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

Product Information

Hanson argues that the individuals we tend to regard as enlightened – people such as the Buddha and Jesus – didn’t possess brains with some special, enlightenment-prone quality; rather, they simply tapped into the right hemisphere’s natural abilities. Our goal here is to test the following truth: You are not the story in your head, but something much greater (even if you don’t know exactly what that is). A clear understanding of how these two sides work – and particularly how the left brain works – is crucial to understanding the illusion of the self. Keeping in mind that the left brain creates stories it believes completely—often without regard to the truth—one could compare this to following an inaccurate map. For example, if someone tells us to go sit in a chair, we rely on language to understand that “chair” denotes that thing with a seat, a backrest, and four legs.

I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). The central idea of how the left vs right brain functions is very interesting and I do enjoy the thought experiments the book suggests. The left-brain interpreter also creates and sustains a collection of categorical thoughts based on judgments and groups them together as likes and dislikes, ideas of right and wrong, and mental models of how things are supposed to be. While there’s nothing wrong with seeking to make sense of the world — certainly, all people are trying to do that!

And if you can’t tell when a particular pattern of letters creates a correctly spelled word, you’ll have no way of differentiating between the categories of written language and nonsense. Just as we categorize “chair” by certain factors, so we define our understanding of ourselves through certain parameters like gender,personality traits, talents, relationships, and our role in any of a hundred other categories. While in grad school in the early 1990s, Chris Niebauer began to notice striking parallels between the latest discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of Eastern thought. However, with her left brain disabled, she found her inner voice was silenced, removing all the anxiety she’d once felt. The only way we can work on this ‘problem’ is by becoming aware of the thinking mind and becoming less identified with it.

We make judgements and even mete out punishments based on these fictions, and so the idea of “me” as a person is firmly entrenched in our minds. His previous books include The Neurotic’s Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment and Catching up with the Buddha. 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. This book reminds me of a beautiful saying I have once heard: happiness is the expansion of self, but joy. Having already read the original book, I recognized the briefest recapitulation of ideas from it in the workbook.The first to demonstrate the biases and forms of faulty thinking our left hemisphere engages in constantly. And since our left brain is our interpreter, it’s also the side of our brain that’s responsible for identifying patterns. The right brain is about doing, so if you want benefits from this book, you must do at least some of the exercises. Big picture: keeps the big picture in focus and attends to a wider array of input; processes the global form that the elements create; ability to see and understand big-picture ideas; the whole. Read this book, do the practices, and begin to disidentify with the false sense of self that is the root cause of almost all the anxiety, depression, and fear we experience as human beings.

Spotlight attention, language center, interpretation/stories, labels/categories, sequential/patterns, nonliving/mechanical. This quote from the book sums up much of what the book sets out to teach; “ Recognizing what the left brain does has immense practical benefits. The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this … We live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and for most of us the mind is a master we are not even aware of. 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. A well written book that unfortunately also exposes the less-than-critical biases of the author for woowoo.In other words when you realize that everyone’s brain is constantly interpreting, in ways that are subjective and often inaccurate or completely incorrect, you might find yourself able to grasp this as “just my opinion “or “the way I see it” rather than “this is the way it is. These demonstrations are highly effective for punching holes in the left-brain ego, readying the reader for alternatives to the limited left brain. These blinks detail the ways that neuroscience is substantiating these millennia-old Eastern ideas, showing why Zen Buddhists might have been right when they said, “No self, no problem.