Quotes About Consciousness

Many a man thinks he has an open mind, when it's merely vacant.

You only live once, but if you live right, once is enough.

39:4.13 There is no material reward for righteous living, but there is profound satisfaction — consciousness of achievement — and this transcends any conceivable material reward.

are not truly real in the consciousness of human experience until they are unraveled and correlated, until their relevant facts actually become meaning through encircuitment in the thought streams of mind.

I think I usually have quite ordinary dreams. Sometimes my dreams take me to other dimensions. I can travel in my mind especially when I'm dreaming I focus my mind on what I want to dream. If I want to fly, I focus on flying.

Woher willst du wissen, dass nur das existiert, was wir mit unseren menschlichen Sinnen wahrnehmen können? Wir bilden uns ein, alles zu wissen. Dabei sind uns so viele Bereiche verschlossen, die zum Beispiel Tiere hören oder spüren können. Das beste Beispiel für unsere Beschränktheit ist doch, dass wir seit langem fleißig an dem Ast sägen, auf dem wir sitzen. Welches Geschöpf mit Ausnahme des Menschen wäre so dumm, seinen eigenen Lebensraum zu vernichten?

Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.

What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Life—how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

It's as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input.

conscious that her lord approved Her going, with great rapture moved, [pg 131] Hastened within, without delay

Association with the wise, abandonment of latent impressions, self-enquiry, control of breathing — these are the means of conquering the mind.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

Ethics is not definable, is not implementable, because it is not conscious; it involves not only our thinking, but also our feeling.

I am, whatever may come tomorrow, today I am.

The Magician represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious (in the sense given to it by C. G. Jung) and the deliberate action of the conscious (in the sense of "I" or ego consciousness).

In Tibet, the word for meditation is gom, which means "to become familiar with one's self.

Learning to be with our experience is not easy. It can feel counterintuitive, like the last thing one should sensibly do. Hearing our thoughts can be even scarier. It can help to recognize that we are not our thoughts, and that we don't have to act out our thoughts. We don't have to believe our thoughts. We don't have to identify with our thoughts.

I wonder why we too often live as though the life we are living is a trial run—some sort of dress rehearsal. Do we think that somewhere down the road we will get the chance to do it right? This is it! Today is it. You will not live this day again. Savor it.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.