Debbie Foster

Heidegger's special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein: literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being.

The phenomena that interested Romantic philosophers might appear somewhat arbitrary. Mental illness, ghosts, animal behaviour? But anomalous and exceptional phenomena can be thought of as a point of weakness between the perceived material world and something greater beyond.

It was like this passage opened an unnoticed door into a new chamber of my heart, or my brain, or a shortcut between the two. I didn't know if it had just appeared, or if it had always been there, a primordial part of my being. Suddenly it was clear to me that books did not work on everyone the way they worked on me, on Roland, on A. S. Byatt. I

After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it, tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

He felt like the face on the back of a coin being tossed in the air. It could go either way, but the whole thing had a bitter taste of destiny to it, as if the coin had already landed and everybody else knew the result.

The actors would repeat the sentence over and over again until it took on weight and, released from its obligation to deliver meaning, entered the realm of music. As I was showered with these fragments of language, I could take my time putting them together and slowly forming my own images. What began to materialize was not "meaning" in the usual

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.

it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence.