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

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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. You’re also likely feeling confident that those thoughts are being processed by the same autopilot self you’ve always imagined up in your head. These book details 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. This serves us well in many ways—our existence would be unrecognizable without memory—but it also comes with some problematic consequences. Furthermore, since your ego – the self you’re referring to when you say “I” – is a construct of the left brain, there is no way for you, in the typical Western sense of the word, to experience right-brain consciousness.

Those moments when you get a strong feeling about something, be it the sensation that someone is bad news or that someone you love might be hurt, are driven by your intuition. Anyone trying to understand the idea behind enlightenment, ego, and some other misunderstood concepts will find a clear scientific explanation. Also, experience with the inert gas xenon used as an anesthetic agent suggests that conscious awareness disappears (the brain goes to sleep) when quantum entanglement at the sub-cellular level is disrupted. For those of you not familiar with the previous version, a very short summary is that we love to use the thinking mind for everything, and it is the thinking mind that manifests much of our suffering.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. That probably sounds like a baffling question, because of course you haven’t thought about it; you know who you mean. The part of the brain that engages when we talk to others is the same part that activates when we talk to our-selves. This effectively disabled the entire left side of her brain and meant that, for awhile, she was unable to process language or access the internal monologue that categorized her sense of self. The right hemisphere may be the brain’s spatial center, but navigating space is far from the only thing the right brain does.

Put another way, it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. This would understandably leave you feeling hurt and left out or confused as to why they suddenly dislike you. But they have discovered that different types of memories are processed in different areas in the brain. Identify with the thinking mind and you are subject to all its mechanisms and preferences for the abstract over reality.

If you’re familiar with one sentence from the annals of Western philosophy, it’s probably this one: Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.