As a clinical psychologist skilled in neuropsychology, I learned years ago that the two halves of the cerebral cortex function quite differently. It is as if there are two brains constantly being coordinated by a thick band of nerve fibers connecting them.
In brief, the left hemisphere houses speech, thought, identity, and numerical functions—skills we associate with education and analytic thinking. In contrast, the right hemisphere processes non-linguistic, intuitive and perceptual-spatial functions that operate in the immediate here and now, giving us a rich picture or feeling sense of the whole experience. When I look at my desk, the left hemisphere analyzes the names, significance, and purpose of everything on it, while the right hemisphere opens a sensory-perceptual experience of the whole collage, without the intervention of thought.
Now here is the really interesting part. This difference in function between the hemispheres creates the duality that spiritual writers have described for millennia. Specifically, the left side of the cerebral cortex creates all our stories about identity, orientation, meaning, purpose, and how things work. Its inner “chatter” is constantly reminding us of who and where we are, the nature of our personal problems, and what’s wrong with the world. The right hemisphere of the brain, on the other hand, lives in the mysterious, captivating and timeless here-and-now.
In sum, the left hemisphere creates the World of Man—with all its beliefs, structures, roles, laws, and ideologies—while the right side holds our capacity to experience enlightenment, unity, and Heaven on Earth. The left hemisphere's preference for conceptualization and self-talk interferes with right hemisphere's awareness of reality's mystical dimensions. Thus as long the left side dominates consciousness, we are locked out of Heaven.
In 1996, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a massive stroke effectively incapacitating the left hemisphere of her brain. In My Stroke of Insight (Viking, 2006), she describes this experience from the inside. With her mind’s inner chatter silenced, she was completely dependent on her brain's right hemisphere functions.
To Jill's surprise, she began to experience feelings of unity, bliss and joy. She writes, “As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent, and I became detached from the memories of my life, I was confronted by an expanding sense of grace. In this void of higher cognition and details pertaining to my normal life, my consciousness soared into an all knowingness, a 'being at one' with the universe, if you will” (p. 41). “My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow…My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea” (p. 69).
She continues, “For all those years of my life, I really had been a figment of my imagination!” (p. 70) Now, she says, “In the absence of my left hemisphere’s negative judgment, I perceived myself as perfect, whole, and beautiful just the ways I was” (p. 71).
It took Jill eight years to recover fully from her stroke. Summarizing its spiritual significance, she said, “I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time. I believe the experience of Nirvana exists in the consciousness of our right hemisphere, and that at any moment, we can choose to hook into that part of our brain…My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is to silence the voice of our dominating left mind” (p. 111). In a later email to me, she added, “I am very clear that right hemisphere consciousness is heaven.”
Jill's unity experiences are neither unusual nor surprising. The alternation of duality and mystical consciousness, as spiritual seekers have described for centuries, represents an intrinsic aspect of brain structure and its neuropsychological functioning. We are born to be enlightened, but we need to learn how to quiet the left brain and tune into our under-developed capacity for transcendence in the right brain. This explains the value of spiritual practices such as meditation, dance, and art.
While the World of Man has contributed to humanity in many invaluable ways (such as science, technology, medicine, and religion), our two hemispheres are still out of balance. As we learn to access the right hemisphere's experience of mystical consciousness, a new balance and integration will become possible, and new human capabilities will evolve.
We are here to build a new world: Heaven on Earth.
----------
NOTES
Taylor, Jill. (2006). My Stroke of Insight. Viking (Penguin Group): New York, NY
