A shared intuition from ancient traditions, Bwiti wisdom, and modern neuroscience
Across cultures and centuries, humans have named the same inner fracture again and again: a tension between a mode that calculates and controls and a mode that perceives meaning, relationship, and life as lived. The language changes; the intuition does not.
Modern neuroscience, through the work of Iain McGilchrist, offers one vocabulary for this divide. But his contribution should be read alongside, not above, older traditions. He is not revealing something new so much as confirming, in contemporary terms, a perennial insight.
What is at stake is not psychology alone. It is how civilizations orient themselves toward reality.
Many languages, one dichotomy
Every serious tradition distinguishes between:
- a mental, analytical, instrumental mode
- and a relational, holistic, living mode
Taoism contrasts forcing with wu-wei.
Plato contrasts shadows with the sun.
Zen contrasts the discriminating mind with direct seeing.
Sufism contrasts ‘aql (intellect) with qalb (heart).
Vedānta contrasts Māyā with Brahman.
McGilchrist places this distinction in the brain:
- the left hemisphere specializes in abstraction, manipulation, certainty, and control
- the right hemisphere discloses context, embodied presence, meaning, and the whole
Crucially, none of these traditions demonize the analytical mode. The problem is always the same: when the servant mistakes itself for the master.
Bwiti: soul and mind
The Bwiti tradition articulates this dichotomy with striking clarity, without neuroscience and without philosophy as abstraction.
Bwiti distinguishes between:
- the mental: the seat of fear, strategy, narrative, control, and survival
- the soul: the seat of truth, continuity, the Divine
This is not a moral opposition. The mind is necessary. It keeps you alive in the village, in the forest, in the social world. But it is structurally incapable of leading.
In Bwiti understanding:
- illness can arise when the mental silences the soul
- Awakening is not the addition of something new, but the reordering of authority
The soul does not argue.
The mind does not surrender easily.
Iboga is not used to “produce visions” or “alter chemistry” in a reductionist sense. It is used to silence the mental long enough for the soul to speak—and for the individual to remember their place within lineage, land, and the living order.
This maps exactly onto the same error identified elsewhere:
- the intellect trying to possess truth
- instead of truth being received through alignment
The Western systemic failure: when the map becomes law
Western modernity is not “too material.”
It is too abstract.
It confuses:
- measurement with understanding
- legality with legitimacy
- procedure with ethics
- ownership with relationship
This produces a society that:
- manages health instead of cultivating it
- regulates nature instead of relating to it
- optimizes systems while degrading meaning
The result is a civilization that knows how to do almost everything and increasingly forgets why.
The Nagoya Protocol: a right intuition trapped in left-hemisphere machinery
The Nagoya Protocol emerges from a fundamentally sound intuition:
genetic resources and traditional knowledge are not inert commodities. They are embedded in cultures, ecosystems, and long-term stewardship. Any benefit derived from them should involve prior consent and fair sharing.
At its best, this is a corrective to centuries of extraction.
But here is the danger when a materialist mindset dominates implementation.
How corruption and neo-colonialism creep back in
A left-hemisphere, materialist approach creates several failure modes:
- Formal consent without real power
Documents are signed, boxes checked, while communities lack legal literacy, leverage, or genuine negotiating capacity. - State capture and elite mediation
Benefits flow to governments, intermediaries, NGOs, or consultants—while the knowledge holders themselves receive symbolic recognition and material crumbs. - Knowledge abstraction
Living traditions are reduced to “data,” “compounds,” or “genetic sequences,” severed from ritual, cosmology, and ethical context. - Moral laundering
Companies and institutions claim ethical legitimacy because procedures were followed, even as the underlying relationship remains extractive.
This is neo-colonialism in clean clothes: extraction continues, but now with paperwork, conferences, and compliance language.
The core problem is the same as everywhere else:
relationship is replaced by representation.
Health recontextualized: what the Iboga Leadership Summit is actually attempting
Most conferences on health, psychedelics, or wellness remain trapped in a familiar pattern:
- molecule first
- protocol second
- culture as “background”
- ethics as an appendix
The Iboga Leadership Summit attempts a different ordering.
What makes it structurally different
- Context before technique
Iboga is not introduced as a substance to be optimized, but as part of a living Bwiti cosmology. The question is not “what does it do?” but “within what order does it make sense?” - Legitimate knowledge holders, not symbolic elders
Bwiti voices are not decorative or folkloric. They are positioned as epistemic authorities—alongside scientists, not beneath them. - Health as alignment, not intervention
Health is approached as the restoration of right relationship:- between soul and mind
- between individual and lineage
- between humans and the living world
- Refusal of pure scalability logic
The Summit implicitly challenges the idea that everything valuable must be industrialized, standardized, and globalized to be legitimate.
This is not anti-science.
It is anti-reduction.
Closing clarity
Across Taoism, Plato, Zen, Sufism, Vedānta, Bwiti, and McGilchrist’s neuroscience, the message is identical:
- The mental is indispensable
- The material is real
- But neither is sovereign
When the mind leads, life fractures.
When abstraction governs, corruption follows.
When material benefit becomes the aim rather than the consequence, meaning collapses.
The task—individually and collectively—is not to reject the mental or the material, but to restore their place under something wiser.
In Bwiti terms:
let the soul speak first.