Each time we become distracted or lost in our judgments, assumptions, and other thoughts, we can return to the moment, the most portable and dependable resource at our disposal.

But there is so much more to be said about how it looks, even just confining our attention to color, than merely that it looks red. At one end it is glowing white in the direct glare of the sun.

that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity — and he examines and develops this claim in the light cast not only by contemporary cognitive science but also traditional Indian philosophy and contemplative practices that are descendent from those philosophical traditions (but are not identical to them).

is Thompson's claim that Buddhist contemplative practices, religion and spirituality aside, can be thought of as a kind of phenomenological training

But ancient Indian philosophers — writing thousands of years before Socrates — thought it was crucial to distinguish modes of consciousness within the range of what, in the Western tradition, we call unconsciousness. Dreaming, lucid dreaming, deep and dreamless sleep, and so-called pure awareness — the awareness that is always present beneath or behind waking, dreaming, and peaceful, dreamless sleep — are examples of such modes. I won't pursue these in any detail here. My present point is more general.

What is needed, then, according to Thompson, is not so much an opportunity to put monks in the scanner to see what makes them special but, rather, an opportunity to collaborate with them — and with the philosophical tradition that informs their practices — to understand better the character of experience and, so, take the necessary preliminary steps toward a better science of consciousness.