Intellectual deep web

Some excerpts from this essay on the topic follow consistent with my inquiry here.

"Being merely ‘intellectual’ or ‘dark’ won’t work. One also has to also be deep. How to be deep instead of merely intellectual?"

"Mysticism and metaphysics are either fetishised by the new age or dismissed by the new atheist. Generally new atheists privilege the brain and new-agers the heart—the latter is largely contemptuous of reason, the former rejects spiritual phenomenology. Spiritual types are always telling us to ‘get out of our heads’— hard nosed rationalists tell us that only ‘faith’ in human reason can save us. However, these two views in isolation leave us dangerously lopsided. We need to find a middle way—which is actually not a path of compromise, but the difficult work of not falling into monological world views."

"Both science and soul, empiricism and deep intuition — the perspectives of the left and the right hemispheres of the brain — need to be honoured, as Iain McGilchrist has so eloquently written about in his book The Master and his Emissary. The beauty of the rational mind is the gift of articulation; however, it has a dark side. To ‘ration’ literally means to separate or divide. Without the deeper, intuitive mind, the rational mind gives us fragments instead of a living landscape. McGilchrist’s distinction between reason and rationality is helpful here. Reason has a holistic, integrative perspective, whereas rationality can be reductive."

"Discrimination, judgment, and thinking should not be reduced to mere conceptual games; in the same way, compassion and care, without discriminating wisdom and judgement fall into the worst kinds of errors—what the buddhist calls ‘idiot compassion’. The point is: we need to re-connect the intellect to those deep realms of feeling and embodied experience or risk becoming disembodied talking machines or hysterical drama queens."

"Today we have a reductionist view of the body and the brain: we are obsessed with the physical body but don’t understand what has been called the subtle or spiritual body. Actually meditation, yoga, and the various spiritual gymnastics are not merely techniques for acquiring a healthy body, nor are they particularly about developing ‘inner calm’ or psychological well-being. Spiritual practices were once adventurous and/or dangerous ways to cultivate the spirit and embody meaning (Yoga literally means to yoke oneself to the divine)."