Quotes About Consciousness

I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.

He was starting to think that consciousness wasn't some lighthouse of self-knowing but merely a little cave where you made up stories about yourself, whatever it took to hide the shit and the slime, the utter mollusk you were in your deepest nature. He wondered what was down there, under the shit, what kind of bedrock he might strike. Take

There is only one meditation—the rigorous refusal to harbor thoughts.

The mind is what it thinks. To make it true, think true.

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.

Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind has built around you.

If you want to know your true nature, you must have yourself in mind all the time, until the secret of your being stands revealed.

Whatever you forget, is not the truth, always remember that.

Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person.

In the stillness of the mind, I saw myself as I am: unbound.

When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute.

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all.

Consciousness is power. Be aware of what needs be done and it will be done. Only keep alert – and quiet. Once you reach your destination and know your real nature, your existence becomes a blessing to all. You may not know, nor will the world know; yet the help radiates.

The interval between the beginning of 'I am' (birth or waking) and when you lose it again (death or deep sleep) is called 'time.

Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.

I am' itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor mind, and the love of the self in you is for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.

The man who carries a parcel is anxious not to lose it -- he is parcel-conscious. The man who cherishes the feeling 'I am' is self-conscious. The jnani holds on to nothing and cannot be said to be conscious. And yet he is not unconscious. He is the very heart of awareness. We call him digambara clothed in space, the Naked One, beyond all appearance. There is no name and shape under which he may be said to exist, yet he is the only one that truly is.

How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, and your personality dissolves.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection.

There is a vastness beyond the farthest reaches of the mind. That vastness is my home; that vastness is myself. And that vastness is also love.

In the great mirror of consciousness, images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material - destructible, perishable, transient. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence - vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion, "I am so-and-so," obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and to die.

Q: No purposeful action is then possible? M: All I say is that consciousness contains all. In consciousness all is possible. You can have causes if you want them, in your world. Another may be content with a single cause — God's will. The root cause is one: the sense 'I am'.

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.