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

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A well written book that unfortunately also exposes the less-than-critical biases of the author for woowoo. The ideas presented will definetely bring a lot more awareness into your being and will change the way you perceive your relationships, as well as yourself as individual and as a part of society. The left brain as a mapmaker to reality, and language is the pen with which the left brain draws… but the left brain also becomes so dependent on language that it mistakes the map of reality for reality itself. 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.

There’s no reason to think that the stories of the self, and the self’s preoccupation with sorrows, worries, and problems, are any more than plausible fictions based on incomplete information.In any case, I would definitely read this book as a reminder that we are much, much, much more than who we “think” we are. In short, I really liked the book and it gave me the opportunity to make peace between my analytical and spiritual thinking.

That’s because Buddhists don’t believe in the sort of autopilot sense of self we believe to be located in our brains. When we remember or recollect, we are putting together a story of what we think happened, not witnessing or replaying what happened. 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.Because if the definition of chair exists only as a construct in our minds, the same must be true for our sense of self.

That probably sounds like a baffling question, because of course you haven’t thought about it; you know who you mean.

When the stories it creates don’t evoke as strong a mental or emotional reaction, our suffering lessens as a result. Instead, it is mere apophenia; it is an overinterpretation by the left side of the brain which excels at pattern recognition. Likewise, the patient’s left brain identified an image of a snow shovel and matched it to the snowscape. If you’d like to get in the habit of feeling true gratitude, a great way to start is to cease complaining.

Although the person we are may grow, develop, and change throughout our lifetime, we at least accept that there is one definitive sense of “I” rather than multiple shifting versions of ourselves.I have discussed with many people about it and it is indeed a paradigm changing book for many; I think in the most positive way. What makes intuition an especially interesting facet of your consciousness is that, although neuroscience can’t explain it, studies have not only proved that it exists, but that it’s also better at making certain types of decisions than your left brain is! The patient was then asked to look at a series of additional random images with both eyes and pick out pick out the images that could be matched with the first two. But I felt this book to be a little simplistic - only dividing the brain up to "left" and "right" when it is so much more complex. However, with her left brain disabled, she found her inner voice was silenced, removing all the anxiety she’d once felt.