A guest post for International Women’s Day by K W Jamieson, author of A World in Two Minds

Many millennia ago homo-sapiens had the bright idea of dividing the complex challenge of survival between the sexes. While men became warriors – competing, destroying and killing – women were tasked with the opposite functions of co-operating, creating and healing. Thus human society sent the genders down dual pathways which, through both nature and nurture, would lead to a marked imbalance in the cognitive preferences of modern-day men and women. To this day, and from the day they are born, many of us still orient boys towards the mechanistic trucks and tool-based toys preferred by the left mind, while offering girls the relationship-based dolls and teddy bears preferred by the right mind. Consequently, while we all use both brain hemispheres all of the time, large groups of men on average skew left while women generally skew right.

The price women would pay for such a gift was thousands of years of patriarchal suppression, but over the last century or so the cultural pendulum has swung resolutely in favour of the liberal impulses of the right mind. Naturally the left mind – the seat of our categorizing and hierarchy-creating functions – is fighting back and the global chaos we are currently experiencing is the result of the tectonic plates of culture shifting, as scientific materialism defends its dominance from an organic worldview with a distinctly feminine lens on the world. Women dominate the core of Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson’s ‘Cultural Creatives’ and formed the vanguard of the many post-WWII movements which liberalized societies worldwide with an emphasis on peace, education, healthcare, equality and human rights. As such they are more likely to be attuned to the rhythmic oscillations of the organic worldview, a perspective which perceives our planet as a living system not a machine, and appreciates the complex relationship between the inner world of the individual and the outer world we bring forth through the global mind we collectively create. Coherence is key to the positive health and wellbeing of both and our future will unfold in accordance with the degree to which we can elevate our consciousness, to create the cultural conditions in which human integration, collective peace and personal happiness can prevail.

Our right mind is essential to such cognitive synthesis and, ironically, the several thousand years of secondary status, during which women were inadvertently allocated primacy of by far the more powerful brain hemisphere, has better prepared the female of our species for leading us forward. However men need not fear. While our left mind processes the right mind as its polar opposite, our right mind sees the left mind only as a collaborating counterpart – an essential yang to its yin. Revenge therefore isn’t in its nature. What’s more, the benefits for men of a more cognitively-balanced culture are also huge, enabling them to become more whole human-beings and to enjoy the entire range of ideas, emotions and experiences which are characteristic of heightened consciousness. For several centuries scientific materialism, despite the great value it has brought humankind, has served to suppress our consciousness to our lowest psychological level, rooting us firmly in the mind and dissociating us from our embodied physicality and sense of soul.

Now science and spirit stand ready to be reconciled, not via classic science or the major monotheisms which can never to unified in their current form, but through the organic lens of quantum science. Einstein et al led us to breakthrough discoveries which now offer a genuinely viable opportunity to reunify science with spirit and to elevate our global mind to a higher plane of cognitive wisdom. Complexity science further informs us of how small changes could send waves of energy cascading across our whole neural network, from which our species could evolve.

Coherence is the natural state of all living systems which automatically try to heal themselves when they are sick. The liberalization of global society is a rebalancing act, as our system self-organizes to the ‘edge of chaos’, offering us great opportunity but also real danger. We may stand on the cusp of a truly transformative change but we could just as easily disintegrate again into more death and destruction. Central to which path we take is the degree to which the right mind is able to re-establish its pre-eminence in shaping global culture. While there’s no ‘silver bullet’ solution, making women more influential in how our world works is by far the best chance we have of ensuring the survival and success of our species.

Read more on this topic in A World in Two Minds – due out later this month.