QC

...jo kata, literally any movement practice) But maintaining that presence while sitting is actually very very hard Left hemispheric narrating and focusing mind wants to contract and exit into linguistic performance review

Couple things follow from this: * you can see why there is so much attention paid to shamatha (in Kagyu preparation for Mahamudra) or shi-né (Nyingma prep for Dzogchen) * I can also see why there is so much deep similarity in the actual instruction (up/down one or two levels

...on the spiral of course) between the shamatha/shi-né and mahamudra /dzogchen

Huh, not seeing how hemispheres relate to the parallels between mahamudra & dzogchen, beyond "both are modeling reality and so is McGilchrist's model"

It's on a practice level. I literally mean, with reference to Tilopa's pith instructions, that he is, in a way, giving directions about how to do mahamudra that *directly gibe with the hemispheres*

gimme one sec and I'll break it down I'm also chatting w/ Venkat Rao about something completely unrelated and its a bit dizzying. Going from epistemic dissensus & the Melian dialogue to meta-vajrayana...I'm going to herniate my left hemisphere

Ignoring nuance, his pet project has been about trying to present a cross-fertilisation of various Buddhist versions of ‘awareness practice’, with some sort of understanding/language of ‘somatic RH experience’, plus hand waving. Might be interesting if you’re into this stuff