Evan Thompson > Quotes

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“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).”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“the grasping mind cannot grasp its ultimate inability to grasp; it can only cultivate its tolerance of that inability.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter. But to suppose that science cannot contribute to an understanding of our experience may be to abandon, within the modern context, the task of self-understanding. Experience and scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk.

We can phrase this very same idea in positive terms: it is only by having a sense of common ground between cognitive science and human experience that our understanding of cognition can be more complete and reach a satisfying level. We thus propose a constructive task: to enlarge the horizon of cognitive science to include the broader panorama of human, lived experience in a disciplined, transformative analysis.”
― Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience

“Concentration is the ability of the mind to focus exclusively or single-pointedly on the object; mindfulness is the ability to keep the object in focus without forgetting or floating away from it. Concentration differs from attention because it involves not just attending to an object but also sustaining that attention over time. Similarly, mindfulness involves more than attention because it retains the object in awareness from moment to moment, repeatedly bringing it back to mind and preventing it from slipping away in forgetfulness.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Why I Am Not a Buddhist

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“OM is the sound of brahman, the nondual source and basis of the phenomenal universe that’s also identical to the transcendent self, ātman.”
― Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“In contrast, the Indian and Tibetan yogic traditions claim to provide detailed accounts of the transformations of consciousness during the dying process. Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, offers a rich contemplative perspective on death, including meditations to prepare for death and to practice as one dies. This kind of experiential view of dying and death is missing from the biomedical perspective. Nevertheless, we might wonder exactly how these yogic traditions, rooted in foreign cultures and belief systems, can help us to recover an experiential approach to death in our modern Western context.”
― Evan Thompson, Dying: What Happens When We Die?: A Selection from Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

“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.”
― Evan Thompson, Why I Am Not a Buddhist