I M Perfect lady

Tag: Stroke

  • Beyond the Mind.

    In Proof of Heaven, Eben Alexander writes,

    "When it came to Near Death Experiences, there are there basic camps.  There were the believers; either people who had undergone an NDE themselves or who simply found such experiences easy to accept. Then, of course, there were the staunch unbelievers (like the old me). These people didn't generally classify themselves as unbelievers, however.  They simply "knew" that the brain generated consciousness and wouldn't hold still for crazy ideas of the mind beyond the body (unless they were good-naturedly comforting someone, as I had thought I'd been doing with Suzanna that day)."

    "The more I learned about my condition, and the more I sought, using scientific literature, to explain what happened, the more I came up spectacularly short. Everything – the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow – suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work."

    "The more I read of the "scientific" explanations of what NDEs are, the more I was shocked by their transparent flimsiness. And yet I also knew with chagrin that they were exactly the same ones that the old "me" would have pointed to vaguely if someone had asked me to explain what an NDE is."

    "But people who weren't doctors couldn't be expected to know this. If what I'd undergone had happened to someone – anyone – else, it would have been remarkable enough. But that it had happened to me…Well, saying that it had happened "for a reason" made me a little uneasy.  There was enough of the old doctor in me to know how outlandish – how grandiose, in fact – that sounded. But when I added up the sheer unlikelyhood of all the details – and especially when I considered how precisely perfect a disease E. coli meningitis was for taking my cortex down, and my rapid and complete recovery from almost certain destruction – I simply had to take serious the possibility that it really and truly had happened for a reason."

    "That only made me feel a greater sense of responsibility to tell my story right." Eben.

    What I love about this book and "My Stroke of Insight" is how a person with the right and perfect background and formal training has an experience, that they intimately understand and do so while remaining conscious, when medically it is impossible or so we thought…and how they are able to write about it.

    Eben was shown how consciousness works by experience and it trumped all his prior learning.  It opened up a completely new space around his neurosurgeon's beliefs.

    What I find so fascinating and so enthralling is how so many old beliefs are getting left standing almost silly looking by the sheer fact that People of Knowledge are experiencing what they thought was impossible.  That it is happening to specific people and it does seem to have its purpose.  If to do nothing else but to tip down old belief systems.

    I have felt, and do feel, a kinship to these folks, but in a much more normal segment of the population. A regular person who was aware of her journey out of dysfunction. 

    To find consciousness, clarity and choices while fully knowing my brain was washed and cleansed and twisted by the church and abuse…respectively.

    It would seem, that a person such as I, would not be able to "know" what to do, what to say and where to go…that the very person I was trained to be, would the very tool against me.  And yet, I was able to walk clear.

    How?

    How was it possible for me to do what others didn't seem able to do?  How was I different than them?  How am I able to see what others can't?  How is it that reality and I are one, while they can't seem to grasp it?

    All, I can say is that I too had consciousness on my side. It wasn't my thinking brain that guided me…for it was completely damaged by years of cult like teachings and abuse's definitions…I used a totally different navigational tool…awareness – consciousness…a knowing that I hadn't known before.

    Everything that I had known prior was to also be found flimsy and weak, without a string to reality.

    The reason I write on this blog is to share my experiences of how abuse looks to an aware mind.  How religion's applications of forgiveness of sins is failing in reality. Without awareness or consciousness…you can only see the unquestioned beliefs…without doubts you will stand steadfast in the clutches of your unfounded beliefs.

    I know, that I am seen as "the crazy one" the one who is way out there.  I get it. And, I agree. I am not the usual victim.  I have been able to see my brainwashed mind and the way abuse had it so completely upside down.  And, I have been able to re-work those old definitions to put them back correctly.

    I believe that this is the new way forward. That the abused mind/brainwashed cult brain can be overcome…by consciousness.

    What I don't know is how to get consciousness, for it just was there for me. When my world shattered into a billion pieces all I was left with was that.  Which actually was much wider and more spacious than any belief I held dear.

    I have lost much, but I have gained even more.

    I write, for I believe that it will someday make someone else's journey less weird and feel less crazy.  

    These books legitimize the unbelievable and make a new belief…while kindly ridding us of the old paradigms.

    I have felt the strange aloneness, the echoes of no one before me. To be ahead of the time.  To look around and see so many challenging me with this 'weird' way.

    It is like there are new experiences coming forth…gaining consciousness.

    I wonder what we have called "Near Death Experiences" were actually brushes with consciousness?

    For, It changes you forever…knowing there is more beyond the mind.

  • Discovered the real me.

    I listened once again to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking to Oprah about her stroke and how she lost all contact to the person she was before the stroke and was left as an infant in a woman’s body, unknowing who she was.

    What struck me were the differences between the two Jills and how I can relate having lived as two of me.

    We both like our second self much better than the first and it took her eight years to grow her second self, and then parts of her old self memories filtered in, but by then a whole new her was in its place.

    My experience wasn’t quite so dramatic physically, I didn’t have to re-learn how to walk, talk, read and write, but my self -identity was equally destroyed, my past all a fraud.

    The me I thought I was wasn’t real and the real me was nowhere and I had to get myself away from the false relationships and places that abused me.

    My healing relied on me walking away from family.

    Her mother came and mothered her a second time and fully embraced her where she was, an infant who needed to be taught all over again. They mourned the loss of her first self, but never expected the second one to be like the first, but a new Jill.

    While they had a second mother and daughter relationship…my mother and I went our separate ways.

    In fact my new self and wellness depended upon whether I could separate myself from my family of origin, the family who created the false files.

    My old self drew its energy and life from being in the old relationships and in doing all the old behaviors and my new healthy self emerged from walking away.

    The tricky spot I was left standing in, was that I knew the old self, and yet the old self was built upon lies, and I had no clue of the new self, but the new self depended upon me walking away from all that I knew.

    I had to learn how I grew wrong to then grow correctly the second time.

    My whole world crashed around me, and my left hemisphere (the storyteller of who you are) was all wrong and it led me to cling to the right hemisphere where intuition, nature, being, now, artistic, and pictures lived.

    While she didn’t understand words, I didn’t trust them.

    Dr. Jill spent 8 years connecting back to the Left side and I have spent 6 years disconnecting from files that were all wrong and then filling them with new contents or meanings.

    I find it interesting what I have learned from her stroke experience, how the brain works and where the self lives.

    What I feel makes a great self is when you occupy the right side most of the time and use the left to communicate.
    We both learned that we couldn’t live unattached to the left side, even though the left side was so damaged, we had to bring it back in order to live whole.

    Somehow hearing Dr. Jill speak of never expecting the second self to appear like the first, took away an unconscious fighting that had been going on within me that it was almost adultery to accept the new me, like I was cheating on the old self.

    My love of my old self and my love of the new self were at odds…it has taken me time to get used to loving the new me, while unloving the old me, if that makes sense?

    There is a wistfulness at times when I struggle to do what my new self needs, a wanting the comfort of being used to this new self.

    While I see my husband in new eyes, it isn’t him, but the eyes looking upon him.

    It is strange to have a new me in an old life and to feel the new self being rejected in places the old self was accepted and it is harder to find confidence in the new self’s love.

    This self loves differently, this self sees differently, this self believes differently.

    This self was grown from the wisdom that my first self experienced.

    I would not be the woman I am today, if I hadn’t lived as the first self first.

    As I learned how she grew to be that way, I discovered the real me.

  • My Natural State.

    What struck me as I wrote about the Unbelievers verses the Believers is that we all breathe air and we all have the same bodies, our only striking differences are what we believe, or the thoughts in our heads.

    I had just heard Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking on Sirius and she made reference to the genetic similarities of humanity that I would love to share.

    (My Stroke of Insight)

    “Biological evolution generally occurs from a stat of lesser complexity to a state of greater complexity. Nature ensures her own efficiency by not reinventing the wheel with every new species she creates. Generally, once nature identifies a pattern in the genetic code that works towards the survival of the creature, like a blossom for nectar transmission, a heart to pump blood, a sweat gland to help regulate body temperature or an eyeball for vision, she tends to build that feature into future permutations of that specific code. By adding a new level of programming on top of an already well-established set of instructions, each new species contains a strong foundation of time-tested DNA sequences. This is one of the simple ways through which nature transmits the experience and wisdom bestowed by ancient life to her progeny.

    Another advantage of this type of build-on-top-of-what-already-works genetic engineering strategy is that very small manipulations of the genetic sequencing can result in major revolutionary transformations. In our genetic profile, believe it or not, scientific evidence indicates that we humans share 99.4% of our total DNA sequences with the chimpazee.

    This does not mean, of course, that humans are direct descendants from our tree-swinging friends, but it does emphasize that the genius of our molecular code is supported by eons of nature’s greatest evolutionary effort. Our human code was not a random act, at least not in its entirety, but rather is better construed as nature’s ever-evolving quest for a body of genetic perfection.

    As members of the same human species, you and I share all but 0.01% (1/100th of 1%) of identical genetic sequences. So biologically, as a species, you and I are virtually identical to one another at the level of our genes (99.9%). Looking around at the diversity within our human race, it is obvious that 0.01% accounts for a significant difference in how we look, think and behave.
    Dr. Jill

    What I find so interesting is that we are so alike yet so different in our responses to life, and what we are taught to believe makes a huge difference in how we live.

    Our bodies have similar genetic make up, yet how these bodies experience life is much more dictated by who raised us and their personal beliefs.

    It is very interesting to me to learn about why you live life the way you live it. I always say, I am perfect coming from whence I came. I simply couldn’t have known no better, being taught what I was taught, either by word or deed.

    I am a perfect rendition of a person who traveled as I traveled.

    What I awoke to in December 2004 was the realization that I had no independent beliefs or even person.

    I thought as one part of a big mind controlled religion, my mind wasn’t mine to own.

    What actually woke up in that moment was the awareness of how little of me was actually mine.

    I told my brother today, all I owned in that moment was my breath.

    All the rest seemed to be tainted from the abuse or the religion, there wasn’t a part of me that was free, but my breath.

    I stayed with my breath. I trusted nature and walked with it, seeking its natural independence. Nature became my teacher in learning how to be me.

    Slowly I am returning to my natural state.