Science & Spirituality

Science doesn't prove spirituality. Spirituality is not opposed to science. Science and mathematics and their technological applications are developing faster and faster in our contemporary world. In doing so they provide an exciting and challenging context for exploring the deepest and most important spiritual knowing of which we human beings are capable. On this page we share different and exciting ways that can happen.

Jill Bolte Taylor says, “Religions are the stories the left brain tells in order to access the right brain experience.”Dr Taylor is a neuroanatomist or brain scientist, who at the age of 37, awoke one morning feeling increasingly sluggish, and soon unable to speak or read. Being a brain scientist, she realized that she had suffered a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. She quickly became locked up inside herself, unable to respond to her professional and anxious care givers. But through all of the trauma, except for a blinding pain behind her left eye in the beginning, she was at peace within herself. She came to recognize she was living out of her right brain instead of the left brain

previously favored by her as a scientist:

“My right hemisphere is all about right here, right now...all about the richness of this present moment. It is filled with gratitude for my life and everyone and everything in it. It is content, compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic. To my right mind character, there is no judgment of good/bad or right/wrong, so everything exists on a continuum of relativity. It takes things as they are and acknowledges what is in the present... My right mind is open to the eternal flow whereby I exist at one with the universe. It is the seat of my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer. It is my intuition and higher consciousness... It is tuned into the subtle messages my cells communicate via gut feelings as it learns through touch and experience.” (pp139-141)

She also recognizes the critical thinking, analytical capabilities, and penchant for story telling of her left brain and its necessary place in her life, as well as its negative and judgmental traits. But she is clear that she primarily and essentially lives her life out of her right/'right' mind.
To explore further, read her book, My Stroke of Insight