Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience
This new book from Karuna-Shechen’s founder, Matthieu Ricard, presents converging and diverging views on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, perception, meditation, and other topics.
The wide-ranging conversation between Ricard and Wolf Singer is an enlightening and engaging encounter between Buddhism’s wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience’s abundance of experimental results.
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.
Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience
Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer
MIT Press
Matthieu’s share of the proceeds from the sale of his books go directly to Karuna-Shechen. Learn more about Beyond the Self and Matthieu’s other books here.
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