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

Product Information

Apparently, lower animals lack the power of language, which is an integral part of the illusion of self, so they operate mostly in the wholistic, silent, right-brain mode, which Sheldrake believes animals do by accessing a field that is attached to their brains. Taylor is a neuroanatomist who, in 1996, suffered a stroke after a blood vessel burst in her brain’s left hemisphere. The No Self, No Problem Workbook by Chris Niebauer is a remarkable workbook to know our thinking patterns and improve them accordingly. per se, but the reader isn’t provided with a strong enough link to neuroscience (plus: the definitions just ain’t there / are blurry) and is left with the assertion that science doesn’t really know where consciousness lies, given experiences the interpretation of which is debatable (another question is: why should we make it a matter of consciousness?

According to the teachings in Buddhism, Taoism, and certain schools of Hindu philosophy, our true essence lies far beyond the limitations of the thinking mind. They also discovered that a clear understanding of these different sides and their functions is crucial for developing an understanding of the self. What made this experiment even more fascinating was the fact that, although most participants never consciously acknowledged that the game was rigged, their hands appeared to sweat or tremble when drawing from the risky first deck, further indicating that they were experiencing trepidation on a nonconscious level. His conclusions have significant ramifications for much of modern psychological modalities, which he says are spending much of their time trying to fix something that isn’t there.It makes you question decisions and patterns of thinking you have always made without much contemplation. 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. No Self, No Problem' by Chris Niebauer is a thought-provoking book that challenges our conventional views about the nature of self and consciousness. In this case, however, “unconscious” doesn’t mean the same thing as it does when we’ve passed out; it just means that it’s an experience we don’t actively think about in words.

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. Perhaps the next step in our evolutionary journey is to change our relationship with our own thinking mind for the better. 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. These demonstrations will be familiar to anyone like myself who has taught psychology and maybe by students who are lucky enough to have encountered them in an introductory psychology course. After all, each of us refers to ourselves as an “I” all the time, and, usually, we’ve got a pretty clear idea who we’re talking about.That is just say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretation so seriously. But when it tries to relay this information to our left brain, the left brain can’t put it into language and thus struggles to accept the information.

That probably sounds like a baffling question, because of course you haven’t thought about it; you know who you mean.Let me be clear that one definition of mind is the left-brain thinking, processing system that I’ve been talking about, which is the one we want to see beyond. Your intuition is controlled by your right brain’s sense of “nonverbal knowing” or “nonconscious thought. They are mental representations that don’t exist ‘out there’ in the world, but rather they are only in the human mind. At times, however, the brain is oversimplified and the author falls into the simplistic and outdated categories of right vs. In the 1960s, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry performed a series of radical, experimental surgeries on patients with epilepsy.

Many of our problems result from an overactive mind, one where the left side of the brain is constantly perceiving and categorizing things into buckets of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘desirable’ and ‘dangerous. In fact, almost everything the left brain does, from language to its perception of objects in space, is categorical in nature. It’s possible that this teaching, usually translated as “the perfection of wisdom,” is something that only the right brain can truly understand.

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. That’s why motion-based tasks like yoga and meditation are awesome for tapping into your right brain’s consciousness. The ‘I’ represents the idea of our individual self, the one that sits between the ears and behind the eyes and is ‘piloting’ the body.