“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”

“As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.”

“Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.”

“Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

“The naturalistic hypothesis that it’s the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly “has” experience and “to whom” things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we’re striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation.”

“Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.”

“...the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”