Quotes About Consciousness

I saw only the glory of green emeralds, and radiant buddhas walking everywhere, and there was no I to see any of this, but the emeralds were there just the same.

Put this all a different way, and perhaps the importance of this fact will become clear: the very key to your growth, development, and evolution is to make your present subject an object—that is, it is to look at your present subject instead of using it as something through which to view the world (and thus remain identified with).

Thought is sequential, successive, one-dimensional, while the real world presents itself as a multidimensional, non-successive, simultaneous pattern of infinite richness and variety; and trying to make the one grasp the other is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence or trying to take in a Renoir painting by microscope alone.

Left-Hand or interior events cannot be seen in that fashion. You cannot see love, envy, wonder, compassion, insight, intentionality, spiritual illumination, states of consciousness, value, or meaning running around out there in the empirical world. Interior events are not seen in an exterior or objective manner, they are seen by introspection and interpretation

There is a spectrum of depth, a spectrum of consciousness. And evolution unfolds that spectrum. Consciousness unfolds more and more, realizes itself more and more, comes into manifestation more and more. Spirit, consciousness, depth—so many words for the same thing.

Your "overall self" is your True Self (or Witness) plus your conventional, relative, finite self, and that finite self can be a false (inaccurate) or an authentic (accurate) self-concept. The choice is truly yours…

Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature.

This profoundly disturbed me, because I had had several kensho or satori-like experiences (glimpses of One Taste), but they were all generally confined to the waking state.

This gives the feeling, vis-à-vis time, that you are not moving through time, but rather time is moving through you (that is, through your awareness), with your being not moving at all. It's like sitting in a movie theater and, without moving from your seat, having the entire scenery move past you (and if the you is "headless," then in you).

Across the board, the sense of being any sort of Seer or Witness or Self vanishes altogether. You don't look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky. It's not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the Kosmos whole—precisely because awareness is no longer split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two.

I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.

The point of the overall meditative path is to have Wakefulness (or Consciousness as Such) transcend and include all state-realms, so it ceases to "black out" or "forget" various changes of state (such as dreaming and deep sleep), and instead recognizes a "constant Consciousness" or ever-present nondual Awareness, the union (and transcendence) of individual finite self and infinite Spirit.

The ladder is much higher than the climber, who remains committed to the lower rungs. It's one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there! And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won't actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased

And if they are to live up to their spiritual experiences, then they will have to grow and develop. They will have to start the developmental unfolding, the holarchical expansion, the actual inhabiting of the expanding spheres of consciousness. Their center of gravity has to shift—to transform—to these deeper or higher spheres of consciousness; it does no good to merely "idealize" them in theoretical chit-chat and talking religion

Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.

In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).

You have to know that there actually is a transcendental something, if you are going to free anybody from anything—if there is no beyond-the-given, there is no freedom from the given, and liberation is futile.

If not, they will once again contract and move down, to the lowest state possible, the gross, egoic realm, and there they will live the life of a typical human—some happiness, much sorrow, some joy, great suffering—until and unless they take up a spiritual practice and rediscover the higher realms of their own being, ultimately WAKING UP to their vast, pure, deep, spacious, Nondual Awareness or Clear Light Void, thence to assist others in their own Waking Up.

ALL you are actually ever aware of is this timeless Now.

My father used to cure hiccups instantly by producing a twenty-dollar bill on the spot and demanding in return that the victim immediately hiccup just one more time. So also, allowed anxiety is no longer anxiety, and the easiest way to un-tense a person is to challenge him to be as tense as he possibly can. In all cases, conscious adherence to a symptom delivers you from the symptom.

The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.

The more familiar we are with a biblical story, the more difficult it is to view it outside of the way it has always been understood. And the longer imprecision in the tradition remains unchallenged, the deeper it becomes embedded in Christian consciousness. The birth story of Jesus is such a story.

There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.

In meditation...the power of God begins to reflect in the clear waters of your consciousness.