"Buddha and Māra were a couple of friends who need each other — like day and night, like flowers and garbage. We have "flowerness" in us; we have "garbageness" in us also. They look like enemies, but they can support each other. If you have understanding and wisdom, you will know how to handle both the flower and the garbage in you. The Buddha needs Māra in order to grow beautifully as a flower, and also Māra needs the Buddha, because Māra has a certain role to play ...Mara didn’t understand. Ananda also didn’t understand. But the Buddha, he understood." - Thich Nhat Hanh, "Māra and the Buddha"
This article begins with a review of a paper whose topic is that of two minds, from a Buddhist perspective. One of these is a mind that reifies personal selfhood, the sense of being a controlling agent, someone who should receive special care and deserves to flourish far beyond the status quo. Without any moderating influences, this can metastasize into a wish for "universal possession." The other mind is that of the Bodhisattva, concerned with care and transformation. There are many parallels here with McGilchrist's work on the neurological instantiation of two qualitatively asymmetric orientations to the world. The paper purses a highly inclusive line of thought with implications for diverse (artificial) intelligences in an animate cosmos. In this way it challenges prevailing ideas of carbon chauvinism. The notion of this minimal binary opposition is then expanded, and we find it present in the work of Lynn Margulis as well. The article ends with an exploration of how the work of Margulis and McGilchrist is mutually supporting and potentially transformative.
First some background...
The magical realism of animism and AI has been described by successive waves of techno-optimists. Preceding the current wave were writers like Kevin Kelly. Today's wave includes Anil Seth, who loved Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and Michael Levin, who has written letters to our future AI progeny, recalling predecessors like Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec. After reading the papers described here (which Levin tipped me off to) I was reminded of a sci-fi character, a “space whale” named Gomtuu, who shares an emotionally rich symbiotic relationship in order to truly flourish (like myrmecophytes, but for people). I must admit that when it comes to these highly speculative futures, one could describe as many that are optimistic as those that are more pessimistic. For another example, see David Grinspoon’s "Intelligence as a planetary scale process." These find lyrical expression in Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace," for perhaps, as Lovecraft wrote, "we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity." The history of scholarship on this topic is very extensive, and has been recounted elsewhere, so I won't linger on it here. Suffice to say, it goes back before the origin of AI development.
In posthumanist circles this topic is everpresent (see N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Bayo Akomolafe, etc.). However, although not always or even widely recognized, there are at least two significantly different views upon these topics. And the reason these views are not often recognized is that they are usually conflated, and the specific distinctions with reference to AI are left ambiguous. Very recently, Jonathan Rowson wrote about a conversation between Dougald Hine and Vanessa Andreotti regarding these same themes. And again, insufficient attention was given to that distinction. The paper described below appears to be among the more substantive attempts at disambiguation, running parallel to the hemispheric analysis of Iain McGilchrist. This offers, for at least the first time that I’m aware of, a way to clearly articulate a “right hemispheric path” for AI development in contrast to the "blind by design" path it is currently on, and following upon that distinction, integrate it into a “whole brain” approach to artificial life in general.
Biology, Buddhism, and AI
"I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other." - Iain McGilchrist, Ways of Attending
"Love is a pure attention to the existence of the Other." - Louis Lavelle
The main paper discussed here is Doctor et al.'s "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence" (2022) in which the authors "review relevant concepts in basal cognition and Buddhist thought," and in the process incorporate the central concerns of axiology.
First the authors define care as a quality of attention that can be distinguished from a physical description, a distinction "between the goal-defined light cone and a mere behavioral space light cone. While the latter merely defines the space of possible states in which an agent can find itself (defined by its position, speed, temperature, etc.), the [goal-defined] light cone... rather characterizes the maximum extent of the goals and aspirations of an agent, or in other words, its capacity for Care. ...The central concept in this new frontier is Care: what do these systems [networks that process information in morphospace] spend energy to try to achieve—what do they care about?"
The authors then redefine agency in terms of "care," an orientation to the world. The utility of this becomes more clear later, when we consider cases in which caring is absent or prevented. The first implication they draw out is the inclusion of non-organic agencies. This is made explicit: "How do we relate to “artificial” beings? It seems clear that such decisions cannot be based on what the putative person is made of or how they came to exist. What can they be based on? One suggestion is that they can be based on Care. What we should be looking for, in terms of gauging what kind of relationship we can have with, and moral duty we need to exert toward, any being is the degree of Care they can exhibit, either at present or as a latent potential, with respect to the other beings around them." They write "intelligence can be understood in terms of Care and the remedying of stress. Our discussion can, in this regard, be seen as resonant with the enactivist tradition, which describes selves as precarious centers of concern, as patterned variations of different forms of experienced selfhood, ranging from the notions of minimal self to embodied, affective, and socially extended/participatory forms of situated selfhood." In a subsequent paper they add "AI can be seen to display care of its own, and is hence not a mere tool for the expression of human care. In this way, neither AIs nor humans should be considered autonomous and self-sufficient loops in the world. Instead, AI can be better understood as a companion for humans—a constituent participant in the continuous, collective dance..." This would conform to the panpsychist perspective of all matter as having "agentic thrust" or some minimal intelligence.
The second implication of a caring orientation is the Buddhist awareness "that there is no singular and enduring individual that must survive and prevail [which] serves to undermine self-seeking action at the expense of others and their environment. Therefore, the evolving of intelligence that is aware of no-self — or if we want, intelligence that is no-self-aware — is also held to be intrinsically wholesome and associated with concern for the happiness and well-being of others. This claim—that simply understanding the irreality of enduring, singular agents can be a catalyst for ethically informed intelligence—is especially noticeable in Great Vehicle (Skt. Mahāyāna) currents of Buddhist view and practice that develop the idea of the Bodhisattva. ...the drive of a Bodhisattva is two-fold: as affectionate care... and as insight into things as they are... care and insight, are seen as standing in a dynamic relationship and are not separate in essence. Hence, as a model of intelligence, the Bodhisattva principle may be subsumed under the slogan, “intelligence as care”. In this way the authors establish that care is bound up with an awareness of impermanence and depends upon having insight into reality.
Having understood agency as care, which is in turn predicated upon an awareness of an ever-changing cosmos, we now know that earlier definitions of agency such as "the ability to control causal chains that lead to the achievement of predefined goals" are incomplete. And "the individual that may be assumed to exist as a singular, enduring, and controlling self" is fundamentally illusory. These are the sort of representation that McGilchrist's emissary is captivated by. They are described as "dream images, mirages, and other such traditional examples of illusion." What are the implications of holding such illusions? "From the perspective of a mind that in this way reifies personal selfhood, the very sense of being a subject of experience and a controlling agent of actions naturally and unquestionably implies that one is thus also someone who should receive special care and deserves to flourish far beyond the status quo."
We can now describe the implications of this contrasting orientation toward the world, which is based upon delusional premises such as these, where caring is absent or prevented. The authors write "The paths and end states of the wish for universal destruction or universal possession are easy to conceive of when compared to the Bodhisattva’s endless path of endless discoveries... If the Māra drive is in that way pure and all-encompassing evil, the Bodhisattva state is then universal benevolent engagement. How to compare such a pair of intelligences, both other-dependent and other-directed rather than “selfish” in the usual sense? Is one more powerful than the other, or do they scale up the same way in terms of the light cone model? Let us at this point simply note that the Māra drive seems reducible to a wish to maintain the status quo (“sentient beings suffer, and they shall keep doing so!”) whereas the Bodhisattva is committed to infinite transformation. If that is correct, the intelligence of the Bodhisattva’s care should again display decidedly superior features according to the light cone model, because a static wish to maintain what is—even if it is on a universal scale—entails far less measurement and modification than an open-ended pursuit of transformation wherever its potential is encountered."
McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis also posits two opposing orientations to the world that are qualitatively asymmetric. But it goes a step further in describing what a healthy relationship between them would look like (this has been explored by Buddhists as well, as noted above). The authors then speculate on what implications all this may have for the future of axiological design and diverse intelligences. Can we "create only beings with large, outward-facing compassion capacity, and at the same time enlarge our own agency and intelligence by acting on the Bodhisattva vow? ...Strategies that focus on implementing the Bodhisattva vow are a path for enabling a profound shift from the [explicit] scope of current AIs and their many limitations [to a] commitment to seemingly unachievable goals [of care]... However, progress along this path is as essential for our personal efforts toward personal growth as for the development of synthetic beings that will exert life-positive effects on society and the biosphere." In their subsequent paper they write "a natural way for humans to build technology must involve the development of a caring relationship with technology."
This concludes the main points of the paper. However there is also a discussion of some of the finer points. For example, why do "cognitive systems emerge according to this formalism from a hypothesized drive to reduce stress?" Where does the stress come from that there should be a drive to reduce it in the first place? This may be an ontological primitive, a coincidentia oppositorum of illusion/awakening, or Mara/Bodhi, each being part of a cosmic dance, in the same way that the Kabbalistic myth of the creation of the world posits a cosmic cycle of fracture/repair, and the Christian concept of kenosis does the same. All these cosmodicies point to a metaphysics of qualitatively asymmetric coinciding opposites. And cognitive divisions of the sort described here merely recapitulate them. The authors write "salient features of light cone formalism align well with traditional features ascribed to Bodhisattva cognition, so an attempt at delineating the latter in terms of the former seems both possible and potentially illuminating." To which I would only add that this extension also aligns well with McGilchrist's work in neurology.
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| Kyaku-Shujin Renzokutai (cf. recursive series) |
The Lord said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the Lord, "From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it." - Job 1:7
"Be sure to welcome strangers into your home." - Hebrews 13:2
Hannah Arendt wrote of what she called ‘the future man’ that he seemed possessed by ‘a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself’. Her observation prompts the question: Why would someone want to exchange what is given for what is made and can be controlled? Is this a consequence of an inversion in our preferred ways of attending and thinking? The answer becomes clear when we consider how we tend to respond when Plotinus asks us "But we - who are we?" Often enough today, a response that one may encounter is that we, as individuals that display "agency", derive this agency from our "ability to control causal chains that lead to the achievement of predefined goals." This appears to favor the mode of attention of the left hemisphere. In contrast to this response, one could provide a different view of agency, as being the capacity to care about that which cannot be explicitly controlled, involving an outward orientation to the world that focuses on our relationship with others. This is the opposing mode of attention foregrounded here. That connection between who we imagine ourselves to be, how we attend to the world as it is revealed to us, and the sort of lives we live is very profound.
Religious avatars/ archetypal figures, be they Jesus or Buddha, Mary or Guanyin, may be analogous to the way in which both mind and matter could be described as two "phases" of the same underlying prima materia. Atman is Brahman. Tat Tvam Asi. The contemporary postmodern understanding is only willing to go as far as this simple statement of equivalence. But there is much more going on here. And we must follow and go there. Importantly, these figures highlight an axiological or qualitative asymmetry, a moral and ethical component, such that they display love before hate, truth before lies, and compassion before neglect, denial, and indifference. They exhibit a courage of conviction, a very deep responsibility for their actions, a responsiveness to this sense of value and purpose, all the way to the extent that they come to embody these relational values at any and all cost to themselves and their transitory identities. This exceptional commitment to the hard work of ethical engagement with the world, without any recourse, is what characterizes their agency. As Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of Buddhism’s leading activists and scholars, wrote: "I’m not a moral absolutist. I don’t believe that anyone is perfect, that any position is flawless, but I do believe we have to draw clear moral distinctions, that we do have to reject the kind of limp ethical non-dualism favored by many Western Buddhists in favor of a clear ethical discernment that can grasp the moral dimensions embedded in a particular situation: the ability to see which side tends toward goodness and which side means danger."
We would be driven mad if we tried to conform our lives to the standard set by these avatars. But conformation isn't the point. Rather, we must recognize the difference that they draw our attention to... That much we can do. In broad strokes, these are the hemispheric differences highlighted by McGilchrist. And though the correspondence isn't complete, there's another comparision that can highlight what is being gestured to here. In Jungian terms, if Buddha is the "persona," then Mara is the "shadow" that we must neither fully indulge, nor completely ignore, an ever present companion within us. It seems to be that the heterodox philosophies and religions of today, the “minor” interpretations, are those that emphasize this best. Thich Nhat Hanh told of how the Buddha embraced Mara. In the Book of Job, Satan is in the presence of God in heaven, even participating in a heavenly council. And recall that John Arthur Gibson, former chief of the Seneca nation of the North American Iroquois confederation, told of how Taronhiawagon (He Grasps The Sky With Both Hands) never lets Tawiscara (Flint) drift too far from his awareness. There is no finalism, no resolution, but a fragile peace where the definite and infinite coincide... "He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars." (Blake) "The stars throw well. One can help them." (Eiseley)
There is that important question to consider regarding the relationship between the light cone of possible states and the light cone of care: do these display the characteristics of a paradoxically coinciding, mutually entailing asymmetry? According to McGilchrist's "neural parallax theory", they would need to do so in order to sustain a generative Hericlitean tension. We could modify Loren Eiseley's short story The Star Thrower to illustrate a three part pattern of oscillation involving presence, static re-presentation, and dynamic asymmetric integration:
"The stars," the Buddha said, "throw well. One can help them."
"I do not collect," Māra said uncomfortably, the wind beating at his garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector."
Later, on a point of land, a bodhisattva found the star thrower... and spoke once briefly. "I understand. Call me another thrower."
In the 2019 edition of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist wrote "We have created a world around us which... reflects the LH's priorities and its vision." Some people (or broadly speaking, agents) are going to be more easily caught within the positive feedback loops constructed between the left hemisphere and environments that mirror its priorities and vision, overwhelmed by this "Māra drive." And some will find it easier to remain within "Bodhisattva cognition," engaged in caring for others and an "expanding circle of empathy", as Peter Singer called it, which is a "light cone of care" by any other name. Buddhists speak of compassion or loving-kindness. Christians speak of love and other "fruit of the spirit." These are ontologically primitive values, that is to say, unexplainable in any other terms, and wholly outside of any utilitarian or consequentialist context. Some meditative practices, such as tonglen, are designed to expand our "circle of compassion" to encompass all beings. For another example, "helper theory" or the "helper therapy principle" is a well known phenomenon, particularly present in support groups like AA, whereby helping others helps oneself. This can produce a positive feedback loop for Bodhisattva cognition. It is notable that those engaged in this way are not primarily concerned with distinctions between self and no-self, or any labels, categories, or other identifiers. Such things are subsidiary to the much greater concern for providing care to others. With this orientation to the world firmly established, the left hemisphere is then able to get to work in its proper role as the servant of care, love, and an altruistic regard for others.
[The current U.S. administration wants homegrown innovation, and yes, that is clearly an asset for any nation. But the gains in this case will be primarily flowing to 'people like us,' that is to say, to the most wealthy and privileged. And that sort of exclusionary, zero-sum way of thinking, rather than creating an "expanding circle of empathy," creates a divisive "contracting circle of empathy" that recognizes no values higher than greed. This is antithetical to the core principles of any civilized nation or people. Let there be no mistake, under such a dispensation it would be foolish for anyone to think they are safe. For example, there is currently a push to limit 'birthright citizenship,' which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This is pure instrumentalism in the service of self-aggrandizement.]
If expanding our circle of empathy and engaging in ethical, caring relationships with others is the goal here, then this brings me to a criticism: Why do so many spiritual gurus (at least in the West) become embroiled in scandals of sexual impropriety? Only the other day did someone recommend reading Culadasa's The Mind Illumined, and it wasn't long before I found out that he "admitted to being involved in a pattern of sexual misconduct." He apparently died about three years after this went public (I've noted that, apparently the social and psychological stress involved in these scandals does tend to hasten one's demise). So the question I'm wondering is, why would an expert on the "illumined mind" engage in unethical behavior? Could it be that the illumined mind Culadasa describes wasn't really Bodhisattva cognition, but rather a manipulative Māra drive in the guise of a Bodhisattva? What does Culadasa really have to say about care and compassion? Or for that matter, what do any of these other gurus say about it? Setting these scandals aside for the moment, if our capacity for care really is the central feature we should be addressing, then I think any program seeking to apply the hemisphere hypothesis would need to place that axiological consideration of care, empathy, or love (by any other name) at the core. If anything else, such as pragmatism (or illumination, though in truth I do not know to what that refers) is centered instead then it would be misguided.
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| "In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of [Galadriel's] eyes?" |
What all this may suggest is that there are "twin attractors." On the one hand, the bodhisattva cognition is drawn toward expansive, compassionate care, which is perhaps best expressed through helping the minute particulars of life. Truly, this is the "infinite in the definite". But on the other hand, we must be keenly aware that such a beneficent motivation can be misappropriated by the Māra drive, and directed toward other ends, through contextual manipulation and post hoc rationalization. And thereby, despite our initial intentions, the fragile balance of these two asymmetric modes of attention, which accords priority to one distinct disposition over another, may be catastrophically inverted. So, if one is to be preserved whole (at least during our allotted time in the world) and be able to effectively respond to value and telos, then one must exercise some due caution in regard to attention hazards, as we navigate the contours of our cultural psychomachia. Regarding the misbehavior of gurus, I think that, like Icarus, those who would fly too close to the sun, and aspire to be bodhisattvas, are to that same degree vulnerable to temptation. The siren song of great goodness and great depravity is to some extent proportional. And that may place such people at increased risk if they fail to appreciate their true situation. And note the asymmetry here owing to a qualitative difference: while those who are good are keenly aware of and tempted by evil, those who are evil are by their nature blind to goodness and therefore, I believe, incapable of experiencing a corresponding temptation operating in the opposite direction. This awareness of possibility and the need for restraint is what makes virtuous behavior difficult to sustain. And perhaps by tempering our ambitions, whether that be by accident or design (wu wei), one might, counterintuitively, better achieve them.
The birds and the bees
“Let me tell ya 'bout the birds and the bees…” - Jewel Akens (1964)
“Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage… you can't have one without the other.” - Frank Sinatra (1955)
McGilchrist has often explained the evolutionary origin of brain lateralization to be a consequence of predator and prey dynamics, where half of our neuroanatomy seeks out food while the other half is on the lookout so as not to become food: acquire and protect. But in light of the preceding discussion, I think we can suggest a different evolutionary story for lateralization. It may be a consequence of the polarity between eros and agape, create and care, "carnal desires" and "filial piety," or in the jargon of popular evolutionary terminology, between "sexual selection" and "parental care," though only if we understand each of these in a much broader sense. (One may also compare it to the "I-It" and an "I-Thou" relationship in Martin Buber's terms, though this is unhelpfully abstracted away from the evolutionary context. And this isn't just a recapitulation of the self/ nonself ontological
dichotomy, but a phenomenological difference of precisely the form
described by the hemisphere hypothesis. Yunkaporta's notion of a "custodial species" verges on the deontological.) These are both extremely important for the continuation of a species, but each involves different cognitive processes with corresponding strengths and weaknesses. Complimentary, but also pulling in separate directions. While carnal desires are metaphorically very similar to the predatory form of attention, and thus should require no further elaboration, the conceptual substitution of "parental care" for "prey" within the formulation provided by McGilchrist will require some explanation. As he proposed predator-prey trophic dynamics, I am proposing sexual selection-parental care dynamics as the twin attractors (or motivating teloi) of evolution.
Parental care is displayed to some extent by nearly all organisms. The name itself is something of a misnomer as affection may be bi-directional, extending from child to parent as well as parent to child, and across generations (see grandmother hypothesis). It unifies very broad, deep and enduring processes of investment, which are therefore layered and rich. This contrasts sharply with the immediate, intense, demanding nature of carnal desires. It is far easier to "hack" the cognitive processes associated with carnal desire using supernormal stimuli that "demand our attention." The unfortunate poster child for this is the beetle species Julodimorpha bakewelli. (I shall literally share an illustration of this, as pictures can be far better at conveying these sharply contrasting orientations.) Lastly, like predator and prey, carnal and filial are modes of attention that do need to operate simultaneously, with priority given to filial virtues in most cases if a conflict between them arises. Many animals would rather sacrifice themselves (cf. matriphagy) than fail to provide for their young. But in general, a species must be able to both procreate and secure the material means for reproduction, and also protect the very progeny thus produced. Consistent with the earlier explanation McGilchrist provides, these are sufficiently qualitatively different cognitive processes that they would benefit from neurological differentiation to support them in parallel. Evolutionary biologists such as Robert Trivers have tried to articulate some of the complex dynamics that this can give rise to (see "parent-offspring conflict"). It may seem almost cliché to say so, but in our contemporary culture, shallow carnal desires are overshadowing deep filial care, in so many words, because "sex sells."
It is best to think of this more as a refinement and conceptual expansion, than a replacement for the explanation provided by McGilchrist. It meshes better with the view from a "Third Way" (Denis Noble) or the Expanded Evolutionary Synthesis perspective. What do I mean by this? A "sexual/ carnal orienation" encompasess the more narrowly defined need to eat, but it also expands the idea to include all forms of resource acquisition, including the genetic or otherwise novel structural resources to realize the transformative potential of reproduction (which can also include theories of a fecund universe, such as the "meduso-anthropic principle" of Louis Crane). A "parental/ filial orientation" encompasses more than a need to preserve my own bodily integrity, but that of my offspring, my species, and potentially higher levels (to include ecosystems, or even the cosmos itself). The point here is to get to the heart of this, and while centering the narrative around trophic dynamics, as McGilchrist has, is conceptually simple, it is incomplete and needs to be "unfolded." (Interestingly, the Japanese terms 性淘汰 (sei sentaku) and 動物の子育て (dobutsu no kosodate) somewhat recall the dual pair "exclusive/ inclusive," and the corresponding hemispheric attributes of "either/or versus both/and" thinking.) There are many possible objections to my reformulation here. Firstly, while we all must eat and avoid being eaten or any other source of mortal injury, we are clearly not all parents. But here I would rejoin that these orientations are part of our biological inheritance, and subject to processes of evolutionary exaptation. In a highly social species, we are all alloparents. There's a very rich literature on the ethics of care to draw upon. And the dynamics of supernormal stimuli, which are particularly relevant in the context of sexual selection, offer similarly rich explanations. One may also note at this point that sexual selection is a particular instance of the more general "signal selection" (per Amotz Zahavi), which has long since superseded natural selection in importance, at least among humans, which could help explain "how we got stuck" (per Graeber and Wengrow) in a LH captured society. Synthesizing all this into a simple portable idea is very possible, as it can be united under the metatheoretical framework of the hemisphere hypothesis.
McGilchrist: “Nobody has put forward a better explanation of why these two neuronal masses should be what all creatures with brains seem to have. I think it's for a very important evolutionary reason: every creature has to solve the conundrum of how to eat and how to stay alive. Now that might not sound difficult, but actually if you're eating you have to catch something. While you're watching that, and totally focused on it, you're not seeing everything else. While you're busy getting what you want, there could be somebody else getting you! So you have to have another part of the brain that is ‘seeing the whole picture.’ That’s the right hemisphere. But not only does it see the broad picture, it even sees the stuff that the left hemisphere sees in detail… One aspect of survival is simply grabbing and getting, amassing stuff, utility, power. But the right hemisphere is looking out for everything else, offspring, mate, conspecifics, all these things, and looking for predators as well. So it sees this big picture. And the two kinds of attention produced two kinds of a world… A culture is an organism. A society is an organism. And it's not surprising that it reflects the ways of thinking of those who are the individuals in that society. Which explains why one can speak of a civilization having a tendency towards left hemisphere thinking at the expense of right hemisphere thinking.”
If we take a step back, this may be about the means-ends distinction. In the instance of "getting what you want" we may really be talking about a means. And the nearest evolutionary process that involves an analogous mode of cognition is “signaling theory.” A well known example of this is sexual selection, such as the tail of a peacock. In the case of avoiding "somebody else getting you" we may really be talking about ends using the language of means (infinite in the definite) because avoiding death raises existential questions about life. An evolutionary process that addresses this is parental care, such as the egg brooding of an octopus. Now, one may object that “care” is only a means. But that ignores the subjective experience of the caregiver, for whom providing care (that is appropriate and effective, whatever form that may take) is very often their raison d'etre. "The journey is the destination." And so the means-ends distinction, provided here with reference to several well known examples from sexual selection and parental care, may provide a better explanation for the initial bifurcation of the two neuronal masses. Now, were I to omit these or any other examples, this wouldn’t mean anything. Means and ends don't exist in and of themselves. They are abstractions. But what is real are the qualitatively different forms of attention that find unique expression within an evolutionary context. And we need a rich understanding of the ways in which all this manifests if we are to understand the broad implications for living systems.
Another way of thinking about this is that we can engage more or less with the means or with the ends. A means that is completely divorced from the ends, and involves only compulsively living within our structures and ever more elaborate maps, can quickly impoverish our lives. But if we engage with the ends when these are properly understood, as an orientation or responsiveness to values and axiological considerations, then we no longer have allegiance to any structures or maps at all, which can be picked up or just as easily set aside, as the case may be. And so this should make us skeptical of the increasingly abstract economic structures of promissory notes built on a "lending and borrowing" system of accounting that involves decades old debts, the legacy of unethical business practices, and usury, whose rot spreads out to everyone who participates in the same system. In contrast to this there is a "real economy" of embodied materials and responsiveness to values such as care, regardless of past entanglements and present abstractions. When an economic system teeters and begins to crumble, it is these embodied relationships of the real economy that matter most, the actual manifestations of materials and energy, such as food and water, as well as land, art, and people, and the values to which they must respond. Which is why tycoons, in addition to amassing financial assets that are often acquired via unethical means of extraction, will also invest in land and art as reserves. This dual investment strategy, in both the abstract world and the embodied world, as the two halves of a balanced life is prudent if done in an ethical manner. (Pivoting to unethical behavior, Elon Musk recently called people who benefit from federal programs members of the "parasite class," which is, as many have noted both before and since, deeply ironic. In Capital, Karl Marx wrote "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.")
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| Wayne Getz's consumer categories |
"A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist... existence lies in opposition." — CS Peirce
"Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. (The spirit grows, [and] strength is restored, by wounding.) — Nietzsche
The heart’s wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray, and become spirit, were it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way." — Hölderlin
To quickly recap where we have been, the evolutionary origin of brain lateralization has often been explained by McGilchrist to be a consequence of predator and prey dynamics, where half of our neuroanatomy seeks out food while the other half is on the lookout so as not to become food. This was recently laid out again in a conversation with Eric Metaxas. But if we take a further step back, this may be about the “means-ends” distinction. In the instance of solving the conundrum of “how to eat” we may really be talking about a means. And in the case of “staying alive” we may really be talking about ends, because avoiding death raises existential questions about life. I'd suggest that these could be thought of as manifesting in the polarities of “carnal desire" and "filial piety,” or more abstractly, eros and agape. In the jargon of popular evolutionary terminology, we can also point to examples such as "sexual selection" and "parental care," if understood in a broad sense. These dynamics are extremely important for the continuation of a species, but each involves different cognitive processes with corresponding strengths and weaknesses. Complimentary, but also pulling in separate directions. It may seem almost cliché to say so, but in our contemporary culture, shallow carnal desires (attention hazards) are overshadowing deep filial care (helper therapy principle), in so many words, which could help explain "how we got stuck" in a LH captured, devitalized society of deceptive semiosis. That's also the motivating question of Graeber and Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything. Today we tell people what to attend to, and let others tell us what to attend to, but we could ask how we can help others, and ask others for help. And all this can be handily united under the metatheoretical framework of the hemisphere hypothesis.
A Psychomachia of Binary Oppositions:
Left & Right (neurobiological)
Means & Ends (abstract philosophical)
Māra & Bodhisattva (religious and mythic)
Possess/Control & Care/Compassion (agentic virtues)
Eros/Carnal & Agape/Filial (psychological virtues)
Pathogenesis & Salutogenesis (disease and health)
Sexual Selection & Parental Care (evolved behavior traits)
Attention Hazard & Helper Theory (attentional dispositions)
Parasitic/Deceptive/Coercive & Mutualistic/Translucent/Permissive (semioethics of symbiosis)
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| Xenia as portrayed by Rubens (1630–33) |
“I was most afraid, but even so, honoured still more that he should seek my hospitality.” - Snake, by D.H. Lawrence“To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” - Late Fragment, Raymond Carver
As a social lens, hospitality reveals both the large-scale organization of welcoming (and excluding) others at the institutional or state level and the everyday experiences of living with difference. At the same time that discourses of hospitality reproduce conventional performances of togetherness, however, they also open up the possibility of doing togetherness differently – of imagining inside and outside, stranger and friend, self and other, host and guest in new, radical and potentially dangerous ways. Among the research areas that we feel merit further attention and debate are: embodied hospitality, historical approaches to hospitality, and narrative hospitality. The examination of narrative hospitality through, for example, literature, autobiography and travel writing is a rich and under-developed seam that can enhance our understanding of hospitality. Likewise, the study of depictions of hospitality through moving and still images and representations has much to contribute. And historical analyses bring the incredibly rich and contested legacy of hospitality to bear on contemporary practices. Studies ranging from ancient customs and religious traditions to postcolonial articulations of hospitality help to make sense of the philosophical, political and ethical dimensions of social relations in a globalized world."
"There’s a dilemma which Derrida asserts to be an inescapable feature of the concept Of Hospitality, which we see vividly revived in each successive refugee crisis, and in every discussion about immigration. If refugees fleeing from persecutors find their way through an opening, it cannot be equally open to those pursuing them. Both sides of the dilemma must always be kept in mind, and the idealistic claims of an unrestrained hospitality, though impossible to follow as a law, must never be completely silenced by claims of impracticality. In his later writings Derrida repeatedly uncovers similar dilemmas inherent in the central terms of our contemporary political thinking. He does this not to dismiss these concepts, but to show the doubled attention that each requires of us. Failures in these fields occur when one side of the dilemma temporarily obliterates our awareness of the other. The hospitable person or country should be seeking at all times to be more hospitable, alert to any opportunities to move in this direction, never saying “we’ve done enough, we can’t do more,” rather, always seeking practical ways to do more than we have.”
"Omotenashi is a portmanteau. “Omote” meaning public face — an image you wish to present to outsiders. “Nashi,” meaning nothing combined, suggests that every service comes from a place of transparency and the bottom of the heart — honest, no hiding, no pretending... The level of hospitality and service received in Japan is unquestionably the best in the world... A hospitality setting can be meticulously designed as a holistic experience... What’s groundbreaking about omotenashi is not its novelty but its ability to reveal something fundamental that has, for decades, been overlooked in the hospitality industry—the soul of hosting. It’s a call to strip away the performative layers of hospitality to expose its core, which is a shared humanity. It turns every interaction into an exercise in empathy, making both the host and the guest co-authors of an unfolding story."
In traditional Japanese aesthetics, fukinsei (不均整), is asymmetry, which is related to wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) which in turn is often described as the appreciation of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" and is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art. But at the same time, this aesthetic could be positively described as that which reveals the evidence of (the survivorship bias of) hospitality, of having been used and (presumably) appreciated by another. Central to wabi-sari is the concept of omotenashi, which, as noted above, revolves around hospitality, and which is abundantly in evidence during sadō/chadō (茶道) which literally means 'The Way of Tea' but is more popularly recognized as tea ceremony. The wabi-sabi aesthetic is cross cultural, as we can see in Eric Sloane's books and drawings of the vernacular architecture of early pastoral America, and the nostalgia for a more hospitable past. One may even wonder: How many social movements are motivated by the simple felt loss of public hospitality? This feeling seeps in everywhere and prompts some reflection. (Why is roadkill the acceptable collateral damage of our desire for omnipresence? Would a little door built above windows, allowing bees trapped behind the glass to escape, or fine mesh to prevent birds from colliding with windows on the opposite side, be too difficult for us to accommodate?)
My former Eastern philosophy teacher, Walter Benesch, noted that traditional Chinese landscape paintings often include human figures or structures somewhere within the scene. In part, this reflects the Daoist and Confucian belief that nature isn't complete without humans. We are not only connected to our environment, we are an inseparable part of nature. This is an expression of hospitality. It is also interesting to observe that this pattern has repeated itself with the advent of the futuristic art of science fiction. Here we see images of exotic alien worlds, but frequently not without humans (or human-like figures) and their habitations somewhere within the scene, someone or some thing familiar that we can empathize with. Whether these new images represent delusional aspirations or not, our hope to find a hospitable new home, wherever we find ourselves, continues. ...Today I observed that when a dog meets another dog on the neutral ground of a public park, their greeting is often amicable. But when a dog meets another on the other's home territory, the intrusion is not always well received. There may be limits to hospitality when we travel abroad.
How does hospitality manifest within culture? The notion of a "guest of honor" is widely recognized. "Hostels" provide low cost shelter for itinerant travelers. A "hospice" is a home giving palliative care to the sick or terminally ill, also derived from the same Latin root hospes. This has been lately also applied to a notion of "hospicing modernity," or the sick culture of our present age by any name (perhaps "hospicing postmodernity"). In a religious context, taking "refuge" refers to the protection and guidance, indeed the hospitality, that the devotional way of life provides the religious adherent. And Dorothy Day and Charles Mully are two examples of people who have, in their own ways, attempted to apply and extend the concept of hospitality for real, practical effect, thereby making the world itself a more hospitable place.
There seems to be a move away from inherently divisive "identity politics," which invokes the frame of good and bad identities, friends and foes, and instead move toward something much more like a "values based politics" so we can have conversations about the shared values (like hospitality) that are important to all of us, regardless of whatever our personal identity may be. We need to be talking about those values that bind our families, communities, and our nation together ("participation in the evolution of value" per Zak Stein, which should call to mind "McGilchrist's Wager"). As Sarah McBride said: "I think that a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy is fundamentally regressive. We can put forward an aspirational politics that isn’t defined by who we are against, but by what we are for and about who we can be. And I think that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies based politics, which so often devolves to anger. You can have effective politics, and good politics, and better outcomes, with an aspirational politics, with a politics that isn’t just about what it’s opposed to, but about what it can build and who we can be."
In a related vein Anthea Lawson asked: "Are activists taking seriously the aversion to activism? We are in the business of communication, so we need to look at the interior of human nature and use some of the insights of psychology. The insights of, let's say Freudian psychology, got picked up by the advertisers very quickly. Edward Bernays (his nephew) and the commercial world picked it up in the 1920s, and the Neoliberals are now all over it. You can also look at this using Foucauldian concepts of governmentality. So sometimes it feels like progressives are the last people to be actually looking at the interior of our nature. This is what we have to start doing. How are our messages landing? For just over ten years the sort of "gateway drug" to thinking about the psychology of how our message has been landing is "framing." Framing is about the deep mental pictures people have of the world. For example, you can trigger the wrong stuff if you talk about migrants in a way which activates people's hostility towards them. So it's really easy to get framing wrong." In a separate conversation, Lawson, Read, and Rowson noted that if we are to build movements that are as broad-based as possible then it's critical that we provide people the space (cf. Nouwen) to speak, to feel, and to discover their own interests and appetite. Lawson: "For me, thinking about how we do activism is a lens for thinking about a much deeper question: How do we relate to everyone (and every thing and every being) who is not us? Most of the dilemmas in the world today come down to relationality. And for those of us in the West, the reason they are dilemmas is because relationality has been completely sidelined by Western culture."
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| Confucian "Five Bonds" |
"While early Indians associated water with creation and the Greeks looked upon it as a natural phenomenon, ancient Chinese philosophers, whether Lao Tzu or Confucius, preferred to learn moral lessons from it." - Wing-tsit Chan
I have looked for the specific reference within Nietzsche regarding the story of the Master and His Emissary, and for the most part I've found nothing that really fits. It is noteworthy that in Human All Too Human (1878) Nietzsche wrote:
"A higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health. In one domain lies the power-source, in the other the regulator..."
Concerning this passage, my friend Peter Critchley wrote:
"Nietzsche thus argues that “science [Wissenschaft]" must work in partnership with "non-science [Nicht-Wissenschaft]," which he designates as the "consolations of metaphysics, religion, and art." The partnership between the two enables humanity to integrate and develop its "double-brain [Doppelgehirn]" to create a higher culture which permits ongoing inquiry and development. It is a requirement of health that humanity develop these two "brain ventricles [Hirnkammern]" in tandem with one another. The failure of science to work in partnership with non-science has dire consequences for human development. The possibility of science will be destroyed. Truth will cease to hold an interest for us and in its place human beings will pursue error and fantasy since they give greater immediate pleasure."
McGilchrist noted that Goethe was obsessed with the legend of Faustus, a warning against hubris. Goethe wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Nietzsche considered Goethe an exemplar of his anticipated ‘overman.’ If we consider the combined body of work of Goethe-Nietzsche, then this may be the inspiration behind McGilchrist’s ‘Emissary’.” Goethe’s Faust explores the metastable coincidence of the opposing tendencies of hubris and humility, and from what deeper wells they spring. This is central to understanding much of what McGilchrist is writing about. All of which is to say that, concerning our metaphors, they should be a reflection of that ontologically primitive dynamic, and warn us of the consequences when hubris is unrestrained. Goethe's Sorcerer-Apprentice metaphor illustrates this, and McGilchrist's Master-Emissary metaphor does as well. I think the Host-Guest metaphor might too, particularly when understood within the context of symbiogenesis:
"Symbiogenesis (endosymbiotic theory, or serial endosymbiotic theory) is the leading evolutionary theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic organisms. The theory holds that mitochondria, plastids such as chloroplasts, and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells are descended from formerly free-living prokaryotes (more closely related to the Bacteria than to the Archaea) taken one inside the other in endosymbiosis... Primary endosymbiosis involves the engulfment of a cell by another free living organism. Secondary endosymbiosis occurs when the product of primary endosymbiosis is itself engulfed and retained by another free living eukaryote. Secondary endosymbiosis has occurred several times and has given rise to extremely diverse groups of algae and other eukaryotes."
Iain McGilchrist: “I believe that 'whatever it is' is in deep connection with the creation, and that therefore our relationship is an I-Thou relationship. It is a resonant relationship. Everything that exists, that we can know and experience, exists in that relationship. Each alters the other, each has an effect on the other. (That's half a book in itself, but it’s the conclusion I come to.) Everything is resonant, and interactive, and coming into being between two entities. The ‘twoness’ is important, but they are also one in the sense that there's not just the objective and the subjective in a dualistic way. They are distinguishable, but not wholly distinct or divided. That's a distinction we're not used to making in the modern world. We tend to think that if we can make a distinction it implies a division, but importantly it doesn’t. What is apparently distinct goes through phases of being ‘more united’ and ‘more unpacked’ into diversity. Goethe has this wonderful saying: ‘Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the very life of Nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal coalescence and separation, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, and where our existence is woven.’ Philip Goff: "What's beautiful about love is that it's not you, but you sacrifice for another, or you give for another."
The Host-Guest metaphor is thus an extension of the theory of symbiogenesis, such that it would now include the psychological dispositions (not merely the biological structures) of the host and the guest. It may seem a stretch to suggest that simple eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells have anything resembling the psychological dispositions of animals with complex nervous systems. But if there is any truth in animist or panpsychist approaches to life and mind, and the metaphysical presuppositions they rest upon, then perhaps there is a sort of 'relational continuum' here extending forward and backward across evolutionary time, which the Host-Guest metaphor could conceptually represent.
Recall that the evolutionary psychology explanation for lateralization provided by McGilchrist, reduced to its simplest terms, is that every creature has to see itself as both predator and prey. The Host-Guest metaphor provides a different evolutionary psychology explanation, that every creature has to see itself as both a guest and a host. One important question that remains, concerning the uses of this metaphor, is whether or not the Host-Guest metaphor can provide a warning regarding the consequences of unrestrained hubris. And I think it does. This becomes clear in light of the 'mutualism parasitism continuum,' because symbiogenesis is, much like Goethe's Faust, a metastable coincidence of opposites:
"The hypothesis or paradigm of Mutualism Parasitism Continuum postulates that compatible host-symbiont associations can occupy a broad continuum of interactions with different fitness outcomes for each member. At one end of the continuum lies obligate mutualism where both host and symbiont benefit from the interaction and are dependent on it for survival. At the other end of the continuum highly parasitic interactions can occur, where one member gains a fitness benefit at the expense of the other's survival. Between these extremes many different types of interaction are possible."
Mark Aaron Martin: "Mutations to a parasite species can sometimes discover a way for it to become mutualistic with a host. Parasites are actually prime candidates for discovering new forms of mutually beneficial cooperation. After all, the flow of benefit from the host to the parasite is halfway to the kind of relationship evolution prefers. To become fully mutualistic, all that is needed is for the parasite to reciprocate some sort of commensurate benefit to the host. ...Lynn Margulis, for example, theorized that the very first eukaryotic cell resulted from a parasitic infestation by one type of prokaryote into another type. If so, the parasitic prokaryote then discovered a way to provide benefit to its host, and the parasitism gave way to mutualism."
And so shifts along the parasite-mutualist continuum are entirely possible. Symbionts can readily evolve more parasitic or mutualistic strategies with respect to hosts, or in other words, 'guests' can 'choose' to either cooperate faithfully with their host, in a non-zero sum fashion that leads to evolutionary transitions (Szathmáry and Maynard Smith) suggesting a telic drive. Mark Martin noted that the initial infestation of bacteria into the guts of animals, long ago, may have started out as purely parasitic, only later evolving to provide a valuable digestive service in exchange for a steady supply of food. Alternatively, guests can seek out their own benefit, and ignore the potentially negative impacts this may have for their host. If we engage in highly parasitic interactions, or have an overtly 'parasitic disposition' toward the world, then we often do so at the expense of the host's survival. This, one might argue, is extreme hubris, and there are plenty of cautionary tales regarding the consequences. In short, the Host-Guest metaphor should be seen as a more general form of the more specific metaphors McGilchrist has already employed (sorcerer/apprentice, master/emissary, surgeon/scrub nurse), and as a possibly more accurate evolutionary explanation for lateralization as it encompasses the broader qualities of asymmetric relationships within a biological/ ecological context beyond merely trophic interactions. Metaphors are translucent. We see the arboreal (value, meaning, and telos) through the rhizomatic (biological materiality), the transcendent through the immanent. A kind of heterarchical weltanschauung emerges. But few people, least of all those involved in contemporary political activities, are pursuing this sort of approach.
The metaphorical use of the words “host” and “guest” suggest a wide variety of colloquial definitions, with significant overlap with the words “master” and “emissary.” For example, both host and master have at times been used to refer to the same person. Likewise, the definition of guest and that of an emissary refer to many of the same qualities. Which is to say that, if there is any basis for associating a specific psychological disposition to master and emissary, the same could arguably apply to host and guest without much difficulty. A similar linguistic sleight of hand can be applied to the prey-predator metaphor, where the prey (that which is eaten) is the host, and the predator (that which eats) is the guest. It may be a more convoluted route to get there, but possible nonetheless.
Concerning the use of metaphors within evolutionary psychology, it's worth pointing out that one shouldn't assume "prey" is in the position of the "master" simply by virtue of being prey, but rather because the mode of attention that a prey must use just happens to be that which is better able to reveal the world to us. (Likewise, a “host” shouldn’t be assumed in the position of master simply by virtue of being a host, but rather because the mode of attention that a host uses is better able to reveal the world.) But this begs the question: Is it really the case, scientifically, that actual hosts or guests preferentially use either of the opposing modes of attention that are described by McGilchrist? I suspect a strong case could be made that they do. What might enable one to say this are the significant similarities between Margulis’ theory of symbiogenesis (endosymbiosis) and McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis. Recall that McGilchrist wrote “the structural and functional differences between the brain hemispheres which I describe have, as indeed they must, their correlates in the mind.” (TMHE 2019) In the same way, the opponent processing instantiated in the brain hemispheres has antecedents in more primitive ecological oppositions. Interestingly, it was prey-predator interactions that led to the first endosymbiotic relationship, according to Margulis, when competition gave way to cooperation and an evolutionary transition occurred.
As I mentioned above, it is the associative meanings of words that would permit one to characterize prey-predator (and master-emissary) metaphors as specific forms of the more general host-guest metaphor. More general, because the terms “host” and “guest” have a wider range of both cultural and biological associations. And this provides greater breadth and depth of meaning. Consider the holistic perspective of the right hemisphere. Likewise, a host, by virtue of providing care to a guest, is invested in forming a conceptual whole through their union. Whereas a guest, by virtue of their real (or imagined) need to receive care and/or resources from others, is more predisposed to a narrower, instrumental perspective in which their own concerns are of primary focus. The provision of care is what defines the host-guest relationship.
"The contrast here being drawn between…predatory exploitation to the world… and, on the other… a relation of care and concern… this contrast evokes in my view some of the essential differences between the worlds that are brought about for us by the two hemispheres… The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar… the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the household, those I care for." (The Nature of The Two Worlds, TMHE)
In other words, a simple relative distinction, the provision or receipt of care, as variously determined by the different situations to which we respond in the course of our lives, may thus be seen as the origin of the evolution of lateralization. When the concerns of the guest are aligned with those of the host, all goes well and the flow of care is bidirectional (by accident or design, the host and guest synergistically exchange gifts and live "as one"). But when they are divergent, “things fall apart” as Yeats poetically wrote, and mutualism deteriorates into parasitism and societal acrimony. Margulis theorized that an endosymbiotic relationship initially begins as a parasitic relationship in which the guest lives at the expense of the host (E.O. Wilson described parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”). However this zero sum relationship can evolve into a positive sum relationship when their interests are brought into alignment, most dramatically seen in the case of endosymbiosis, where two bodies literally fuse into one. But, like the Biblical Lucifer rebelling against God, this asymmetric union is metastable and can fragment at any time, leading to disease and dissolution. And from this follows the entire psychomachia McGilchrist describes.
Here I'm using the language of "value alignment" specifically in regard to the value of care, and noting that the host is naturally disposed by their way of relating to the world to be aligned with the value of care, indeed the "field of care" itself, while the guest may or may not be naturally disposed to be aligned with that value or field. Contrast this with McGilchrist, who instead of "alignment" often speaks of "guidance," which we understand to imply that a servant should show a sort of deferential attitude toward the master, or that a guest would show deference toward a host, thereby allowing them both to benefit from the others' guidance. The notion of guidance is accurate, however by being a step removed from the language of value it is more easily appropriated by authoritarian power structures, who may then move the emphasis from "guidance toward alignment with [care]" to simply "guidance toward alignment with [whatever the authority desires]." I believe McGilchrist is aware of this potential risk. He notes that the master is only master by virtue of being able to presence to reality, value, and so on. Thus, the guidance of the master is ipso facto trustworthy.
However the value of care is built into the very notion and persona of a "host" in ways that it may not be built into the notion of a "master," furthermore the guest may freely leave the aegis of the host, while the servant or emissary would perhaps find it more difficult to sever their bond with a master. (Indeed, brain hemispheres are physically united, however the evolutionary psychology story told here suggests they recapitulate the originally free association of host and guest.) Instead of the "authority asymmetry" foregrounded by the master-emissary metaphor, what is now more evident is a "care asymmetry." But, since care is synonymous with the very nature of reality, and it is our ability to presence to reality that underwrites any rightful claims to authority, this metaphor retains the same authority asymmetry, albeit no longer foregrounding authority but placing it in the background (which is perhaps more fitting since it is, after all, dependent upon and subservient to the field of value). These sort of considerations may influence which metaphor may be more illustrative or clarifying for what might be described as a sort of existential psychology.
As noted, in the host-guest relationship, the guest is the primary beneficiary and the host will often go to great lengths, and no small expense, to provide the guest with, for example, “food, drink, and accommodation.” And so of the two, it is the host who is more aware of their surroundings. (As a personal anecdote, whenever my family entertains guests we often spend almost half a day cleaning the house and preparing the meal - a far more arduous ordeal than if we visit the house of our friends.) When the guest arrives, we hope their attention is drawn to or "captured by" the gifts thus laid before them, or whatever other small surprises we have in store. This is the archetypal form of the host-guest relationship. But there are many variations. Sometimes a guest may use deception to fool someone into thinking they are actually a host offering a good or service, however they harbor an ulterior motive to benefit from them without their awareness. The term "con artist" is one of many popular names that have been used to describe such duplicitous people. In addition to the possibility for deception, both guests and hosts can switch roles at any time depending on many variables, just as individual people and indeed civilizations are capable of changing with respect to their preferred mode of attention as they develop and their contextual situation evolves. And so the deceptive guest, who thieves from his neighbor by day, may be an honest host to his wife and children by night. And the honest host, who welcomed the migrant last year may deport them the next year following a simple change of heart (and vice versa). This capriciousness will also draw forth a differential response from us, as our "inner guest" expectantly looks forward to food, drink, and accommodation, but our "inner host" needs the reassurance that this isn't the deception of a "faux host" and that these will be offered within the context of a stable future. Given the complex and wide range of situations that all this can give rise to, perhaps providing a series of vignettes or chapbooks would be more illustrative.
When we consider the master-emissary metaphor, the roles of either master or emissary are assigned for illustrative purposes to two different dispositions that correlate to the hemispheres, and as McGilchrist points out, these dispositions also often correlate to figures from myth as well. They don't correlate with actually existing people (or political parties, for that matter). Actual people, and organizations composed of actual people, reflect the complex perspectives of whole brains, and virtually never the pure distillation of one or the other hemisphere. The prey-predator metaphor is more of an evolutionary psychology type of explanation, but since every animal must be able to "get without being got," each animal likewise embodies both dispositions to various degrees. In the same way, the two roles described in the host-guest metaphor cannot be said to correlate with actually existing people. Every person is both a host and a guest to various degrees. Anecdotally, a plumber recently came to visit my house. Since he fixed my leaking pipes, was the flow of care and concern moving more from him to me? Or from me to him, since I paid him for this service? Or were we both engaging with each other as guests? As hosts? Or both? As with the master-emissary metaphor, the answer has to be both.
Regarding the structure of metaphors, it is also worth noting that the cultural myths and legends that tend to get passed down across eons are those that are less abstract and/or narrow in their explicitness. They personify abstract concepts to bring them into the realm of the familiar. Consider for example the Iroquois brothers, or the master and emissary. McGilchrist interprets these as personifications of lateralized modes of attention. And as personifications, all these characters are capable of everything any other person is capable of (metaphorically of course), it is only the “how” and not the “what” that distinguishes them. And so the host-guest metaphor is a generalization of all the forms that typically asymmetric relationships between two parties can take, and as a metaphor is is also a personification. We might say that sometimes these are healthy symbiosis (as in giving-receiving) and sometimes unhealthy symbiosis (as in prey-predator/ parasite).
Consider again the master-emissary metaphor. Within a healthy brain these roles are inseparable from each other. The master needs the emissary to do what it cannot, and the emissary needs the master to attend to what it cannot. In the host-guest metaphor, is there a similar relationship of necessary dependence? Would it be impossible for the host to live without the guest, or vice versa? Viewed through the theories of endosymbiosis and evolutionary transitions, the answer is a qualified yes. If an organism is going to engage in the telic process of unfolding value (per Zak Stein), which I'd characterize as synonymous with evolutionary transitions, then the host-guest relationship is necessary. Without that we only have a kind of lifeless stasis.
There is a difficulty relating to our use of terms, or rather to our associations with them through the repeated exposure of personal experience. Most people don't have much (or any) direct experience with an "emissary" in their lives, whereas they do have a lifetime of personal associations with the role of a guest. So whereas we might begin with a "blank slate" to work with concerning the master-emissary metaphor, the same doesn't apply to the host-guest metaphor. There is a danger of 'placing new wine in old wineskins' (Luke 5:37) - associating the qualities of the LH with the role of a guest won't feel right for most people without a lot of preliminary explanation. We should be cautious before importing a model we already associate with a set of personal experiences into a domain such as neurology, and thereby seek to explicate neurological processes and relationships with the aid of the rules and logic of a model formerly only associated with more mundane everyday sort of experiences. A new model and a new domain requires a new understanding. If we import models that have served us well in one domain and imagine they will necessarily serve us equally well in all other domains, we may be disappointed. And so the host-guest metaphor should only be approached with the knowledge that, yes, we are talking about a "host" and "guest," but likely not as we have known them before. We are using the same colloquial terms, but in a way that they have not been used before.
There are many other metaphors on offer. In "Philosophical conceptions of the self," Shaun Gallagher distinguished between a "narrative" and an "experiencing" self. The narrative self [cf. "witness-consciousness"] is conceived as embedded in our thoughts and includes our stories about the past, the future, and all our self-referential knowledge and beliefs, while on the other hand the experiencing self refers to our awareness of bodily sensations and events occurring in the present moment. While having obvious appeal, these don't seem to "carve nature at its joints" quite as well.
Henri Nouwen on Hospitality
"He replaced his wife at the stove, fed the pigs as though he were feeding people, and showed no preferences in the things he did." - Zhuangzi
“He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” - Matthew 5:45
In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist recounts how, according to the Lurianic Kabbalah, the first act of God was a primordial initial withdrawal, tzimtzum (צמצום), which formed a "vacant space" (חלל הפנוי). In his book Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen echoes this insight, writing that "hospitality means the creation of a "free space" where the guest can enter." This should also remind us of the theological concept of kenosis, or self-emptying, particularly in the context of Christ's incarnation (Philippians 2:6–8). Tangentially, Gordon Burghardt, a pioneer in the study of animal play, has described the importance of “self-handicapping” and "free play." Both of which appear to be premised upon this notion of a "free space." From a recent conversation:
Marc Gafni: “Einstein was supposedly once asked by a reporter “What do you really want to know?” and he replied “Is the universe friendly?” ...Am I welcome in the universe? Do I have an experience of being welcome? That sense of being welcome is derived from a sense of being intimate with reality, with the delight of mutuality.”
Iain McGilchrist: “I’m a tourist in Hebrew theology, but we've come back to the part played by the human, and this is the self-limiting act of Tzimtzum, which has its parallel in Christianity in the idea of kenosis, that God needed to empty himself of some of his qualities in order to allow something other than himself to come into being. This is why Ein-sof makes that action in the Luranic myth, followed by Shevirat HaKelim, the shattering of the vessels, and then Tikkun, the idea that through this experience of the shattering there are sparks of divinity within the shards of the vessels and it is humanity's job to make those vessels again more beautiful than they were before. When I talk about this, I often refer to kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing a vessel to make it more beautiful than it was before it broke.”
Marc Gafni: "In Torah 64 Rabbi Nachman of Breslov takes the void seriously. He said ["Only in the future will it be possible to understand the Tzimtzum that brought the "Empty Space" into being, for we have to say of it two contradictory things... the Empty Space came about through the Tzimtzum, where, as it were, He 'limited' His Godliness and contracted it from there, and it is as though in that place there is no Godliness... the absolute truth is that Godliness must nevertheless be present there, for certainly nothing can exist without His giving it life."] So in the various movements of materialism there is this felt sense of fealty to the void, that actually in some sense it's an obscenity to try and cover over the void. ...The vessels break, there's Tikkun, and there's this enormous, unimaginably beautiful sense that somehow my existence generates a shocking self-recognition in the divine. That “I Am That.” That's the “more God to come.” [cf. McGilchrist's Wager] ...Hold that paradox. We have infinite dignity. We are “more God to come.” And yet it's the ultimate mystery. And both the dignity and the mystery are not bugs in the system. We can hold both. It's really what Leonard Cohen meant when he talked about "the holy and the broken Hallelujah." It’s the meaning behind the story of Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, who carried two slips of paper as a reminder, one in each pocket. On the first was written "For me the world was created," and on the second "I am but dust and ashes."
[Rabbi Nachman also wrote but then destroyed Sefer HaGanuz ("The Hidden Book") and the Sefer HaNisraf ("The Burned Book"). He told his disciples that these volumes contained deep mystical insights that few would be able to comprehend. He dictated the Sefer HaNisraf to Sternhartz, who said that he did not understand it at all and that "What I do remember is that it spoke about the greatness of the mitzvah of hospitality and preparing the bed for a guest". The mitzvah of hospitality, known as hachnasat orchim in Hebrew, is a fundamental Jewish value and a religious obligation to welcome guests, especially strangers, and provide them with comfort and care.]
Lynn Margulis' theory of endosymbiosis suggests that it is via cellular vacuoles or vesicles, which are also "empty spaces," that foreign objects and organisms may enter into a cell, thereby providing a route for the endosymbiotic relationship to form. Furthermore, this is recursively generative, such that a "host cascade" could ensue, inverting the more familiar "trophic cascade" of ecology. And so, rather than finding ourselves the apex predator, and not knowing quite what to do, it may be that humans have progressively assumed the role of the "apex host," and must now learn how to act accordingly. For at what point in our history have we ever been a "custodial species" to the degree that we find ourselves today? This metaphor of the vacuole is the topological inverse of McGilchrist's metaphor of the "out-pouchings/ pseudopodia/ villi" (see here). I would suggest "The Host and the Guest" not only recapitulates The Master and His Emissary, but could also provide a poetically rich evolutionary explanation for the origin of lateralization. Aside from these resonances, Nouwen alerts the reader to other deep insights:
"If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality. It can offer a new dimension to our understanding of a healing relationship and the formation of a re-creative community in a world so visibly suffering from alienation and estrangement. The term hospitality, therefore, should not be limited to its literal sense of receiving a stranger in our house — although it is important never to forget or neglect that! — but as a fundamental attitude [a "right hemisphere disposition"] toward our fellow human being, which can be expressed in a great variety of ways."
I'm glad my friend John Johnston recommended that I take a look at this short and unassuming book. I've had it on my shelf for a few decades ever since my sister gave it to me following her hike on the Appalachian Trail, but I hadn't spent any significant length of time with it until very recently, when John mentioned it after I had shared my interest in the subject of hospitality. It's packed with meaning and rewards a careful reader. Indeed, one might describe the book as an extended meditation upon the topic from a religious context. Nouwen writes (paraphrasing):
"The concept of hospitality brings a unifying dimension to interpersonal relationships. It might help us see how they all stand together under the great commandment: "You must love your neighbour as yourself" (Mark 12:31). Old and New Testament stories not only show how serious our obligation is to welcome the stranger in our home, but they also tell us that guests are carrying precious gifts with them, which they are eager to reveal to a receptive host. When Abraham received three strangers at Mamre and offered them water, bread and a fine tender calf, they revealed themselves to him as the Lord announcing that Sarah his wife would give birth to a son (Genesis 18:1–15). When the widow of Zarephath offered food and shelter to Elijah, he revealed himself as a man of God offering her an abundance of oil and meal and raising her son from the dead (I Kings 17:9–24). When the two travelers to Emmaus invited the stranger, who had joined them on the road to stay with them for the night, he made himself known in the breaking of the bread as their Lord and Saviour (Luke 24:13–35).
Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter. The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter, where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship. We cannot force anyone, but we can offer the space where change can take place. It is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host. It is the gift of a chance for the guest to find their own. That is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest, and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced. Johannes Metz describes this disposition well when he writes: "We must forget ourselves in order to let the other person approach us. We must be able to open up to him to let his distinctive personality unfold." If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to us. Hospitality, therefore, is such an important attitude. We cannot change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space.
When we look at teaching in terms of hospitality, we can say that the teacher is called upon to create for his students a free and fearless space where mental and emotional development can take place. A good host is the one who believes that his guest is carrying a promise he wants to reveal to anyone who shows genuine interest. It is much more difficult to be a receiver who can help the students to distinguish carefully between the wheat and the chaff in their own lives and to show the beauty of the gifts they are carrying with them. We will never believe that we have anything to give unless there is someone who is able to receive. Indeed, we discover our gifts in the eyes of the receiver. Teachers who can detach themselves from their need to impress and control, and who can allow themselves to become receptive for the news that their students carry with them, will find that it is in receptivity that gifts become visible. We can offer the space with safe boundaries within which our students can find a path worth following. (One should note that receptivity is only one side of hospitality. The other side, equally important, is confrontation. These two inseparable sides have to remain in careful balance. Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody. This balance between receptivity and confrontation is found at different points, depending upon our individual position in life. But in every life situation we not only have to receive but also to confront.) Training for service is not a training to become rich but to become voluntarily poor; not to fulfill ourselves but to empty ourselves; not to conquer God but to surrender to his saving power. All this is very hard to accept in our contemporary world, which tells us about the importance of power and influence. Our fulfillment is in offering emptiness.
Our children are our most important guests, who enter into our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while and then leave to follow their own way. What parents can offer is a home, a place that is receptive but also has the safe boundaries within which their children can develop and discover what is helpful and what is harmful. Children are guests we have to respond to, not possessions we are responsible for. They are guests who have their own destination, which we do not know or dictate. A good host is not only able to receive his guests with honor and offer them all the care they need but also to let them go when their time to leave has come. Listening needs the full and real presence of people to each other. It is indeed one of the highest forms of hospitality. Healers are hosts who patiently and carefully listen to the story of the suffering strangers. Patients are guests who rediscover their selves by telling their story to the one who offers them a place to stay. Healing is the humble but also very demanding task of creating and offering a friendly empty space where those who suffer can tell their story to someone who can listen with real attention, where strangers can reflect on their pain and suffering without fear and find the confidence that makes them look for new ways."
It's interesting to note that McGilchrist's The Matter with Things is a book in three parts, and Nouwen's book Reaching Out is also structured into three main parts. And although these parts are described to be about solitude, hospitality, and prayer, there are deeper unifying themes behind them. The first two parts, ostensibly concerning solitude and hospitality, are overwhelmingly concerned with sunyata (vacuity, voidness, or hollowness), absence, withdrawal, "empty space," and the "free space," receptivity, hospitality, discovery, engagement, and fulfillment that this enables. The third part, ostensibly about prayer, continues to dwell on these same themes, but actually serves as the philosophical foundation or justification for the previous two parts, because "hospitality can only bear lasting fruits when embedded in a broader, deeper, and higher reality." It is a cornerstone of religious thought. "In my Father's house are many mansions... I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2) For Nouwen, prayer is what gestures toward this deeper reality. He exhorts us, "search for the prayer of your heart, your unique way of reaching out to God" and writes movingly that "God can become our host," our shepherd, refuge, fortress, and home. Calling to mind a corresponding state of humbleness and complete dependence, the publican prayed "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (Luke 18:13, see also Kyrie eleison). This is the primary scriptural support for the Jesus Prayer that Nouwen wrote at length about.
Rabbi Shira Stutman: “I think that many people walk through the world with a feeling of existential loneliness. To know that there is a God who will walk next to you no matter what can help make you feel less alone. You are part of the universe, part of this fabric. Prayer connects you to God's presence. You are not just a unitary creature. And acknowledging that God is a God of loving-kindness is a reminder that we too should do acts of loving-kindness. Just as God feeds the hungry, so too should we feed the hungry. In this way prayer can be transformative.”
Remaining true to his underlying themes, Nouwen also describes "God as the absent God," the deus absconditus of the medieval Christian theologians Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and Martin Luther. Having understood Nouwen's perspective by this point in the book, and his proclivity for paradox, the conclusion should be clear to the reader: “absence and presence are never separated... The mystery of God’s presence, therefore, can be touched only by a deep awareness of his absence.” And further, by extending hospitality toward others we are imitating the original act of God's creation of a "free space" for us. Or in the words of Schelling, "the one absolute act we start from contains - united and condensed - an infinity of actions whose total enumeration forms the content of an infinite task."
Nouwen writes, "to fully appreciate what hospitality can mean, we possibly have to become first a stranger ourselves." And indeed, are we not all guests of the master host? In Reaching Out he frequently quotes Zen sayings, which should not be surprising since Zen makes sunyata a central concept. Is this merely a coincidence? We can also compare the host-guest relationship with the notion of "interbeing" or pratityasamutpada (dependent origination), which is often illustrated by the fractal image of Indra's net. And take a look at the guest-host continuum image above. On the left is how it might appear, at best, to the LH, as a single flat level. But on the right is how it might appear to the RH, full of multiple interpenetrating levels while still retaining a very distinct form. This may be compared to the somewhat more organic image of tree rings, when a tree is cut at a point where it grows around the knot of a branch, eventually fully embracing it. Such biological analogies provide substantial correspondences.
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| cellular gʰóstis (see inyo symbol, above) |
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| "Insatiable Planet Eating Creature" |
"What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the west?" - The Gateless Gate, case no. 37
"For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." - Luke 12:48
Ivan Tyrell recently wrote The Charter of Human Needs in Politics. He takes the perspective of "basic needs" as a starting point for the design of social institutions, which is a line of thought with a very long and productive pedigree, as documented by Peter Corning. Starting here, the charter then weds this to the neuro-developmental perspective of Iain McGilchrist. Paraphrasing from the charter:
"Perhaps the most important modern development in our understanding about why the world is in such chaos and in thrall to bureaucrats and power seekers, and our civilisation is degenerating so quickly, is to be found in the works of the British psychiatrist, neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. His decades of work have revealed more about how the different ways the two hemispheres of our brains pay attention to the world and drive our actions than anyone hitherto."
"Awe can bring us to an understanding that we are all partial and limited beings that are part of one another, and that we owe each other a degree of compassion... but simple parasites can commandeer the whole system of an animal and there may be a kind of mental parasite that takes us over and governs us."
"This has social and political implications at a grand scale. There is in us a drive towards power, which the Ancient Greeks called hubris – "we can do or make anything," a desire to be like the gods. As a result, there is an overreach and a consequent downfall, and this can apply to whole civilisations. More balanced civilisations – more balanced between the two hemispheres of the brain – are those that are less involved in reduction, in analysing and fragmenting, and instead see how things are situated in a much larger context."
"That these problems await humanity cannot be denied. But it is possible that the build up of psychological pressure they are causing will lead to an evolutionary breakthrough, a leap to a more refined form of thinking. The questions arising over our continuing survival are forcing us to resolve the ecological and psychological crisis we have created over the last 8,000 years or so. Perhaps the pressure will increase until a new evolutionary development occurs that stabilises our species' consciousness."
"The pioneering American psychologist Robert Ornstein put this very well: "Our biological evolution is, for all practical purposes, at its end. There will be no further biological evolution without human 'conscious evolution'. And this may not happen without first having an understanding of what our consciousness is, what it was originally designed to do, and where the points of possible change may be."
"This Charter is intended for people who wish to contemplate this idea and cooperate in designing practical ways to approach the situation. Perhaps the more our institutions prepare themselves to become fit enough to cope, the more likely our species is to survive. But if we are to enhance our consciousness to do this, we must first look to our psychology and behaviour and learn how we might rise above the primitive evolutionary impulse to identify ourselves with our country, our 'tribe', our sex, our race... and this could lead organically to planet consciousness and to caring for the planet as a whole."
Ens Amans
"Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations" — David Graeber, Debt
"The edifice of the world is only sustained by the impulses of hunger and love." — Friedrich Schiller (the epigraph to Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden's Animal parasites and messmates)
Ashley Hodgson recently spoke to Jim Rutt about how economics can benefit from the application of a paradigm inspired by Margulis and McGilchrist:
"We think of the cynic as being the person who sees through problems to the actual motives underneath. And the person who’s gullible as the person who just falls for the BS. If we get in our minds too much that sort of everyone is out to get us, then we’re fearful about being taken advantage of, and our orientation toward everything will be to look for whomever is trying to get us. We end up projecting that where it is not. That is not actually perceiving reality. To perceive reality, you have to be open to the possibility that somebody could have nefarious motives, and also to the possibility that they could have generous motives. And you kind of have to be able to hold both possibilities without necessarily landing on one view of the world. The motivational force is usually (and oftentimes) both selfish and altruistic at the same time. You’re selfish on behalf of your in-group, but also altruistic and self-sacrificing toward your in-group. Most actions have both elements. It’s very few actions that are just “okay, me for myself” without considering the social context of the people I care about.
Which means financial incentives are a secondary motivator. People care about money because it buys them something they care about. And that can be a social cause they care about that’s very altruistic, or it can be a personal ambition. It can be either selfish or unselfish. McGilchrist’s frame has given me greater ability to explain this. Do you think about things in the stupid and immoral way, or do you think about it in the deepest way you can? I think our culture today tends to replace things that are hard to explain with things that are easy to explain, and this is causing blindness.
With economics, you don’t want to mistake the map for the territory, because that causes a lot of the misunderstanding. There are many economists who don’t understand this, who actually do take what is closer to the immoral perspective on it. This is part of how I’m thinking about the game theory of in-groups and out-groups. With the out-group, you’re sort of taking what is the maximally left-brain mistake – mistaking the map for the territory, and only oriented toward power. Here I would say that economists have been, first and foremost, guilty of upholding an absolutely destructive mythology. We need multiple frames, we need to be able to move back and forth between lenses that are mutually excludable, this thing McGilchrist describes where you have selfishness and altruism overlapping at the same time. You need to be able to hold both of those things, uphold different economic mythologies in different spaces.
A lot of the arguments between people are the result of one group being attached to a particular map. And a lot of times when a map gains legitimacy in any way inside our system, it gets sucked into power and gets used by power to accomplish power’s goals. And so you have people who are using a map to try to understand something true about the world, something they could not see without it. So maps have a lot of value. They allow you to see things you would otherwise not notice. But they can also create distortions. A map is both a lens to see the world through and it’s also a projector. It’s projecting something onto the world that may not be there. You need both perspectives to actually sift through problems in our society. But all it takes to misunderstand this is an attachment to the law of non-contradiction, which is deeply ingrained in how our culture thinks. That forces people through polarization into one camp or another, and it blinds all of society. If you approach the world really attached to one specific thing, I don’t think you’re going to arrive at this even after years of studying it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure we'll get through this moment in history unless we do."
Witkowski O, Doctor T, Solomonova E, Duane B, Levin M. Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: stress, care, and intelligence. Biosystems. 2023; 231, Article 104964
Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden. Animal parasites and messmates. (1876) Classic text, whose author is credited with introducing the term mutualism in biology in 1875 and the term commensalism in 1876.
Henri Nouwen. Reaching Out (1975)
Thomas Ogletree. Hospitality to the Stranger (1985) "One of Emmanuel Levinas's most creative contributions [in Totality and Infinity] is to call attention to the asymmetry of the interpersonal relations that mark the commencement of moral consciousness."
Christine Pohl. Making Room (1999) Pohl: "I think hospitality is about really sharing ourselves, inviting people into our lives as we live them."
Andrew Shepherd. The Gift of the Other: Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality (2014)
Krish Kandiah. God Is Stranger (2017)
Notes:
[1] McGilchrist: "An experience that I've had, and that probably most people have if they develop intellectually, is that when you're young you think you know things, but then as you get older you realize how little you do know. It's a kind of unknowing which is not the same as ignorance. Ignorance is what you have before you know, but 'not-knowing' (wu zhi) is what you have after you've gone through knowing. Action can be like this as well. So there is laziness on the one hand, and then there's action, but then there is what the Tao Te Ching calls 'not-doing' (wu wei). This is the most desirable area. At the end of their various lives, people as different as St. Paul and Socrates and Montaigne, their conclusion was 'What do I know?'"
[2] In Buddhist teachings, "questions which tend not to edification" refer to questions that are considered unproductive or distracting for spiritual growth and the attainment of enlightenment. Similarly, a monk once asked Joshu for instruction. Joshu asked if the monk had eaten his rice. The monk replies yes. Joshu then instructed him to wash his bowl. ...After writing "The Host and the Guest," it may be time to focus on other questions, such as the integrity of this host, which involves physical health, a broader mutual understanding between its various parts (in my case, language studies), and the "sacred work" performed with others.
I was taught to pray before every meal "Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, And let these gifts to us be blest." This is a common table prayer, especially in Lutheran churches. And we are as much guests ourselves. (See description of Luke 18:13 in the Henri Nouwen section above.) An autobiography might be simply titled “The Guestbook” as a nod to our humble station in life. Though I do not think it too proud if one were to write a “Hostbook,” as indeed this is what the devout are called upon to do, while nonetheless continually falling short.
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