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

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The goal of the exercises in the No Self, No Problem Workbook is not to eliminate the fictions created by the left brain (including the sense of an unchanging self), but simply to understand the limitations of those fictions and to become more open to our silent but important right hemisphere. Niebauer's first book, I noted a similarity between his ideas and those of don Miguel Ruiz, and I wondered if he had read or even met Ruiz.

In an effort to make sense of the images and their subsequent identifications, patients formulated such answers as, “Well, the chicken foot goes with the chicken and I chose the shovel because you need it to clean out the chicken coop. Buddhism has a word for this concept— anatta, which is often translated as ‘no self’—which is one of the most fundamental tenets of Buddhism, if not the most important.So, if we could only get our left brain to listen to our intuition, we might all be a little safer and a little more successful!

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. The right brain is about doing, so if you want benefits from this book, you must do at least some of the exercises. While each side of the brain specializes in certain types of tasks, both sides are usually in continuous communication.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. But it also provided scientists with a group of people whose left and right brains were no longer in constant communication. 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.

I suspect any psychic communication by means of a field would be subject to the same limitations that the laws of cause and effect impose on communication using electromagnetic fields, whereas certain psi phenomena appear to bypass those laws. Some headings describe forthcoming content, while others begin with the label Exercise: or Practice: that ask the reader to do something. That probably sounds like a baffling question, because of course you haven’t thought about it; you know who you mean. Without the ability to identify patterns, we can’t assert that “cat” is a real word which means something but that “adjks” is gibberish. Where we believe that our “self” simply is and that it exists in our own minds, Buddhism believes that self isn’t really up there.

It’s also important to remember that our interpretation of events as “bad” or “good” is merely a construct of our left brain. What he found is that the "rational" left brain based on language and intuition dominates the right brain, which often is responsible for our "gut instincts" and creative processes that can't be put into words. Our character, our personality, is not just the story we tell ourselves about us: it’s the version of our story that has the most support from our community. His previous books include The Neurotic’s Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment and Catching up with the Buddha.

Before we get into that, however, and before we take a close look at exactly how this illusion of selfhood is created, let’s take a moment to review how the brain works. In his bestselling book No Self, No How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism , Professor Chris Niebauer explored the incredible link between Eastern philosophy and recent findings in neuropsychology, which is now confirming a fundamental tenet of anatta, or the doctrine of “no self. And what happens when that pattern-making skill is directed inward, toward that concept of our self? If you’re intrigued by this neuroscientific insight and how it intersects with Eastern teachings, then we highly recommend the blinks to Buddha’s Brain, by Rick Hanson. Present: focused on the immediacy of the present moment (doing and being in a way that is beyond thinking and language).However, it can also conjure up patterns that don’t exist — like the concept of a stable, continuous self — and these miscommunications can generate real mental pain and suffering in our everyday lives.