For a taste of this mystery, simply close your eyes, calm your breathing, and try to still your mind. This will be next to impossible; thoughts and feelings will come up regardless. The calmer your mind is, the more disconnected and arbitrary will be the thoughts that arise. Images will appear out of nowhere, things you had long ignored or forgotte

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the memory was also the very instrument that she used to design and build new mental structures from the materials she had at hand.2 In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the memory was where monks did some of their most complex concentrating. To do that, monks learned how the memory worked—rather than treat it like a black box, as we often

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