We Are Not Our Memories

Who Am I?

The “I,” or self, is a surprisingly intractable concept — obvious to commonsense, yet notoriously evasive to definition by any demanding philosopher.^[1] Many philosophers, psychologists, and laypersons believe the self is a substance whose essence preexists their search to understand its nature. The belief that the self is a separate entity is reinforced by the modern cultural dictum that things exist in isolation.

Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) could not find “something simple and continued” within himself, and consequently, he denied the existence of self: “I may venture to affirm [that we] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different sensations, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.”^[2] If we are mere bundles of sensations, then we have no unity, and to speak of a particular person, say David Hume, is meaningless; however, Hume seems correct to assert that we are not simple objects, like a lamp or an ox cart.

Part of our unity stems from culturally-instilled habits of thinking and feeling. I am an American because I think and feel in a certain way that differs from that of a Lakota Indian, a traditional Chinese, or a Latin American. To give one simple example. We Americans are taught to maintain an inviolable spatial envelope, or imaginary bubble, around ourselves. If I am talking to another American and move closer to him, he will without thinking move away in order that I not invade the imaginary, private space that he maintains around himself. A Latin American, conversely, does not feel comfortable talking with another person unless he or she is very close to the distance that usually evokes either sexual or hostile feelings in a North American.^[3] Culturally-shared habits of thinking and feeling, clearly, do not specify a particular person.

The principal way we fashion coherent wholes out of Humean bundles of sensations, desires, achievements, losses, and experiences with others is through storytelling and personal narratives, which are universal ways we humans organize our experiences and interpret the world; from this perspective, the human being creates maps of the world and the self through storytelling.

When we tell others who we are, we tell our personal life story, what has made us who we are and what we hope to become; we tell others and ourselves about our successes and failures, our hopes and fears. Our idea of our self is a narrative map with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We care intensely about the map of our own life and cast ourselves as the central character, even as the hero of what we hope is a good story. We may tell ourselves and others how in the third grade we refused to learn the multiplication tables and our father scolded us, or how in the eleventh grade we tricked Sally Burnham, the most popular girl in school, into going to the Junior Prom with us, or how in college we learned to praise wine, women, and song.

Except on a résumé for a job or on a college application, no one defines themselves by giving a laundry list of personal facts. The personal narrative we tell integrates the events of everyday life into a coherent whole, in which we are both narrator and the main character. Generally, we possess a different narrative for career, romance, and family, although, of course, many of us skilled at storytelling weave disparate events of our life into a single narrative.

We repeatedly tell our personal narrative, adding layer upon layer of meaning, incorporating new experiences into our stories, and perhaps embellishing past events to such a degree that they become fictitious. Just like young children, we develop intense attachments to certain personal stories, revisiting them again and again, for weeks, months, and even years. In this way, our self both solidifies and changes. Consequently, the self is not a static thing or a substance just waiting to be known.

Memories Are Not Trustworthy

Our memories of past events are not sealed within our skulls, immune from external influence. When a young mother shows to her child pictures on her cell phone of their trip to Disneyland and says, “Annie, you had such a great time talking to Mickey Mouse; that was the best part of your summer,” she is implanting a memory in her child.^[4] When we tell parts of our life narrative to others, we enhance those parts that others respond to positively and delete those parts that others dislike. Our desire to tell a good story changes our life narrative.

Memories are not like a read-only computer file stored in the brain, and remembering is not like retrieving an uncorrupted digital document of our history faithfully and permanently recorded.

Daniel Offer and his colleagues at the Northwestern University Medical School examined “the differences between memories adults had of their teenage years and what they actually said when they were interviewed as adolescents” thirty-four years before. “The subjects’ recollections were about the same as would have been expected by chance . . . the accuracy of recalled memories was uniformly poor.”^[5] The subjects, all male, had only two memories that accorded with what they said as adolescences: the expectation of earning more money than the father and the importance of having a girlfriend. We all know that memories fade, but we seldom realize that the recollection of a memory alters it.

Furthermore, our memories are limited. I look at my face every day in the mirror while shaving, yet cannot find in my memory an image of my face in the mirror, though I can easily remember a photo taken of me last summer seated outdoors at Restaurant Counterculture with a glass of red wine on the table in front of me. I can recall with clarity great photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange I had seen years before, but I cannot in my mind’s eye see scenes I had personally seen the previous week. In the same vein, I cannot recall with vividness the restaurants and bars I frequent. Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, Morocco is more real to me than the Eldorado Hotel bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico; at will, I can recall a vivid image of Sam, the black piano player at Rick’s, while my image of Señor Mendoza, the guitarist at the Eldorado, is feeble at best. I do not think I am an anomaly with a quirky memory. When we are in the world, we experience too much to remember­ — sights, sounds, tastes, and smells, all constantly changing. The camera, both still and motion, drops out virtually everything we experience, and this depleted world — that of images — can easily be stored in and recalled from memory.

Two summers ago, I visited a friend in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When I returned to Santa Fe from Cape Cod, I had vivid, physical memories; I could feel my toes in beach sand, the glaring sun in my eyes, and the smell of sea breeze. The more I told these memories to myself and friends, the weaker the concrete memories became; until now, they exist only in speech.^[6] With the possible exceptions of wine connoisseurs, painters, and musicians, most of whom maintain that certain things are better left unsaid, verbalization erodes concrete experience until it is replaced by speech. Thus, the self, the I which we think is the most permanent, stable object in the cosmos, is based on untrustworthy memories that are a shadow of concrete experience.

Our Personal Stories Our Not Entirely of Our Own Making

As infants, we do not enter life as isolated, autonomous individuals but as members of a family and as participants in the surrounding culture. Psychologist Jerome Bruner observes that “when we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is already in progress — a play whose somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and toward what dénouements we may be heading.”^[7] The English word “person” is derived from the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, words that originally meant the masks worn by actors on stage.

Around 19 months, a child begins to use the words “my,” “mine,” and “me” and her name with a verb — “Annie eats.”^[8] By 27 months, self-reference is common, although the child is not telling the parents who she is; that requires a narrative. Between three to five years of age, autobiographical memory emerges, and the development of a unique personal history begins.^[9] Even at this young age, the self-narrative pattern that emerges depends upon culture.

When a Harvard undergraduate was asked to think of her earliest memory, she reported, “I have a memory of being at my great aunt and uncle’s house. It was some kind of party; I remember I was wearing my purple-flowered party dress. There was a sort of crib on the floor . . . I don’t know if it was meant for me or for one of my younger cousins, but I crawled into it and lay there on my back. My feet stuck out, but I fit pretty well. I was trying to get the attention of people passing by. I was having fun and feeling slightly mischievous. When I picture the memory, I am lying down in the crib, looking at my party-shoed feet sticking out of the end of the crib.” (Memory dated at 3 years 6 months.)^[10]

A female Chinese college student from Beijing University described her earliest memory: “I was 5 years old. Dad taught me ancient poems. It was always when he was washing vegetables that he explained a poem to me. It was very moving. I will never forget the poems such as ‘Pi-Ba-Xing,’ one of the poems I learned then.”^[11]

Qi Wang and her colleague Jens Brockmeier discovered, after extensive interviews of American and Chinese undergraduates, that the first memories of the Americans were earlier and more focused on self than those of the Chinese. “The American memory has the individual highlighted as the leading character of the story. In contrast, the Chinese memory shows a heightened sensitivity to information about significant others or about the self in relation to others.”^[12]

Wang and Brockmeier also studied conversations between mothers and daughters. From their study of such conversations, Wang and Brockmeier concluded that “American parents often focus on the child’s personal attributes, preferences, and judgments, making the child the central character of the co-constructed story. In contrast, consonant with Confucian ethics that place a high value on social hierarchy and moral rectitude, Asian parents often take a leading role during the conversation with their children and frequently refer to moral rules and behavioral expectations.” To their amazement, they found that American children as young as three often comment on “their personal roles, choices, and opinions, [while] their Asian peers make references to rules, standards, and requirements.”^[13]

Unlike the Chinese, Hopis, or members of other premodern societies, we Americans cannot answer “Who are you?” in terms of tradition, family, or nature. Instead, we define ourselves in the absence from any group. For us, the self is primary. The group is an imposition on us and a threat to our identity; indeed, we believe that to discover our true self, we must completely sever our self from the group.

A revealing visual representation of the modern definition of self was given by a former student of mine in reply to the question, “Who are you?” She answered, “I am everything in here,” tracing her hands over her body from head to toe, “and nothing out there.” This young woman thought of herself as living inside an imaginary bubble that isolated her from the world. She thought to be free meant to be an isolated, autonomous individual and believed that she owned herself and her abilities, that all the relationships she had with other persons she voluntarily chose, and that she owed nothing to other persons except what she of her own free will incurred. When I pressed her further, she told the class that human nature is nonexistent and that all ethical systems are arbitrary social conventions.

From their extensive study of how various cultures understand the self, social psychologists Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama conclude that in the modern West the individual is viewed as an “independent, self-contained, autonomous entity.”^[14] Anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out that such a conception of the self is unique in the world’s cultures.^[15] In premodern Africa, for instance, a person regarded himself or herself “as a rather insignificant part of a much larger whole — the family and the clan — and not as an independent, self-reliant unit.”^[16]

We now see why the self is such an intractable concept that is not reducible to either memory or brain processes, for the self is a social construct that emerges from family storytelling and a personal narrative, and thus does not exist by nature the way the body does. The self is not encased in the skull or hidden within the human heart; a person does not terminate with his or her skin but emerges through ongoing social relations. Not lasting or stable, with no inherent essence, the self cannot be defined. The isolated, autonomous self fails to see that it is an illusion, frail and fleeting, with no more permanency than a smoke ring, doomed to disappear into nothingness with the death of the body.

Memory Erasure

For over sixty years, psychologists and neuroscientists believed that the consolidation of traumatic, emotional experience into long-term memory was a one-time irreversible process and that no procedure existed for erasing what had been solidified in the brain. Beginning in 1997, researchers discovered that long-term memories are not fixed forever; indeed, not only can traumatic memories be revised, but they can also be erased, in the sense that an acquired behavioral, emotional, or physiological response to a previous trigger is eliminated.^[17]

As we have seen, many of us draw internal maps of who we are and what the world is from adverse childhood experiences. These maps serve us well as children but are invariably disastrous for us as adults. Psychologists Bruce Ecker and Sara Bridges give the case history of Tina as an example of how faulty maps from childhood can be erased.^[18]

Tina, 33, began her first session with a new therapist by confessing, “I’ve been feeling depressed and lousy for years. I have a black cloud around me all the time.” The absence of motivation, low energy, and social isolation caused her to lament, “I’m a vegetable. I’m a worthless nothing that nobody could possibly find interesting.” Past therapy, self-help groups, and a regime of Prozac had not tempered her depression or lifted the black cloud that enveloped her.

Under her new therapist’s persistent questioning about her early family life, Tina described painful memories of when she expressed her feelings, her mother and other family members verbally assaulted her, then, in conclusion, said lifelessly, “Saying what I’m really feeling or caring about gets me mowed down — so I don’t go there.”

The therapist asked, “And how do you keep yourself from ‘going there’?”

She answered with unexpected animation, “By being dead, apathetic, and telling myself I have nothing interesting to say!”

For the first time, she recognized that for self-protection, she had resorted to eliminating her own self-expression by deadening herself. Ecker and Bridges note that “her state of depression, lack of motivation and futility suddenly made deep sense to her in an entirely new way. Instead of viewing those symptoms as mystifying, out-of-control personal defects and pathology, she now recognized that they were . . . purposeful and effective tactics for keeping to a minimum the suffering that her family members were always ready to inflict” on her when she expressed her feelings.

Tina suddenly experienced two contradictory understandings of her plight: 1) The hopelessness, fear, despair, and aloneness she knew were her fault and 2) The exhilaration that accompanied her discovery of the obvious truth that her childhood map of herself as a person of no interest to anyone was protection from her family. Blaming herself for her depression was disconfirmed by the truth and erased.

During the sixth and final therapy session, Tina blurted out the childhood map of her relationship with her mother: “Mom sees and knows everything I ever care about or do, and then takes over and takes away everything I ever care about or do, which feels devastating for me, and my only way to be safe from her pillaging is for me to care about nothing and do nothing.” As a child, Tina believed her mother was all-seeing, and she protected herself by zeroing herself out, so her narcissistic mother could no longer take credit for what she did. 

To prompt Tina to find the needed truth to counter her childhood map of an all-seeing mother, the therapist said, “You feel just as vulnerable as ever to your mother taking things away. So, tell me: In what ways do people keep other people from just reaching in and taking away things?”

After a moment of reflection, Tina answered, “It’s as if there has been a ‘no walls’ rule all along. I think I’ve been obeying a ‘no walls’ rule.” She then expressed amazement seeing the possibility of “having walls” and keeping her personal affairs “behind walls” and totally unknown to her mother or others. That “behind walls’ existed and was available to her was a contradictory truth in opposition to her mental model of her mother as all-seeing.

She felt jubilant; the false understanding of her mother was erased. No further sessions were scheduled. Two years later, in a follow-up telephone conversation, Tina reported her life had been transformed by the therapy that erased her faulty map of herself. She was nine months into a new career in computer programming and spoke about her future with enthusiasm. She said she was completely free of the black cloud and antidepressants, and added, “Things are very good.” Clearly, the erasure of a memory can be life-altering. 

Ecker and Bridges state that memory erasure has occurred in various systems of therapy, one of which is Tapping. In the accompanying video, Robert Smith, the founder of Faster EFT, gives an example of how tapping can quickly erase a negative memory.^[19]

Smith discovered memory erasure by carefully examining his traumatic childhood memories. His mother ran away from her Oklahoma home to Texas when she was fourteen and went back home to give birth at fifteen to Robert. Smith never knew his biological father, and his mother may not of either.^[20] His stepfather was the oldest of nine children, an alcoholic, and at one point in his life, all his brothers and sisters were in foster homes. His stepbrother, Steve, had been in prison two times, the next time for life. The stepfather came into Robert’s life when he was six months old. By the time his mother was nineteen, she had four children.

The stepfather lacked a high-school education, worked hard, lost jobs, and moved his family from home to home. Smith recalled that “my dad had a rough life. He would beat you at the drop of a hat. When he came home, we didn’t greet him at the door because it wasn’t safe.” Everyone on his father’s side of the family was an alcoholic. Smith remembers that the first time he got drunk, he was thirteen and “It was one of the best things I ever had at the time.”

Smith went to college but could not pass English II; he tried three times and quit. He understood why he flunked English II: “I was not dumb. I had moved from school to school to school and had learning difficulties. I rode the small bus to school. You know what that means? That was the special school bus. The reason I had problems with English is that my English teachers didn’t understand where I was coming from. In this way, I discovered that most of our problems come from our past.”

The defining event in Smith’s difficult life happened when he was eleven years old. His stepfather had moved his family to a new house; Smith had moved to the third school in a year. Once again, in a new neighborhood, he was bullied. One day to avoid getting beaten up, he climbed a tree, boarding on the driveway of his new house. The bullies were throwing rocks at him when his stepfather pulled into the driveway.

The bullies backed off, and Robert climbed down from the tree and went to his stepfather for protection. The stepfather got out of the car, and he had a hammer in his hand. “He beat the crap out of me with his hammer, right in front of those bullies,” Smith later said, and added, “If I went to this memory at twenty-two, I would still feel intense emotional pain.”

Smith’s adverse childhood experiences placed him at high risk for suicide and a shortened life expectancy of twenty years or more. Instead, one day, he seized control of his life. He quit fleeing from the memory of his stepfather beating him with a hammer and observed that his memory was a series of images. “When I remembered the memory, I’m watching my father beat me with a hammer. It’s like I’m a fly on the wall. And I’m watching him do this. It’s impossible. It never really happened that way.” As we have seen, the recall of a memory alters it. In Smith’s case, his defining traumatic childhood memory became part of his personal narrative, and thus, his memory was altered to accord with the viewpoint of the storyteller.

What happened next was startling. Smith explored further this memory: “I started looking at my father’s face and how he was looking, and I noticed that my father was angry, and I would tap. I kept tapping, and all of a sudden, my father’s face changed. Then I started looking at my face. I felt abused. I felt rejected. I kept tapping until that little boy inside me was smiling.

“I, then, focused on my father again. He had a hammer in his hand; he was beating me. I looked at the memory and tapped. I just tapped on it over and over again. Suddenly, my mind gave me something better. It put a fishing pole in my dad’s hand. And in my mind, I feel like my father said, would you like to go fishing? I said, sure, dad, and you know what? We went fishing. And the amazing thing about this is I happened to catch the biggest fish. I mean, it’s gigantic. And I could still see the look in my father’s eyes. He was envious of this great big fish.”

Smith acknowledges that he did not erase the actual event of his stepfather beating him with a hammer when he was eleven years old. What he did change were the emotions associated with the memory. The emotions power our internal maps; without an emotion, a memory has no power over us, as Smith discovered through tapping. Today, he says, “I can tell this story, and it’s not my story.” I suspect that many if not most of us think that Smith replacing a real memory with a fake memory is a profound betrayal of who he is. Once again, we encounter the profound, difficult question, “Who am I?”

Who am I? Redux

I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and christened George Stanciu, but suppose at two months, I was adopted by the Li family, and they moved to Beijing, China, their home city. My new family named me Li Zhang Wei. That my given name Zhang Wei was second indicated I was first a member of the Li family or clan.

Zhang Wei’s parents emphasized interdependence, group solidarity, social obligation, and personal humility. Zhang Wei was taught obedience, proper behavior, emotional restrain, and the value of group harmony. He understood himself in terms of his relation to a whole, to the Li family, to Chinese society, and to the Tao. “In Confucian human-centered philosophy, man cannot exist alone,” philosopher Hu Shih writes. “All action must be in the form of interaction between man and man.”^[21] Zhang Wei always saw himself as part of a larger whole. In the Chinese language, there is no word for “individualism;” the closest word is the one for “selfishness.”^[22]

If I were not adopted, my European-American parents often focused on my attributes, preferences, and judgments, making Georgie an individual. Parents in America aim to develop an autonomous self, and thus encourage independence, assertiveness, and self-expression in their offspring. Georgie was taught to “stick up for his rights and to fight his own battles.” 

In grade school, Georgie was trained in the ethos of capitalism. He competed with his fellow students to get the best grades and the most gold stars. In this way, Georgie learned I succeed only if someone else fails, and the converse — if someone else succeeds, I must have failed. Another lesson he learned was that my success is entirely due to me, and no other person has a legitimate claim on its benefits — a fundamental ethic of capitalism, where each person is responsible for his or her own success or failure.^[23]

By the end of the sixth grade, Georgie understood himself as an autonomous, isolated individual.

Both Li Zhang Wei and George Stanciu took their cultural-constructed selfs to be who they really were. While George took himself to be the center of the universe and Zhang Wei did not, both had natural self-love, although George’s self-love was greatly enhanced by his individualistic culture.

That different cultures produce different “I”s is apparent in the twenty-first century. In America, the “I” is quick to anger; in the Etku Eskimo community, the “I” seldom experiences anger. The American “I” wishes for others to fail and becomes envious when they succeed, while the Lakota “I” takes pleasure in others’ success. In America, the “I” is always lonely; in China, the “I” feels lonely only when separated from a lover or the family. To understand anything, the American “I” first looks to the smallest parts, while the Hopi “I” turns to the whole. The American “I” does not accept any man’s word as proof of anything, while the Japanese “I” seeks guidance from masters. The American “I” demands scientific demonstrations, whereas the Eastern Indian “I” wants a direct experience of the eternal.

In a roundabout way, I arrived at the central insight of the Buddha — the self is an illusion. In the Deer Park at Isiptana, the Buddha preached his second sermon, The Discourse on Not-Self, and “while this discourse was being spoken, the minds of the monks of the group of five were liberated from the taints by nonclinging.”^[24] Arguably, anattā, a Pāli word that literally means no-self, is the most important and most difficult concept in Buddhism, since it led the five monks to instant enlightenment, to Nirvāṇa, to “the annihilation of the illusion [of self], of the false idea of self.”^[25]

Anam Thubten Rinpoche, the author of No Self, No Problem, cautions us not to believe that an enlightened person has no self, which is an impossibility. Even His Holiness the Dalai Lama has a self; he is quick to laugh, encourages the scientific exploration of meditation practices, and desires to save Tibetan culture from extinction by the Chinese. Unlike the Dalai Lama, we, the unenlightened ones, identity with the roles we play and do not see them as masks but as who we really are.

If each one of us were merely a particular compound of body, sense perceptions, memories, and ideas, then no escape from Samsara, the never-ending wheel of birth and death, would be possible. The Buddha told his disciples, “There is, monks, an unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded . . . therefore an escape can be shown for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded.”^[26] I had no idea what the Buddha meant by the unborn, so I suspected that my answer to “Who am I?” missed an essential element of who I am. 

In some mysterious way, I was more than my memories, which by themselves without storytelling were disconnected, and more than my self-narrative, whose main plot was my adolescent rebellion against all authority. As an adolescent, I had two warring selves within. One self, formed by culture and the accidents of childhood, despised conformity and obedience, adhered to individualism and Cartesian thinking, hated itself and mocked others because it was formed in the crucible of a mother’s hatred. An old Gypsy witch put a curse on me when I was one-day-old according to my mother, not known for truth telling.

The other self, mysterious in origin, loved the rippling pattern of tree leaves caused by warm summer breezes, the look of empty streets in the working-class neighborhoods of Motown, and the stillness of the rural Michigan landscape after a heavy snowfall. As far as I can tell, even as a child, I had a life not determined by my crazy family. My intense perceptions caused me to wonder about the world I inhabited. For some unknown reason, I was attuned to, and at times overwhelmed by, the beauty that surrounded me. To my mysterious self, the world was good; as I grew, the world and I became larger together, and we both included Mozart and Bach, Euclid and Hilbert, and Newton, Maxwell, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Under the aegis of beauty, my desires, emotions, and intellect aimed to become harmonious, like beauty, itself.^[27]

My two warring selves could not have been more different; ultimately, one wanted to die and the other wanted to live forever. I can truthfully say, and this is no Gypsy flimflam, that beauty, again and again, saved my life.

Main image courtesy of Greg Jurgajtis and Upsplash.

[Next and Final Episode: Does Love Always Lead to Suffering?]

Endnotes

[1] See Jerome Bruner, “Self-Making Narratives,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003), p. 209.

[2] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1739]), pp. 187, 188.

^[3] See Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language,(Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett, 1959), p. 164.

[4] For a scientific study of implanted memories, see I. E. Hyman Jr. and J. Pentland, “The Role of Mental Imagery in the Creation of False Childhood Memories,” Journal of Memory and Language (1996) 35 (2): 101–17.

[5] Daniel Offer, Marjorie Kaiz, Kenneth L. Howard, and Emily S. Bennett, “The Altering of Reported Experiences,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (June 2000), 39 (6): 735-42.

[6] See Jonathan W. Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler, “Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid,” Cognitive Psychology 22 (1990): 36-71.

[7] Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34.

[8] Jerome Kagan, Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition, and Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 233.

[9] Qi Wang and Jens Brockmeier, “Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Memory, Self and Culture,” Culture Psychology 8 (2002):52.

[10] Ibid., pp. 47-48.

[11] Ibid., p. 48.

[12] Ibid., p. 49.

[13] Ibid., pp. 56, 57.

[14] Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991): 224.

[15] Clifford Geertz, “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” American Scientist 63 (January-February 1975): p. 48.

[16] J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” Psychiatry 22 (Nov. 1959).

[17] Bruce Ecker and Sara K. Bridges, “How the Science of Memory Reconsolidation Advances the Effectiveness and Unification of Psychotherapy,” Clinical Social Work Journal (2020) 48:287–300, published online: 22 April 2020.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Robert Smith, Robert Smith of Faster EFT explains how the mind works at Habilitat Hawaii. We note in passing that because Robert Smith, Alan Gordon, and Gary Craig were not medically trained, they were more open to exploring seemingly woo-woo treatments of mind/body diseases; however, the lack of sound medical knowledge placed them at risk of misinterpreting their insights.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Hu Shih, quoted by Ambrose Yeo-chi King, “Kuan-hsi and Network Building: A Sociological Interpretation,” Daedalus, 120 (Spring 1991): 65.

[22] Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (New York, NY: Free Press, 2003), p. 51.

[23] For a detailed discussion of grade school in America instills the ethos of capitalism, see George Stanciu, The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life, Ch. 7 Self-Interest: The Other Pathology of Modernity.

[24] Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self in In the Buddha’s Words: An anthology of Discourses from the Pāli Canon, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005), p. 342.

[25] Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 37.

[26] E. A. Burtt, ed., Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (New York: New American Library, 1955), p. 113.

[27] The beauty physicists talk about is not the product of private or idiosyncratic emotion. See George Stanciu, The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life, Ch. 22 Physics, Beauty, and Divine Mind.