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A scientific experience of cosmic proportions
Article from Yoga News copyright 2008
On Dec. 10, 1996, Jill Taylor woke up to a pounding pain behind her left eye,
what she described as “the kind of caustic pain you get when you bite
into ice-cream.“ Gradually, over the next four hours, she watched
as, one by one, her brain functions, speech, movement and comprehension
began to leave her. She had suffered a stroke.
Each year, nearly three-quarter of a million people suffer a stroke in North America alone. What was unique about Jill Taylor
is not that she was and still is a renowned neurobiologist, whose life is
dedicated to the study of the human brain, but it is the profound experience
that it left her with, and the change it has made in her life and her work.
It took eight years for her to “fully recover”, as she puts it,
and in February, 2008 she recounted her experience in an eighteen-minute
lecture at the cutting-edge TEDtalks conference in Monterey, California.
In that presentation, Taylor
presents herself at the opening as the quintessential neuroscientist, giving
a brief but rather academic overview of the hemispheres of the brain and the
scientific classifications of their various neurological functions.
It’s not until she treads into the depths of her personal experience
that the transformative weight of that life-changing morning is revealed.
What she proceeds to narrate is a tale of experience that is both
heart-warming and though-provoking. The yogi would easily recognize her
sensation of the dissolution of her ego-self into the expansive state of
universal one-ness. As she describes it, “I found nirvana. I remember
thinking that there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself
back inside this tiny little body.”
Perhaps the full scope of it all was not truly absorbed by the hundreds of
people, scientists, media personalities and folks from all walks of life who
listened intently with reserve while she showered them with the profound
emotion of her experience.
That’s no surprise. After all, what she was attempting to illustrate is
an experience that, by its very nature, defies description. An incident that
some of a purely scientific bent may no doubt attribute solely to the firing
or misfiring of neurons and other biological processes, but an experience
that the yogis would certainly appreciate as something much more… one
that few today can appreciate or even approximate… what Taylor herself
describes as a “tremendous gift”.
In the end, she speaks the profound truth that lies at the very heart of the
practice of yoga: “I realized that if I have found nirvana, then anyone
who is alive can find nirvana… I pictured a world filled with
beautiful, peaceful, loving, compassionate people who know that they could
come to this space at any time, and that they could purposely choose to step
to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace.”
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