In Your Right Mind

Expand… and suddenly you can’t ignore your own vastness.

Someone recently sent me a link to a video from the web site TED.com. (videos from “the annual conference that brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)”

The speaker that was brought to my attention is Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph. D. – a neuroanatomist (brain scientist). One morning, Taylor had the opportunity to study her own brain – from the inside out – as she realized she was having a massive stroke. She articulates her experience in great detail, giving us a first hand account of being inside a body that is experiencing the complete shut down of the left hemisphere of the brain. As most of us are aware by now, the left side of the brain is the seat of language and processes in a logical and sequential order. It’s also the part of ourselves that we use to define who we are (ego?). The right side is more visual and processes intuitively, holistically, and randomly. It is the side that experiences our feelings, sensations, the here and now (conscious awareness?). It was Taylor’s left side that experienced the blow out – leaving her to solely experience her right, or intuitive side, freely, without the input of her logical, identity-defining self: “I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.”

I bring all this to light because what strikes me so profoundly is not only her amazing recovery, but the gift she received through her own personal experience, to bring this important message to the world – a brilliant scientist who experienced a connection with the divine – through her own study of her massively debilitating physical trauma with her own scientific mind.

It might be easy to shrug off the radical, tarot toting, jewelry dangling, evangelistic astrologist – but, as more and more people of modern science step forward with their own stories and discoveries and awakenings, more of us in modern culture will perhaps begin to explore for ourselves the mysteries of our own deeper meaning, and perhaps lead us to expand into the vastness of wholeness and oneness and peace.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Be… in your right mind!
Sat Nam!