Quotes About Consciousness

In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us, which is repeatedly reporting to us via our bodies, emotions, and dreams, and is incessantly encouraging our healing and wholeness.

Our ego consciousness — namely, who we think we are, or what we believe real — is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea. In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame.

Paradoxically, our ability to see something of the Shadow within ourselves sharpens our capacity to recognize shadowy actions around us.

How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life. That I would have to grow up, stand naked before this immense brutal universe, and step in to the largeness of this journey, my journey.

gurus who will do the simplistic thinking for us and remove us from the suffering that forges larger and larger consciousness. They foster narcissism, naiveté, self-absorption, and indifference to others, promise magic versus the daily work of constructing our lives, and reward us with only superficial engagements with the

Without a larger measure of consciousness, we cannot begin to struggle with fate. We rather remain its prisoner. It behooves all of us to look at the prevalent patterns of our lives and ask what "story" they might be serving.

Violent men don't have the strength of consciousness and character to own responsibility for what is missing in their own psychological life. They pummel others for not carrying their own anguished souls.

Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask, "Does this path enlarge or diminish me?" Usually, we know the answer to the question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny.

How do we know what is right for us? Well, the body knows, our deepest feeling knows, and the psyche knows, and each expresses its opinion, even as we learned early in life to evade these continuous messages from our own depths. So, the recovery effort must typically begin with the experience of inner discord, outer conflict, and sometimes heartache and loss.

So much of life is on automatic pilot, and we pay for this loss of consciousness over and over in the sabotage of relationships, in our self-stultifying attitudes, and in the shameful power we routinely bequeath to others in managing our values.

He was not saying that external reality does not exist; rather, that we can only know it subjectively.

the Sage of Koenigsburg, Immanuel Kant, ended traditional metaphysics and made modern psychology necessary by discerning that we never know reality directly;

four categorical ways in which the Shadow manifests in our lives. They are found when the Shadow a) remains unconscious, albeit active in our lives; b) is disowned by being projected onto others; c) usurps consciousness by possessing us; or d) broadens consciousness through recognition, dialogue, and assimilation of its contents.

one is an observation by that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it tends to happen outside, as fate. Now its a pretty scary thought, whatever i am not aware of is likely to enter my world from the outside.

It is no accident that the primary motive, the hidden agenda in any relationship, is the yearning to return. It is the cardinal's project, the Eden project, the professed aim of the Romantic poets, the yearning for the Beloved. It is essentially a religious search, as attested to by the etymology of the word religion, from Latin religare, to tie back to, reconnect with. Consciousness is achieved only through the loss of the Other, and the perception that the Other is truly Other.

So, then, now you know your task: to become what the gods want, not what your parents want, not what your tribe wants, but what the gods want, and what your psyche will support if consciousness so directs.

The meaning of the midlife affair is the imperative to go back and pick up what was left behind in one's development. Since what was undeveloped agitates from below consciousness, it is still unknown.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

Me. And me now.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Your mind will give back exactly what you put into it.