Harvard Neuroscientist's Stroke Revealed the Exact State Mapped in the Upanishads 1000s of Years ago

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]On a December morning in 1996 >> And this is the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke. And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter, went totally silent.

[00:00:13]>> A Harvard-trained brain scientist stood in her apartment and watched her own mind go quiet.

[00:00:19]>> Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence.

[00:00:25]And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me, "I am."

[00:00:29]I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me.

[00:00:35]>> A blood vessel had ruptured in her left hemisphere. And as the part of her brain that built her sense of self shut down, she did not feel fear. She felt something different. And I think you have felt this, too. [music] You have had moments of this. A stillness that came during the morning walk, a sense of absolute love and connectedness that came when you were holding your child or when you are speaking to your spouse. A few seconds where the noise stopped and everything was simply enough. And then it left. You could not hold it. Here's what's interesting. When that scientist finally recovered from her stroke, she described what she had endured, complete peace. No boundary between herself and the world. No past, no future. She called it the La La Land in a very interesting TED Talk. Millions of people have watched this talk and many might have watched her describe it and felt a recognition they could not name. But that state is not new. Over thousands and thousands of years ago, the seers of the Upanishads mapped it precisely. They gave it a name. They gave it a structure. And they left a process and a method for entering it without breaking your brain. By the end of this video, you will not only understand her experience and what she was speaking about, but why the peace that you have experienced momentarily has always slipped away from you. This is about the state named Turiya by the ancient Upanishad. The Mandukya Upanishad, the shortest and one of the most powerful Upanishads, describes the four states in consciousness. You live in three of them. The fourth is [music] Turiya. And this is what that scientist experienced accidentally when she had a stroke and when her brain broke. And this state is not far away from each and every one of us to experience, which you will clearly understand by the end. Now, there are the two hemispheres for human brain. We all know this. As the scientist describes, left hemisphere runs language, time, the boundary of the separate self, the voice that says, "I am me." That individual sense of identity and ego that we experience, it primarily comes from here. On that day when a nerve broke in her brain, blood flooded to this hemisphere of the brain and it began to dissolve this. What replaced it was vast oceanic peace. No edges, no boundaries. She felt enormous.

[00:03:21]Instead of experiencing pain and suffering, she began experiencing completeness and limitlessness. So, the core question is, what state did she enter? And why did it require her left hemisphere to be flooded to get there?

[00:03:38]To understand this, first we will understand the brain structure and human physiology, and then we will talk about consciousness and how the rishis described this. So, as we discussed, left hemisphere builds the constructed self, the name, the history, the problems, the running commentary lives in time and it lives here. Whereas the right hemisphere has no language, no timeline, no direct present moment experience, no hard line or boundary between who you are and what the world is. There is no limitations here. Now, to live our lives, both are real and both are useful. If you lose that sense of ego unconsciously, you'll be a mad person. You'll be called crazy.

[00:04:24]And you would not know how to conduct yourself in the world. But the problem is most of us live almost entirely in the first part, in the analytical part. We are constantly acting from the space of ego, from the space of boundaries. We have created set patterns for our life and we keep repeating it.

[00:04:48]The stroke for her silenced the constructed self and left her alone with the second. And what remained when the constructed self went was quiet. And it was not emptiness, but it was peace. And the science of consciousness from Vedanta is about achieving this. With this, let's come to the explanation of Mandukya Upanishad. And this framework in Vedanta is called Avastha Traya Viveka and I will put it very, very simply. Imagine there are three rooms in which you live your life.

[00:05:23]One room is the waking state or Jagrat Avastha. Second room is the dream state or Swapna Avastha.

[00:05:31]The third room is the deep sleep state.

[00:05:34]That is Sushupti. These are the rooms in which we live our lives in. Every morning we wake up through our conscious mind, through a sense of ego and identity, we go go the world. We go as professionals and entrepreneurs, we do different things, we get the job done, and we interact with people, we interact with our families, and we come to sleep. The entire activity of the waking state that we do throughout the day that you are in right now is called the jagrat or the waking state in the Upanishads. Then we move on to the second room.

[00:06:12]This is the dream state. This happens when you go to sleep and when you begin to dream different dreams. Within the dream, again, there is a person called you, there is a sense of self and an identity, and you are talking with people, you are interacting with the world, maybe you're hiking, maybe you're cycling, but there is a subject-object experience even in the dream state. Now, this is also a state, a room where all of us have different experiences, right? And then we move on to the next room, that is the deep sleep state or sushupti.

[00:06:48]This state is of absolute silence, where we go to deep sleep, where there are no dualistic experiences as such. There is no subject-object split here.

[00:06:59]Mind rests and the sense of identity and ego also sleeps here. It seems to be an unconscious state, but there is still awareness here. There is still awareness at a very deep level here because we can see it. Because we can measure it. And people who go to deep sleep, they don't die, they wake up.

[00:07:20]It's just that temporarily the sense of self had slept and had dissolved. Now, apart from these three rooms, there is a fourth.

[00:07:30]The fourth is not a room, but it is that which travels in and through all the rooms.

[00:07:37]That which walks into each room without being affected by it. This fourth is called Turiya by the Mandukya Upanishad and it's very simple to understand. In your waking state, your body was different, your mind was different, your thoughts were different and your very life experience was in a certain way.

[00:07:57]Similarly, in the dream state, when you were dreaming, the environment is totally different. People whom you're interacting with is totally different.

[00:08:04]Sometimes even you look different in the dream. The very person you are is different. And in the deep sleep state, there is total absence of any kind of dualistic experience. There is absolute silence. But what is the common denominator in all these three states and in all these three rooms?

[00:08:23]Think about this. Inquire into this.

[00:08:27]What is common in these three states and in these three rooms? Now, that is the fourth. That is Turiya. That is you yourself. You, not as the body, not as the mind, not as the ego, but as that awareness, as that sakshi, as that witness. Now, that is common in and through all these three states and in and through all these three rooms. You, as the awareness, embodied the waking ego and lived your life as a professional and an entrepreneur. You, as the dream ego, went and had the dream experience. You, the awareness, without the ego, experienced the silence in the deep sleep state. The deeper awareness that you are was always there and that is what the scientist was able to experience directly in an unadulterated way when her sense of boundary and limitation and ego dissolved temporarily. Now, this was her exact words in the video. She said, "After the stroke, she experienced complete peace.

[00:09:33]No past, no future, no edge between her and the universe, she felt like the life force itself. And this is what the Upanishads say on Turiya. Turiya is beyond language, beyond time, no subject-object divide, peace as the very nature of awareness, and the boundary between the individual and the universe dissolves. These are not similar descriptions, this is the exact same description 3,000 years apart. One arrived through neuroscience and a medical emergency, the other through contemplative inquiry and meditation.

[00:10:09]And remember, she was not a spiritual seeker, she did not have a spiritual agenda. In fact, she was a scientist, but she was able to experience this and articulate it with neuroscience and biology. And that's why we've always said, "Upanishads are not poetic, Upanishads are not just a philosophy.

[00:10:30]It's a deeper science of life and consciousness." And the experience of this Harvard scientist confirmed it from a totally different angle. Now, just to be clear here, the stroke here was just a doorway. This in no way means that the right hemisphere is Turiya. That's the wrong understanding. Turiya is not a hemisphere, it is not a brain state at all. The right hemisphere is still an instrument, it still belongs to the body. But when the boundaries that were constructed in the left hemisphere, when the ego and the sense of identity in the left hemisphere vanished, for a moment, the right hemisphere gave her access to that. Now, we will move to how we can live this in our lives. Let's first understand why most of us are never able to experience this. The problem is this.

[00:11:21]We always operate from the sense of ego, from the sense of limitation, and from the sense of boundary. And if we try to experience deep inner peace and absolute stillness and that connectedness with the universe from the sense of limited identity and ego. It is like we are searching to see our eyes with our eye.

[00:11:43]It can never happen. Ego can never experience deep stillness because it it always comes from a set of patterns and it operates within a boundary. So, it can never experience limitlessness. To experience that, we need to go beyond the ego, go beyond the sense of limited identity. Turiya lies beneath the constructed self. And if you want to get there, this is how you need to actually approach it. You need to turn your attention inward. The ego's attention is always outward. But when you reverse this, when you turn this attention inward, you see yourself for who you are. You go a level beneath the ego. And this going inward is called as self-inquiry. Ramana Maharshi in his simple language said, "Who am I?" So, ask this to yourself. Who am I? Or what am I? What is that ego? When you begin to inquire and when you turn your attention inward, you will begin to see this vast expanse of limitless existence that was always there waiting for you to be discovered.

[00:12:54]And you don't have to go through a stroke or you don't have to break your brain to experience this. And Turiya is not a far destination to be achieved. It is your own essential self. Technically, there is no gap between that and where you are right now. It is right here waiting to be seen. And practice self-inquiry for a few minutes every single day. Sit in silence, take a few breaths, and turn your attention inward and see what it can do for you. And next, check out this video where we delve deep into the science of consciousness and what the Mandukya Upanishad actually said in different verses with respect to achieving the state and understanding consciousness.

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[00:13:44]Shivoham.