Quotes About Consciousness

The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who "lives" in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking.

Genesis' saying that we are made in the likeness of God does not mean that God looks a little like us, with a face and a body, arms and legs, but that at the time of the creation of the first man and woman, human beings did not know or care about a tangible likeness, about the fact that they had bodies. The awareness of them is an invention of the human self, idolatrously preoccupied with wanting something to look at in the mirror.

how he once slipped through the "scriptural text" of his daily life into the primordial light of consciousness itself.

A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice. We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone.

But we must not think that just because we have words for all the parts of a tree, a tree really has all those parts. The leaf does not know, for instance, when it stops being a leaf and becomes a twig. And the trunk is not aware that it has stopped being a trunk and has become the roots. Indeed, the roots do not know when they stop being roots and become soil, nor the soil the moisture, nor the moisture the atmosphere, nor the atmosphere the sunlight." (pp 54-55)

One should be so absorbed in prayer that one is no longer aware of one's own self. There is nothing for such a person but the flow of Life; all one's thoughts are with God. One who still knows how intensely one is praying has not yet overcome the bonds of self

allowing the river of light-the deepest currents of consciousness-to rise to the surface and, without anxiety, animate our lives. We are thus blessed to return to the scriptural text of our ordinary lives and live out its dream. Not to leave life but to learn how to be fully present in it.

If the human species is differentiated from the beasts by the marvel of consciousness, then we enact our humanity and the very authenticity of our being by straining to "know" through awareness the "unthinkable" experience of others.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

If I felt any better I'd be unconscious.

Phil never settled on a name for the new, dual consciousness within him. His most frequently used term was "homoplasmate" - a bonding of a human and an information-rich "plasmate" life form. He further felt that this new wisdom or grace had been "programmed" in him by age four, and that it would save him.

I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.

The clairvoyant is simply a man who develops within himself the power to respond to another octave out of the stupendous gamut of possible vibrations, and so enables himself to see more of the world around him than those of more limited perception.

Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it.

Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."

We translated the basic Hindu teaching that everything is illusion into the modern neurological truth that everything is a figment of your own brain.

My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key -- it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

leary timothy iii

At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.