In a psychological experiment, jam-tasting experts and students more or less agreed on the best tasting jam — until the students were asked to analyse their preferences. Then they promptly forgot how they actually percieved the jam and started thinking too much.

A friend recently endured a series of counselling sessions which were completely unsatisfying, although at the end of the sessions, my friend thanked the therapist and told him how effective the sessions had been and how much better she felt. What a colossal waste of everybody’s energy and intentions.

I have practised meditation and studied Buddhist philosophy in some detail, but never has it been so clear to me that all phenomena are impermanent and transient, that life is suffering and change, or that everything in fact depends on your mental attitude to the constant stream of illusions, as a day by the seaside in England.

Does consciousness exist along a continuum, beginning in the simplest forms of life, rather than being an event which springs out of nowhere once a certain level of evolution has been achieved?

A neuroscientist comments on the vital role of emotions and feelings, rather than disembodied rationality, in our survival.

What does modern neuroscience have to say about our sense of self? Is there really any permanent, essential self to us at all?

Buddhism, as a religious and/or philosophical enquiry, has been pointing the way towards the casting off of the self for the last 2,500 years.