Want inner peace? Have a stroke.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist, had a stroke that effectively shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. It took her 8 years to fully recover. In this video she shares her experience of entirely losing her sense of herself as an individual being.

Mystics, meditators, and psychadelic explorers have been to that “place;” a bleeding brain took her there. To her it felt profoundly spiritual but also underscored her understanding of the vastly different roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Are we spiritual beings capable of having physical experiences or physical beings capable of having spiritual experiences? I think the way that we’re “wired” prevents us from being able to know which is true. Does such a dichotomy even serve us?

Science continues to demonstrate how electrical impulses and chemicals interact to create our perception, which can include vast experiences of consciousness. If we truly are nothing more than extraordinarily complex machines, does that really matter? We do know that what matters in our relation to others and the world is what we do in the physical realm.

[via Open Culture]