by Evelyn Rysdyk
For many years, we've been told that our brains are laterally divided in their abilities. That is, some tasks were either accomplished by the left or right brain. Left brain tasks were those requiring logic, detail, factual information, math, language, names and patterns. On the other hand right brain activity was about feelings, imagination, symbols/images, spacial perception, and understanding function. This brain power division of labor is called the neural wiring theory.
More recent research tells us that most often our brain hemispheres work in concert. In an article in The New Scientist (www.newscientist.com/article/mg16321934.600-left-brain-right-brain.html) author John McCrone discussed the work of clinical neurologists Gereon Fink of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany and John Marshall from the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford who used scans to look at brain activity. They had been pursuing the idea that the difference between the sides of the brain was their style of working. McCrone talked about their findings in this way, "The left brain...focused on detail. This would make it the natural home for all those mental skills that need us to act in a series of steps or fix on a particular fragment of what we perceive--skills such as recognizing a friend's face in a crowd or "lining up" words to make a sentence."
He added, "By contrast, the right brain concentrated on the broad, background picture. The researchers believed it had a panoramic focus that made it good at seeing general connections; this hemisphere was best able to represent the relative position of objects in space and to handle the emotional and metaphorical aspects of speech. So, in a neat and complementary division of labour, one side of the brain thought and saw in wide-angle while the other zoomed in on the detail."
While these studies are more about function and less about consciousness, there are still clues that can help us to understand ourselves and our two minds. Our left hemisphere's processing is more focused on the linear and local, while the right-side processing is tilted towards the big picture and the non-local.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who teaches at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Bloomington, Indiana. When she had a stroke in 1996, she had a unique opportunity to observe her brain from the inside as part of it shut down. Dr. Taylor's experience offers us a way to look at the way we think and also how we are a combination of two different and interlinked forms of consciousness.
She describes the right hemisphere as "about this present moment. ...it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically...Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like." She described the right "mind" as one that perceives that, " 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 through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful."
She describes the left hemisphere as the one that, "thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking details and more details and more details about those 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 all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world." Dr. Taylor also realized through her experience that this hemisphere is the one that has "that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And 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."
When Dr Taylor had her left hemisphere stroke, that part of her consciousness/mind went "off line". She was no longer able to hear mind chatter, the stress of her ordinary life was gone and she had a sense of peace. Once she received medical attention and realized that she would live, she knew that she had to share her story. She said that she could "picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space (the peaceful place of right brain consciousness) 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." Her complete recovery took over two years.
We have the power to move the focus of our consciousness from left into right. By choosing to use our mind in this manner, we can quite literally change the course and texture of our lives. Dr. Taylor describes us as "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." We can either consistently choose the consciousness that see us as separate, isolated beings or spend more time in the consciousness of connection and peace. Dr. Taylor's experience reinforces this amazing truth.
I would describe the right mind as the Consciousness of Spirit and Energy. It has the awareness of our eternal, timeless nature and it is this mind that we contact through deep meditation and prayer. It is the part of our consciousness that sees everything as one incredibly rich and complex Whole into which we are inextricably woven. It is the mind that accesses the cosmic consciousness.
By choosing to spend more time in the right hemisphere, we begin to strengthen the awareness of ourselves as connected, timeless and eternal beings. More importantly, we shift ourselves into beings that radiate the "right consciousness" into the world.
-Evelyn
Here is a video of Dr. Taylor's talk about her stroke and resulting consciousness awareness that has been circulating on the internet. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.) Video courtesy of TED. (www.ted.com)
Evelyn C. Rysdyk, author of Modern Shamanic Living is a nationally recognized presenter. Included in the book Traveling Between the Worlds she is among the world’s most influential writers and teachers of shamanism.
Originally trained in core shamanism, she has integrated practices taught to her by elders from North and South America, Central Asia, Nepal and Siberia. She is also a Medicine for the Earth Teacher--teaching ways that transfigured human energy can heal our planet.
With her partner C. Allie Knowlton, MSW, LCSW, DCSW she presents
eco-spiritually focused training programs--which include advanced shamanism and shamanic healing---across the USA and Canada. In addition, as a founding member of True North, a unique, integrated medical center in Falmouth, Maine--she collaborates with physicians, nurses, a psychiatrist, a naturopath and several other complementary healthcare practitioners to provide a new model of health care that includes the spirit.
www.spiritpassages.org
www.spiritliving.org
The Herald Sun newspaper of Melbourne, Australia published an online a test to determine which side of your brain is you dominant hemisphere. You can find it at: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html.
-Editors.
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