No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism (The No Self Wisdom)

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But before we begin to unpack that, let’s go back and take a close look at how our illusion of self is generated and how our brains function. Given that language is controlled by the left brain, it’s no coincidence that it is the interpreter’s main form of expression.

But toward the end of the book, the conversation suddenly shifts toward an idealistic interpretation of reality; namely that consciousness is singular and the idea of separate consciousnesses or selves emerging from individual physical brains is an illusion.The central idea of how the left vs right brain functions is very interesting and I do enjoy the thought experiments the book suggests. My left brain had a problem accepting the premise of this book; that the story telling part of the brain is responsible for all suffering and delusion. For example, until this connection was disrupted, scientists relied on either brain damage or indirect methods to test for differences between the left and right brain. This book reminds me of a beautiful saying I have once heard: happiness is the expansion of self, but joy. I personally don't care for the morphic field concept because it is an attempt to use a quasi-physical field to explain certain psychic connections between subjects.

Interpretation/stories: constantly interprets the world and tells stories to explain it; endeavors to solve the problems it believes arise out of the stories it has created (most of the time, it uses language to create these stories); creates explanations/reasons to help make sense of what is going on. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as “pure coincidence, nothing more.Global attention: attention is broad and vigilant; gives attention to the whole scene and processes the world as a continuum; takes a more global approach to what it perceives. Thus, most of us live in an unbalanced state most of the time, our left brain chattering away like a sports commentator, interpreting the world instead of just experiencing and enjoying it. This is the "spooky action at a distance" that so bothered Albert Einstein, but this was later proven to be real from experiments demonstrating violations of Bell's inequality. So, as you can see from this example, our left brain is an interpreter; its job is to provide us with plausible explanations for the things that happen to us, even if those answers are completely off base.

Through this was not directly explained, (no explanation from another is really beneficial) how we each have grown an artificial self is very nicely covered.When we curl our fingers around the handle of a coffee cup, our spatial awareness is responsible for our accurate hold on that object.

Awareness can be described as the experience of the witness or the observer of what is happening now. Your intuition is controlled by your right brain’s sense of “nonverbal knowing” or “nonconscious thought. While the thinking mind began as a useful tool in our evolutionary survival, it now acts as an obstacle, as nearly all of us live our lives confusing who we truly are with the interpreting voice in our heads. Niebauer does sprinkle some suggested activities for achieving a sense of no-self in it, a few of which appear in the workbook. The point of both the original and workbook is that most of us rely so heavily on the left cerebral hemisphere's constant use of language, categorizing, and story-telling that we miss out on experiencing the world through our right cerebral hemisphere, which connects us to our body's movement through the world and our feeling of wholeness and connectedness to everything.Then the problems the mind creates become ‘our problems,’ and a whole world of suffering and avoidance comes into being.