| This isn't your usual TED talk. What Jill describes sounds to me a lot like a major acid trip - the boundaries between you and the world become indistinct, the whole sense of "you," indeed, becomes indistinct. The left brain occasionally starts up, like some unruly heckler - "Hey! There's a problem here! You need to do something about this!"
And then she slips back into being amazed at all the energy, in between trying to invent new ways to decipher telephone numbers, and remember that she needs to call one for help.
Really amazing piece, and well worth watching if only for the part where she whips out the brain (for illustrative purposes), if thinking about thinking doesn't grab you.
It does me, though, and I've been thinking about this TED talk ever since I saw it.
I've always thought of myself as a left-brain person. Not too visual, good at talking, argumentative. But I'm starting to think I've been wrong about that, badly wrong.
I used to take LSD. Maybe 100 times? from about 1973 through 1980 (and then once in 1990). It always felt rather like coming home, and it often felt a lot like Jill describes in her talk.
When I was a little kid (which I don't remember really well) I used to be quite the artist, and I suspect my family suspected I was maybe...well...autistic?
I have a lot of people in my family who meet the description of talky, goal-oriented, debaters. Left-brain oriented people. I can remember the time in my adolescence when I realized that there was more to it than that, that I was not my left brain.
But now I'm starting to wonder if I was just remembering something I'd forgotten earlier.
Ever since then (and perhaps before then), I've had this abiding sense that there are a lot of people around who think that they are their left brains, and that the right brains are big dark scary places better avoided.
Alternately, there are people who pretty much live in their right brains, and are considered funny or strange or even defective, by those who are less comfortable with that place.
I remember from all of those acid trips, a gradual progression of learning how to integrate my left brain into what was essentially a right brain experience. Eventually I got to where I could take acid under all sorts of adverse public circumstances and "maintain." I did, however, find that a rather boring thing to do while tripping. I could have a lot better time sitting in my room listening to snow melt off the roof.
But the left brain does not understand the value of sitting listening to snow melt off the roof, unless there is some measurement involved, or perhaps the excuse of waiting for something else to happen. The left brain is saying; "Hey, this isn't normal, just sitting here like this. Somebody is going to think there's something wrong with you."
Because that's what the left brain does to the right brain. It's uniquely suited to do so, because the right brain really doesn't care. It's far to pleasant hanging around in the right brain, to bother with all of these silly left brain arguments, that ignore the obvious, which is that it's all here now, always has been, always will be. And that sitting and listening to snow melt off the roof is one of the very best things anybody can do.
I'm finding it helpful to consider myself, perhaps not an endlessly inadequate left brain-oriented person, but instead a repressed right brain-oriented person. Much falls into place. Maybe I could get somewhere with this.
That is, if I can just stop listening to this snow melt? |
