April 18, 2008

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A dear and close personal friend directed me to this remarkable TED Talk by Dr Jill .Bolte Taylor, Harvard brain scientist and stroke survivor. She has some extraordinary observations about her own brain, as, and after, she suffered the stroke. She entitled the book she wrote about her experience,"My Stroke of Insight".

Taylor tells us that "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 it smells like, what it feels like what it sounds like..... We are energy beings connected to the energy all around us through the consciousness of our right hemispheres ....".

As if to emphasize this point, the universe provided a profound contrast. On the day I received Taylor's talk, I attended the wake of a twenty seven year old free skier whose clearly vibrant, energetic connection had been tragically severed when he missed a jump and tumbled to his death down the mountain. His body, clad in a yellow ski suit, lay still in an open casket a few feet from his grieving family as they received hundreds of mourners. To quote a friend, it was a fierce reminder that the body is just a suitcase

Photo note: The animate and the inanimate and the split.

Posted by Dakota at April 18, 2008 07:49 PM | TrackBack