A Neuroscientist Shares The Tremendous Insight She Gained While Having A Near Death Experience
What if your left brain suddenly shut off and only the right side of your brain were active and working? This is something that can happen when you have a stroke, and exactly what neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor experienced in 1996 — and she was conscious of it happening. Taylor’s story is not a new one. She gave a TED talk about the amazing journey she had the morning of her stroke and wrote a book about what she learned. I wanted to draw attention to this story today because ‘consciousness’ has become a huge topic recently, and Jill’s story, which gets at the heart of who we truly are, offers much to the discussion. Think about some of the shows and movies that have taken over the collective consciousness over the past two years — The OA, Stranger Things, Sense 8, Interstellar, The Arrival, Unacknowledged — and you’ll see these share a common theme: the exploration of our reality and consciousness. Even if these themes weren’t obvious to everyone who watched, they planted seeds that continue to germinate a desire to explore more about our reality and who we are. A subject once viewed as purely religious has now become more acceptable to explore and to discuss scientifically. Once viewed as pseudoscience, consciousness is now becoming self evident. “We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.” But why? Why now? Why has this subject become so huge, not just in the minds of explorers, but also in pop culture? I examined this question in 2011 when I began a film project to discover why humanity seemed to be going through a mass shift in consciousness. I looked at science, the cosmos, daily global events, and what ancient cultures had been saying for years about things that apply to our own time, and I discovered that we are in fact going through the greatest and most profound shift in human history. No it’s not a renaissance, a small revolution of ideas, a new tech age, or even the natural progression that happens from generation to generation. This is much bigger. You can watch the film we released for free here. In this moment it may be hard to wrap our minds around it, just as Jill had trouble grasping everything she was discovering during her stroke. This is why it’s imperative to practice presence and going within. I also believe it’s imperative to do this sober. “Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness.” We can achieve this through meditation and presence. We are always pushing for things like alcohol, cannabis, or psychedelics to calm ourselves, but until we truly recognize and ground in the fact that we must be able to live that reality in everyday life, at peace, with our soul connected and aware in our reality, we are simply still living unconscious. What we KNOW in our mind is not what defines how consciously aware we are of ourselves and reality. We can know a ton of words to describe what we truly are, but until we can experience it sober in everyday life, it’s simply a mental understanding, not one we are living. Jill Bolte Taylor Taylor describes an understanding that we all can achieve through practice, meditation, taking quiet time to remember, or shifting consciousness through processes like those we use in our 5 Days of You Challenge. “So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are — I am — the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist.
These are the “we” inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.” I recently explored these questions in a status I posted on Facebook that I think is important to share here too: I still think most of us underestimate the true nature of the shift we are experiencing on this planet. This isn’t a small revolution in tech, business, our economy or ideas... we’re reshaping the entire human experience from one that operates on ego and disconnection to one that has our soul living and driving our experience. We won’t need activism and revolutionary new ideas because the consciousness that will form, and is forming, on this planet (that of oneness consciousness) is not rigid, does not need “waking up,” and evolves naturally. Our systems will flow and change fluidly, there won’t be a fight to make it happen. We won’t need marketing to convince millions down a different path. We won’t even need this whole idea of sustainability and to teach our kids because it’s simply part of that state of consciousness. Most changemakers and “thought leaders” are still approaching this whole shift from a 3D level of consciousness in many ways. I ring this bell right now because I feel it’s imperative we actually begin to anchor our meditations and thoughts in a reality that taps into the emerging consciousness and not one where we use our minds to try and figure out how to project a world that’s still of this state of consciousness but simply with some more harmonious elements. Get out of the mind and explore what the future really looks like, dream! ... and try it sober, the truth is within you and it’s time to start practicing that deeply. .
Read the full article at the original website
References:
