Debbie Foster

something radically contrary to common sense must be true about the fundamental structures of the mind and the world, while leaving us poorly equipped to determine where exactly the truth lies among the various weird possibilities.

ULTIMATELY THE PRACTICE of meditation was supposed to produce a perpetual state of attentiveness.

The joy I felt in that measure of time occurred not only because of the recognition of similarity, but because of all the difference that surrounded it, and the awe of recognizing the great distance that small word, for , had to bridge.

The theory that shamanism is a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty explains the spectrum of shamanic activities. Illness, weather, and beached whales are not scattered, unrelated events but members of a single class: big outcomes that we want control over and for which we are apt to suspect supernatural involvement. Shamans are not

neuroscientists are increasingly appreciating that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing state; rather, it is a continuum of different states. We say colloquially that this or that is happening in the subconscious mind as though it were a geographically separate part of the brain, somewhere down deep in a dank, dimly lit basement of the cranium.

It's a loss and a gift that part of me stands a little bit outside of every experience, grasping for words.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with fiction being aspirational: one of the things that fiction can provide is a space to imagine what doesn't exist in reality. But in the case of The West Wing, aspiration and inspiration went further into something like delusion, a desire to patch the problems of American political reality through the re-creation

Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is painstakingly collecting EEG data from long-term Buddhist meditators during a state known as pure presence, an experience with no self, no discursive thoughts, and no perceptual content except for a luminous expanse, an empty mirror.

In practice, this means that change requires doing things differently. You can't just say you'll start exercising or socializing; you have to commit. Personality isn't based on what we say we'll do. It's rooted in what we actually do, which becomes what we think about.