Sometimes man stumbles upon great truths entirely undeservedly. Kamerlingh Onnes just happened upon superconductivity while twiddling around with mercury and refrigerators; Roentgen was playing with himself in electrical ways and realized to his shock that he could see through his skin. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroscientist, woke up one morning with headache, a stroke and noble sentiments. Her discoveries are even more astounding.
As preliminary, recall that blood clots in the brain can cause loss of language, memory, or face recognition, paralysis, personality changes and the like. What had hitherto gone unsuspected is that certain parts of the brain actively hinder us from realizing our potential. Blood clots in such undesired parts (the stodgy and linear left hemisphere, specifically) instead improve us! Indeed, they cause us to Awaken to our full, true nature, as the unshackled remainder reveals what had previously been blocked off.
Now, it is hardly surprising that no scientist has predicted this – why would large parts of the brain be actively engaged in keeping us from Truth? And yet, why should it be otherwise? After all, do we not function better without an infected appendix? Surely the loss of what forces us into dull, methodical, detail-oriented, negative-energy patterns might have similar effects! Taylor’s work is being widely celebrated; she has written a bestseller, appeared on Oprah, and is recognized by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Here is a colloquium where she presents her findings (a twenty minute video, but well worth the trouble. Do wait for the standing ovation she justly receives):
Her testimony is fascinating and jarring, even humbling. With bad brain gone, she found the boundaries between her body and the rest of the universe dissolving into the common Energy Field of which she discovered she was made, like everything else, and experienced herself connected, perfect and together, brother and sister with the Whole, beautiful whole. She lost all sense of her day-to-day life and work and relationships, which she found was quite compatible with Oneness. She saw the stranger in her body, that tiny, detached bit of universal consciousness, and wondered how she would ever contain such enormous vastness of being into a mere meat-brain. She realized, somewhere in the buzzing blooming confusion, that she was rising above her parochial, linear need to parse time into past, present and future and saw it pictorially, complete. As she says, she achieved Nirvana, energy lifted and spirit surrendered to the nurturing womb we all emerge from.
The connections she draws to eastern contemplative practice are perceptive and profound. Also eerie, almost frightening – how could those sages from ages ago possibly have adumbrated what materialistic Science is only now coming, dimly, to appreciate? Now, it is a bit troubling that that the path to becoming one with everything involves losing your mind. That seems to suggest something rather peculiar about what we are to unite with. But brain as yet unmutilated, we miss the brilliance of the insight: this is precisely the sort of distracting, bad-karma-thought sprit-strokes rid us of!
And to think, we each may possess such knowledge, for the contemptible price of keeping golf-ball sized clots in our heads! Taylor does say she lost the ability to read, speak, and move, and that it took her eight years to recover. Still, who among us wouldn’t be tempted by the thought of even a few moments of perfect clarity? Would not viewing visvarupa compensate for blindness before and after? As she says,
“Who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity, and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are – I am – the life-force power of the universe. I am the LIFE-FORCE POWER of the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form! At one, with all that is!”
THIS is what we miss by retaining left-brain. Effulgent, incandescent truths are offered us. Shall we fail to confront them?
Accidental Blogger 
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