The necessity of the right brain

The brain has two major modes or systems which must work together and be

harmonized if we are not to lose the essentials of our human existence. The nadis must be

balanced for optimal functioning, for sushumna to function, and for us to maximize our

human elements and potential. Unfortunately, few of us are really balanced and most of

us, especially men, tend towards the purely external, materialistic and technological

pingala side rather than the subtle, intuitive, feeling ida side. When imbalance between

the nadis is minor we may not even notice its effect, though it must manifest in our

personality, behavior, relationships and so forth, in ways that are baffling to us, and

which can make our lives miserable. What happens in the normal situation can be better

understood when we look at an extreme example.

       Howard Gardener and his colleagues studied people with severely damaged right

brains (ida) and found that they become robot-like, minus their essential human

understanding. (2) He has found that only when both hemispheres of the brain are

working together can we appreciate the moral of a story, the measuring of a metaphor,

words describing emotion, or the punch line of a joke.

      Without the right brain we lose our understanding and take things very literally. For

example, someone might say that he has a broken heart and the right brain damaged

person will ask, "How did it break?" They see the explicit, the facts, but cannot

understand what has been implied. These people also tell jokes at the wrong moment,

their sentences become meaningless and they confabulate - make up things. The

important points in their sentences are lost and are submerged or flattened, becoming part

of the background. There is just a stream of words without meaning or purpose. They

also accept the bizarre and argue with what should normally be accepted. It is obvious

then that the right brain, which yogis called ida or the receptive mind, is vital in the

appreciation of relationships, of seeing how the parts fit together as a whole, in

understanding.

        There is also evidence to show that the right brain is not only important for normal

understanding, but also holds the key for intuition and higher experience. Eugene

D'Aquili, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, feels

that split brain research indicates that the circuits which underlie higher mental states,

from flashes of inspiration to altered states of consciousness, lie within the right brain,

ida, and are powered by the emotions. (3) D'Aquili has formulated a neurological

description of "the intuitive perception of God" in which one sees reality as a unified

whole, experiencing a feeling of oneness with the world. He feels it is a product of the

parietal-occipital lobe on the right, "non-dominant" side of the brain which somehow

takes over the brain's functioning. Time is experienced as standing still and a sense of

absolute and complete unity of self with the cosmos is felt. Both are features of right

brain function and this experience is long lasting and totally transforms people's lives so

that they find new motivation and a healthier, more fulfilling perspective of their

relationship with life.

   This research indicates that unless we begin to take more notice of and develop the
right brain, we cannot partake inthe experience of higher consciousness. According to
yogis, the right and left brain, ida and pingala, must be balanced for such experience to
take place.

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Ida Pingala Nadis

Left(Pingala) versus right(Ida)

Scientific study of the hemispheres of the brain by Sperry, Myers, Gazzaniga, Bogen
and later researchers, has shown us that the left side of the brain is usually concerned
with speech, logic, analysis, time and linear function, whereas the right side is silent,
dark, intuitive, feeling, spatial, holistic in function, and does not require linear, structured
analysis for its knowledge, though how it does know is a mystery. The right side of the
brain is the physical side of ida nadi, and the left brain, ofpingala. Thomas Hoover, a
researcher comparing Zen with the latest neurological discoveries, sums up the situation
when he states, ''The hemisphere that speaks does not know; the hemisphere that knows
does not speak."
A number of word opposites have been used to describe and help us understand the
new view of brain function. Though the situation is not so simple, and each hemisphere
must work in an integrated fashion, there is a definite trend to separate modes of function
:
Left Brain (Pingala) Right Brain (Ida)
analysis understanding
verbal spatial
temporal "here and now"
partial holistic
explicit implicit
argument experience
intellect intuition
logic emotion
thinking feeling
active passive
And we could also add light versus dark, conscious versus subconscious, talkative
versus silent, solar versus lunar, positive versus negative, mathematics versus poetry,
rational versus mystical, law versus art, objective versus subjective, digital versus analog,
and many other adjectives to aid our understanding.

Emotions in the split brain

Research by Marcel Kinsbourne, neurobiologist and neuropsychologist, director of
the Department of Behavioral Neurology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center for
Mental Retardation in Waltham, Massachusetts, throws light on brain functioning which
points to the fact that the brain has two main modes of emotional activity. (1) He has
found that the two halves of the brain support different emotional states.
Research indicates that the left hemisphere governs happiness and positive feelings
and the right brain governs sadness and negative feelings. In the abnormal situation,
patients with right brain damage are often cheerful, elated and indifferent to their
abnormal state. Left brain damage, on the other hand, can lead to a gloomy outlook on
life and unjustified anger, guilt and despair. Most of us fluctuate from one state to another
even in the normal situation, though not to the extremes found in brain damaged subjects.
Still the experience of fluctuation can be distressing if we are not balanced and healthy.
The fact that the left brain is associated with bright, cheerful thoughts and the right
with sad and depressing thoughts, Kinsbourne theorizes, points to the conclusion that this
dual action of the brain is designed to handle our likes (pingala) and dislikes (ida). The
things we like are handled by the left brain, which focuses on and then approaches the
object or situation. This fits in with our active mode, the concept of the externally
directed pingala nadi. The things we dislike we try to avoid or withdraw from and we
tend to be much more concerned with the overall picture in this situation. This is handled
by the right brain and fits in with our receptive mode, introversion and ida nadi concept.

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Controlling the Nadis and the Brain

The human brain is truly one of the most awesome and amazing of creations. Housed
within the skull, it contains some 12 thousand million cells, and each of these cells has an
estimated 5 hundred thousand possible interconnections; there may be even more that we
do not know about. When the mathematics are computed there are more possible
interconnections in the brain than there are atoms in the universe.
The brain has an almost infinite capacity, and all within the two kilograms or so of
amorphous, pinkish grey brain matter with the consistency of jelly or cold oatmeal
porridge. How this quivering, pulsating, jelly-like substance remembers, thinks, analyzes,
feels, discriminates, intuits, decides, creates and directs all the countless functions of the
body, integrating the whole so that we synchronize action, speech and thought, is
something that each of us should contemplate daily.
Meditation on this miracle of creation, and any attempt to understand how the brain
and mind function, can lead to an understanding of the total process of kundalini
awakening. Indeed, many of our theories of how kundalini works are based on the brain,
and this research can help us to better understand the basis for kundalini awakening, the
nadis and chakras. This is because the brain, housing as it does the master control
systems for the body within its unlimited circuitry, must contain the physical circuits for
the nadis and chakras.
The brain is also the interface between the body and the mind. All sensory
information travels to the brain via the gyanendriyas, the sense organs of knowledge, and
is then fed into the mind, and all decisions in the mind are then translated into the body
via the karmendriyas, the organs of action, in a continuous, synchronous, dynamic
process. Thus within the workings of the brain we can see the workings of the nadis as
described by yogis, and research is deepening our understanding of this. Yogic
techniques utilize this knowledge to stimulate the body so as to achieve higher and better
states of being.

The nadis in the brain

Important research from neuroscience has shown us that the brain fits into the dual
nadi model of man's personality as handed down to us by yoga. In a radical and last ditch
attempt to cure severe, unremitting epilepsy, Roger Sperry and his associates divided the
brains of their patients down the midline structure linking the two brain hemispheres, the
corpus callosum. To their surprise, not only did the epileptics cease seizures, but they
came up with startling new findings which are radically altering our neurophysiological

understanding of how the brain works and are revolutionizing our whole concept of man.
We have always known that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the
body, and vice versa. Sperry's findings, though still in the initial stages and requiring
more research, show us that each side of the brain handles a completely opposite but
complementary mode of consciousness. This finding is extremely important as it verifies
the yogic viewpoint.
Yogis and scientists, using different terminology and different approaches, have come
up with the same conclusions, that man is divided into two main modes of functioning.
The circuits of the brain are based on ida and pingala, consciousness or knowledge, and
action or physical energy. We see ida and pingaia at all three major levels of the nervous
system :
1. Sensory-motor nervous system (SMS) : all electrical activity in the body moves in
one of two directions, into the brain (afferent), ida, and out of the brain (efferent),
pingala. Yogis called the sensory nerves which are governed by ida, gyanendriyas, and
motor nerves, governed by pingala, karmendriyas. These nerves are concerned with
perception of and activity in the world.
2. Autonomic nervous system (ANS) : the autonomic nervous system is divided into
the outward directed, stress handling, energy utilizing, pingala dominant, sympathetic
nervous system, or the inwardly directed, rest handling, energy conserving, ida dominant,
parasympathetic nervous system. These two systems control and regulate all the
automatic body processes: heart, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, liver and kidney
and so on.
3. Central nervous system (CNS) : this consists of the brain and spinal cord and
contains the controls for the SMS and ANS. The brain contains much more than this
though, for it is a huge, ultimately complex computer, which stores and integrates
information and puts our decisions into action in a superbly synchronized and
orchestrated performance. Its functioning is definitely much more than its parts. Within
the infinite circuitry of the brain resides more potential than we can realize in one
lifetime, however, the techniques of yoga systematically clear and strengthen these
circuits with regular practice.
This is what yogis have been telling us, that the circuitry for nadis and chakras exist
within the CNS, along the spine and in the brain. If we can tap, purify, strengthen and
reconnect these circuits via the various yogic techniques, we can totally transform our
mind/ body complex. The basis for yogic techniques lies in the fact that there is a
nadi/chakra system which can be seen, at the physical level, as being the sum total of the
input and output of the various sections of the nervous system and the parts of the body
which connect to it. This total body/mind complex functions on the power of the three
basic types of energy- ida, pingala and sushumna. We can therefore begin to understand
why so many yogic techniques are specifically aimed at balancing the ida/pingala flow
and increasing our awareness of its fluctuations.

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