Far From the Madding Crowd (The New York Times, D.Browning, Book Review, Sept. 13, 2009) A Book of Silence, b y Sara Maitland (2008), is a brilliant exploration of something — or is it a nothing? — that right at the start is impossible to define precisely. Is silence the absence of words? Or is it the absence of sound altogether? Is there even such a thing as silence that we can experience?
The control of human thoughts depends fundamentally on slowing down the activity of
our left brain for long enough to perceive the still, quiet spiritual voice
previously completely drowned in the cacophony of external noise. Hence the
proverb "silence is golden". Only in silence can the golden 'treasure' of
enlightenment, which comes from inner thinking, be realized! One practices meditation to obtain the inner quiet needed to put one in contact with the right brain. When Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed her left brain, she was transported directly into the intuitive domain of mind that enables us to tune in to the whole Ultimate Reality, to the cosmos, to the Universal Mind. 
In her amazing video, which explores this experience, Professor Bolte Taylor explains what occurs When a Brain Scientist Suffers a Stroke. The story was reported, first in The New York Times, Mar 16, 2008; once again in her book, My Stroke of Insight, which earned a second review in The New York Times, "A Superhighway to Bliss " May 25, 2008. Updated November 22, 2009 |