No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism

by Chris Niebauer

Perhaps this is why the ancient Eastern philosophers valued nonlinguistic consciousness to a degree that is difficult for the modern Westerners to appreciate. Again, neuropsychology is catching up to this, but it hasn't exactly gotten there yet. Consider the following quote from the Advaita Vedanta master Nisargadatta Maharaj: “In your world, the unspoken has no existence. In mine the words and their contents have no being. . . . My world is real, while yours is made of dreams.” To live in a world of abstractions—based on language, concepts, beliefs, patterns, labels—is to live in a dream world rather than reality. One of the primary teachings of Zen Buddhism is to bring your consciousness back to reality, saving it from being lost in the world of the abstract. When my class gets too lost in one abstraction after another, I will clap my hands together making a noise loud enough to startle students sleeping in the back. I remind them that at that point, for the moment they were startled by the clap, they were awake without thought: that is Zen. At my son's soccer match, I found myself in a conversation with another soccer dad about how stressful work was at the time. I tried to explain that most stress is the result of taking fictitious stories too seriously, but he was having a hard time separating the story (left-brain interpreting) from the reality (right-brain witnessing). So, I pointed to the soccer field and reminded him that there was no soccer championship going on ...