News Jill Bolte Taylor

8259758brainOprah Winfrey

According to Oprah Winfrey Jill Bolte Taylor’s story is an exceptional one. Oprah’s described Jill as follows; “When she was a young girl, brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor became fascinated with the functions of the human brain. Jill, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2008, has a brother with Schizophrenia, and his brain disorder led Jill to dedicate her career to studying severe mental illnesses as a Harvard-trained Neuroanatomist. While she worked to uncover the differences between the brains of people born with mental illnesses and those who were not, something remarkable happened to Jill’s own brain-it went silent.” In fact, on December 10 1996 Jill would transform from a logical, practical, strategically prone scientist into a right brained spiritual being using Philosophy and love to express her art and life.

How did this happen? Well, Dr Jill Bolte Taylor woke up one morning with severe eye pain. A blood vessel had burst in the left hemisphere of her brain and she was experiencing a gigantic stroke. Still conscious, she dragged herself to the shower. But her left-brain was failing, and she was falling into an altered state of consciousness, a state where she could not use language to describe her reality. She tried to continue as if nothing had happened, but the sound of water falling on her skin created such an unbearable noise she realized she had a serious problem. Her ability to communicate had been suddenly severed and as she staggered to the phone, she noticed the phone numbers looked like pixels. Somehow her finger “remembered” her way around, and she felt her way through dialling for help. However, as the bleeding in brain increased, she collapsed on to the floor, completely losing her left-brain capacity to access logic. Now far away from everyday perceptions, only aware of a mystical reality around her, one so often described by Psychics and Healers as the “Universal God Force” or by Quantum scientists as the “unified field”, she had fallen into a space of utter peace. She had become pure consciousness with a sense of “oneness” or “connection” to all that is. She said, “Deep inner peace exists in the core of the right hemisphere of the brain.” In fact it was there that she experienced Nirvana and felt at one with life for the first time!” She perceived God as the energy within all things and she was no longer separate from the enormity of the Divine

Recovery

After her recovery, she started to give a series of lectures not only to help stroke victims, but also to explain the spiritual experience of her stroke. In fact, she came back into the external world with a message that helped people realize structured reality is just conditioning and what we “perceive” rather than what “is” can be an illusion. Our narrow sense of life, and ourselves, can blind us to the beauty of life in other words.

Most natural Psychics, Mediums or Healers have had spiritual breakthroughs of this type. Not that they have had a stroke to do so, but they have surrendered to peace, often due to personal life crises. They have also realized a Great God Force works through all living things. What is interesting is that altered states of consciousness are centred in the right hemisphere of the brain. Brain exercises can develop that right hemisphere perception, which is a higher vision of life and spiritual states of awareness. The left hemisphere is what we expect of ourselves, rather than what we are. We need it to survive, but sometimes we place too much emphasis on it. We strive, we push and we judge, but what we really need to learn is love and self-respect.

Jill advocates teaching children how to exercise their right brain hemispheres, and thus integrate a new vision of education. If this were possible, an alternative reality could emerge. She also stresses that only a tiny bunch of cells in our left-brain is actually responsible for our worries, our fears, and our pain. But if we can train ourselves with meditation, spiritual exercises and self-enquiry, we can learn to emphasize the mystical gifts of our right hemisphere, and think just like dolphins. If we could do this, the world might indeed become a more beautiful place to live in!