Jill's stroke of insight
Hot on the heels of my previous post about suggesting the connectedness of all comes another find. This time it's a video of Jill Taylor describing her stroke experience. She's a scientist but she expresses herself in such poetic terms.
One of the central themes of the video is what do you choose to believe, how do you choose to live your life. She describes the right hemisphere of the brain as one that takes in sensory experience, and the left as one that connects the perceptions: metaphorically speaking bringing order to chaos. During her stroke her left hemisphere became inoperative and thus visual stimuli began to lose meaning. The pixels that make each character of this post lost meaning and became just dots. Her hand became some strange claw thing. She eventually described a sensation of losing the ability to discern where the boundaries of her body were. Who was she? Every now and then her left hemisphere would function and she'd snap back to reality, but then she'd fade away into la-la land again. Eventually she was able to retain enough sense to call for help.
It's an interesting thing to consider, that the left hemisphere of your brain gives meaning to your world. I even watched an episode of the Human Body on the Discovery channel where they chronicled a man who had lost his vision at 3 years old but got it back in his 40s. Vision is more than just taking in visual stimuli, it's also interpreting that. Having lost his vision at such a young age he found it difficult to see later in life, even though his eyes were working perfectly fine. He could see the face of his wife but had no clue he was looking at a face. Like those Magic Eye images that hide images in patterns. There's something there but you can't make sense of all the visual stimuli to discern it.
Poetically speaking, spirituality and science are a lot like the examples I just mentioned. Science might be the visual stimuli. It's what is, it's not a lie, no judgments, just what is. Spirituality interprets that which is seen. It would be like how a picture on a computer monitor is a collection of dots. Certainly a true statement. Is that all a picture is, just a random collection of differently colored dots? Why yes, even that statement is correct. The qualifier of the word "just" is a judgment. I inserted it to play the devil's advocate role I observe many skeptics take. "There is nothing else but a random collection of dots, stop trying to find meaning in it you fool!" :)
Of course one can choose to look at the random collection of dots and see patterns. One can choose to see a picture of a waterfall amongst the collection of dots. One can choose to see a picture of Calvin pissing on a flower. :) One can choose to see something that for whatever reason other people don't see -- modern art anyone. And yes, one can even choose to see the coming of the Zombie Apocalypse because I said the word brain one too many times. :) Perception perception perception. Choice choice choice. How do you choose to see your world?