Quotes About Consciousness

Getting Things Done is not some new technology or invention—it simply makes explicit the principles at work within what we all do implicitly. But with that awareness, you can then leverage those principles consciously to create more elegant results.

El pensamiento es la esencia misma de la empresa y la vida, y lo más difícil de lograr en ambas. Los forjadores de imperios dedican horas y horas a la labor intelectual… mientras otros se van de fiesta. Si no te planteas conscientemente el esfuerzo de ejercer el pensamiento creativo autoguiado… entonces estás cayendo en la pereza y ya no controlarás tu vida. —DAVID KEKICH

T]he last thing a fish notices is water.

There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.

Most of us don't really think about how we spend our money—or if we do, we focus solely on the big items. At the same time, we ignore the small but steady expenses that drain away our cash.

Being alive and living were also two distinct things

the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for 'a description of the world as it is'. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man's approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.

if there is listening through a "listener," then we are not listening.

Q: Are you saying that thought has a kind of possessive quality which stays, gets stuck, and then becomes habitual? And we don't see this? Bohm: I think that whenever we repeat something it gradually becomes a habit, and we get less and less aware of it. If you brush your teeth every morning, you probably hardly notice how you're doing it. It just goes by itself. Our thought does the same thing, and so do our feelings. That's a key point.

the subtle but crucial role of our general forms of thinking in sustaining fragmentation and in defeating our deepest urges toward wholeness or integrity.

science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view

violence doesn't stop merely by saying, 'we'll act based on love', because that can become just an idea that gets absorbed into the system.

We can refer to this one process as experience-knowledge (the hyphen indicating that these are two inseparable aspects of one whole movement).

We propose instead that the basic element be a moment which, like the moment of consciousness, cannot be precisely related to measurements of space and time, but rather covers a somewhat vaguely defined region which is extended in space and has duration in time.

However, as indicated earlier, truth and falsity have actually, like relevance and irrelevance, to be seen from moment to moment, in an act of perception in a very high order.

Make the best of every moment. We're not evolving. We're not going anywhere.

Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben

the towering standing wave that composes the symphony of thought.

It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.

You are the spiritual entity that emerges out of the material networks in your head.

Zuzuki-roshi] I don't know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.

That allowed them to model important features of the external world and even to model possible futures. No brainy creature (not even you or I) is in direct contact with its environment. Instead, we all live in a rich virtual reality constructed by our brains. Our brains generate and constantly update maps of the most salient features of our bodies and our surroundings, just as climate scientists model changing environments today.17 Those maps enable us to maintain homeostasis.

Knowing or feeling the deep openness who you are is fairly easy; living as this openness, and serving all others to live as this love, in every moment through all appearances, is where the art is.