Quotes About Consciousness

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?

El propósito de la encarnación física es el desarrollo de una conciencia superior.

alma es fuente de vida (Prana), amor (Chitta) y luz (Buddhi), sus tres potencias principales.

None of us is perfectly aligned with the truth of our being. All of us live with falsity, but the magnitude of the gap between inner reality and outer appearance will always be an indication of the magnitude of the clouding of presence.

There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values.

Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.

By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).

At any moment, you and I are aware of little more than what's on the screen of our consciousness. But beneath the surface, unconscious information processing occurs simultaneously on many parallel tracks.

Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.11

Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to guide us. But we don't experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it.

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.

Sex and love are inseparable, like life and consciousness. —D. H. LAWRENCE

Once, on a sleepless night, I elaborated a whole theory of art predicated on simply reminding the ever-forgetful mind of the most basic truths: We float in water and revolve around the sun. We are born out of a woman's body and are made of meat and bone. One day, pretty soon, we will die.

politically, there is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day.

Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It's unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn't really feeling it.

this agonizing double consciousness: the awareness that the highest things one has to strive for are also, ultimately, wrong; but at the same time, the feeling that this is simply the nature of reality.

Right now I would submit that lack of self-knowledge is an existential risk. An inability to act with global intent and consideration of multigenerational timescales is an existential risk.

The true self] rests in direct intuition. Therefore I said: "Better to abandon disputation and seek the true light."60

was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I." But at this moment I came upon myself.Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. Previously, I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.20

When a person has found the method of making thoughts and energy harmonize with one another... spirit and energy are pure and clear; the heart is empty, human nature (lising) manifest, and the light of consciousness transforms itself into the light of human nature. If one continues to hold firmly the light of human nature, the Abysmal [water, K'an] and the Clinging (fire, Li) have intercourse spontaneously.

Without beginning, without end, Without past, without future. A halo of light surrounds the world of law. We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty. The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven. The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors The moon in its surface. The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear. Consciousness reverts to contemplation; The moon-disk rests alone.31

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

A lição é clara: enquanto nós arquitetos rebeldes não conhecermos a coragem de nossa mente e estivermos preparados para dar um mergulho igualmente especulativo em algum desconhecido, também nós continuaremos a ser objetos da geografia histórica (como abelhas operárias) em vez de sujeitos ativos que levem conscientemente ao limite as possibilidades humanas.