What is the witness?
The one who watches thoughts, the one who testifies, the one who may split with a cut.
Sacred Traditions
A sixteen-year-old lies down as if dead, and a question becomes a life.
Who Is Asking?
Madurai, then Arunachala · 1896
Science
Two Reports, One Skull
A cut intended to stop seizures reveals that a person can contain more than one witness.
California laboratories · 1960s–1970s
Sacred Traditions
Beneath the Fig
A man sits down and vows not to rise until he has seen through the trouble of existing.
Uruvelā, later Bodh Gayā · c. 5th century BCE
Sacred Traditions
A woman describes the soul as a diamond castle of many dwellings, and a journey inward that is not escape.
Interior Castle
Ávila / Toledo · 1577
Philosophy
Beside the Stove
A man sits through a winter of doubt, and finds a remainder he cannot unsay: that thinking is going on.
A stove-heated room in Germany, later on the page from the Netherlands · 1619 / 1641
Philosophy
The Floating Man
A physician-philosopher asks you to imagine a person created at once in mid-air, with no senses, and still knowing that they are.
On the page, from Bukhara to Hamadan to Isfahan · c. 1027
Art & Literature
A playwright tells actors that the mask must be worn until a different kind of looking becomes possible.
The Flower Is Not the Face
Yamato sarugaku, in the orbit of the Ashikaga court · c. 1402
Science
A Map Drawn on a Waking Man
In Montreal an awake patient names what a current in the cortex is doing to a hand, a sound, a memory.
Montreal Neurological Institute · 1930s–1958
Science
Imagine Playing Tennis
A young woman diagnosed as vegetative is asked, inside a scanner, to imagine a game. The brain answers as a healthy volunteer’s brain answers.
Cambridge · 2006
Philosophy
A political thinker, late, describes thinking as a conversation the mind holds with itself. Solitude, she says, is populated.
The Two-in-One
New York · 1973–1978
Sacred Traditions
Light That Is Not a Creature
On Athos, a defense is written: the light seen in prayer is not a metaphor and not a created lamp. It is God, they say, as energy, not as essence.
Mount Athos, and Constantinople of the controversy · 1330s–1351
Science
Asleep, and Knowing It
A sleeper in a Stanford laboratory moves his eyes in an agreed pattern. The movement is the proof that he knows he is dreaming.
Stanford University · 1981