Sublime

Perception, the neuroscientist Anil Seth writes, is “a generative, creative act.” It is “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality.”

Art is an act of decoding.

Consciousness was not some substance in the brain but rather emerged from the complex relationships between the subject and the world. It was part alchemy, part illusion, a collaborative effort that obliterated our standard delineations between self and other. As Brooks put it, “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer.” —

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path.

The gap between who Bill knew himself to be and his experience of himself on DMT was wide and he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to come back to what he called his normal self.

In his late writings, Michel Foucault examined classical Roman biographies to probe how individual subjects came to be formed not only through relationships of power and knowledge (or power/knowledge) but also co-constituted themselves through intentional practices as ethical subjects.3