Our association of our true self with the constant voice in our head is an instance of mistaking the map (the voice) for the territory (who we really are). And although neuroscience hasn’t yet found a way to explain how intuition works, that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

And if you can’t tell when a particular pattern of letters creates a correctly spelled word, you’ll have no way of differentiating between the categories of written language and nonsense.Hanson argues that the individuals we tend to regard as enlightened – people such as the Buddha and Jesus – didn’t possess brains with some special, enlightenment-prone quality; rather, they simply tapped into the right hemisphere’s natural abilities. No Self, No Problem offers a unique approach to understanding ourselves (our ego and our perception of it) through combination of science and eastern philosophy.

Where Western philosophy explicitly affirms that it does, Eastern philosophy posits that there is no singular sense of self and that al; human suffering can be attributed to the illusion that there is. At times, however, the brain is oversimplified and the author falls into the simplistic and outdated categories of right vs. Because of this, the thinking mind will constantly seek out ways to make comparisons (the building block of categorization), and find problems as a result. You often catch them casting sideways glances at you as they talk and sometimes, they stop talking altogether when you approach.His conclusions have significant ramifications for much of modern psychological modalities, which he says are spending much of their time trying to fix something that isn’t there. 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 servant to its master.

After all, each of us refers to ourselves as an “I” all the time, and, usually, we’ve got a pretty clear idea who we’re talking about. 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. The patient’s right hand — remember, the one controlled by their left brain — correctly selected a picture of a chicken to match the chicken foot. The ideas presented will definetely bring a lot more awareness into your being and will change the way you perceive your relationships, as well as yourself as individual and as a part of society. Perhaps the next step in our evolutionary journey is to change our relationship with our own thinking mind for the better.It explores the implications of scientific discoveries on our perception of reality and the sense of self. They also discovered that a clear understanding of these different sides and their functions is crucial for developing an understanding of the self.

For those of you not familiar with the previous version, a very short summary is that we love to use the thinking mind for everything, and it is the thinking mind that manifests much of our suffering. Although you’re thinking a lot about how to move into the correct positions and focus on your breathing, you’re fully present in the moment and in your body, free from the illusion of language and self. Your intuition is controlled by your right brain’s sense of “nonverbal knowing” or “nonconscious thought.When we remember or recollect, we are putting together a story of what we think happened, not witnessing or replaying what happened. When we train ourselves to see the world through a lens of gratitude, we reduce our stress and suffering and give ourselves the gift of a positive worldview. This serves us well in many ways—our existence would be unrecognizable without memory—but it also comes with some problematic consequences. The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this … 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. Just as we categorize “chair” by certain factors, so we define our understanding of ourselves through certain parameters like gender,personality traits, talents, relationships, and our role in any of a hundred other categories.