Quotes from Evan Thompson

a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).

The central idea of this book is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity. The self isn't something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm.

the grasping mind cannot grasp its ultimate inability to grasp; it can only cultivate its tolerance of that inability.

The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.

Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They're always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure.

Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.

Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.

OM is the sound of brahman, the nondual source and basis of the phenomenal universe that's also identical to the transcendent self, ?tman.

Epictetus, a first-century Stoic philosopher, who said, "Never, when asked one's country, answer, 'I am Athenian or Corinthian,' but 'I am a citizen of the world.

In establishing a pole of internal identity in relation to the environment, the autopoietic process brings forth, in the same stroke, what counts as other, the organism's world. To exist as an individual means not simply to be numerically distinct from other things but to be a self-pole in a dynamic relationship with alterity, with what is other, with the world.