The Master and His Emissary

This is part of the series From Ego to Soul: Remembering the Right Brain’s Wisdom. [Read Part 1] [Read Part 3] [Read Part 4] [Read Part 5]

Years of spiritual work and meditation had left me with one burning question:

How do I move beyond the ego, so I can live from my soul—know it, hear it, follow it?

Much to my surprise, I didn’t find the answer to my question in ancient texts like the Upanishads, multi-hour Kundalini chants, or a 12-week raw foods cleanse. No, I found the key in a book on neuroscience.

After learning that the left and right halves of our brains have their own ways of perceiving reality [Left Brain v. Right Brain]. And that we can decide which side we pay attention to: the left brain, as the voice of the ego, or the right brain, as the knowing of our spiritual selves. A new question emerged:

How do I recognize what each side is saying clearly enough to choose?

And scholar, Iain McGilchrist, delivered on that beautifully in his pioneering work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The book is substantial—I could only read short sections at a time—but it offers an utterly fascinating journey through neuroscience, philosophy, art, religion, and the history of Western civilization. 

When you’re finished reading it, you will thoroughly understand the difference between the left and right hemispheres of your brain, their personalities, values, and preferences, and how the left brain has come to dominate our entire civilization. And you will never again believe what most of us have been taught—that the right half of your brain is in any way inferior to the left half. 

In fact, McGilchrist uses the master and his emissary metaphor to make the solid and compelling case that the brain has a hierarchy, and it’s the opposite of what we’ve been told. 

“There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people.”

As his influence spread, the master trained an emissary whom he could send out to handle the day-to-day business of protecting his people and lands. He trusted this emissary implicitly. 

The right brain is the master—the left brain is his emissary.

The worldview delivered to us by our right brain is meant to be primary. In its natural state, the left brain, says the author, “. . . must be used in service of what the right hemisphere knows and sees, not the other way round.” The left brain, while brilliant at what it does, is essentially a tool for the right brain to use.

The right brain looks out and sees the world as an ever-changing, flowing, undivided whole. In its view, everything is alive and existing in relationship with everything else. It has an expansive focus, scanning the wholeness of the world and bringing to us what it chooses to focus on. It’s solely interested in living things and is attracted to whatever is new and emotionally resonant. It alone understands context and nuance, has empathy, reads facial expressions, gets jokes, and uses metaphor. It’s able to hold complexities without an immediate resolution.

But the right brain needs its emissary, so we can focus in on the world and learn from it. Without it, we would just watch the world flow continuously by.

The left brain’s job is to reach out and grab whatever the right brain chooses to focus in on. It has a narrow focus. It takes the whole and divides it into parts; it sees details, analyzes, uses logic, categorizes, and becomes familiar with things. It’s strongly attracted to manmade objects, and even when presented with the living world, sees it similarly as a detached series of parts, like a tool or a machine that’s meant to be taken hold of and used. The left brain likes to have answers, and to be right. It’s prone to assert that its position is correct even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

As the right brain’s trusted advisor, the left is supposed to send whatever information it has grasped back to the right brain for final processing. This return is critical because the right brain’s understanding exists beyond the left brain’s reach.

The left brain only has access to its own logic about a frozen moment in time. Without the return, we’re forever stuck inside a mechanical world of detached parts where everything has already been categorized, labeled, and declared known.

And with this stunning insight, neuroscience confirms what spiritual traditions have always taught—we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, that ego is meant to serve the soul. 

The soul exists beyond the mind. The right brain uses the left brain.

Our brains serve as a mirror for the fundamental choice we have as humans:

Are we simply material objects left alone in a meaningless universe? 

Or

Are we spiritual beings existing in sacred connection with a conscious, living world?

After a time, the trusted emissary “. . . began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence.”

Western civilization has been taken over by the emissary. Instead of returning its information to the right brain for more advanced processing, the left brain has decided it is the master. It has built a mechanical, technological, time-bound world in which all things are separate parts without life or meaning. A world ruled by logic, algorithms, and simple soundbites. A world that values procedures, efficiency, and being right at all costs. And it has convinced us that this is the way the world works and no other options exist.   

And that’s what it believes, because the left brain doesn’t know anything beyond itself. 

Whenever we attempt to live beyond our ego, according to our soul’s knowing, the left brain confidently states that it’s pointless, it’s dangerous, the soul can’t be trusted, and worse, the soul doesn’t exist.

The left brain’s view of the world is so dominant in our society that it has come to seem normal, but from the right brain’s perspective, it most definitely is not. With the emissary in charge, we get the exact problems we see in the world today: materialism, disconnection, environmental destruction, and spiritual emptiness. This isn’t random dysfunction—it’s the predictable result of denying the right brain’s wisdom.

“The Master is betrayed by his emissary.”

But we do have a choice. We can decide which worldview we want to live from.

We’ve seen that we have two ways of knowing, two consciousnesses. Now we understand that one is meant to lead the other.

Trying to fix our current problems with left-brained solutions like more technology, more analysis, more control—or colonizing Mars—only makes things worse. What we need is a civilizational shift back to the proper order: the right brain as master, the left brain as its trusted emissary.

This isn’t about balance. It’s about understanding that we’ve had it completely backwards. The emissary has usurped the master, and we’ve built an entire civilization on that reversal.

But it wasn’t always this way. Indigenous peoples all over the world once lived with the Master in charge, and it wasn’t that long ago. Just 200 years ago on this continent, people knew how to live from their souls, not their egos.

So how did the left brain become so dominant? What happened to shift an entire civilization away from the proper order?

Continue the series: The Great Mother and the Fall