Hello guys, This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: Enlightenment: Is it any Fun?. This is part of a chapter titled The joys of meditation. Enlightenment: Is it any Fun? What IS meditation? Meditation is many things. One of them is a means to exercise your awareness muscle. Were all born with awareness. Its omnipresent, by definition. Were also born with a left- and right-brain, and this is where it gets tricky. In the western hemisphere, interestingly, (western, left) were encouraged to use our left-brains. This is the domain of linear, logical thinking and problem-solving. We have highly trained left-brains and the training begins early here. We start school at 5, 4, 3 years old. The eastern hemisphere, interestingly, (eastern, right) has long been associated with the characteristics of the right-brain. stillness, presence, Qi, surrender, what will be will be, relax, be in the now, and so on. What weve found in the west, with our brilliant left-brain investigative approach and rigorous scientific method, is that all emotions reside in the right-hemisphere of our brains – hereafter referred to as the right-brain. Here lies joy, sadness, peace, anxiety, curiosity, boredom and so on. Under test conditions, when subjects are induced to feel a range of emotions through various stimuli (puppy, loud noise, melodious tones, blood-soaked bandages etc), areas of the right-brain light-up. Emotional feeling is a right-brain phenomenon. So we need both our left-and right-brains for a full and wholesome life. Without the right-brain our lives, for all the left-brains efficiency, are simply not enjoyable, although neither are they upsetting. We cant feel with our left-brain. It isnt a feeling domain. There are no emotions here Its a doing, determining, working it out logically and talking about it problem-solving domain. None of that unpredictable touchy-fluffy-feely-nonsense here. The left-brain is all about future-past empirical evidence, and this is a very good thing. It brings the esoteric down to earth and makes sense of the unknown, from Copernicus to Einstein to Max Planck and beyond. I love understanding stuff from the left-brain perspective. I used my highly trained left-brain to very good effect in the military. I learned to fly fast-jets and search and rescue helicopters. I was an RAF pilot. Uncontrolled emotions can be unhelpful in a search and rescue scenario, so I learned to control them where appropriate. In fact I learned to over-control them, of which more later, but I love the left-brain. Its a magnificent thing. Without it we wouldnt have the world of literature, art, clarity, understanding and technology that we walk about with in this century. Equally, neither would we have, nor be variously enjoying and despising, the very same world we have, without the right-brain. First of all, the right-brain is the seat of intuition. Almost every major scientific breakthrough since the dawn of time has been prompted, or accompanied, by a moment of pure intuition, such that the harbingers of the breakthrough have often struggled to take credit for their work, being unable to explain, even to themselves, why they decided to take that step or try that. Einstein used to take a nap when face with an intractable problem. Ive used Einsteins method many times, not always deliberately. Naps allow the left-brain to switch off for a while, and in the gap, between unconscious sleep and full-awake-left-brain consciousness, theres an opportunity for the right-brain to filter through with what it knows, often stimulating an Aha! moment as this knowledge enters and becomes coded into language in our left-brain language-centre. We often use the phrase sinks in for a dawning realisation of something that previously we hadnt understood or couldnt explain with our left-brains. Meditation is a getting into the gap method. Sure enough, when I first began meditating, I would indeed sleep, a lot. I had many a staggering pop-up of intuition, but I couldnt sustain wakefulness and would invariably either fall asleep whilst meditating, or if I managed to keep myself awake, fall asleep immediately afterwards. I found meditating fulfilling but exhausting. I concluded I was really not very good at it, but persisted, intermittently, over the years. After many years, looking back, I realised I was supposed to fall asleep in the early days. It wasnt the meditation that was exhausting. I was exhausted. I had two young school-age children, and in common with most parents was stretching my days beyond their natural span, fitting into every 5 minutes all that could be crammed in in order to get the tasks done and the babies washed and fed and played with and tidied up after before the next task or day arrived. My husband was equally burning the candle at both ends and in the absence of awareness of our need for right-brain-time (we had both come from the military which had further honed our left-brains marvellously) we generated very little time for each other or ourselves to pause, take a breath, and really appreciate and enjoy the life we were living. The good news about the right-brain is that theres no time-awareness here, so time isnt an issue, so its possible for me to enjoy all that time and activity now - and I do. The same as when I was flying fast jets or helicopters, or any fully-absorbing activity. There are times when were all a bit too busy with, or absorbed in, the task to be conscious of how much we may be enjoying ourselves in the moment - and we may be controlling our emotions anyway - but occasionally a fleeting kind of inner gasp of awareness would bubble up into my mind of Wow, this is awesome!; but mainly Id feel the joy afterwards; sometimes years afterwards, and I can tap into it at any time. It doesnt matter when you feel the joy of an event. The wonderful thing is that the joy is always there, sitting, timelessly and ever-present, in the domain of your right-brain, and is ever-accessible. Isnt that nice? If youd like to take a break and view two awesome examples of right-brain activity harnessed to left-brain activity, I recommend these two clips. They both absolutely blow me away. The first video of John Wiles is long but so worth it. The filming and presentation, of content that is staggeringly hard to follow for this common woman who took four attempts to get her Maths O-level, is just beautiful. It allowed me to persist and stay with this genius mathematician and follow his wonderful journey into a world I stand in joyous awe and wonder of. Maths. Blimey. Whod have thought it could be so beautiful? (I think Einstein knew). The second clip is equally beautiful, of Jill Bolte-Taylor, a neuroscientist, talking about her observing and reacting to her own stroke as it took place. Really. Life. Its amazing, isnt it? Fermatts last theorem vimeo/18216532 A stroke of insight, Jill Bolte-Taylor https://youtube/watch?v=QTrJqmKoveU So, without intuition our left-brains would be still stuck with some of the thorniest problems of the last few centuries. Second of all, as already intimated, without our right-brains, all of the left-brain work weve done or do, simply wouldnt be enjoyable. The adage All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy directly addresses this need for balance. If we overly rely on, or identify with, our right-brain, little doing gets done. Its, quite literally, time-out. Theres no measure of time in joy, misery or grief. One of the reasons emotional pain can feel so bad is because in it we stop being aware that it will end. It feels endless because its timeless. We need to be reminded by a left-brain - ours or someone elses - that this too will pass, in order to be more aware of our natural balance - because grief or pain does pass, naturally, with time. We dont have the same problem with joy because theres no fear here of its timelessness - but it does end, because we have a left-brain too that deals in time. Its a very interesting world. ...and thats the end of this excerpt for now. If you like it, let me know :)) xxx
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 09:12:51 +0000
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