Quotes About Consciousness

But one does not liberate someone by alienating them. Authentic liberation--the process of humanization--is not another deposit to be made in a person. Liberation is a praxis: action and reflection upon the world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking [pedagogical] methods of domination (propaganda, slogans--deposits) in the name of liberation.

One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men's consciousness.

Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.

Oppression is domesticating. The gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.

It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centers of the country. Although these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and promises, usually finds fertile ground here.

The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to transmit a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. The more consciously freedom assumes its necessary limits, the more authority it has, ethically speaking, to continue to struggle in its own name.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, "housing" the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, "housing" the oppressors within them­ selves, they cannot be truly human.

To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that it is necessary to be the "owner of one's own labor," that labor "constitutes part of the human person," and that "a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself" is to go a step beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize women and men.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.

Primeiro: o movimento interno que unifica os elementos do método e os excede em amplitude de humanismo pedagógico. Segundo: esse movimento reproduz e manifesta o processo histórico em que o homem se reconhece. Terceiro: os rumos possíveis desse processo são possíveis projetos e, por conseguinte, a conscientização não é apenas conhecimento ou reconhecimento, mas opção, decisão, compromisso.

A consciência é essa misteriosa e contraditória capacidade que tem o homem de distanciar-se das coisas para fazê-las presentes, imediatamente presentes.

The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders. The latter course, by preserving a state of alienation, hinders the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in a total reality. And without this critical intervention, it is always difficult to achieve the unity of the oppressed as a class.

Es por esto que [la educación liberadora] reconoce [a las personas] como seres que están siendo, como seres inacabados, inconclusos en y con una realidad que siendo historia es también tan inacabada como ellos. [...] De [la inconclusión de las personas y la conciencia que de ella tienen] que sea la educación un quehacer permanente. Permanente en razón de la inconclusión de los seres humanos y del devenir de la realidad.

A reflexividade é a raiz da objetivação

Testemunhando objetivamente sua história, mesmo a consciência ingênua acaba por despertar criticamente, para identificar-se como personagem que se ignorava e é chamada a assumir seu papel.

Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs. In this way, they can go beyond the level of real consciousness to that of potential consciousness much more rapidly.

Cito um exemplo de um estudioso de meu marido, que inadvertida e ingenuamente, asseverou que empoderamento é "Conceito central teórico e prático de Freire, presente pela primeira vez em Medo e ousadia, escrito em parceria com Ira Shor (1986)1.

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Along the same lines, it is indispensable to analyze the contents of newspaper editorials following any given event: "Why do different newspapers have such different interpretations of the same fact?" This practice helps develop a sense of criticism, so that people will react to newspapers or news broadcasts not as passive objects of the "communiqués" directed at them, but rather as consciousnesses seeking to be free.

One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber's consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.

If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate "things." This tendency of the oppressor consciousness to "in-animate" everything and everyone it encounters, in its eagerness to possess, unquestionably corresponds with a tendency to sadism.

Study circles. They began also to have their study circles, studying, discussing the Gospels, and think­ ing about the political and social circumstances in which they were reinterpreting the Gospels. In doing that, they discovered the need to change the country, and they got a new consciousness-a historical, politi­cal consciousness of the reality.

I am neither the earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air, nor sky, nor any other properties. I am not the senses and not even the mind. I am Shiva, the undivided essence of consciousness.