Stroke of Instight

Jill Bolte's Stroke of Insight is a bit annoying.

Jill had a stroke in her left temporal lobe. That shut down her ability to reason, talk or think in a conventional way. In the talk linked above, she uses this experience (complete with an actual demonstration brain) to bolster her theory that we are too "left brained".

I assume that she is not recommending that we all have strokes like hers, but it's hard to see just *what* she's recommending. Her interpretation of her experience sounds pretty much conventionally Buddhist. Her stroke took her straight to Nirvana.

This would be more interesting to me if I hadn't heard so many breathless accounts of brain damage resulting from LSD or mental illness. For me, Jill has done a lot to convince me that Zen's project of suppressing left brain activity amounts to little more than an artificial way of inducing a temporal lobe stroke.

Zen "philosophy" is very useful I think, but I see no reason to let go of my sense of "self" entirely. The motivation to do this seems to stem entirely from the gee-whiz excitement arising from strange mental states plus the ancient wisdom of the Buddha that things won't bother you if you don't care.