I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behaviour could be that, when travelling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.

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

Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.

When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

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.

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.