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

by Chris Niebauer

In this middle path, you might look at a trashy magazine in the grocery store and simultaneously see it as gossipy nonsense and an expressio...

You might feel a surge of anger when someone cuts you off in traffic, while at the same time be laughing internal...

There may be moments when you experience the egoless consciousness and the total embrace of “no self, no problem,” but then a few minutes later your ego kicks ...

In fact, you may already be playing the game in exactly this way. Maybe you meditate, practice mindfulness, and feel very spiritually grounded when you do, and later the ego comes back online and is frustrated to find out that you've run out of coffee. You take a yoga class and feel great, but curse the person that left a scratch on your car when you leave to go home. To become aware...

You may even stop trying so hard to change certain things in your life, or to become this or that in the future, because you begin to notice that the problems you are trying to overcome are mostly creations of the left-brain interpreter and you see how once they are overcome the left-brain interpreter will simply create new ones. This can also be true even for those pursuing a strict spiritual path, as indicated by the words of former Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass) when he said, “All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.”