Friday, May 1, 2009

Silent Guru-Dakshinamurthy

Medha Dakshinamurthy is depicted as a guru who teaches without speaking a word.He sits in jnaana mudra in silence and knowledge comes automatically. Thisseems to point at the intuition within us, which taps to the universal sourceof knowledge! This intuition that contributes to unstructured learning is "theformless entity of the right brain" and it gives us knowledge thru silence.Medha Dakshinamurthy is stationed in our right brain as the formless entitycalled intuition and teaches us everything.

Medha means intelligence. What is the seat of intelligence? Normally we considerthe brain as the seat of intelligence. Dakshinaamurthy is dakshina+amurthy.Amurthy means a formless entity. So "Medha Dakshinaamurthy" may be roughlytranslated as "the formless entity in the right brain". What is it?If we study the basics of yoga and modern neuroscience, this can become clearer.The right half of the brain controls the left part of the nervous system and theleft half of the brain controls the right part of the nervous system. There is across over in the medulla.

Though Lord Medha Dakshinamurthy's name is associatedwith the right side (dakshina), he is depicted as sitting with his left (vaama)leg up.Modern science says that structured logic is performed by the left half of thebrain and inutition and unstructured logic is performed in the right half ofbrain.
That may be why left-handed cricket batsmen tend to look morefree-flowing, intuitive and elegant (e.g. David Gower, WV Raman, Brian Lara,Sourav Ganguly etc). The nervous reflexes associated with left part of the body(and hence the right brain) are used by them more pre-dominently and hence thereflexes are more intuitive.

No comments: