Quotes About Consciousness

We fit the universe through our brains and it comes out in the form of nothing less than poetry. We have a responsibility to awe.

All a poet can do today is warn.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.

Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.

Poetry, like dreams, will eventually break through every person's consciousness, even the tightest iconoclast's.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.