Debbie Foster

The thing about time was that no matter how Violet had changed on the outside, on the inside she had remained every age she ever was.

The irony is that Enlightenment principles have set shamans free. By insisting on autonomy, tolerance, and a separation of church and state, Enlightenment thinkers have protected ecstatic religions from subjugation while creating open markets for religious services.

Freud was a modern alchemist who reformulated medieval demons as complexes and Darwinian imperatives. He translated all things devilish - lust, violence, cruelty - into terms that were compatible with twentieth-century thinking.

tautologies are not the same thing as paradoxes.

I looked up half expecting some kind of synchronicity between my consciousness and The World.

This tends to happen to ex-believers who find themselves back in church: it's not until you're back in the room, with the faith atomized in the air, the energy rising off the people still inside the system, that you really remember. Call it late-breaking phantom limb syndrome of the soul.

Dreams feel as real as life—the primary distinction between dreaming and waking consciousness is an absence of a sense of self, insight, self-reflection. You aren't surprised that you can fly, walk through walls, or meet long-dead animal companions, lovers, parents, or siblings. You are along for the ride, watching a movie that someone else is

Because time and space are so central to consciousness, explaining how we experience them may also help to crack the broader puzzle of why we experience anything at all. Unlike most other experiences we have, our sensations of time and space can be analyzed.

The various illusions and distortions of perception help with that analysis—they are not

In the 1970s, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued that these same basic principles underlie the regularities of social existence too, up to and including the cultural symbol systems used by humans to encode meaningful information and guide our behavior.7 Today, quantum information theory, discussed in the last chapter, is also being