Quotes About Consciousness

The God concept, of course, originated from mankind's innate knowledge that consciousness precedes physical construction.

We evoke the world we perceive.

A sobering thought what if, at this very moment, I am

What is reality, anyway Just a collective hunch.

The thing I want to know is, if you tell your brain not to do stuff... and it keeps doing it anyway, does that mean your mind has a mind of its own? And if it does, then who's in charge here, anyway?

There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and bone, the trap inside the skull. For these split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus. Then you remember

Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind.

His classes... had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don't smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they're defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs.

Across the political spectrum, Americans assert that any form of white racial consciousness or solidarity is despicable. Whites, therefore, have tried to keep their end of the civil rights bargain. They have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same.

Whites cannot, by law, set up all-white schools. As it is, they are criticized if they take their children out of integrated public schools and send them to private schools that are largely white. None of these schools teaches a deliberate racial consciousness the way many black private schools do. Blacks, on the other hand, are increasingly demanding that publicly funded schools teach black racialism—with only a murmur of criticism from whites.

It is only a matter of time before this gives rise to an increasingly explicit white racial consciousness.

It is as if, even within the privacy of our own minds, we are afraid to criticize her. We are protecting the image of mother inside, protecting our fragile relationship with her by denying anything that might unsettle it, and protecting ourselves from the disappointment, anger, and pain that we've kept out of consciousness.

When consciousness is dissociated, you may find yourself feeling as if you or the world around you isn't fully real. This is most often a reaction to severe stress and trauma. The main difference between these two conditions is that depersonalization relates to your experience of yourself as a person, whereas derealization relates to your perception of the environment as amplified below.

Even traumas that we have pushed outside our consciousness affect us deeply. They affect our nervous systems, our bodies, our reactions to events, our choices, our feelings about ourselves and others, and many other aspects of our experience. Out of sight is not out of bodymind.

Your capacity to stay present will increase as you (1) practice grounding, (2) defuse traumatic triggers and learn to self-regulate, (3) learn to recognize dissociation right away and how to come out of it, (4) develop more sense of safety, reinforced by good boundaries, and (5) cultivate witness consciousness, the capacity to notice your thoughts and feelings without being caught inside them.

We are now able to use this recognition of body states as useful messages rather than indications of present threats. And by achieving all of this, we will have achieved wisdom—the integration of emotions, the feelings of the body, and our ongoing conscious awareness and thinking. We will have progressed from the state of being a trauma victim to becoming a trauma survivor.

It is a full time job being honest one moment at a time, remembering to love, to honor, to respect. It is a practice, a discipline, worthy of every moment.

The true significance of having an open mind lies in being deliberate, not obedient.

But you're probably not manufacturing anything. That can make it tough to spot your by-products. People at a lumber company see their waste. They can't ignore sawdust. But you don't see yours. Maybe you don't even think you produce any by-products. But that's myopic.

I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

Sí, es la conciencia de la edad lo que nos condiciona, más que la edad misma.

la mirada no se domina, a menudo actúa al margen de nuestras instrucciones y de nuestras censuras, o es que bajo ese pretexto le permitimos desobedecernos.

Basta con que alguien salga por una puerta y desaparezca para que su imagen empiece a difuminarse, basta con dejar de ver para ya no ver claro, o no ver nada; y con oír pasa lo mismo, y no digamos con el tacto.