Mi'sen

Just dawned on me (D'oh!) that Tilopa is not really a Dzogchen figure. But whatever

It strikes me that one could make a very good set of teaching instructions that incorporates McGilchrist & Tilopa Mahamudra taught with hemispheric awareness

couple things come to mind: you can actually see how difficult it is to remain in right-hemisphere-predominate states *when in sitting practice of meditation* It is very easy to access these right-hemisphere states *in embodied motion in the world* (eg with qi gong, aikido...

...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"