Debbie Foster

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

is not unthinkable that the brain may turn out to be something like a squishy, pinkish-gray tesseract—a roughly six-inch-in-diameter information tunnel through time,

As Dorianne Laux wrote, "Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

As the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book ‘Future Tense,’ anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail-orientation. Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that achieving our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should

Consciousness is a distinctive state of mind, but the words “consciousness” and “mind” are often used as if they were synonymous and corresponded to the same process

These three points, that we are all bound to slip up, that even our cosmic existence is ephemeral, and that happiness, or at least pleasure, comes and goes just like any feeling, form the scaffolding for Aztec philosophy. Any philosophical outlook that ignores these points, the Aztecs would say, is naive.

In Socrates we witness a new way of doing philosophy that makes inquiry into the world dependent on inquiry into the self and its capacity for knowledge. But we also witness an afterbirth—anti-philosophical anger.

IF BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?” Because this active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder you concentrate, the better you’ll attend, but the longer you persist, the likelier you’ll fade.

There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when.