Quotes About Consciousness

Spiritual traditions and teachings have all emphasized that each one of us has a unique purpose and mission in this life to unfold and fulfill, and that this is our work. Our work has to do with purifying and awakening our consciousness, contributing creatively to our community, and being the voice and hands that confer blessings on others. As we discover our calling, and live it as fully as we can, we discover joy and meaning, and our life becomes precious and filled with blessings.

By denying the intelligence in animals, ignoring their extensive abilities to feel and to live as subjects in their own ways in the natural world, we have made our culture and ourselves less intelligent.

As Joseph Campbell once said, watching birds speeding through webs of branches and never even grazing a wing tip, animals may dwell in a realm beyond mistakes, totally present to life in ways our concept-crowded thinking cannot fully understand.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

I'm learning in my old age that the only thing you can do to keep your sanity is to stay in the moment.

Zo vreemd, zegt ze, dat wij hier nu samen zijn, onbegrijpelijk. Ik denk dikwijls dat er eigenlijk niet veel verschil is tussen leven en dromen. Het verschil is maar schijnbaar, doordat we, als we wakker zijn, alles veel te bevooroordeeld bekijken om te zien dat het leven ook een droom is.

Op dit moment gaat een tipje van de sluier omhoog die over het hele leven ligt: dat ik altijd en in alles weerloos, machteloos en vervangbaar als een atoom ben en dat alle bewustzijn, alle wil, hoop en vrees alleen maar manifestaties zijn van het mechanisme waarvolgens de menselijke moleculen zich bewegen in de peilloze kosmische materiedamp.

Je zou een tweede hoofd moeten hebben om te begrijpen wat dat éne hoofd is, maar ik heb er maar een, hier is het in mijn handen, ik houd het vast op een manier waarop een mens nooit iets anders vasthoudt.

On materialist principles, our minds are limited to the material constitution of our brains (minds transcending brains are simply not an option for materialism), and our brains are simply more complicated arrangements of balls going down inclined planes and coins being tossed. Thus we are not in control, we are not free.

The columnist George Will likes to quote a line that he says Cardinal Wolsey uttered about Henry VIII: "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.

He reasoned because human consciousness is a part of universal life, that the part may not be greater than the whole. Therefore he concluded that the purposive force which directs life, which guides the stars in their courses and spurs and speeds the energies inside the atom, is of itself a consciousness.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

Evolutionary processes made us susceptible to suffering but also gave us—accidentally—a tool by which we can prevent much of this suffering. The tool, once again, is our reasoning ability. Because we can reason, we can not only understand our evolutionary predicament but take conscious steps to escape it, to the extent possible.

In the words of Libet, "The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!

Psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has gone so far as to argue that conscious will is an illusion—that despite appearances, what causes my finger to rise is not my consciously willing that it rise but something else.

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

This life's dim windows of the soul Distorts the heavens from pole to pole And leads you to believe a lie When you see with, not through, the eye.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Is it any wonder that countless Americans—bearing psyches no less malleable than those of other members of the species—are only dimly conscious of the fact that they even have the right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and to question the government's real reasons for carrying it out, without thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"? Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Reality is what we are ignorant of.

What we are watching now as though it were real is shadows thrown on the back of the screen by lights and puppeteers behind it whose they are we." - Whose They Are We

But if you don't have the name of a thing, it is still the thing.