TBH: You say in your new book Why We Believe What We Believe that it is the nature of our brain to search for its deepest truth. So where is self in this picture? Is self merely a construct in the brain?

ANDY: There’s a couple of very interesting answers for that question. I mean on one hand if we start from a neuro psychological perspective then the concept of the self and how we develop our beliefs, we’re sort of always trapped with the part of the conclusions we’ve come to…we’re trapped within our brain really. So how we perceive of ourselves as well as the rest of the world is all based on what comes into our senses - what we think about, how our brain processes information.

Of course, part of how we develop a sense of self is that our “self” is what really has all of those senses. So we feel ourselves more than we feel somebody else. It’s not to say that we can’t feel somebody else’s pain and so forth. But clearly there’s a difference in terms of how we experience our own self verses anything else that’s out there. So on one hand the brain is sort of set up to conceive of our self as being separate from the world. But on another hand our brain is very capable of expanding that self to connect that self with the rest of the world.

In a lot of our studies of meditation, for example, people actually describe that they get beyond that sense of self. That they feel as if their self has been connected or become one with something much greater than that self. And so in some senses we are kind of built to have a sense of our self and to establish that self, and that constrains how we understand the world. There’s also this interesting aspect of how we get beyond that, especially through various practices like meditation and prayer and so forth. That enables at least the perception of that self getting beyond itself to see the world in a very different kind of way. And in many ways to have a more universal sense of self instead of a more specific kind of ego sense of self. So does that answer your question?

TBH: Actually it seems there is no real answer.

ANDY: That’s true.

TBH: Your book makes that clear. And yet it’s fascinating because on the other hand at one point you speak about a current hypothesis that says the human brain is also inclined to accept reality as a spiritual belief separate from the influence of others and even physical “sense reality.”

ANDY: Right. The thing that we kept coming back to in terms of the process of beliefs, and this also ties back to being, in some instances, basically trapped within the brain, is whatever information, or whatever ideas we form about ourselves and about the world are, in fact, beliefs. And whether they are spiritual beliefs or social beliefs or political beliefs, whatever, they’re based on the fact that we have processed that information. So we’re always dealing with what might be argued to be a best guess about our world. And to the extent that until we really have complete knowledge of what that world is really about, I think that there are certain limitations and restrictions that we have based on just the inherent workings of our mind. And what I’ve been trying to do in our research is to try to see if there are ways of getting past that in some way, and to get through these practices like meditation or prayer - to get to something which enables us to get beyond that merely subjective and objective sense of the world, and get to some deeper reality, a deeper understanding of reality.

TBH: Or what you could call a ‘direct experience’.

ANDY: Yes. But I want to point out this really goes extremely well with What the Bleep and with the whole concept of creating our own realities and so forth. In addition to what was discussed in terms of the quantum level and all the other perspectives of reality, this is what this research is ultimately demonstrating on a neurological level. On a very neuro-psychological level, what we believe about our world - which ultimately makes up our reality - really depends upon how our beliefs are formed in the brain.

TBH: What’s fascinating is what makes us chose to go beyond your belief system when we’re trained and educated from the get-go to form concrete beliefs that define self? What is the trigger that makes us chose to lay waste to our self concepts - like the phoenix burning its own nest - to search for something else?