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

by Chris Niebauer

For one who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy. —Bhagavad Gita

The brain is the subject and the mind is the verb, or as cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky put it, “The mind is what the brain does.”

For the first time in history, the findings of scientists in the West strongly support, in many cases without meaning to, one of the most fundamental insights of the East: that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing. In other words, the self that you think you know is not real.

This reverence for thinking is in stark contrast to the tenets of Eastern philosophy found in traditions such as Buddhism, Taoism, and certain schools of Hinduism. These traditions at best advocate a distrust of the thinking mind and often go further to claim that the thinking mind is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Mistaking the voice in our head for a thing and labeling it “me” brings us into conflict with the neuropsychological evidence that shows there is no such thing. This mistake—this illusory sense of self—is the primary cause of our mental suffering. What's more, I contend that it blocks access to the eternal, expansive thread of universal consciousness that is always available to us.

Taoist philosopher and author Wei Wu Wei when he writes, “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn't one.”

The brain breathes mind like the lungs breathe air. —Huston Smith

Gazzaniga determined that the left side of the brain created explanations and reasons to help make sense of what was going on.1 The left brain acted as an “interpreter” for reality. Furthermore, Gazzaniga found that this interpreter was often completely and totally wrong.

The left brain was simply making up interpretations, or stories, for events that were happening in a way that made sense to that side of the brain (a shovel is needed for a chicken coop) or as if it had directed the action (I got up because I needed a drink, or I laughed at my own joke). Neither of these explanations was true, but that was unimportant to the interpretive mind, which was convinced that its explanations were the correct ones.

This reminds me of faith promoting stories.

Ramachandran found that the left brain's role is one of beliefs and interpretation and that it had little regard for reality in making up its interpretations.

Is it possible that the self we invest so much in is nothing more than a story to help explain our behaviors, the myriad events that go on in our lives, and our experiences in the world?

Most people are familiar with Helen Keller, who lost both sight and hearing very early in life. It is particularly telling that she states that she only developed a sense of self after she learned language.

The root of the problem is that many of us do not see language as a representation of reality, but confuse it with reality itself.

As long as we remember that categories are mental representations (thoughts) only, they can be very useful; in other words, categories exist as “things” only in the mind and only in the act of perceiving them. Issues arise when we believe these “things” are real.

For instance, think of all the ways in which you can answer the question “who are you?” Most people in my shoes would say things like, “I am a man, a father, a husband, a professor, an author,” etc. But if you really look, while all of these things point to ways in which I can categorize myself, they don't actually answer the question, “who am I?” Is that because the “I” that I am looking for is more akin to the university or the country of Canada? Sure, the physical entity of my body and my brain is there, but the “I” attached to it only exists as a thought—and only when I think it. Is it possible that you can't definitively answer this question because the “I” you are addressing isn't a thing? Seen in this light, “I” is simply a useful, categorical fiction, expressed through language. But unlike the categorical fictions of the university or Canada, believing wholeheartedly in the fiction of self—in effect, making the left-brain interpreter the master instead of the servant—has unintended consequences—suffering being one of them.

To think is to think in categories, and there is no way around this.

This awareness of the interpreter can profoundly change how you experience the world. In addition, when you begin to observe the interpreter, you find that you make fewer judgments and can take your judgments less seriously. You know that they just happen.

The tendency of the self to defend its own image through more thinking is a hallmark of understanding in Buddhism. Experienced meditators describe how in meditation, as the mind begins to still and the voice in the head speaks less frequently, there is often a rush of thoughts that are most important to sustaining the self-image. This is how meditators can notice what mental stories and thought patterns are their most prevalent preoccupations, as the mind reverts to replaying these topics as a defense against slowing down. Some Eastern teachers explain that the mind “keeps talking” in this way because it's the only way it can exist. This is consistent with my view that the self is more like a verb than a noun. It only exists when we think it does, because the process of thinking creates it.

I have experienced this.

The left brain has created this illusion of self by noticing a pattern of categorical differences between you and others and combining those observations with memory, preferences, and the perspective of the “pilot,” who seems to be steering the ship of the brain and body. Our definition of self depends in part on our difference from others. There is no “me” without “not me.”

We want to be smarter, more attractive, more successful, etc., and all of these ideas are our “problems.” The great tragedy here is that we never realize that none of these conditions will ever be met completely to the satisfaction of the self because the self must continue to think in order to stay in existence and therefore will always change the measuring stick—always adding a new “better” to fall short of. As a reminder, when I say we suffer, in this context I mean we generate thoughts and feelings of sadness, disappointment, grief, what have you, as we reject one imaginary version of ourselves in favor of another. This is simply the left brain doing its thing and nothing more.

Remember, to think is to think categorically, and there is no way around this. The trick is to become less identified with your thoughts, to not take them so seriously, to see them as “happenings” rather than “the way things really are.”

These images are a powerful example.

I also find it interesting that the word yoga means “union,” the union of your true self and the rest of the universe.

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.

becoming a new parent is one of the clearest ways to trade ego happiness for meaning and never look back.

Equating perception with understanding is the essence of metaphor; we take something abstract and connect it to a right-brain experience, hoping that the left brain will get it.

Perhaps this is intuition in a nutshell: the right brain senses information that isn't available to the left-brain interpreter and sends it over in the form of what is described as an inspiration or gut feeling that the left brain can't quite put into words and so it has reached the end of its ability to understand how it knows what it knows.

All of these unhelpful complaints stem from an overidentification with left brain and the illusory self, for it is only the ego that can object to reality as it is.

Sheldrake conducted a careful study on such occurrences where pet owners would randomly get a call to head home.3 The owners would then head home in a taxi making sure that there were no other cues that they were on their way. What he found was that the animals began to act excited at the exact point when the intentions of the owner were to head home. This suggests some sort of connection between the consciousness of the pet and its owner.

As adults, our monsters become very real—taking such forms such as financial ruin, loneliness, job loss, sickness, and death. As adults we've come to really believe that monsters can “get us” and that we will be devastated by this. Somehow a game that started with a built-in safety valve and the inability to stop laughing ends up in stress, depression, and anxiety. Not coincidentally, as our bodies get older, our sense of self becomes more established, and our propensity to experience mental suffering grows too.

former Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass) when he said, “All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”

If this book has served its purpose, it has been a reminder that there is no place to go and nothing in particular to do, because you are already there and already doing it. Except of course that there isn't even a real you anywhere, doing anything. Or, perhaps we could say it is also everywhere and doing everything.