Quotes About Consciousness

When we spent a day being fully present, we quickly discovered how much of the rest of our lives we weren't fully present.

Begin whatever you're doing by remembering that you are here and you have been given a gift.

read the story in the book of Genesis about Jacob waking up from a dream and saying, Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn't aware of it. Jacob is waking up from a dream, but he's waking up in a larger sense as well, to the divine presence in all of life.

started to see what all those yogis and Buddhas and monks and nuns and sages and gurus across the ages were smiling about. This experience we're all having here, this event we were born into— it's profoundly, deeply, fundamentally off.

Even with my limited self-awareness

Polyconsciousness is what one researcher termed the resulting state of mind that divides attention between the physical world and the one our devices connect us to, undermining here-and-now interactions with actual people and things around us.

What we do with our attention, in short, is at the heart of what makes us human.

The daily papers talk of everything except the daily," he complained. "What's really going on, what we're experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it?" That's his deeper question: What about everything else?

I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.

Thou art god, I am god. All that groks is god.

Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.

He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.

Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am.

you are not in my debt. You can't be. Impossible—because I never do anything I don't want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.

Eh? I don't grok your answer." Mike hesitated. "I will try. But words are . . . are not . . . rightly. Not 'putting.' Not 'mading.' A nowing, World is. World was. World shall be. Now." " 'As it was in the beginning, so it is now and ever shall be, World without end—

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!

All symbols were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not "feel like" food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor

I remember thinking, "Gosh, that's terrible!" and feeling sorry for the one Porteño in the ship. But B.A. wasn't my home and Terra was a long way off and I was very busy, as the attack on Klendathu, the Bugs' home planet, was mounted immediately after that and we spent the time to rendezvous strapped in our bunks, doped and unconscious, with the internal-gravity field of the Valley Forge off, to save power and give greater speed.

But how, from the viewpoint of a Martian, did man differ from other animals? Would a race that could levitate and god knows what else be impressed by engineering? If so would the Aswan Dam or a thousand miles of coral reef win first prize? Man's self awareness, sheer conceit. There was no way to prove that sperm whales and sequoias were not philosophers and poets exceeding any human merit?

A man isn't a collection of chemical reactions, he is a collection of ideas.

He knew that he did not invent the information brought to him by his senses. There had to be something else out there, some otherness that produced the things his senses recorded. All philosophies that claimed that the physical world around him did not exist except in his imagination were sheer nonsense. But

There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment.

Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness.