The email was innocent enough. Sent by a well-meaning and always interesting friend, I opened it. Here is part of his text to me . . .

Hi Friends,

I just saw this and thought you would find it as engaging and inspiring as I did:

www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229

This is a presentation by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. Most importantly, this is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Okay, I said. It’s Sunday morning. I have time. Why not?

The URL is above, or the video is embedded here below.

{Spoiler Alert}

For those who do not have the time, or wish to make the time, to watch the entire eighteen minutes and forty-four second presentation, here’s the punchline:

After she awoke . . .

“I found Nirvana. I’m still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I’m still alive, and have found Nirvana, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana. Then I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time, and that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemisphere and find this peace.

“And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be, to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

. . .

“Who are we? We are the Life Force power of the Universe with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are, I am, the Life Force power of the Universe, the fifty trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, one with all that is.

“Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist.

“These are the we inside of me.

“Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.

“And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.”

Is it ever!