Hello, all –
A couple of days ago, a package arrived with a book in it: My Stroke
of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD (Viking Penguin, 2006). There
was no note or return address (except that of the shipper), so I have no
idea whom to thank. But thanks, for sure.
Jill Taylor got her PhD in neuroanatomy, and was vitally interested in
how the brain works. She was employed at Harvard when, awakening on the
morning of Dec. 10, 1996, she suffered a severe hemmorhagic stroke that
devastated the left hemisphere of her brain. For a time she lost a large
part of her hierarchy of perception and control. But she remained aware
and capable of thought and memory (obviously), and in this book describes
her whole experience including her essentially complete recovery over a
period of five years or so.
I plan to write to her to find out if what she described at various
points in the narrative was what I call the Observer Self. Another
fascinating idea was that she somehow was consciously helping her damaged
brain to reorganize – to relearn, in effect, the skills that had been
destroyed, as if for the first time. This, of course, raises the question
of whether this is how the learning takes place originally – I have
wondered whether the phenomena of awareness and reorganization that we
explore in the Method of Levels are being guided somehow by the Observer
Self. This is not to say that the Observer already knows all the skills
and teaches them to the brain, but only that there is some sense of
orderliness or completeness or – well, something – that sets
goals to be achieved and keeps reorganization going. Vague ideas, I know,
but when one is ignorant all ideas start out vague.
Throughout the book, she speaks of “my brain” as if it is
something she can observe working, something she depends on and loves,
something she takes care of – but not something she IS. When people talk
that way I always want to ask who is talking, because the observed
phenomena are clearly not the one who is observing them. All the
properties of the self, or selves, seem to belong to the brain, but the
observer self does not have those properties.
When Jill was first cut off from contact with large parts of her brain,
she was isolated in a new way. But instead of feeling only terror,
sorrow, and confusion, she experienced the same thing I experienced in my
experiments, back in the 1950s, with Kirk Sattley, and that Kirk reported
too: a sense of peace and wholeness, a release from all the tensions of
living. No conflicts. She, as did Kirk and I, speculated that this state
was what the Eastern philosophers spoke of as enlightenment, satori, and
so on. Non-attachment. It seems that this state of being has been known
about for many thousands of years. Of course the descriptions get
embellished with religious and mystical interpretations as people invent
theories and try to explain the experiences, but aside from that the
descriptions seem remarkably uniform. There is something real
there.
Actually, I’ve decided to CC this post to Dr. Taylor (to show her a
little of the respect she deserves) and will just leave it to her to
decide if there’s anything here worth looking into. There is too much to
talk about to cram it all into a first-contact post.
I thank the unknown person who sent me the book, and recommend it to both
the neuroscientists and psychotherapists in our group.
Best to all,
Bill
P.S. Dr. Jill, check out
[
http://www.pctweb.org