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

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Once you are converted to this book’s way of understanding what your left brain is doing to you- you will be able to stop gossiping, stop complaining, stop hating yourself, and stop being hurt by the comments of others. This serves us well in many ways—our existence would be unrecognizable without memory—but it also comes with some problematic consequences. So, as she sought a way to regain some use of her left and brain and bridge the gap, she found that there must be a type of “middle way,” a means of existence that avoided relying too heavily on either the left brain or the right brain.

Though I picked up this book hoping for an abundance of neuroscience, what he gave me instead is far more important. I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015.And although neuroscience hasn’t yet found a way to explain how intuition works, that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

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. 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. While it is clear that these experiences are happening to us, we somehow retain the idea that we are still in charge of it all.In Zen Buddhism, there’s a teaching known as prajnaparamita, which emphasizes a form of knowledge that doesn’t depend on language. Instead of being so identified with the ‘me’ in our heads, we find ourselves noticing things like ‘that’s my left-brain interpreter telling stories. What makes this book unique is that Niebauer offers a series of exercises to allow the reader to experience this truth for him- or herself, as well as additional tools and practices to use after reading the book, all of which are designed to change the way we experience the world―a way that is based on being rather than thinking.

Indeed, if you stripped away these qualities, you might find that, just like the chair, your sense of self may be nothing more than a construct. The left brain mistakes the map for the territory … The left brain becomes so dependent on language that it mistakes the map of reality for reality itself.

I selected this title because there has always been a question for me as to if there is no self then what is on the constant cycle of rebirths? Then the problems the mind creates become ‘our problems,’ and a whole world of suffering and avoidance comes into being. This fits right in with the conventional physicalist interpretation of consciousness, and so my initial reaction was, "So what else is new? When this connection was disrupted, however, it became possible to study the job of each side of the brain in isolation.