In fact, the moment we attempt to categorize this experience in words, we’ve engaged our left brains and disabled the right. How many times have you “just known” something, even when you lacked tangible evidence to support that feeling? So, while these signifiers are useful for making sense of the world, the truth is that they only exist in our minds as a type of linguistic construct.

Drama and tragedy and suffering remain, but around them, the infinite space of consciousness opens wide like an embrace. Compassion is also a central tenet of Buddhist philosophy and it’s defined as “the ability to see another person as potentially ourselves. In those moments when I’ve been able to do so fully, I begin to understand what Niebauer means when he explains that “the original nature of drama is to play.They’ve identified our language center and our zones for processing compassion, love, facial recognition, and every other function that makes us a human being. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. Since we now know that the self is an illusion created entirely by the left side of the brain, we can explore the myriad ways this revelation can change the way we experience the world. This book aims to unpack and explore the thinking mind and move toward our ultimate goal, which is to integrate everything we are (brain, body, emotions, and more) and live in the mystery and wonder of clear consciousness. While in grad school in the early 1990s, Chris Niebauer began to notice striking parallels between the latest discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of Eastern thought.

And what happens when that pattern-making skill is directed inward, toward that concept of our self? Put simply, it controls our understanding of physical space and motor control; it’s what guides us when we reach out our hand to take hold of an object. In an effort to make sense of the images and their subsequent identifications, patients formulated such answers as, “Well, the chicken foot goes with the chicken and I chose the shovel because you need it to clean out the chicken coop.When we first started to think is also the moment we began to trade reality for a thought about reality, a mental representation or abstraction of reality. The premise of "No Self No Problem" is that the human brain is organized in such a way that we carry around a split personality. While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it—not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. That probably sounds like a baffling question, because of course you haven’t thought about it; you know who you mean.

Mistaking the voice in our head for a thing and labeling it ‘me’ brings us into conflict with the neuropsychological evidence that shows there is no such thing. All these (spiritual) traditions agree that when the self is revealed to be an illusion, it also shows how the problems the self created are illusions too.Identify with the thinking mind and you are subject to all its mechanisms and preferences for the abstract over reality. You’re surely experiencing it right now, thinking thoughts such as “interesting” or “I’m not fully convinced yet,” and feeling confident that these thoughts are being generated by you, by that piloting “I” inside your head.

But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. Niebauer is correct in suggesting that reading the original book is not necessary for understanding and making use of the workbook (although I do recommend reading the original simply because it is an excellent book in its own right).

It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality.