ABSTRACT
We are all brought up to implicitly believe that the egocentric mind is a healthy mind. The Healthy Mind is going to present the findings of a twenty-seven year long and counting ethnopsychiatric study of the nature of the healthy mind in which Tibetan Buddhist lamas have been asked to describe their experiences of their own mind. We have found that the egocentric mind is an inherently unhealthy mind, and that the egoless mind is a healthy one. The Healthy Mind will present a body of data that demonstrates that the egocentric mind is an unhealthy mind by mapping out the dynamics of the individual egocentric mind and by explaining how they engender the normal pathologies of the ego. However, to wake the reader to the counterintuitive notion that the egocentric mind is a profoundly unhealthy mind, Chapter 1 will draw attention to the idea that in addition to causing the normal pathologies of everyday mental life, the ego also causes significant sociopolitical problems. It will make this point by narrating a long overdue case study that examines how the workings of the ego produced both the religious intolerance that caused 9/11, and the sense of national honor that generated the American response to 9/11.
