Hypnophobia

'Sleep can continue any idea…” as his self-awareness fades into suspension points. Valéry himself kept a diary for over fifty years (collected as the Cahiers [Notebooks]). One of his central concerns was to observe the successive phases of his awakening, as in the early hours of the morning he annotated his mind-rise. Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness.'

interaction

"For them it's the spirit of God which is moving through them. I can't prove that or disprove that on the basis of a brain scan, but I can see the changes that are going on in the brain while they're engaged in this very, very powerful and very deep spiritual practice... It certainly looks like the way the brain is put together makes it very easy for human beings to have religious and spiritual experiences."

quantifiable

In general, nations with a higher measure of gender equality also have higher levels of Emotional Investment. As gender equality increases, though, the increase in women’s Emotional Investment score is greater than the increase in the men’s score. Everyone is more loving with greater gender equality, but the difference between men and women’s tendency to love diverges as equality increases, so that women become notably more loving than men in countries with high gender equality. Economists have long struggled with the realization that while we recognize that culture matters for economic outcomes, only quantifiable evidence can tell us by just how much. Cultural traits are often difficult to quantify, unfortunately, and the absence of reliable measures leaves us with a hand-waving exercise, the reliability of which our mathematically-oriented minds find difficult to accept.

Subtil nettoyage

« Ce qui n’était que pigment sur la terre est glorifié dans le ciel par le moyen de la transparence, écrivait Paul Claudel à propos de la Sainte-Chapelle. Ces panneaux de verre coloré autour de nous, c’est la matière sensible au rayon intellectuel. Voici le paradis retrouvé. »