661 - Antonio Damasio

This man has written a book called 'The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness'. I am excited to be reading it, because the ideas within it are so beautifully put. Here, for example, about the capacity of the conscious mind to hide as well as reveal:

"Perhaps it was easier to get a more balanced perspective in earlier times when there was no veil, when the environments were relatively simple, long before electronic media and jet travel, long before the printed word, before the empire, and ahead of the city-state. It must have been easier to sense the life within, when the brain provided a lopsided view in the opposite direction [to the present], tilted toward the dominant representation of the internal states of the organism. If it was ever like that, perhaps at some magic brief time between Homer and Athens, lucky humans would have perceived in an instant that all of their amusing antics were about life and that underneath every image of the outside world, there stood the ongoing image of their living bodies." [p. 29]

It would be fascinating to read the Bible on Adam and Eve in the light of this passage.