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

by Chris Niebauer

In Iain McGilchrist's masterpiece of a book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,4 he describes the central role of the left brain as a mapmaker to reality, and language is the pen with which the left brain draws.

Language can obviously be extremely helpful in communication with others, but the left brain also becomes so dependent on language that it mistakes the map of reality for reality itself. There is an old Zen proverb that points to this problem, advising against “confusing the menu with the food.”

When the mind mistakes the map for reality, the result is that we carry on blindly in a world of language-based stories created by the left-brain interpreter. Keeping in mind that the left brain creates stories it believes completely—often without regard to the truth—one could compare this to following an inaccurate map. Anyone who has allowed their ...

Categories are just another type of map of reality. They are mental representations that don't exist “out there” in the world, but rather they are only in the human mind—the left side of the brain to be specific. Categories are based on the left brain's ability to see differences and create opposites and are formed when things in the world that are continuous are grouped by some common feature and then treated as one unit.

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.

Simply becoming aware of the interpreter and the endless categories it creates through judgment frees you from being tied to the inevitability of these judgments. That is to say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretations so seriously. 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.”

You begin to see your judgments as simply a different line in the sand than others.

When someone approaches you with a “this is the way it is” attitude, you can appreciate that this person is dominated by the left brain, that they are a servant to its master. As a result, there is no need to take their actions or attitudes persona...

Furthermore, when you become aware that the left brain is just doing its thing, interpreting and judging, the stories it creates don't tend to provoke the physical reaction in your nervous system they once did. A momentary judgment of “They don't like me” doesn't have to spiral into the sweaty palms and increasing heart rate of a mini panic attack. This awareness of the interpreter can profoundly change how you experience the world.

The left-brain interpreter also creates and sustains a collection of categorical thoughts based on judgments and groups them together as likes and dislikes, ideas of right and wrong, and mental models of how things are supposed to be. We collectively call these judgments our belief system.

But belief systems are like the university where I teach or the country of Canada: they don't exist “out there” in the world, but only in the left brain and only when people are thinking about them.

Take some of the most popular beliefs: my country is the best; my religion is the only true one; I think so-and-so should be president of the country. None of these beliefs exists independently in the world, but only in the mind and only at ...

Furthermore, if everyone believes something different, then we cannot all be right. What are the odds that you alone have the right beliefs and everyone else is wrong? When you are heavily identified with your left-brain interpreter where your beliefs are housed, it can seem as if they are no longer ...

Let's look at how being overly identified with a belief system can cause suffering. What is the major source of conflict between people? Why do we fight each other? Turn on any news channel and you can confirm the intense suffering that occurs due to opposing belief systems.

People die and kill for beliefs all the time, but not just any beliefs—only the ones they believe in without recognizing that they are only beliefs. This is how the interpreter confuses actual reality with a thought-based belief, and it is simply another example of the map/territory mistake.

The left-brain interpreter not only creates and maintains these assumptions of the world, but makes them feel as though they are truly how the world really is. This is very unsettling when you consider the left brain's ability to make up stories that hav...

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a belief if you see it for what it is: the outcome of a process that goes on in the left brain maintained by ...

The old Zen saying of “Right and wrong are the sickness of the mind” points to this dilemma precisely, as “right” and “wrong” are only beliefs that become a sickness when we take th...

Only when we begin to see that the interpreter is creating and maintaining our beliefs can we become less attached to the idea that our own beliefs are “right.” This opens us to new ideas and the possibility that for other ...

You categorize and define your “self” in relation to others.

If you feel you are funny and intelligent, that judgment places you in social categories that depend upon other people being boorish and not so smart. Otherwise your categories would have no meaning.

If you are an extrovert, you need introverts for a comparison. If you are male, you need female in the same way we see in the classic reversible symbol of Taoism: yang needs yin to define what it is.

Psychology and many self-help practices play the game of categories regularly, when we say things like “this is how I am, and this is how I want to be.” We create an image of ourselves, split that image, and then suffer when one i...

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...

You might be feeling guilty or beating yourself up in this moment for not recognizing that the interpreter is a transparent image. This won't help in overcoming suffering one bit, since this process of self-flagellation is exactly how the interpreter continues to create itself. It is just more of the “this is how I am” and “this is how I want to be” game that simply produces more problems for the interpreter to think about. 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.”

Another way to think of the fictional self or ego is that its addiction to interpreting works like a drug. Every day it needs to get its fix, and it does that in a variety of ways: telling stories about what it perceives, comparing and categorizing itself again others, judging things as right or wrong—and it uses all of these processes to define “you” as “yourself.”

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 “out there,” there were no teams “out there,” no points were being scored outside of the collective fiction in our heads. The only thing “out there” was a bunch of little boys running around kicking a ball, and everything else made up our story about it.

In the reality of the right brain, there are no winners or losers, no teams or championships, th...

Think of this soccer tournament. Beyond the being and doing of boys kicking a ball on a field, it is all a story. Winners, losers, championships—these are all based on categories, labels, patterns. Language and thought provide the tools to generate these stories.

Our whole lives, even our very sense of self, might be thought of in the same way as this soccer game. The abstract stories themselves aren't the problem, but becoming lost in them creates the problem. Our suffering comes from getting swept up in these stories and forgetting that they are not themselves reality.

Complaining is a popular and well-accepted form of social interaction. I don't mean being skeptical or offering constructive criticism—those can be very helpful. By complaining, I mean objecting to things as they are in a way that isn't helpful, such as, “this cloudy weather is terrible!”

For our purposes, let's define complaints as statements that advocate the idea that things “shouldn't be the way they are” or that “this shouldn't have happened.” As you can probably guess, whether said out loud or just in your head, complaints always stem from the interpretive mind. A complaint is strictly an interpretation of events, a story, and a negative judgment.

For instance, statements such as “This rain is ruining my day,” or “I can't believe I got a flat tire,” or “Traffic is horrible,” are all examples reflecting a negative mind-set rather than helpful criticism. We even have a popular conversational game in our culture—the “worst day” competition, in which people argu...

As you can imagine—and numerous studies have confirmed this—complaining leads to increased level...

When someone says, “This line is too long,” or “Nothing ever goes my way,” or “I wish I was someplace else,” the statement becomes a belief, and the e...

In short, complaints turn into the belief that there is something wrong with reality. This often snowballs, as one complaint brings on a wave of emotion that influences other beliefs in turn, and more negative emotions result from those beliefs. All of these unhelpful complaints stem from an overidentification with left bra...

Let's conclude with a few explicit pointers on playing this cosmic game. One way to play the game is to dismiss or forget the ideas presented here and continue to believe that the left brain is in fact you.

You keep your identity and keep playing a role in this theatrical world we call modern society. In this realm of categories and interpretations, there are good days, but there are also bad days; there are friends, but also enemies.

In this left-brain world, you can win, but sometimes you will lose. There is the thrill of victory but also the anxiety over defeat. The game is played with a dreadful sense of seri...

Of course, there are some downsides in this approach. Life is viewed as short. Death and disease are the enemy, and you must work as hard as you can for as long as possible, trying to win with the ...

Like most of us, your actor ego is likely cast as only an extra in the background of the world's stage, but there is always the chance for stardom, and f...

There is nothing wrong with this choice, and currently and historically it is the most popular option on the planet. In a way, for those who are totally ignorant of all these ideas, we could say that they are playing the ...

Going to the other extreme, another option would be to wholeheartedly pursue activities associated with the right side of the brain, in a search ...

Taking this option to the fullest means following a path similar to the saints, masters, and monks of the world's great spiritual t...

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 l...

A third option is what one might call a middle path, where you have one foot in each ...

In this option, you take the game just seriously enough that you cheer when your kid wins a soccer game and feel sad when...

Of course in either case, you don't take either the victory or defeat too seriously, because behind them both you maintain a hint of a smile and this smile symbolizes your understanding that without losing there can be ...