I wasn't particularly thinking about the brain or the human imperative or anything quite so lofty when I picked up a copy of Echart Tolle's book, The Power of Now on a recent business trip. I was just looking for something to kill the time on a two-hour flight from San Francisco to Denver, and the title intrigued me. I thought I was in for some kind of treatise on time management, although if I had taken the time to read the subtitle, "A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment," I would have had a much clearer idea of what I was getting myself into. Tolle writes about the need for people to get their heads out of time and into a peaceful and elevated sense of the Now.

He describes here his moment of enlightenment and spiritual transformation:

"I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. The sudeenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' can't live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real."

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy...

For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss....I realized that what everybody was looking for had already happened to me. I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind....I dwelt in states of such indescribable bliss and sacredness that even the original experience I just described pales in comparison.

If this strikes you as typical New Age mystical boilerplate, you're not alone. That is exactly how I classified it while breezing through most of the book on my flight from San Francisco to Denver. Which is not to say that I don't necessarily like the sound of it. I think most of us (who have never had one) would like to try experiencing a state like that, to get our internal chatter to knock it off once in a while and feel that whole peaceful, connected...thing that these people are always talking about.

All of which brings us back to Jill Bolte Taylor, and her description of a nirvana-like state she achieved a few years ago:

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there...

So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria.

What Taylor experienced sounds every bit as profound and spiritual as what Tolle describes; I would love to experience a few minutes of it. But here's the difference: Jill Bolte Taylor is describing what she felt in the first few minutes after suffering from a severe and debilitating stroke.

Her background as a brain scientist provides Taylor with a unique perspective on having a stroke. The euphoric state she describes was the result of experiencing consciousness primarily (if not exclusively) through the right hemisphere of the brain. As she struggled to make sense of her situation in the minutes following the stroke, she recounts how periods of peaceful bliss were followed by long frustrating attempts to get help, each time the left hemisphere of her brain went through a faltering "re-boot."

The left hemisphere of the brain processes our memories, our individuality, our strategies for dealing with the world around us -- that is, for responding to our sensory input as processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. So if what I describe as "the human imperative" is to be found anywhere in the brain, surely it must be there in the left hemisphere. Without our memories, our sense of identity, our sense of mission, we have no means of improving the human situation. And so, with her left hemisphere on the fritz, Taylor found the process of calling her office to get some help an incredibly complex and drawn-out ordeal.

And yet, while the functioning of the human imperative takes place in the left hemisphere, surely a good deal of what we as humanity are looking for can be found in this conscious state as experienced through the right hemisphere. What Tolle describes in his book -- a state where the ego has been overcome, and one dwells in timeless bliss -- is strikingly similar to the experience that Taylor described. In fact, they are so similar that I can't help but wonder whether Eckhart Tolle has found a way to deliberately move the seat of his consciousness into his brain's right hemisphere. (Or perhaps he even suffered a mild stroke that night?) Consider this passage:

A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.

Tolle found his bliss, but lost the human imperative. He was no longer working to improve his own life condition or the condition of humanity. But that changed in time:

Before I knew it, I had an external identity again. I had become a spiritual teacher.

Tolle needed his left hemisphere in order to become an author and guru in much the same way that Taylor needed hers in order to call for help. And yet both of these very different individuals -- one a scientist, the other a mystic -- argue that the transformation of consciousness they have experienced is profoundly important, not only in the lives of individuals but for the quality of life on this planet.As Taylor sums it up:

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

I would agree that this is an idea worth spreading. Perhaps the most encouraging transformation of all is the evolution of our understanding of the this blissful, euphoric state. By moving it out of the realm of pure mysticism into the light of scientific inquiry, maybe we can learn more effective ways of tapping into a transformed state of consciousness -- one that will not only make us happier, but truly make the world a better place.

Here's Jill Bolte Taylor telling her story at Ted Talks last month: