Quotes About Consciousness

Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness.

Meaningful ritual and ceremony affirm our relationship to the sacred and nourish both the spiritual and secular worlds. Our inner nature needs acknowledgment from our conscious personality as much as our egos need to remember their source in the collective unconscious.

To advance from opposition (always a quarrel) to paradox (always holy) is to make a leap of consciousness. That leap takes us through the chaos of middle age and gives a vista that enlightens the remaining years of life. It is a valuable exercise to list the oppositions that we face, then try to restore them to the realm of paradox. We can start with these two sets of values: the everyday practical attitudes that nearly everyone agrees to and the religious instruction that we are given.

The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.

Proverbs in many languages point out these three levels of consciousness. One story, for instance, relates that the simple man comes home in the evening wondering what's for dinner, the complex man comes home pondering the imponderables of fate, and the enlightened man comes home wondering what's for dinner.

Guilt creates nothing; conscious work constructs a mandorla and is healing. The mandorla has no place for remorse. it asks conscious work of us, not self-indulgence. Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilty would be far better invested in the courage act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality. Guilty is also arrogant because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.

Since he has grasped the white-hot stuff of freedom, modern man must have an equally powerful grasp of consciousness if he is to avoid the pitfalls that are so common in our relationships today.

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

When it is time for growth, the old ways and the old habits must welcome the new. The old way seems to hinder the new growth at every point, but if you persevere, this way will bring a new consciousness to birth.

All that we know is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

Life is one, but consciousness is divided. It is the stress of the divided consciousness that every visionary is seeking to deal with.

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

Of course, it is fairly easy to see that other people's minds operate this way; it is comparatively much harder to become aware that one's own mind is working that way also.

I do not dare assert that the one is actually a conscious mind in the same way that each of us is a conscious mind. It is found through the unconscious, and unconscious it probably is in essence. I can understand why many, bowled over by this experience, call it God, but I still feel that all ideas of God are only symbols of the experience itself.

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom — the conscious activities of perception and evaluation — is demanded of the Power Elite, the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid.

Precisely. Every religion is a way of arriving at a certain state of consciousness and every society is based on a particular religion. Naturally, since any state of consciousness can be induced by a specific drug or group of drugs, you are going to find each society accepting certain drugs and bitterly condemning others.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

Who is the Master who makes the grass green? (Zen koan)

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

And so on, ad infinitum. To account for our perception of our perception — our ability to perceive that we perceive — we have three heads, and to account for that, four heads, and to account for our ability to carry this analysis onward forever, we have infinite heads . . . A