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The story of her stroke and remarkable recovery are now well-known, through her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, through the remarkable 18-minute video of her TED talk and through multiple interviews and articles in national media. Though Jill Bolte Taylor emphasizes her professional experience as a neuroanatomist, she has become a star not of science but of a kind of humanist spirituality. She passionately pleads for a shift of humanity toward the intuitive side of life and the dwelling in a state of peace achieved by apprehension of the union of all things through a powerful energy or life force. That is the state she came to by the impact of a stroke that stripped away all other mental functioning, including the understanding and speaking of language, as well as the command of her own body.

At one point in the TED video, she refers to the “nirvana” she reached through physical disaster. Her description of this state of oneness with things is remarkable and matches those of others who have achieved such experience through spiritual discipline, mystical encounters or an altered consciousness assisted by hallucinogenic drugs. But this is no momentary vision. It was what she had left of her mind, her awareness, her functional capacities in the aftermath of the stroke. And it is the state she says is accessible to her whenever she becomes oppressed by the tensions and depression that can be brought on by excessive dwelling in the analytic, verbal, organizing part of her mind.

I have been reading recently in the Christian mystical tradition and what strikes me is the parallel between her account of this state of oneness and classical descriptions of the union with God achieved by a human soul through “infused contemplation.”

There are three elements of the experience that help illuminate what she went through.

• There were no boundaries to her body. She couldn’t feel any separation from other things as an individual physical entity. Instead, she felt part of a pure energy that filled the universe. As she said in her TED talk, she became vast in that state and couldn’t imagine being contained again within a small single body.

• Though she had lost her language abilities, memories, analytical functions, and a sense of the linear direction of time, she retained awareness and seemed to apprehend what she was experiencing in a direct way, without the language-oriented consciousness that usually filters and organizes what is happening. She was immersed in the life force she felt and, in a sense, became what she perceived inwardly. There was no complicated chain of perception, interpretation by the brain of external signals and formation of an intellectual concept of what was going on. It was a kind of knowing through pure intuition and feeling.

• Once she got used to this state of existence, she experienced a complete peacefulness and joy that later became a touchstone helping her to measure the quality of her inner condition. With the return of her intellectual faculties and customary consciousness, she felt separated from that pure energy state and deep peacefulness. She associates the negative aspects of living, such as tension, anxiety or depression, with her analytical mind. Remarkably, she is able to pull back from excessive involvement with that linear, symbol-interpreting part of her mind. She can stop herself from going too far in that direction, shift more to her intuitive side and find peace again in the sense of oneness that she first experienced in the immediate aftermath of the stroke. She believes passionately that this ability can be cultivated by everyone.

Thomas Merton quotes several Christian mystical writers in his absorbing book on the experience of contemplation, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Here are two passages trying to capture an inner state that is beyond human experience and beyond the power of language to portray.

First, the anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing:

Through grace a man can have great knowledge of all other creatures and their works, and even of the works of God Himself, and he can think of them all; but of God Himself no man can think. I would therefore leave all those things of which I can think and choose for my love that thing of which I cannot think.

And why is this so? He may well be loved, but He may not be thought of. He may be reached and held close by means of love, but by means of thought, never. … You are to strike the thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and you are not to retreat no matter what comes to pass.

In other words, just as Taylor had to leave behind her thinking, analytical brain to reach the state of oneness with all things, this author says that thinking is not the way in which one can reach union with God. It is only by love that this is possible. Language and thought fail, but feeling and love bring what knowledge a human can have of God’s presence. And the contemplative never actually sees God – He is concealed in that cloud of unknowing. Only His presence is sensed. Watch Jill Taylor in her TED video, and you will see through her passion and tears that it is a kind of love that fills her as she recalls/relives the experience of the state of oneness with all things.

Here is another quotation cited in Merton’s book, this from a Flemish mystic of the 14th century. It goes directly to Taylor’s experience of oneness in the moment (Now) where time and distinctions among things fall away, and the connectedness of the universe is what she feels.

This purity is the dwelling place of God within us … it is eternal, and in it is neither time nor place, neither before nor after: but it is ever present, ready and manifest … In it we are all one, living in God and God in us. This simple unity is ever clear and manifest to the intellectual eyes when turned in upon the purity of the mind. It is a pure and serene air, lucent with divine light; and it is given to us to discover, fix and contemplate eternal truth with purified and illuminated eyes. Therein all things are of one form and become a single truth, a single image in the mirror of the wisdom of God: and when we look upon and practice it in the divine light with these same simple and spiritual eyes, then have we attained the contemplative life.

Given the interval of 700 years between the writings of these mystics and Jill Bolte Taylor’s description, it is remarkable to find the similarities. Though she avoids explicit references to God, the key elements of a common quality and intensity of experience come through. The sense of peacefulness and joy, the inner vision, the blending of all things into “one form” that “become a single truth,” the perception of this state with “simple and spiritual eyes,” rather than with the analytical faculties.

I believe it is less relevant to try to explain Taylor’s experience in scientific terms than simply to enter with her into the evocation of a state of universal peace and oneness. She is helping us glimpse an experience that human beings have shared across the ages. And she also dramatizes that this state of being is one in which such problems as depression fall away completely. Her insight that such disorders and tensions are linked with the analytical, planning and linguistic functions of the mind is a powerful one for all of us trying to understand the spiritual ways out of the trap of depression.

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I keep remembering those amazing moments, all too brief, when I had the sense of stepping out of time, schedules, worry, depression into a different kind of space that was free of all that. It was an opening to peacefulness, calm and a sense of being that I can only call spiritual. As Jill Bolte Taylor
put it, she achieved a state of utter peace and oneness with the universe after undergoing the most drastic experience imaginable, a stroke that took away much of her mental functioning and memory, left her unable even to move. But inwardly, she gained access to a world of being that still remains available to her after recovery. Thomas Merton focused himself on a life of contemplation to achieve a state of union with God, but to do this he withdrew from the everyday world into the silence and discipline of monastic life. These two can stand for the many who have found access to such states only after calamitous events or prolonged and demanding practice that involves a separation to some degree from the ordinary demands of living.

I count myself among the greater number who make do, if very lucky, with glimpses of such things that suddenly strike through all the worries about the big and small events that put us on a roller-coaster of feelings and imaginings. Dwelling on these moments now, I’m looking for what they might tell me about finding a way to a more lasting recovery from the long-term effects of major depression than I have yet been able to achieve. Here is one such moment.

I had been on a business trip to New York where I stayed at a friend’s house in the West Village. That first day I had been off to various appointments, walking about the city amid gentle showers, feeling good and alert to the pleasant side of everything I saw, even in that grit and glitter place of hard-driving people. In the evening, I caught a then new film, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. I had never seen anything like that before, a fable about good and evil wrapped in grotesque melodrama, and neither had the rest of the audience. At the end of the film, half the house hissed and booed loudly – and then, after a pause, the other half, including me, applauded and cheered. There was something about that strange, haunting film I connected with. It seemed to me a spiritual story underneath all the surface weirdness.

Back at my friend’s house, I was snacking on some fruit, still feeling moved by the film and generally happy about the day. I bit into a slice of bosc pear, looked at the remaining half of it in my fingers and thought, “What an amazing flavor that has…” Then everything changed. Suddenly, I was seeing what I sensed as the whole world opening before my inner eyes. The room I stood in faded into the background, making way for this different reality that had somehow appeared.

It’s a lot to say, but I felt that I was seeing, or, better, taking in with all my senses at once the wholeness and sacredness of life. The whole experience couldn’t have lasted more than a few moments – but time was irrelevant. I was full of profound peacefulness and simply understood that there was a complex structure to all of existence and that we all had our places within it.

Before me was a great living spiral of being, alive with movement and energy. I was overwhelmed with the vastness and detail, the ordering of physical, social, personal lives – great numbers of people busy in cities, whole societies, a part of the natural world of all other living thing. I saw there also myself and my family as part of the whole, at ease and loving in the spiritual order of things. And at the peak of the spiraling flow was the power of God and images I could make out of Christ and the Madonna. From that pinnacle flowed an energy that instilled a feeling at once of force and goodness. This was no passive sweet-pastures-of-heaven picture. It was a dynamic intertwining of everything in life, invisibly bonded through spiritual ties that I sensed like a flow of sunlight through a high window that lets you see the brownian movement of dust particles – except that here instead of dust there were tiny bursts of sparkling energy.

Partly, I was in awe at feeling that I was participating in this force-field at every level of mind, feeling, spirit, even as my more my skeptical self lingered on the Christ and Madonna and thought: Come on, you mean all that stuff is true? The quality of the experience was a feeling of being suffused with the energy of peacefulness. I was just one soul blending into this world with my wife and children. It was a deep relief, despite rocky times at home because of a raging depression at the time, to see that I was meant to be part of my family, at one with my wife, experiencing all this together. I was stepping back, though, thinking about that Christ and Madonna – that’s what I see because I grew up with those images – a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Lakota experience would be different. Thinking that way took me in a different direction.

Then I realized I was focused again on that half-eaten slice of pear. The opening in day to day life had closed up.. But I knew I wouldn’t be looking at things in the same old way.

The problem is that the immediacy of such experiences fades, and the tensions of life, and illnesses like depression, take over again. At times, I’m longing for another glimpse, another reassurance that all of this life includes a force toward an active peacefulness instead of destruction. The lasting effect of the experience has been a sense of centeredness, of knowledge that I am part of a vast whole, connected and not isolated, as the impact of depression would have me believe. That sense may fade out almost completely when I’m really down, but some spark of it remains even then.

What are the experiences that have given you an anchor to hold you to life while depression or other threats try to sweep you away?

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I’ve found that there is a longing for spiritual closeness just as there is a longing for an emotional bonding to another human being. But it is a form of longing, of human need, that I spent years ignoring. I’ve written here about longings arising from depression and inner devastation, emptiness and loss. Those longings tend to break up relationships, work life, family, but I’ve experienced spiritual longing as a draw toward a sense of closeness to a different dimension of life, a spirituality that is transforming when I can handle it and so remote from credibility when I’m shutting down.

Growing up Catholic, I always had a reverential attitude toward whatever was meant by the holy, the divine. But part of it was too abstract, plunging me into the catechism to learn about what was and what was not true or sinful or permitted. At the other extreme it was too concrete, too wrapped up in the details of ritual, of saints days, of rules, and the comfortable decorativeness of the statuary, stained glass, baroque buildings and beautifully colored vestments. I felt a strange combination of awe at the beauty and intensity of it and annoyance at the authoritarian side that demanded I accept everything without worrying for a moment what it was all about. God was mediated through so many layers that I came to associate the great Being with only two things: the tiny but intense red light in the lantern hanging in the church that symbolized God’s presence and the ever present universal eye that saw all my faults, sins, inadequacies, guilt and shame. That, of course, gave me a rich storehouse of goodies to feed my earliest depression.

After a time, though, my orientation toward things spiritual shifted radically. That happened because of a series of experiences over many years that gave me a greater sense of closeness to the spiritual world than I had imagined possible. There are times when a completely unexpected opening occurs and part of another world slips through, as if we existed side by side with it, ignoring hints of closeness until it reaches out and forces us to see something, really see. Almost always that experience was overwhelming, inexplicable, frightening, thrilling, peaceful – depending on how well prepared I was to deal with it. When I grasped what was going on, set aside fears of going crazy, I was filled with a sense of peace and purpose arising from an awareness that I was part of a vast spiritual reality. Depression, loss, grief – all that disappeared completely. However, as the immediacy of those experiences dimmed in time, I came to experience something new, that longing to be there again, to be reminded that there was a level of life beyond the frustrations and illness I was experiencing. That’s how I came to understand what spiritual longing was all about.

Every religious tradition I’ve tried to understand has defined a life-long discipline about how to approach communion with its spiritual source. Each has also generated amazing descriptions of the ups and downs, the dangers and distortions of attempts to dedicate one’s life to the sacred or enlightenment or vision – however the ultimate experience might be described. These are full of warnings about the potential misuse of seeking a mystical bond for the wrong reasons – to gratify ego, to solve a personal problem, to achieve a kind of “high,” to cultivate magical powers or to fulfill some mundane or even harmful purpose. I know I can’t seek spiritual experience specifically to free myself of depression – it just doesn’t work that way. The practice requires a setting aside of personal issues and a real devotion to seeking God on God’s terms. I have not devoted my life to the disciplined practices that the religious traditions describe.

But everyone prays in one form or another and at some point in life is open to spiritual experience. And that’s what has happened to me. Things happen, as I recently tried to describe, and I find myself in a different world that restores me completely. There is no such thing as depression there, and all the negativity, the mental and physical symptoms disappear for a time after those episodes. But spiritual experience is not so simple as that. Taken seriously, it demands paying close attention to everything that feels intolerable and destructive within, not simply wishing it away or having it taken away in a flash.

One of the remarkable interpreters of spiritual practice from a Catholic perspective is Thomas Merton. I’ve been letting his words about the contemplative life, as he calls it, sink in, become part of who I am. Here is one of his passages getting at the essence of living with a spiritual center to one’s life.

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s inmost self. The movement of recognition which accepts our own obscure and unknown self produces the sensation of a “numinous” presence within us. This sacred awe is no mere magic illusion, but the real expression of a release of spiritual energy, testifying to our own interior reunion and reconciliation with that which is deepest in us and, through the inner self, with the transcendent and invisible power of God. … The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is within us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe, and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of the inmost self. In silence, hope, expectation and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as to an arbitrary and magic power … but as to the stream of reality and of life itself. (The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, pp. 54-55)

Seeking a spiritual path, then, requires acceptance of that “dark self” while sorting out the “good ground of the soul.” That’s not so different from what I feel I’ve been through. In my case, though, I seem to have gotten this backwards. Instead of starting with the goal of seeking God and learning how to deal with inner darkness, I have followed my rigorously secular path of depression until it forced me to confront the larger need for spiritual fulfillment.

Has that happened to you?