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

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The demonstrations illustrate how what seems logical can lead us to incorrect solutions, how beliefs lead to visual illusions, how motives distort thinking, how we use limited information to draw incorrect conclusions, and—to my mind, most importantly—how the left brain tends to create more problems and suffering than it solves. The No Self, No Problem Workbook is a bit of a paradox in that a book full of words is intended to get us to stop using our words so much.

Taylor is a neuroanatomist who, in 1996, suffered a stroke after a blood vessel burst in her brain’s left hemisphere. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. 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. All these (spiritual) traditions agree that when the self is revealed to be an illusion, it also shows how the problems the self created are illusions too.Some headings describe forthcoming content, while others begin with the label Exercise: or Practice: that ask the reader to do something. The goal of the exercises in the No Self, No Problem Workbook is not to eliminate the fictions created by the left brain (including the sense of an unchanging self), but simply to understand the limitations of those fictions and to become more open to our silent but important right hemisphere. 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. By now, you know that physical exercises like yoga and meditation can stimulate your right brain, but what about emotional exercises?

The right brain is holistic; it sees all aspects of the world as interconnected, and is most active when we’re simply doing rather than consciously thinking.This fits right in with the conventional physicalist interpretation of consciousness, and so my initial reaction was, "So what else is new? In other words when you realize that everyone’s brain is constantly interpreting, in ways that are subjective and often inaccurate or completely incorrect, you might find yourself able to grasp this as “just my opinion “or “the way I see it” rather than “this is the way it is. 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. It explores the implications of scientific discoveries on our perception of reality and the sense of self.