Before you are body, or nervous system or brain or mind, your most immediate experience of yourself is as a medium through which, in which, a world is manifested with you at its centre.

Those are the kinds of friends you want, where your heartbeat only raises to just the perfect pitch of anticipatory excitement, where all that awful effort of the beginning of things is over, the paths beaten and the shovels shelved. Look out for those kind. They are hard to find, and difficult to lose.

The second chapter refers to another exercise: the view from above, which consists in distancing oneself from things and events and trying to see them from an overall perspective, detaching oneself from one’s individual, particular, and partial viewpoint.

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what i

We have always wanted to see, feel, and understand more than we do, and in pursuit of these goals we have consistently tried to transcend the limits imposed on us by biology and geology, and extend ourselves into potential worlds mediated only by our minds.

Far from grasping the universe as a transparent whole, we are blind, groping seekers adrift in time and space. As such, free will isn’t a metaphysical implant or delusion of grandeur but an admission of our fallibility in the face of an unknowable future.

The unity of his self is not a thing in reality; it is the means of his observing anything at all.