Quotes About Consciousness

While you are looking at the stars tonight, I want you to reflect on two koans. The first one is this: out of nowhere, the mind comes forth. And the second: show me your original face, the one you had before your parents were born.

Frances made a tremendous effort not to comment on his height, as she knew from her six-foot friend Jen that tall people were well aware they were tall.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

Our focus is our reality. What we choose to focus on becomes our world. It produces our thoughts, values, attitudes, and beliefs.

If you know how much reality is getting in, then you know a great deal about what a person sees to be true.

you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.

I spend the night that way, passing through layers of anxiety, humiliation, and despair. Somewhere close to dawn I lose some consciousness. It isn't sleep exactly, but I have to think of it as sleep because it's all I ever get anymore.

Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That's what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it's contagious because while you're reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.

I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer

The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is "natural.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream.

Death lies not in being dead, but in acting dead.

I couldn't dream of a future, I couldn't reliably remember my past.

The man who has forgotten to be thankful has fallen asleep in life. Robert Louis Stevenson

He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can't remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The

In other words, knowledge arrived at through rational thinking alone, lacking in awareness that engenders wisdom, is a dangerous thing, and the greater the knowledge, the more potentially destructive it becomes.

this "is-ness" just some philosophical abstraction? No. Just like the yogis of India, Parmenides says is-ness is consciousness. And everything that exists, even rocks and stones, participates in this living awareness.

slowing down an activity may meet with greater success than doing it quickly.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses.... The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

I am involved in Greenpeace. And I just recently completely switched my diet over to near-veganism. So you try to do little things that you can. I recycle every single day. Every single thing in my house that can be recycled is.