Nirvana

Today I watched this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
About a neuroanatomist who studied her own stroke. At the end of it I almost cried.

There is such a power to the desire to “transcend”, to see beyond what we notice every day, to penetrate our physical experiences to a greater understanding. I think in some way this is what all exercise is about – shutting off the brain that monitors, quieting the dialogue of our place in the world.

Jill explains that the left hemisphere of our brain monitors linear time and experience, projecting forward from the data of history it picks up. The right hemisphere processes sense and the current moment. She comments on how we live always with our left brain, planning and taking stock, and in her stroke she experienced the full death of that process. Dr. Taylor labeled her experience in right-brain existence as nirvana, the state that ancient philosophers and Buddhists spend lifetimes trying to attain. Is nirvana as simple as shutting off the left brain, of silencing our thoughts on time and duty?

I must do some more reading, as I am confused. From what I thought, nirvana traditionally also incorporates shutting out sense, it is a quest for pure removal of the individual from our experience of everything, which is not the same as isolating our senses to one particular form of interpreting it. The thought, though, is beautiful, of the ability to escape, to understand our inter-connectedness, our eternal fluidity of existence. This is what made me want to cry.