For the story is a simple and elegant way of translating a founding insight of modern science into the corporeal immediacy of felt experience.

Spinoza accepted this exile without the least objection, remarking only that it left him freer to pursue his researches without distraction.

Europeans soon found themselves adrift in a limitless space, a pure outside.

A small but influential array of researchers from various disciplines began to amass evidence demonstrating that mental experience was dependent not only upon the functioning brain but upon the whole of the animate organism—that the mind is less an attribute of the brain than of the living body as a whole, of which the brain is simply a necessary

The feelings that played through these persons seemed less confined or bottled up within them, and more a part of the general circulation between cedar trees, humans, woodpeckers, mountains, and lizards, between cloudbursts and streams studded with trout.

But as soon as we recognize that our bodies are always intertwined with the broad flesh of the Earth, and that our conscious experience is sustained and steadily informed by that very involvement, then the need for a multitude of individual, immaterial minds drops away …

For this reason alone, awareness will never be fully amenable to the methods of empirical, objective science.

Never having separated their sentience from their sensate bodies—having little reason to sequester their intelligence in a separate region of their skull where it might dialogue steadily with itself—many undomesticated animals, when awake, move in a fairly constant dialogue not with themselves but with their surroundings.

I came to believe that the shamanic application of sleight-of-hand for healing purposes is likely the aboriginal source of the entire craft of sleight-of-hand conjuring.