Debbie Foster

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

think about a simple action that can quickly shift your mood, such as music or scent; reconnect you to your body, such as stretching or conscious breathing; or give you the chance to check in with yourself, such as making a handwritten list of your intentions for the rest of your workday.

the words of twentieth-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure…: "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula"

You see, I have always found it difficult to understand that in fact one can only be oneself. Who else could you be? Changeability and hypocrisy and performance are parts of who we are. And what is empirical reality, anyway?

And when something deceives us by purporting to be genuinely "real"—based on true events that happened to actual people, or could have happened to actual people, we tend to give them more weight: we think of them as truth in a fiction jacket. This problem bleeds over into related half-fictions like true crime and government conspiracy theories,

But the simple truth was that he didn’t know how it happened. He couldn’t explain it. His brain did it without his permission, the way his heart pumped blood or his lungs infused cells with oxygen. It latched on to patterns and sequences without his consent or, at times, his awareness and filled his head with a deluge of numbers and images. When he

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabilize systems of oppression. It was not a unified program but a process of creative intellectual destruction.

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

There is nothing more beautiful than a formal system with axioms that are perfectly internally consistent. Such systems can be right, and they can be wrong, but that is beside the point. The beauty is that there is no room for bias or prejudice, no tolerance for interference.