Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

the right hemisphere is dominant for many higher cognitive abilities, both in normal brains and in those that have been surgically divided. It tends to have an advantage when reading faces, intuiting geometrical principles and spatial relationships,

She would no longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts.

we have ethical responsibilities toward other creatures precisely to the degree that our actions can affect their conscious experience for better or worse.

There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.

There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes.

Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains; nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction—sensory, emotional, and intellectual—moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.

The self, as the implied hub of cognition, perception, emotion, and behavior, can remain stable across even wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness

mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.