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

by Chris Niebauer

The advice to watch your emotions as they happen can increase your EQ because it puts space between the interpretive reaction and the emotion. It also teaches us not to fight or try and suppress our emotions, which is always a losing battle. Zen meditation instructs that when a distracting thought or emotion arises while meditating, one notices it and returns to the present moment.

gratitude and compassion are innate in our being, as the experience of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, whom we met in a previous chapter, suggests.

As you can imagine—and numerous studies have confirmed this—complaining leads to increased levels of anxiety and depression.

When Sacks was facing his own death, he wrote a short book called Gratitude.16 In it, he wrote “I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominate feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

In Buddhism, compassion is often described as “the ability to see another person as potentially ourselves” or “to see the interconnectivity of all things.” Compassion is all about the big picture, at which the right brain excels.

Filmmaker and artist David Lynch goes even further, saying that “Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition . . . a knowingness occurs.”

In the areas of intuition, emotion, and creativity, right-brain intelligence brings “wisdom beyond words.”

The next time you have a major decision to make, take note of your initial gut feeling regarding it, as this study suggests you should likely follow it.

another option would be to wholeheartedly pursue activities associated with the right side of the brain, in a search for what many refer to as enlightenment. Taking this option to the fullest means following a path similar to the saints, masters, and monks of the world's great spiritual traditions, and of course, the Buddha. Meditation, mindfulness, prayer, yoga, and maintaining a focus on compassion, gratitude, and the interconnected nature of all existence are all great places to start. Ultimately how to “get there” is largely a mystery and certainly something that cannot be articulated fully in words, but there are many signs and pointers the adepts have left behind. If this is your calling, then I bow to you and wish you well in your journey.