The self and the mind
May. 4th, 2025 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mickiStill reading Why Buddhism is true ; the two chapters I read today were on No-self and theories of the mind from psychology. This section is a little basic because he's assuming people don't know about the teaching of no-self, and he goes through an early sermon of the Buddha about the 5 aggregates and how we're not really any of them. The only part of this that stuck out for me was that one of the Buddha's main arguments is not the impermanence of every part (though I'm sure that's in the sermon), but rather that we're not really in control of our form, our perceptions, our feelings, our mental formations, etc.
That's important because the modern psychology parallel is that we're not really in control of our brains and how they drive us; he goes into a lot of psychological studies (people with split left and brain hemispheres, etc) of how we often really don't know what's driving us, and modern theories that are brains are modular (split into a number of competing processes with none of them in true control). I think this is leading up to something but I felt that two chapters were enough--so more next weekend!
That's important because the modern psychology parallel is that we're not really in control of our brains and how they drive us; he goes into a lot of psychological studies (people with split left and brain hemispheres, etc) of how we often really don't know what's driving us, and modern theories that are brains are modular (split into a number of competing processes with none of them in true control). I think this is leading up to something but I felt that two chapters were enough--so more next weekend!
