When we are sitting quietly, one-fifth of the blood leaving the heart, one-fifth
of the oxygen we breathe and most of the circulating glucose in the bloodstream
are destined for the brain. Its metabolism resembles a slow-burning stove, combusting
sugar in a stream of oxygen, thereby obtaining energy and exhaling carbon dioxide. Its
own fuel reserves are small, making it reliant on regular deliveries. These depend on one
critical factor: blood pressure... From large arteries the blood passes into small, its cells eventually squeezing into themselves into microscopic 'capillaries', with walls only one cell
thick: here the blood gives up its riches, such as oxygen, and takes up the byproducts of metabolism, like carbon dioxide. From the capillaries the blood, darker now that it has surrendered its oxygen, is collected into veins, and returns to the right side of the heart.
Thence it is sent to the lungs, to replenish its oxygen supply and discharge its carbon
dioxide, speeds on back to the left side of the heart, and out again to the arteries. The
pressure in the system depends upon both the heart's muscular contraction and on the
tension in the muscular walls of blood vessels. If the heart slows or the arteries
suddenly relax, especially in someone who is standing up, blood pressure falls abruptly
and the bloodstream may find itself unable to conquer gravity and refresh the part that
needs it most...

That which is deepest in man is the skin.

...self is a way of pointing...

There is such a thing as respect for reality. You are living on dreams now, dreams of
happiness, dreams of freedom. But in all this you consider only yourself. You do not truly apprehend the distinct being of either your wife or Miss Carter.

Reality is not a given whole. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey,
but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.

Truth is the homage the good man pays to his own dignity.

Only my innocence gives me strength in my misfortunes.

He learned the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest
retreats, the power of an intimate presence in the things he handled. He did not at once
or entirely desert his art; only he was no longer the cheerful, objective painter, through
whose soul, as through clear glass, the bright fissures of Florentine life, only made a little mellower and more pensive by the transit, passed on to the white wall. He wasted many
days in curious tricks of design, seeming to lose himself in the spinning of intricate devices
of line and colour. He was smitten with a love of the impossible--the perforation of mountains, changing the course of rivers, raising great buildings....all those feats for the performance of which natural magic professed to have the key. Later writers, indeed, see in these efforts an anticipation of modern mechanics; in him they were rather dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and labouring brain. Two ideas were especially confirmed in him, as reflexes of things that had touched his brain in childhood beyond the depth of other impressions--the smiling of women and the motion of great waters.

Our soul grows by subtraction, not by addition.

Reflexive thinking quickly becomes a cage separating individual consciousness from the
very world that consciousness is intended to mediate and confirm. In the language of metaphysics, 'things-in-themselves' vanish, leaving sense percepts or rational
reconstructions of sense percepts as their sole ciphers.

A unique feature of our species is that we can become graceless.

Never expect to be able to will a poem into existence. / It must happen to you
because / You are what you are--/ With all your defects.

Throughout our long lives our experience shapes our behavior. It is very likely that
the neural plasticity which makes this possible is central at the synapse, creating a
fourth dimension of synaptic plasticity. At birth our brains possess more or less their
final complement of neurons, but synapse formation continues briskly for some time.
We know that synaptic numbers in the brains of young animals are influenced by their environment: 'enrichment' of the surroundings of neonatal rats, providing additional
sensory and motor stimulation, leads to a measurable increase in synaptic contacts.
Work with young animals and with children deprived of vision in one eye suggests that
active neurons expand the territory over which they form synapses, at the expense of
inactive ones. In the developing brain, activity, in general, boosts synaptic numbers
and strengthens synaptic links.

Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.

...moral criteria founded on spatial considerations are extremely fragile.

Between mouth and spoon there is often great trouble.

Now what I particularly wish to insist upon, is the state of vision in which all the details
of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the
least tell what they are, or what they mean. It is not mist between us and the object,
still less is it shade, still less is it want of character; it is a confusion, a mystery, an
interfering of undecided lines with each other, not a diminution of their number; windows
and door, architrave and frieze, all are there; it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and
rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is. Observe
your friend's face as he is coming up to you.





___________


Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User's Guide
Paul Valery
R. Schafer, Self-Awareness in Animals & Humans
Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle
Iris Murdoch
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of A Solitary Walker, 4th Walk
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of A Solitary Walker, 3rd Walk
Walter Pater, Leonardo da Vinci
Meister Eckhart
Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy
Matthew Fox
Robert Penn Warren, A Few Axioms For A Young Man
Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User's Guide
Ba'al Shem Tov
Medieval Proverb
Michel Tournier, The Mirror of Ideas
John Ruskin, Of Truth of Space