Jill Bolte
Taylor had a stroke on December 10th, 1996 that disabled most of her left brain
functioning, and I would argue that in the world patched together by her
isolated right brain she then experienced an amplified (and somewhat distorted)
version of Enlightenment as described in various Buddhist traditions,
particularly Zen.
What is enlightenment? We’ve been talking about it a lot, but
sometimes repetition and summary are helpful. 心身脱落. Shin-shin datsu-raku. Shedding the body and shedding the mind. It’s the visceral awareness of the
impermanence of life, the irreducible interdependence of all systems, the
feeling in your bones that all things are both interconnected and destined to
be torn apart for subsequent and roughly eternal recombination (unless, of
course, the heat death of the universe isn’t actually the end of it, in which
case no qualifier is necessary). If you read enough, an intellectual appreciation of these phenomena seems to me
inescapable given the realities of energy transfer and the continuous exchange
of cellular material between pretty much everything (you don’t have to make out
with someone to swap spit; just being in the same room and breathing the same air
is enough), but in some way Enlightenment is about more than reading
comprehension. It’s about feeling it,
you know? I can know that the Earth goes
around the Sun, but it’s a lot harder to feel it (as an aside, I read a book
the other day explaining why there are seasons (it has to do with the way in
which the Earth’s titled axis lets in sunlight at different angles during
different periods), but even though I spend a fair amount of time looking at
the sky I can’t figure out what’s going on).
It’s difficult
to get to that deep level of understanding, but we’ve all had at least a taste of
it at some point. At least I suppose we
have. Maybe this experience depends upon
whether or not you like math, but I remember mechanically working on algebra
problems or calculus problems or whatever kind of math problems they were without really
knowing what was going on, just sort of plugging numbers into formulas like the
textbook said, when all of a sudden, Cha-Ching, it clicks and you get it. It’s not about words which is why it’s hard to
define, but in an intuitive flash you see the interlocking parts and you
feel how they work together. The details
snap into place and like that you have a picture of a larger functioning
whole. What does that sounds like to
you? Perhaps a shift from the
particular-oriented left-brain to the pattern-oriented right one.
It’s
relatively easy to see the interaction between left and right brain thinking in
the manipulation of numbers and formulas, but it’s considerably more difficult
to see the larger patterns into which we as sentient beings are enmeshed. Why is that, exactly? When you “get” a math problem, it is because
you have stopped thinking about the specific numbers and your brain has been
allowed to cast its neural net over the wider and more generalized patterns
governing the way in which they interact.
An intuitive understanding of a2+b2=c2
requires that you step back from the individual elements and let your mind envision
the larger relationship between sides of triangles. Enlightenment, as I understand it, is roughly
the same process applied to human beings (specific numbers) as they are
entangled in the various pushes and pulls of life on earth (general
formulas). The problem is that our
left-brains are always working, and we are too focused on ourselves as singular
digits to see where we fit on a massively expansive number-line.
You can use
meditation to tune the descriptive silence out, or you can just burst a few
carefully placed blood-vessels in the left side of your head. That’s what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor,
and while I wouldn’t recommend having any sort of invasive brain surgery to
simulate the effect (the experience sounded excruciating and fully debilitating),
I am thankful for it (and astounded by her recovery) because it
fills a lot of holes in a lot of gaps.
While I stressed caution in attributing too much hemispheric
specialization to the brain in one of the previous posts, well, here’s an
actual brain scientist talking (with more first-hand experience than most) so
let’s at least listen to what she has to say.
The left-brain, she says, “thinks in language,” and is the source of the
“on-going brain chatter” (also known as zatsunen)
that I know I, at least, am accustomed to living with. It is “designed to take the enormous collage
of the present moment and start picking out details, details, and more details
about those details” before organizing it all into a coherent conception of a
defined self in the world, patterned around past experience, present emotional
state, and future possibilities. Sounds
good so far. The left-brain, she
continues, “is the little voice that says to me, ‘I am,’ and (with that
statement) I become a single individual separate from the energy flow around
me, and separate from you.” According to
Dr. Bolte Taylor, it is through the constant referential, administrative powers
of the left-brain that what we consider our “selves” are constructed from what
otherwise would be an incomprehensible glot of sensory input.
When the
left-brain malfunctions, however, what happens to that self? Recounting the difficulty of taking a shower
on the morning of her stroke, she describes hesitating in the act of turning on
the hot water, shocked into immobility when “the left-brain chatter (in her
head) went totally silent.” Where most
of the time unspools a constant stream of phone-calls to make, deadlines to
meet, injustices to be righted, wounds to be nursed, clothes to iron, rewording
of a conversation that didn’t go so well last night, breakfast to make, an
umbrella to locate, where almost every moment of our inner lives is dominated
by the endless fragments of social obligation, all of a sudden there was
nothing.
There were no familiar thoughts,
and soon after there was no familiar body, either. “I could no longer define
the boundaries of my body,” she says. “I
felt enormous and expansive. I felt at
one with all the energy that was and it was beautiful there.” Talk about an out of body experience. It's very difficult to identify with because most of us have never stepped outside of them, but the boundaries of self are inscribed, it
seems, by the tools of the left brain, and while your pride in you pecs
therefore falls away when the tools are broken, so too do private insecurities
and the accumulated scar tissue of past failures: “Imagine what it would be
like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage!
I felt euphoria.”
“I found
Nirvana.” That’s Bolte Taylor what says
of her experience. I found Nirvana. I am sort of inclined to believe her. Considering that her self-constructing left
brain was submerged in blood rather than being inhibited by neuro-transmitters
or whatever the hell is going on when you’re in a deep meditative state, she
may in fact have found more of it than most monks. And that’s kind of that. When Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi Tree
meditating all those years ago (if in fact he did), the wisdom he eventually
came to wasn’t, I would suggest, something he “came up with.” It wasn’t something he crafted out of the
words and thoughts, but rather, it was a picture that emerged when he stopped
trying to paint it. Hopefully now that
shouldn’t strike you as nonsense.
Next time
let’s sum up and talk applications.
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