Debbie Foster

IF BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?” Because this active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder you concentrate, the better you’ll attend, but the longer you persist, the likelier you’ll fade.

Decades earlier, I'd moved to Japan in part because it was the most inward and subtle culture I'd met: the relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain there and I can never begin to imagine I can get to the bottom of things. Yet my neighbors around Kyoto hold on to their privacy by saying little and expressing, with their faces, even

Some monks visualized not only their thoughts but also themselves thinking those thoughts, as a way to reframe their prayers and keep them from meandering.

To Robert, his negative thoughts were the other stronger guy, the one overpowering him. He decided to just drop the rope—to exist alongside the negative thoughts but to stop resisting them. Avoiding discomfort wasn't making him any less uncomfortable; it just mired him in weary inertia.

This meant that he resolved to move forward despite his

Freedom to act under the direction of reason rather than the coercion of authorities was one of the great themes of Enlightenment thought.

Common to many transformative experiences is the dissolution of the self, including loss of ego and the body it is chained to.

we genuinely think across the fourth dimension

Finally, here was the world's constantly broken promise of transcendence, the cosmic wonder I'd chased impatiently ever since I was a child, rounding every corner with an eager smile that faltered just as quickly. I'd been waiting my whole life to find a feeling this big. It was a religious conversion.

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t