Debbie Foster

Superattractors are "super" for two reasons. First, they are complex packages of functionally interrelated cultural attractors. Like a machine built from an array of interacting components, shamanism involves non-ordinary states, narratives of otherworldly contact, and goal-oriented services. Hero stories include not just triumphant endings but

Finally, here was the world's constantly broken promise of transcendence, the cosmic wonder I'd chased impatiently ever since I was a child, rounding every corner with an eager smile that faltered just as quickly. I'd been waiting my whole life to find a feeling this big. It was a religious conversion.

As uncertainty and precarity become the new normal, so governmental regimes have shifted their focus from how to secure us to how to make us resilient. Security, and the longing for it, have become a kind of pathology. We are no longer to expect or seek certainty but rather to embrace and accept challenge and danger, a state of perpetual emergency…

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don’t need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder; just stand on a street corner and look around for a while.

Platonic eide. Or as pure information that a human brain could never perceive nor describe.

a high-functioning Silicon Valley executive suffers from partial seizures in a region within the posteromedial cortex (on the inward-facing side of the cortical hemisphere, along the midline) during which his sense of self is distorted, including his perceived location in space; he eavesdrops on his own thoughts, a form of depersonalization. Direct

When you are immersed in a foreign language for several years and are taking in a new language system, part of the theoretical basis for your mother tongue breaks down, changes form, and a new self is born. Some writers strongly dislike this immigrant condition, in which one's "original self" gets broken down.

the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering

Following Julie's lead, I'd started viewing the everyday the way I looked at art—with an extra beat, with an inquisitive eye, with a willingness to linger on form and ask why.