Quotes About Consciousness

For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.

She found that if she paid extremely careful attention to what was around her, really concentrating, and noticing every detail, the terror would fall back.

Tomorrow will have a diet in it, maybe not a go-for-broke diet or even one that involves tracking calories, but I will always be conscious of what I eat and how much I exercise. That's why body neutrality doesn't feel like a good fit: I'm never going to stop wanting to be thinner or to stop chasing it. I know my life will always be this way, and I'm okay with that. That acceptance, even if it's an uneasy one, is my new normal.

She knew her death was near because time had begun to fold like a fan so that the past and the present rubbed together in ways that made her feel supple and porous, as if time were moving through her body and not the other way around.

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.

In a word, the basic principle of the Scottish philosophy — that people could reason naturally from the evidence of their own consciousness to the existence of God and the validity of traditional morality — had become very widespread by the early nineteenth century.

Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right.

La oración no es algo que tengamos que hacer con los ojos cerrados; nosotros oramos con los ojos bien abiertos. La oración no es una serie de palabras que comienza con un «Amado Jesús» y termina con un «Amén».

We don't see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.

Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate... The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an "alienated majesty

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess.

The reader learns the language of herself; she is humanly enhanced, enlarging the previously constricting circle that made up the border of what she's been... her consciousness has been expanded.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

The mind that realizes its own Buddha nature is said to be like clear space—it is empty and all-pervasive but also vividly aware.

We therefore tend to rely on willpower alone. This never works because the ideal sequence above is opposed by a stronger and more primitive one: Stimulus – Reaction. Without the right structures to keep it under control, Stimulus – Reaction will always tend to overwhelm Thought – Decision – Action.

Step 1: Increase physical awareness. Impulses begin as physical sensations. Stop and notice what you feel and where you feel it. In your stomach? Head? Neck? Chest? Step 2: Increase emotional awareness. Try to connect the physical sensation to an emotion. Why do you feel tense? What do you feel angry about? What are you afraid of?

Your brain has three layers that evolved over millions of years: a primitive reptile layer, a more evolved mammal layer, and a final primate layer. They all interconnect, but in effect they often act like three different brains—and they're often at war with each other.

They're not just dreams. Not anymore, I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can't you see? I've been there.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

Yeah, I actually do know where I am.

it's usually a bad one, a negative thought, but we have