touch; and brought an acute analysis to the phenomena of the physical world.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

The esoteric tradition is also intuitive, focusing on our subtle, inner worlds, rather than our obvious outer one. It believes in a living, organic, spiritual, even conscious universe, rather than a dead, mechanical, oblivious one. It is also concerned more with the whole than with the part, with the “correspondences” between things—the “network of connections that links everything with everything else”—than with what separates them.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

We know that with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century—a development clearly linked to the temperament of the left brain—the esoteric tradition lost much of its prestige and that, in order to maintain itself, it had to go “underground” and become, as it remains today, a kind of “counterculture.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

There is another kind of knowledge. It is not one of physical facts, nor can it be quantified and measured. It is a knowledge of our inner world, not the outer one, a knowledge of what we used to call the spirit or the soul, that invisible, intangible something that animates us and leads us to ask questions about who we are and what our place in this mysterious world can be.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

The left brain, on the other hand—literally—is geared, McGilchrist argues, toward breaking up the whole that the right presents. It turns the right brain’s unity into bits and pieces, which it can then manipulate. Its job is to analyze the big picture presented by the right and reduce it to easily manageable parts, which it can control and arrange to suit its purposes.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Even figures associated with the rise of modern science and the modern world—Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton—were profoundly influenced by Hermetic ideas. Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, made a living as an astrologer, and Newton wrote more about alchemy than he did about gravity—which, if nothing else, is a very “occult” force, given that no one has ever seen it.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Indeed, imagination, linked to the right brain, is one of the central pillars of the esoteric tradition. As the historian of esotericism Antoine Faivre writes, imagination is “a kind of organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with an intermediary world,” what Faivre’s fellow esoteric scholar Henry Corbin called the “Mundus Imaginalis,” the “Imaginal World,” an inner yet nonetheless objective symbolic territory, having its own rules and inhabitants.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

For one thing, the esoteric tradition deals in imagery and symbols, the meanings of which are often complex and multiple, and which elude the left brain’s demand for clarity and definiteness; they are more attuned to what McGilchrist calls the right brain’s “both/and” approach, rather than the left brain’s “either/or.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

What sets the mental-rational structure apart from the previous three structures is that it is the most separated from “Origin.” In it, human consciousness, which had previously felt a fundamental connection to the world around it, was now unattached and “free.” The subject/object divide became firm. Consciousness and the world were clearly experienced as different, radically opposed realities. In the mental-rational structure, for the first time man learned how to think about the world as something separate from himself, and this also meant the growing dominance of the ego, the verbal “I” which, we’ve seen, inhabits the left brain.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

As its name suggests, the mental-rational structure, which Gebser believed began circa 1225 B.C., is characterized by rational, discursive thought, the kind of logical, sequential thinking associated with the left brain.

Whereas the previous structure of consciousness, the mythic, is characterized by “a shaping or designing of images”—a right-brain activity—the mental-rational structure is focused on words.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World

The right brain is geared toward engaging with living things, McGilchrist says, and with recognizing overall patterns, meanings, and relations. It is attuned to the network of connections that links everything with everything else. Its fundamental attention is to the “whole,” which it takes in simultaneously. It is more geared to perceiving the forest, we might say, and not the individual trees.

Gary Lachman
The Secret Teachers of the Western World