Perceptions of Energy and of Truth
A few days ago I stumbled upon a TED Talk given by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is a brain scientist, a neuroanatomist, who suffered a massive stroke and had the insight - and the unbelievable energy - to pay attention to what was happening to her.
The talk moved me.
Here was a lady who let her heart out in front of an audience without any apparent concern for her mannerisms, her tone, her look on stage. She just let it flow and let it rip. In the process she touched the gathered audience in Monterrey, California in February 2008 and now is doing the same to people around the world via ted.com.
She mentions in her talk that, during the stroke, she could no longer see the physical shape of her arms, her body or the walls around her. That she only saw that there was energy and that she could not clearly (or at all) determine where her body ended and the rest began. It was all just molecules and energy with no perceived shape. She had lost her ability to structure the world with her left brain as this is where the stroke had occurred. She was being driven by her right brain - the here and now, pictures, captivating all the energy from all our senses. She has lost her left brain's ability to structure all of the information flowing in from her senses.
To me this is most interesting. If you accept what she is saying it would seem to say that our perception of who we are is closely linked to our left hemisphere. Without it we may not perceive a two-legged animal, with a name, age, job, etc. In fact, without it all physical forms may cease to exit somehow. She refers to being a whale in an ocean. The left brain created body, the physical of shapes and forms, flows in some sort of ocean of energy perceived by the right brain. A state of nirvana, so close to us all, within us yet so far and hard to attain due to the strength, the will, of our left brain.
Some of the comments left on ted.com by viewers of the talk have reinforced my opinion that we are ruled by the left brain, that our society is transfixed by a need to know the "truth". Truth, in our world, needs to be something that can be categorized, labelled, repeated. Is perception true? Is a feeling truthful? Are dreams true? Are emotions real and true? What is the truth?
It reminds me of a Nature of Things episode that I saw many years ago. It showed us humans that what we see is not what all animals see. In the context of what I am talking about here that our truth is not their truth. The topic of the episode was the insect pollinators. It showed us how they see a wide variety of colours in a bush of red roses, for example, whereas we humans just see uniform red. The pollinators see much more variety. The difference being due to our anatomy and chemical makeup being different. We are not wired the same way and we have different tools. Our eyes are different, our brains are not the same.
The comments on TED.com complained that Jill was not being scientific. That her talk did not prove anything. That she was not yet over the event. That she was too emotional.
If you listen to the last few minutes of the talk and listen to the audience's reaction I think you should have the sense to feel that there is a certain truth in her emotions, her perception, what she felt. Truth in the sense that many seemed to grasp her ideas. She connected to the audience and they to her and, in the end they rose, cheered, clapped, whistled and were moved. The group gathered are not your average Joe Schmos. They are invited guests, leaders in their fields of science, engineering, art, design, technology.
It was the truth. Going back to that Nature of Things episode......Truth in that it was her reality and that, given the modified tools and brain that she had for those moments of the stroke, it was how she physically perceived the world around her. She was no longer using our regular human eyes and brain. The brain had been modified. She was still an animal but a different one during those moments.
Sure we need to prove things. Especially those tools and ideas that will impact others. The plane had better fly. The computer had better not meltdown. The vaccine had better be effective. The grain had better not kill. But all of this does not mean that what we feel, what she perceived, is not true. Because we just may not yet have the way to prove it does not mean we should refute is as nonsense.
Remember...she is a neuroanatomist with a very well developed left-brain as well.
Listen to her talk here and lose yourself in the possibility.
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