A Powerful Stroke of Insight

10/24/2011

I watched this video:

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

and then I wrote this, which is as scattered and unintelligible to me now as the talk was lucid and clear. This video scrambled my brain like eggs and as I wrote, I found myself jumping in and out of my contradictory brain spaces, which makes my writing sound completely illogical to me now. Watch the video and tell me what you think of this profound experience. You may find the act of writing about it to be as enlightening as the talk itself.


Maybe this won’t make it to you, because I will decide with my left brain that it is better not to share. That my thoughts are my own, that they are my property just as much as this computer which I purchased with something formless called money simply by choosing to participate in the shared social construct of capitalism, of society. But now it belongs to me, and that so-called truth of ownership makes my logical left brain believe in the truth and possibility of ownership. Now, I think I own my body, own my thoughts.

I watched this and I thought of you. I only just met you though, so I feel I have no right of ownership over you. Those aren’t the rules by which we live. There are stages to pass through, tests to be scored, before I can claim ownership of the thought of you. This was my right-brain, left-brain discourse as I watched a woman slowly dissolve and reform in front of me. It was so expansive, so beautiful. Her tears called out to my own, and I cried. But then I thought of you, and those tears dissolved. They were her tears, not my own. My left brain called out to me again, but in the form of you.

What is this reality? Why were you the thing to call me back, to redirect my dissolution into a logical absorption of information once again? To distract me from my own thoughts, my own tears? I think about living in that right brain space, that moment of nirvana, although even that word brings me right back into left-brain territory. Nirvana makes me think in a logical, linear line right back into the past, makes me think of India in a clear, straight line. Everything in order, even as I ponder divine chaos.

I love the idea of looking at my own body and thinking “I’m a weird sort of creature.” I own my body, that’s what I think most of the time. As a woman- a young, attractive woman- I am so used to fighting for the right to own my body. I feel I am constantly wresting it away from the stares of men. Fighting to hold on to the sense that it is mine, and separate from others. Sometimes, it makes me so tired. In those moments, something happens to me, like a hemorrhage in the brain, I suppose. In those moments I look down at my body, or I look into a mirror, and I see it all unraveling- piece by piece starting with all those coveted parts- my lips, my breasts, my legs. Then there is just a center left, a core and it doesn’t belong to me either. I’m a weird looking creature, without all those parts. And those parts are all pretty weird looking too. Schizophrenic misogyny, perhaps. There I am, floating out into the endless energy all around me, and each part starts to dissolve away. Those things others want go first, because they are the things I let go first and have traveled farthest away from my core. “Take them,” I think, they don’t belong to me. Nothing belongs to me. And then I feel very expansive, and for a moment: very beautiful.

Is this an experience of nirvana? In Buddhism it is all about attachment, but language inhabits the left hemisphere too, and so what do the words really do but bring us back into a place of blindness and distraction? In a place of no attachment, of nirvana: there is no “I am” there, no ownership at all.

The world is so harsh; the light like gunfire in my brain, and the sound a vast cacophony of horror from which no single voice can be distinguished. The experience of birth: when terror seizes us and makes us wail. Later, the pain of life teaches us to not be afraid. We get so adept at dealing with the pain and horror and the fear. We master it, we conquer it with drugs, we ignore it. Yet one single moment of complete right-brain consciousness is enough to remind us that the wonder of pain is a revelation, is a death. Death is the truth birth, and birth into this world: a brutal, slow murder.
But I don’t own the pain of the world any more than I own this body that is forced to absorb it. In that right brain place, all that pain is just a confusing and wondrous overlap of discordant memories- a golden retriever and the sound of your voice. Pictures as pixels, which my left brain reminds me is how digital cameras always see the world.

What is worth spreading? What did she say was worth squeezing herself into that tiny capsule of body again?

“We are the ___________________________ of the world. With manual dexterity. I am __________________________ and Dr. Jill Bolte ________________. That is the we inside of me. And you get to choose, what to be. What one would you choose? The more time we spend in the peacefulness of our right hemisphere, the more peaceful our world will be. And that, I thought, was an idea worth sharing.”

There are blanks in my memory. They aren’t my words. But I feel them settling into those porous parts of me, and the next time I crawl into that right-brain consciousness and begin to expand, I know they will have the space to grow.
Thank you for sharing.