This I know to be true:
There are a few people in this world who have the supernatural ability to pull an event from our future timeline and manifest it in our present reality simply because we were in need of a miracle. Now, these are not some well-marketed magicians or crowd-amassing clairvoyants. They don’t have their hands hovering over a crystal ball or noses buried in horoscopes. They don’t break the internet with their popularity because it is not in their making to seek attention. They don’t even want to have anything to do with any of us, yet if our path crossed with theirs and if their grace was upon us, they can rewrite our future with just their thought.
These are the people who have the ability to go beyond the silence within them and for label-driven, logic peddlers like some of us, they are famously known as the enlightened ones.
Tangent #1 – My Stroke of Insight:
Fair credits to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the book My Stroke of Insight, because of whom I now believe that enlightenment is a flip of the switch, a covert action potential that resides in the right hemisphere of everyone’s brain. It is not an abstract accomplishment exclusive to the spiritually ordained but rather a lightning bolt of a sneak peek into something beyond us that could hit any John Doe or Jane Doe when they least expect it.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk is easily one of the best talks of all times for me where she narrates how her life turned upside down when she woke up one morning with a full blown headache. This Harvard-trained neuroanatomist was rather surprised to realize that what she felt was actually the oncoming of a stroke caused by a blood clot pushing on the left hemisphere of her brain. She goes on to narrate moment by moment how her brain altered her viewpoint as it deteriorated, which she states as, ‘seeing the workings of the brain from the inside out’. The highlight of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s story is that when the logical left hemisphere started shutting down function after function and the brain chatter ceased causing her to feel like her mind had gone offline, she began to notice the sea of tranquility that belonged to the right hemisphere, an engulfing silence where she felt as pure energy one with all that is, very much similar to the concept of enlightenment.
Tangent #2 – Savants:
There is something called savant syndrome where people with mental disabilities from birth (congenital savants) or in some healthy individuals following a brain injury (acquired savants) show prodigious skills without any prior training in areas like math, music or art. According to Dr. Darold A. Treffert, the psychiatrist who studied the syndrome extensively refer to savants as people who “know things they never learned”.
These unusual-minded people could comprehend the rules of music so intuitively that despite having never had a music lesson before, they could replay classical compositions flawlessly after hearing it only once – like the 18th century prolific composer, Mozart, who wrote down the Sistine Chapel’s much-guarded and exclusive composition, Miserere, entirely from memory after listening to it just once.
They could do lightning arithmetic calculations and solve exponential math problems by visualizing numbers as three dimensional shapes with colors and textures that make them see the answer in their minds instantly without having to actually solve it – like the gifted engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla who solved arithmetic problems by envisioning a blackboard where the operations appeared step by step so rapidly that by the time the problem was presented by the teacher, he would have already arrived at the solution.
They can create original symphonies, write pages of structured poetry, and produce expressive paintings, not through the conscious effort on their part but rather compelled by the urge of inspiration surging through them unbidden and unrestrained from a source they know is beyond their minds – like the intuitive mathematical genius of the 20th century, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed that his equations and formulae, which are now considered to be significant in understanding string theory and black holes despite these things having been unheard of during his time, were revealed to him in his dreams by his ancestral goddess Namagiri.
What is striking is that in most of these savants, neuroscientists have observed that the disability was always in the left hemisphere of the brain while the hidden magic that it brought forth belonged to the right hemisphere, similar to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s story.
Tangent #3 – Near Death Experience:
Anthony Cicoria is one such acquired savant, an orthopedic surgeon by profession, who was struck by a lightning following which he developed an insatiable desire to listen to piano music. Soon thereafter he started hearing original compositions in his head, initially in vivid dreams and later whenever he tried to listen or play others’ work, that compelled him to eventually learn to play the piano and write music. He claims that his compositions are being, ‘given to him from the other side’ and that he finds his experience to be a virtual rebirth of sorts for the purpose of “tuning into” the music that flows through him spontaneously.
But Dr. Cicoria’s spiritual reboot happened well before music came into the picture, in fact right when the lightning hit him sending him flying backwards while at the same moment he sensed himself moving forward. Confused, he turned around to see his body on the floor and everything he experienced from that point onward was classic near-death in nature – a phenomenon described by many who had a brush with death that typically includes being immersed in a bright but pleasant light, feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and love, seeing a flash of various scenes from one’s life, and meeting spiritual beings or long lost relatives and communicating with them not with words but simply receiving the communication in a manner that is clearer than hearing.
Tangent #4 – The Brain
Brain is a biological instrument, an amazing and complex one, but nevertheless an instrument made up of a hundred billion nerve cells called neurons, each connected to 10,000 other neurons that pass information via 1,000 trillion connections every second.
The brain sits in a dark, hard place and has no clue what the outside world is like, yet it perceives the world by receiving information through our sensory portals, transforming them into electrical impulses, and interpreting patterns from the database perfected over eons of evolution, thus painting our reality as we know it.
The neurons don’t contain data but only positive and negative ions. So when we see a red rose, what really happens is that the photons of light enter the retina, stimulate the photoreceptor cells to exchange the ions, thus generating an electrical signal that is transmitted among other neurons and cross referenced with patterns stored in memory to ultimately make us go, “Oh, a red rose”, all of this at a mind-boggling speed.
Everything is an electrical impulse – a rose, a face, a fragrance, a touch, even a thought is an electrical impulse.
The Point Where the Lines Curve:
The brain cannot think on its own. The brain is not capable of creating a subjective experience. When we saw the rose, our brain did not create it but only received it to stimulate the relevant neurons. Then will it be fair to say that when we think a thought, our brain did not create our thought but only received it as a stimulus?
We have people who were declared to be clinically dead because they had a cardiac arrest that halted blood supply to the brain killing any neuron firings, but when resuscitated were able to recall events that happened during that flatline period. When they had no brain functions or brain wave activities how could they have experienced those images of peace, light, memories, and events? Even if their brains did have some residual active neurons that were undetected by the brain scanners, from where did those neurons get the stimulation to generate electrical signals that interpreted those thoughts of peace?
In the case of savants, some experts claim that the artistic abilities surging forth without any prior learning could be the result of genetic memory stored by some dormant neurons, which were released into action by a damaged left hemisphere. This could be a fair theory to some extent because of the way our brains work – the left hemisphere actively suppresses other areas of the brain in order to focus on what is important. For example, if it were exclusively up to the right hemisphere, we would be reveling in the beauty of the tiny pixel of light that seems to dance as one with all the energy of the universe, but fail to see the bigger picture that the light is actually the headlight of an oncoming truck and that if we don’t react on time, it will turn us into road meat to possibly have one of those near death experiences ourselves. So, evolution has trained our brain to suppress areas of its hemispheres, which might otherwise be distracting, in order to enable us function better in the world. But in that noble process, has the brain turned off our ability to intuitively experience peace or be naturally creative? Even if the switch was turned back on because of a left hemisphere damage, genetic memory can only resuscitate the neurons on the rules of music and math but not create the original composition or complex math equations. Then from where does the brain receive its first hand ideas?
Not every person that has tasted the eternal peace had to receive a clout on the left side of his/her head in order to do that. Most of them spontaneously experience the sensation and upon conscious determination to stay in that space, continue to feel peace and also rake up extraordinary abilities like seeing things beyond one’s timeline or folding events from the future onto the present like it was soft caramel. Russell Targ, an American physicist who worked on remote viewing with the CIA in the 1970s and ‘80s so plainly states, “People can quiet their mind and describe and experience what is happening at a distant place or in the future.” So clout on the head or not, if rewiring in the brain enables us to access information that is beyond the physical like events unbound by time, where is that information streaming from?
“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
Nikola Tesla
