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

by Chris Niebauer

As the inner language quieted, she reports, “I became detached from the memories of my life, [and] I was confronted by an expanding sense of grace.” She could no longer perceive the boundaries of where she ended and everything else began. She felt her being as fluid rather than solid. She was totally in the present moment, embodied in tranquility. Categories such as good/bad and right/wrong were experienced as a continuum rather than disconnected opposites. Her left-brain ego, which viewed herself

as separate, was no longer dominant in her consciousness. In her right brain (or perhaps her “right mind”?), she felt gratitude and a sense of contentment. The right brain was compassionate, nurturing, and eternally optimistic. In her words, “I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call nirvana.”

She talks about how she can now choose to enter right-brain bliss, a place she good-naturedly calls “la-la land,” but she can also focus on left-brain processing to get things done, communicate with others, and solve the practical problems that come up in life.

For instance, in the same way that the left brain is categorical, the right brain takes a more global approach to what it perceives. Rather than dividing things into categories and making judgments that separate the world, the right brain gives attention to the whole scene and processes the world as a continuum. Whereas the attention of the left brain is focused and narrow, the right brain is broad, vigilant, and attends to the big picture.

The left brain is sequential, separating time into “before that” or

“after this,” while the right brain is focused on the immediacy of the present moment.

Another way to summarize the differences between the left and right brain is that the left brain is the language center and the right brain is the spatial center. While admittedly this is reductive, it is a helpful way to summarize decades of research. Language is categorical; it looks at one word at a time with a narrow focus either as you read or as you speak. When we process the space around us, we deal with the whole at once, not individual parts but how the parts are all connected as they are in any picture.

Because there is no story necessary for reaching out and grabbing something, it seems as if you were not conscious of how this is done due to our bias of identifying with a language-based interpretive consciousness.

Because we don't have words to even describe how we do movement, many will consider it meaningless to ask if it is conscious. The most common answer from my students to the question “how did you do that?” is a blank look

and the response, “I don't know, I just did it.” Dismissing this action as unconscious is a result of our overdependence on the language-based interpretative consciousness our interpretive pattern perceiver cannot imagine a world without.

No one would say that any of these practices are unconscious; rather many describe them as a very alert form of consciousness that is difficult to put into words. However, just because something cannot be put into words does not make it unconscious.

This echoes the wisdom of the ancient Eastern philosophers, who said that the real world couldn't be put into words and anything put into words was not the real world.

Finally, another well-known way to experience right-brain consciousness is the practice of mindfulness, something that is most often associated with Buddhism and other Eastern traditions. Mindfulness in this context is defined as being fully in the present moment, observing what is happening in the world around you along with the world inside you—your thoughts, feelings, sensations. Practitioners are often taught to watch the machinations of the mind without attaching too much importance to them in the