6th Sunday of Easter, Year A - My Stroke of Insight

My Stroke of Insight is a very clever title for the book.  The author, Jill Bolte Taylor, would not call herself a Christian or a member of any other religion, for that matter.  She had devoted her life to science, and had become a highly accomplished Harvard neuro-anatomist, who was already winning prestigious awards in her thirties.  It is clear that she is both brilliant and dedicated to her study of the brain, with a kind of nerdy charm of someone who is genuinely enthusiastic about learning.  She also holds no romanticized notions about mental illness.  Her brother has suffered intensely from his schizophrenia, and it was a desire to help him and others like him that led her to her research of the brain in the first place.  In her spare time, she became involved with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and became the youngest person ever elected to their board.  

So it came as a huge surprise to her that she got up one morning and had a sudden stroke at the age of 37.  Her book describes in detail the piercing pain as the brain hemorrhage advances, the frustration of knowing she needs to get help but can’t think clearly enough to get it, the difficulty of having to dial a phone when numbers on a business card just look like meaningless squiggles, and when her colleague answers the phone, to try to ask for help when she can neither decipher his speech nor form words herself.

The functioning of various sections of her brain comes and goes in waves.  The damage to her brain is severe, so severe that if she had lost her will to live she might very well have slipped into death.  But she wants to live.  She prays that she will live.  It takes her eight years to recover from the stroke, which includes doing a tremendous amount of extremely hard work, and enduring a considerable amount of physical pain.  It is not something anyone would choose to go through.  But she is profoundly grateful to have had this experience, and even more profoundly grateful that she has lived to tell about it, because telling about it is vitally important to her.  

She describes the moment that her right arm falls totally paralyzed at her side: “Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool.  This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" 

There is a part of her that is suffering, and a part of her that is deeply peaceful.  And when I talk about these two parts of her, I mean that quite literally.  In the book, she provides a scientific explanation of the differences between the left part of the brain, which suffers, and the right part of the brain, which is peaceful.  

She also gives a 15-minute TED Talk in which she stands on a stage holding in her hands a human brain and showing that the separation between the two hemispheres of the brain is visible.  I’ll put the link to her TED talk in the written version of the sermon so you can watch it yourself if you want to: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight

I’m using quotes from her TED talk as well as quotes from her book today.  She decribes the differences between the two parts of the brain: 

“Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about ‘right here, right now.’ Our right hemisphere thinks in pictures. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another  as one human family. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. 

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details, details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter. It's that little voice that says to me, ‘Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning.’ 

But perhaps most important, as soon as my left hemisphere says to me ‘I am,’ I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.”  Taylor says the left hemisphere of her brain suddenly goes “offline”: 

 “My left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.  I remember thinking, there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.  

She describes the sense of being free of all the stress from her job, free of all the stress from other people, and free of 37 years of emotional baggage:  Can you imagine that?  It is euphoria.

“My left hemisphere had been trained to percieve myself as a solid, separate from others.  Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow.  I was no longer isolated and alone.  My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea….Prior to this morning, when I had experienced myself as a solid, I had possessed the ability to experience loss—either physical loss via death or injury, or emotional loss through heartache.  But in this shifted perception, it was impossible for me to perceive either physical or emotional loss because I was not capable of experiencing separation or individuality.  Despite my neurological trauma, an unforgettable sense of peace pervaded my entire being and I felt calm.”

But she is thrilled that she is still alive after having found this connection, and she wants other people to find it too.  At the end of her TED talk, she tells her audience,

“I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew 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. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be, to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover. 

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. I am 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.

The audience applauds.

People in my line of work spend a lot of time thinking about how to talk about our connection to God and the spiritual world in a way that people will not dismiss you as a wacko.  It is not an easy task, and it gets harder all the time as more and more people in modern society are predisposed to think of religious people as wacko even before you open your mouth.  So I am grateful to have a highly respected neuroanatomist talk about her glimpse into the spiritual world.  The words she uses to describe it are her own words, and they are different from mine.  

She reminds me of kids minding their own business, messing around in the upstairs room of an old house, hiding in a wardrobe full of old coats, leaning into them, and suddenly stumbling into Narnia.  Jill Bolte Taylor seems to have stumbled into something that Christian theologians have been trying to tell us about for centuries: the sense of divine infinity and eternity being not something separate from us, but something that is within us.  This is what the apostle Paul is trying to tell the Athenians in today’s reading from Acts 17: “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands; he gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. They would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him-- though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For `In him we live and move and have our being';”

God is not far from each one of us.  God is as near as the right hemisphere of your own brain.  God is in you.  In him we live and move and have our being.  Has Jill Bolte Taylor stumbled on the reality that Jesus was talking about 2000 years ago:   

Jesus said to his disciples, "This is the Spirit of truth. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.  You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

I can see why we human beings have trouble wrapping our minds around the concept of the Trinity.  It won’t quite fit into our left brain.  But when the brain chatter of our left brain settles down for a little while, our right brain feels right at home in the blissful, euphoric, connectedness of the Trinity.  Hasn’t Jesus been trying to tell us all along about the reality of this peace, this connectedness in God, in which nothing is separate, and eternity is in the present moment, and infinity is right here?  The Holy Spirit is God within us.  Jesus tells us, “The Spirit abides with you, and he will be in you.  I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.  Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”   It’s not as strange as it seems, really.

Jesus says, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.”  And what are Jesus’ commandments?  He tells us: “Love God.  Love your neighbor.”  Peace.  Compassion.  

Taylor says,  “I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. 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.”

I do not think Jill Bolte Taylor is the Messiah, and I do not think her book contains all things necessary to salvation.  But I think she’s on to something real.  When the Apostle Paul stands in front of the Areopagus to speak to the Athenians, he begins by pointing out to them that they already have a sense of connection to holiness; he points out that they have an altar with the inscription, “to an unknown God.”  He goes on to say, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”  His task as a preacher is to name the unknown god, and he tells them the good news of the gospel, and how it enriches the sense of connection to holiness that they have already.  

It is a good way to deal with the skepticism in the world, and the skepticism in ourselves: to begin with whatever sense of connection to God we have, which God gives to people so that they will search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him-- though indeed he is not far from each one of us.  For `In him we live and move and have our being.'  It is an idea worth spreading.