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

by Chris Niebauer

These studies strongly suggest that we live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and for most of us the mind is a master we are not even aware of. We may become angry, offended, sexually aroused, happy, or fearful, and we do not question the authenticity of these thoughts and experiences. While it is clear that these experiences are happening to us, we somehow retain the idea that we are still in charge of it all.

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.

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.”

Noting just how many “yous” appear in a day works to dismantle the illusion of a singular “you” behind it all. A sense of freedom can emerge from the realization that you are under no obligation to be consistent. You need not try to glue the continuous change in the world into one single thing. Anger may appear with one “you,” but that is only one page of the flip-book, which will soon be replaced with another emotion, another perception, another thought. Like the sun rising and setting, these “yous” will come and go. There is no need to cling to some and avoid others. There need be no conflict between these selves—so you can abandon the wrestling match between “sinner you” and “saint you.” This frees up an enormous amount of mental energy and fundamentally changes how we can experience the world.

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

The left-brain ego thinks in terms of cause and effect, and in order for an action to be worth taking, it must have a positive outcome, but this can complicate the actual doing of the tasks.

Meanwhile, psychology—and much of culture—has been on a pursuit of happiness crusade for at least the last thirty years. However, the current research is backing up Frankl's insights.

For this exercise, I invite you to redirect awareness to the space between your hands, the space between you and the next person you see, the space between any objects in front of you now. There is so much space that there are infinite variations of this practice, and you don't have to leave Earth to experience it. One practice is to look outward into the night sky and focus on the space between things. There is something about space that slows the mind, since the mind has no way to understand it because it has no content and no container. Therefore, when we shift our awareness to it, the interpretive mind slows down.

It's not about lacking emotion; rather, one could say that they have mastered their emotions because they do not fight them and in this way they are free from them. There is an old Zen story about a student with an anger problem that illustrates this perfectly. The story goes that when the student expressed concern about his own bad temper to his master, the master said, “Show it to me.” Of course, the student couldn't and explained that it wasn't within his control to produce it at will, but rather it just happened. The master replied that if it wasn't within his control, then it was not part of his true nature.

During a now famous lecture, the Eastern philosopher and spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti asked the audience “Do you want to know what my secret is?” According to several accounts of this story, in a soft voice, he said, “I don't mind what happens.”

Mythologist Joseph Campbell said this about compassion: “When real trouble comes, your humanity is awakened.”

ask two students to sit in chairs, one right behind the other, with both students facing the same direction. Student A is in the back, facing Student B's back. I then have both students either close their eyes or don a blindfold. As the experimenter, I take Student A's right hand with my right and guide their index finger to tap the nose of Student B, who is seated in front of them. At the same time, I also use my left hand to tap on student A's nose. I control the tapping so that they are in perfect synchrony. Consider the message being sent to Student A's brain: my hand is two feet in front of me touching a nose. Incredibly, and without fail, Student A's brain then makes a radical revision based on the physical evidence; it assumes its own real nose is two feet long. Afterward, Student A sometimes reports that they felt their nose slowly grow two feet, and sometimes it seems to have grown instantly. The experience is often so profound and surprising that, even in a roomful of others, Student A will let out a scream.

A third option is what one might call a middle path, where you have one foot in each of the other two options. In this option, you take the game just seriously enough that you cheer when your kid wins a soccer game and feel sad when you don't get a promotion at work. 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 no winning and that every win ultimately depends on a loss.

In this middle path, you might look at a trashy magazine in the grocery store and simultaneously see it as gossipy nonsense and an expression of human creativity and spirituality. You might feel a surge of anger when someone cuts you off in traffic, while at the same time be laughing internally at the silliness of the drama. 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 when a coworker walks by and ignores you.