Download or read book Self No Self written by Mark Siderits and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature and reality of self is a subject of increasing prominence among Western philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists. It has also been central to Indian and Tibetan philosophical traditions for over two thousand years. It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind. Leading philosophical scholars of the Indian and Tibetan traditions join with leading Western philosophers of mind and phenomenologists to explore issues about consciousness and selfhood from these multiple perspectives. Self, No Self? is not a collection of historical or comparative essays. It takes problem-solving and conceptual and phenomenological analysis as central to philosophy. The essays mobilize the argumentative resources of diverse philosophical traditions to address issues about the self in the context of contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Self, No Self? will be essential reading for philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of the self and consciousness, and will offer a valuable way into the subject for students.
Download or read book Attention Not Self written by Jonardon Ganeri and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonardon Ganeri presents an account of mind in which attention, not self, explains the experiential and normative situatedness of human beings in the world. Attention consists in an organisation of awareness and action at the centre of which there is neither a practical will nor a phenomenological witness. Attention performs two roles in experience, a selective role of placing and a focal role of access. Attention improves our epistemic standing, because it is in the nature of attention to settle on what is real and to shun what is not real. When attention is informed by expertise, it is sufficient for knowledge. That gives attention a reach beyond the perceptual: for attention is a determinable whose determinates include the episodic memory from which our narrative identities are made, the empathy for others that situates us in a social world, and the introspection that makes us self-aware. Empathy is other-directed attention, placed on you and focused on your states of mind; it is akin to listening. Empathetic attention is central to a range of experiences that constitutively require a contrast between oneself and others, all of which involve an awareness of oneself as the object of another's attention. An analysis of attention as mental action gainsays authorial conceptions of self, because it is the nature of intending itself, effortful attention in action, to settle on what to do and to shun what not to do. In ethics, a conception of persons as beings with a characteristic capacity for attention offers hope for resolution in the conflict between individualism and impersonalism. Attention, Not Self is a contribution to a growing body of work that studies the nature of mind from a place at the crossroads of three disciplines: philosophy in the analytical and phenomenological traditions, contemporary cognitive science and empirical work in cognitive psychology, and Buddhist theoretical literature.
Download or read book Self and No Self written by Dale Mathers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the growing interface between Eastern and Western concepts of what it is to be human from analytical psychology, psychoanalytic and Buddhist perspectives. The relationship between these different approaches has been discussed for decades, with each discipline inviting its followers to explore the depths of the psyche and confront the sometimes difficult psychological experiences that can emerge during any in-depth exploration of mental processes. Self and No-Self considers topics discussed at the Self and No-Self conference in Kyoto, Japan in 2006. International experts from practical and theoretical backgrounds compare and contrast Buddhist and psychological traditions, providing a fresh insight on the relationship between the two. Areas covered include: the concept of self Buddhist theory and practice psychotherapeutic theory and practice mysticism and spirituality myth and fairy tale. This book explains how a Buddhist approach can be integrated into the clinical setting and will interest seasoned practitioners and theoreticians from analytical psychology, psychoanalytic and Buddhist backgrounds, as well as novices in these fields.
Download or read book No Self No Problem written by Chris Niebauer and published by Hierophant Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as “pure coincidence, nothing more.” Fast-forward 20 years later and Niebauer is a PhD and a tenured professor, and the Buddhist-neuroscience connection he found as a student is practically its own genre in the bookstore. But according to Niebauer, we are just beginning to understand the link between Eastern philosophy and the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience and what these assimilated ideas mean for the human experience. In this groundbreaking book, Niebauer writes that the latest research in neuropsychology is now confirming a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, what is called Anatta, or the doctrine of “no self.” Niebauer writes that our sense of self, or what we commonly refer to as the ego, is an illusion created entirely by the left side of the brain. Niebauer is quick to point out that this doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist but rather that it does so in the same way that a mirage in the middle of the desert exists, as a thought rather than a thing. 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. What makes this book unique is that Niebauer offers a series of exercises to allow the reader to experience this truth for him- or herself, as well as additional tools and practices to use after reading the book, all of which are designed to change the way we experience the world—a way that is based on being rather than thinking.
Download or read book Self and Non Self in Early Buddhism written by Joaquín Pérez-Remón and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.
Download or read book The No Self Help Book written by Kate Gustin and published by New Harbinger Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s time to get over your self! Written by a clinical psychologist and student of Eastern philosophy, this handy little guide offers a radical solution to anyone struggling with self-doubt, self-esteem, and self-defeating thoughts: “no-self help.” By breaking free of your own self-limiting beliefs, you’ll discover your infinite potential. There is an insidious, global identity theft occurring that has robbed people of their very recognition of their true selves. The culprit—indeed the mastermind of this crisis—has committed the inside job of creating and promoting the idea that we are all a separate self, which is the chief source of our daily distress and dissatisfaction. No more than a narrative of personhood pieced together from disparate neural activations, the self we believe ourselves to be in our own minds—although quite capable of being affirming, inspiring, and constructive—often spews forth a distressing flow of worry and second-guessing, blaming and shaming, regret and guilt. This book offers an antidote to this epidemic of stolen identity, isolation, and self-deprecation: no-self (a concept known in Buddhist philosophy as anatta or anatman). The No-Self Help Book turns the idea of self-improvement on its head, arguing that the key to well-being lies not in the relentless pursuit of bettering one’s self but in the recognition of the self as a false identity born in the mind. Rather than identifying with a small, relative sense of self, this book encourages you to embrace a liberating alternative—an expansive awareness that is flexible and open to experiencing life as an ongoing and ever-changing process, without attachment to personal outcomes or storylines. To help you make this leap from self to no-self, the book provides forty bite-sized chapters full of clever and inspiring insights based in positive psychology and non-duality—a philosophy that asserts there is no real separation between any of us. So, if you’re tired of “self-help” and you’re ready to explore who you are beyond the self, let The No-Self Help Book be your guide.
Download or read book Cultivating the Mind of Love written by Thich Nhat Hanh and published by ReadHowYouWant. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I am continually amazed at how Thich Nhat Hanh is able to translate the Buddhist tradition into everyday life and make it relevant and helpful for so many people. Cultivating the Mind of Love just might be my favorite book of his....
Download or read book True Peace Work written by Thich Nhat Hanh and published by Parallax Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thich Nhat Hanh, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, bell hooks, Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder, Maha Ghosananda, Charles Johnson, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Matthieu Ricard, and many others are featured alongside each other in this foundational trove of Buddhist essays, poems, and teachings. Now a modern classic, True Peace Work is the premier collection of writings on the practice of Engaged Buddhism, a term that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh coined in the 1960s as part of his peace work in Vietnam that has grown to become a worldwide movement. The topics covered here are especially relevant in today's world: from creating nonviolent social change, to raising climate awareness, to simply learning how to walk (and enjoy it). This is not purely an activist's manual, however. True Peace Work is a spiritual bedrock that is as timeless as it is timely, one that insists on the connection between peace in oneself and peace in the world. Originally published in 1996 as Engaged Buddhist Reader, this revised edition has been expanded for our current time with a new introduction and additional contributors.
Download or read book Stepping Out of Self Deception written by Rodney Smith and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent Insight Meditation teacher presents the Buddhist concept of “no-self” in an easy-to-understand way that will radically change your perspective on life Anatta is the Buddhist teaching on the nonexistence of a permanent, independent self. It’s a notoriously puzzling and elusive concept, usually leading to such questions as, “If I don’t have a self, who’s reading this sentence?” It’s not that there’s no self there, says Rodney Smith. It’s just that the self that is reading this sentence is a configuration of elements that at one time did not exist and which at some point in the future will disperse. Even in its present existence, it’s more a temporary arrangement of components rather than something solid. Anatta is a truth the Buddha considered to be absolutely essential to his teaching. Smith shows that understanding this truth can change the way you relate to the world, and that the perspective of selflessness is critically important for anyone involved in spiritual practice. Seeing it can be the key to getting past the idea that spirituality has something to do with self-improvement, and to accessing the joy of deep insight into reality.
Download or read book The Self Illusion written by Bruce Hood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us believe that we are unique and coherent individuals, but are we? The idea of a "self" has existed ever since humans began to live in groups and become sociable. Those who embrace the self as an individual in the West, or a member of the group in the East, feel fulfilled and purposeful. This experience seems incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that this notion of the independent, coherent self is an illusion - it is not what it seems. Reality as we perceive it is not something that objectively exists, but something that our brains construct from moment to moment, interpreting, summarizing, and substituting information along the way. Like a science fiction movie, we are living in a matrix that is our mind. In The Self Illusion, Dr. Bruce Hood reveals how the self emerges during childhood and how the architecture of the developing brain enables us to become social animals dependent on each other. He explains that self is the product of our relationships and interactions with others, and it exists only in our brains. The author argues, however, that though the self is an illusion, it is one that humans cannot live without. But things are changing as our technology develops and shapes society. The social bonds and relationships that used to take time and effort to form are now undergoing a revolution as we start to put our self online. Social networking activities such as blogging, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter threaten to change the way we behave. Social networking is fast becoming socialization on steroids. The speed and ease at which we can form alliances and relationships is outstripping the same selection processes that shaped our self prior to the internet era. This book ventures into unchartered territory to explain how the idea of the self will never be the same again in the online social world.
Download or read book Being No One written by Thomas Metzinger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.
Download or read book Thinking about Oneself written by Kristina Musholt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel theory of self-consciousness and its development that integrates philosophical considerations with recent findings in the empirical sciences. In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. Traditionally, self-consciousness has been central to many philosophical theories. More recently, it has become the focus of empirical investigation in psychology and neuroscience. Musholt draws both on philosophical considerations and on insights from the empirical sciences to offer a new account of self-consciousness—the ability to think about ourselves that is at the core of what makes us human. Examining theories of nonconceptual content developed in recent work in the philosophy of cognition, Musholt proposes a model for the gradual transition from self-related information implicit in the nonconceptual content of perception and other forms of experience to the explicit representation of the self in conceptual thought. A crucial part of this model is an analysis of the relationship between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and awareness of others, Musholt argues, are two sides of the same coin. After surveying the philosophical problem of self-consciousness, the notion of nonconceptual content, and various proposals for the existence of nonconceptual self-consciousness, Musholt argues for a non-self-representationalist theory, according to which the self is not part of the representational content of perception and bodily awareness but part of the mode of presentation. She distinguishes between implicitly self-related information and explicit self-representation, and describes the transitions from the former to the latter as arising from a complex process of self–other differentiation. By this account, both self-consciousness and intersubjectivity develop in parallel.
Download or read book No Self No Problem written by Anam Thubten and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible introduction to the profound experience of enlightenment—with instructions on how to wake up to, and feel confident about, our true nature We can realize the highest truth in each moment when we learn to see through the illusion of the self. Anam Thubten, in remarkably easy-to-understand language, provides teachings for doing exactly that, based on the wisdom of the Buddhist traditions. He illuminates the path of going beyond the misconceptions of the ego to experience the reality of our true nature, which is already enlightened. He communicates with clarity, humor, and refreshing honesty, lighting the way to a life full of love, compassion, and true satisfaction.
Download or read book The Phenomenal Self written by Barry Dainton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-13 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phenomenal continuity seems to provide a more reliable guide to our persistence than any other form of continuity. The Phenomenal Self is a full-scale defence and elaboration of this premise."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Greening of the Self written by Joanna Macy and published by Parallax Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The premise of Greening of the Self is that we are not individuals separate from the world. Instead we are always "co-arising" or co-creating the world, and we cannot escape the consequence of what we do to the environment. Joanna Macy's innovative writing beautifully demonstres that by broadening our view of what constitutes "self" we can cut through our dualistic views and bring about the emergence of the "ecological self." Part of the Parallax Press Moments series.
Download or read book Losing Ourselves written by Jay L. Garfield and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why you don’t have a self—and why that’s a good thing In Losing Ourselves, Jay Garfield, a leading expert on Buddhist philosophy, offers a brief and radically clear account of an idea that at first might seem frightening but that promises to liberate us and improve our lives, our relationships, and the world. Drawing on Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, Garfield shows why it is perfectly natural to think you have a self—and why it actually makes no sense at all and is even dangerous. Most importantly, he explains why shedding the illusion that you have a self can make you a better person. Examining a wide range of arguments for and against the existence of the self, Losing Ourselves makes the case that there are not only good philosophical and scientific reasons to deny the reality of the self, but that we can lead healthier social and moral lives if we understand that we are selfless persons. The book describes why the Buddhist idea of no-self is so powerful and why it has immense practical benefits, helping us to abandon egoism, act more morally and ethically, be more spontaneous, perform more expertly, and navigate ordinary life more skillfully. Getting over the self-illusion also means escaping the isolation of self-identity and becoming a person who participates with others in the shared enterprise of life. The result is a transformative book about why we have nothing to lose—and everything to gain—by losing our selves.
Download or read book Beyond the Self written by Matthieu Ricard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Buddhist monk and esteemed neuroscientist discuss their converging—and diverging—views on the mind and self, consciousness and the unconscious, free will and perception, and more. Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk trained as a molecular biologist, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—close friends, continuing an ongoing dialogue—offer their perspectives on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, epistemology, meditation, and neuroplasticity. Ricard and Singer’s wide-ranging conversation stages an enlightening and engaging encounter between Buddhism’s wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience’s abundance of experimental results. They discuss, among many other things, the difference between rumination and meditation (rumination is the scourge of meditation, but psychotherapy depends on it); the distinction between pure awareness and its contents; the Buddhist idea (or lack of one) of the unconscious and neuroscience’s precise criteria for conscious and unconscious processes; and the commonalities between cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Their views diverge (Ricard asserts that the third-person approach will never encounter consciousness as a primary experience) and converge (Singer points out that the neuroscientific understanding of perception as reconstruction is very like the Buddhist all-discriminating wisdom) but both keep their vision trained on understanding fundamental aspects of human life.
