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

Product Information

Niebauer posits that practicing compassion can actually strengthen our right brain and that Buddhists have understood this all along. 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.

When we curl our fingers around the handle of a coffee cup, our spatial awareness is responsible for our accurate hold on that object. A well written book that unfortunately also exposes the less-than-critical biases of the author for woowoo.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. But before we begin to unpack that, let’s go back and take a close look at how our illusion of self is generated and how our brains function. In fact, the instant you begin to put words on an experience, you’ve already switched over to left-brain thinking. 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. I also enjoyed how the information is structured and the gradual way in which ideas are presented and build on with the advancement of the book.

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. Keeping in mind that the left brain creates stories it believes completely—often without regard to the truth—one could compare this to following an inaccurate map. Now, Niebauer takes a deeper dive, offering exercises and practices you can do right now to experience the state of “no self” and its benefits. But because we don’t tend to think through that experience or say to ourselves, “Okay, I need to stretch out my hand at exactly the right space and distance to grab that coffee mug,” the mechanics of this function exist outside our language sphere and thus become categorized as an “unconscious mental experience.An interesting and easy to understand book for anyone wanting to find out more about how the mind works.

Read this book, do the practices, and begin to disidentify with the false sense of self that is the root cause of almost all the anxiety, depression, and fear we experience as human beings. For example, until this connection was disrupted, scientists relied on either brain damage or indirect methods to test for differences between the left and right brain.

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. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as “pure coincidence, nothing more. And, unfortunately, in contemporary society, complaining has become a common form of social interaction.