Quotes About Consciousness

There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

I believe that there is something connecting us ... Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we're gone. I've begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness. ... An animating presence .... [pp. 205-206]

And probably every object that we make room for in our life immediately structures that life—the important thing, don't you agree, is to actually acknowledge and experience this fact.

It's all about eating real food! Sweet potatoes come from the ground, maple syrup comes out of a tree, carrots grow in the dirt, bees make honey, and hopefully we can all find more and more pasture-raised, grain-free, cruelty-free animals for protein. Because what our animals eat becomes what we eat, too. I don't see ever getting too far from these principles. Real food is medicine, and I like to put the highest-quality food into the only body I will ever have.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes with more a active skin.

Pick Up Trash:

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

How do we know that even the realest of realities wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?

Where you bring your attention always determines how you feel.

This frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.

machines and invertebrates prove that it doesn't take a smart, self-aware, conscious brain to make simple predictions

We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

Just as an abacus can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

We are all expressions of our own minds, projected onto the world.

Taking time to reflect opens the door to conscious awareness, which brings with it the possibility of change.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

neuroscientists have recently discovered that parts of the brain can fall asleep for a few moments or longer without our realizing it. At any given moment, some circuits in the brain may be off-line, slumbering, recouping energy, and as long as we're not calling on them to do something for us, we don't notice.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain;

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.

Inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.

Mental presence is a state of being wide awake and receptive to what is happening, as it is happening in the moment, within us and between the world and us. Presence cultivates happiness.