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Jill Bolte Taylor on TED Talks and NPR

Last post 07-29-2008, 6:09 PM by serengetiplains. 3 replies.
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  •  07-01-2008, 8:04 AM 60122

    Jill Bolte Taylor on TED Talks and NPR

    Well. I think this is just great! Anyone else seen these?

    Jill Taylor is a brain researcher who experienced a stroke in 1996. Full recovery after 8 years... but the most insteresting thing is how she describes it as a revalatory experience. Also check out the NPR interview, where near the end she talks about how the "right brain non-judgement la-la land state" is anchored and she can get that feeling back instantly.

    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91861432

     

     

     


    George
    Your own life is bigger than any fears and despair you have because your life contains these things
  •  07-01-2008, 9:02 AM 60143 in reply to 60122

    Re: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED Talks and NPR

    Hi, George. Yes I have and really liked it!

    A few words about it were spoken on this thread:
    http://multiplex.integralinstitute.org/Public/cs/forums/thread/46606.aspx

    Gotta run but welcome and, I agree, good stuff. ambo

    Ambo Suno
  •  07-29-2008, 1:35 PM 66455 in reply to 60143

    Further musings

    George, I found Jill's experience quite interesting.  Her stroke, as she competently explained, literally shut off her language centre, which apparently then allowed her right brain to direct or stamp the very quality of her experience.  That experience, from her description, very closely, in my perception, parallels what I've read of Being or so-called enlightenment (better: enlightening) experiences from several sources: Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Eckhart, Genpo Roshi, etc.

    In two interviews recorded after her TED talk, Jill speaks to this parallel, suggesting the core element in the experience is, to use a Rumi poem title, to shut the language door.

    Notice one implication of her experience: the Being state of awareness, or enlightenment, or call it what you will, carries an UR correlate of right-brain activity or prominence.  From where I sit as regards brain understanding, which is from afar, if left brain is time and action and part (and worry and so-called ego and all that), right brain is space and being and whole/wave.  Left brain is perhaps quantum, right brain relativity.

    Jill's experience also, to me, implies that the Maharshi (if I can be so general) experience of Oneness-Non-Separateness of the Universal All is itself ... partial: the expression of but one half of the brain.  Now there's an implication worth pondering (hint, leads to Genpo Roshi's threefold architecture).
  •  07-29-2008, 6:09 PM 66500 in reply to 66455

    Re: Further musings

    Let's muse a little further.  But first, allow me a quote from Nisargadatta from the last year of his life.  We might suppose this quote arises from his mature view:

    M: The manifest dynamic nature, don't stamp it with words!  Don't conceptualize.  Now everybody is weighed down by words ...

    V: So words are the only problem.

    M: Yes.  The whole problem is with the words.


    Shut the language door!  If I can interpolate a little: shut the language door slash left brain particle so-called ego self, open non-conceptual perception slash right brain "wave" "self."  In case you're wondering, the quotation marks are my typed form of disappearing everything they encapsulate, immediately.

    Adopting this simplification, a question arising for me is this: is the RB"W""S" non-dual?  My intuition thinks perhaps not, that non-duality is perhaps found in a, call it what you will, L+R perspective, view, understanding, experience, reality, synthesis, whatever whatever.  A little evidence that this might be true can be seen in the following *very* common non-dual (not to mention routinely capitalized) pronouncements from the right brain region: my "Self" is the "True Self," is "Reality," is the "True Nature," is the non-illusory, non-mayic Absolute Ground of All.  One might, from these and other issuings (like that heavy, stuck notion of Enlightenment), think the right brain thinks it's view is pretty darn There, or Now, or Whatever---got the Real Goods, in other words.  Which is not to say I don't appreciate the peace of space consciousness, just that its All is perhaps not all.  Jill's experience might be seen to point this direction.  : )
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