I have just watched the most extraordinary video clip of a talk given by Dr Jill Bolte Taylor a neuroanatomist, or brain researcher, of Harvard University. The 18 minute talk describes how she awoke one morning, aged only 37, to find herself in the process of having a stroke. (See references below)Ironically, it couldn’t have happened to a better qualified person than Dr Jill. Even as the left hemisphere of her brain was undertaking its 4 hour journey towards total collapse, thus rendering her unable to walk, talk, read write or remember who she was; she was still curious about the actual unfolding of the event.

As the golf ball sized blood clot took over her left hemisphere Dr Jill was still functioning full on in her right hemisphere and discovering the place where mystics yearn to go. She discovered a mental state where time did not exist, which was a centre of bliss and joy, intuition and an overwhelming sense of connectedness to all and everything, an ego-lessness.

In her book “My Stroke of Insight; A brain scientist’s personal journey” Dr Jill details all the events of that day and the following 8 years that it took her to regain full brain health. She maintains that having experienced the right brain’s amazing vistas, she is now able to visit at will this place of wonder. She says that the left brain’s propensity for organisation and mind chatter are keeping us connected to the external world, and therefore maintaining a sense of separateness, of ego function. It also serves to block the experiences of the right brain behind the “clouds of everyday reality.”

The stroke enabled Dr Jill to differentiate in real terms between the two hemispheres of the brain and also to recognise how it is possible to quieten the  mind chatter of the left brain and open up to the immensity of the mystical experience through the right brain.

I have long thought that the eternal search for the beloved that most pop songs, myths, sagas and the like – from Girls Aloud, through Mills and Boon to the Arthurian legends – are actually descriptions of our inherent need to unify the twin halves of our being. In other words the drive to cross the mythical rainbow bridge and discover the deep unity of being that this promises is hard wired into our brain technology. We yearn for it. And don’t recognise that it is an inner, not an outer experience. No one human being can ever fulfill that unity for us – it is an illusion!

Interestingly, in the video clip Dr Jill shows the audience an actual brain and its trailing spinal chord and the two halves of the brain are totally separate. So where is the bridge? It must be a state of mind beyond the actual physical matter.

This then brings me to ask the question – if all of this is inherent in brain function –      where is the Mind? When I worked with Stan Grof many years ago he suggested that there exists in the very cells of our bodies the totality of experience that we call “mind” Candace Pert in her book “Molecules of Emotion” suggests the same thing. They would both then seem to indicate that the brain together with all the cells of the body actually form a body/mind whole, that is our uniqueness.

So where is consciousness? This reminds me of the conundrum “One day nothingness looked in the mirror and saw itself – and thus the Universe was created.” If there is no out there out there and it’s all within each of us to create for our selves, then it’s also up to us to control our mind chatter and get out in the wide blue yonder of the right hemisphere.

And it’s only fair to say that meditators and those of an artistic creative bent will naturally be familiar with the territory of the right brain. However, we live in a society that devalues most of those qualities, preferring the intellectual development of the left brain. Education systems like Steiner and Montessori are turning out pupils who are more developed in their right brains than their left. These students then go on into “normal” life as musicians, artists and even scientists – however, the quality of person produced by these systems may serve as a useful template for future human development.

As Dr Jill suggests, if we can create a new way of living by valuing unity, oneness, the ego-lessness of our right brains and resist overstating the left brain’s separate egoic state as THE reality – in other words, make love not war – then we could be on the way to saving the world and everyone in it.

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References:

To see the video for yourself go to www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229

Jill Bolte Taylor – My Stroke of Insight – published by Lulu.com

Candace Pert – Molecules of Emotion – published by Pocket Books

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