Last week, my wife and I watched Oprah Winfrey, in her "Super Soul Sunday" show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, interview Jill Bolte Taylor, a woman who--if she could do it all over again--would choose once again to suffer a near fatal stroke that shut down half her brain for weeks. The stroke, which she writes about in her book, "My Stroke of Insight", instantly shifted her into the state of mind that mystics of all religions spend years striving to achieve. Taylor got more than a glimpse of this state. She was in this state of pure bliss for weeks, and has successfully resisted returning to the habitual negative thoughts that make bliss impossible.
It's been just over 15 years since she had the stroke at the age of 37. It took more than 7 years for her to remember a single thing that happened to her before the stroke. And yet, she told Oprah, if she could decide whether to do it all over again she would choose to have the stroke. She is glad to have been "reborn" a more enlightened person who her friends tell her is happier, funnier, lighter, and more compassionate than the old Jill Bolte Taylor.
Why was her stroke a "Stroke of Insight"? Ironically, before the stroke, she worked as a researcher in Neuro-anatomy at Harvard University. Although the stroke caused her to lose most of her memory and training, she still has obvious mastery of how the brain functions and how her stroke played a role in her experiences. To hear her own perspective, here is a link to a video in which Taylor describes her "stroke of insight": Jill Bolte Taylor's speech. Also, here is her homepage: JBT's homepage. My summary of her experience is this: the stroke caused the left side of her brain to shut down for several weeks. The left side of the brain is well known to be the place--the ONLY place--in the brain that describes the world in words. When the stroke shut the left braindown, Jill had to see the world purely through her right brain. The intuitive, spacial, artistic, emotional non-verbal right brain. And this pure right brain perception caused her to see reality as one holy whole. Taylor's description of the experience is no different than the descriptions I've read from Buddhists and other mystics across various cultures, religions, countries, and centuries.
It seems to me that she was a brain-damaged Buddha. The Buddha sits in the right side of each of our brains. Our brains don't need to be improved. The Buddha is already there, latent, waiting to be released. All we need to do is put our logical left brains on pause. Just for a little while. Then we will experience the world through our right brains. And see reality exactly the same way that the mystics see reality.
I've read other books about research into the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, especially Robert Ornstein's, "The Psychology of Consciousness". This book describes brilliant experiments with epileptic patients whose seizures could not be controlled until surgeons cut the nerves connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain. When I read Ornstein's book in the 1990's, I was blown away by the clean break between the consciousness of the verbal/logical left brain and the consciousness of the intuitive/spiritual and utterly illiterate and blissful right brain. The extraordinary difference between Ornstein's research and Bolte's account is Bolte's prolonged immersion in pure right brain consciousness.
I'm grateful to Jill Taylor Bolte for sharing her experience so that the rest of us, without having to experience a life threatening stroke, can get a glimpse of the consciousness we all possess but which few of us know how to tap into. Her experience reinforces my personal philosophy that my Buddhism isn't a religion. It's just a practice that helps me tap into something natural, concrete, and substantial: the stuff contained in the right hand side of my skull.
No comments:
Post a Comment