Debbie Foster

…transformative experiences achieve transcendence, conveying a sense of equanimity, a feeling that everything is as it should be. They transform the life of the experiencer to the extent that the sense of self is extinguished. Experiencing the world with the "I" out of the way--an "I" that always wants something, desires something, fears

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.

By exposing himself to the overwhelming majesty of Nature, the Romantic enters an altered state of consciousness that facilitates connection with the deeper truth behind appearances.

…believing in the naturalness of your mother tongue shows a lack of serious engagement with language and belies the entire premise of modern literature. This is why I believe that existing outside of one's mother tongue is not exceptional, but simply an extreme version of the normal state of things.

The sum of the phi’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Q. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems

Instead of focusing on a destination, he simply moves in the direction of his curiosity

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

God (as Nietzsche famously declared) is dead. But in the unconscious, God is eternal.