Quotes About Consciousness

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.

There are a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).

We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

The vegetarian does not "see" (experience) meat on a rack in the butcher shop the same way the meat-eater sees it. The racist does not see a member of another race as, say, that person's parents do. More generally, as the Poet tells us: "The Fool sees not the same tree that the Wise Man sees.

When mystics etc. talk about ordinary consciousness as sleep, dream, illusion, etc., are they talking about something very esoteric that only other mystics can understand? Or are they talking about the extent to which normal consciousness (mechanical consciousness in my sense) relates to fictitious predicates attached to groups and ignores (does not perceive) person1, person2, etc.?

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

Is there some connection between waking up in the mystic sense, and learning to read (or to see paintings, say) in an alert, non-mechanical way? One Zen master, when asked what Zen is, always replied with the single word, Attention. What the hell did he mean?

Fifth-Circuit neurosomatic consciousness bleaches out all these problems at once. The disappearance of first-circuit physical" illnesses only seems more "miraculous" than the transcendence of second-circuit emotionalism, third-circuit perplexity and fourth-circuit guilt. It is the Cartesian mind/body dualism that makes us think of such first-circuit "physical" cures as somehow stranger or more spooky than any rapid improvement on the other circuits.

1Nobody knows why at present, but paranormal events seem much more likely at 4 hertz than at any other brainwave frequency.

What is tuned-in by Mr. A may not be tuned-in by Ms. B, but that does not mean that either of them is crazy or perverse. It merely means that every reality-tunnel encourages us to notice some things and ignore or forget other things.

It is not impossible, however uncongenial the thought may be to the Citadel, that many unscientific reality-tunnels, explored by, say, painters, or poets, or musicians, or novelists, or mystics, may be not non-existent but merely not-tuned-in by those who have not practiced for many years in tuning-in painterly or poetic or musical or novelistic or mystical brain circuits.

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life.

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

CULTIVATING NOT-KNOWING Though not-knowing is natural to us and not all that unfamiliar—as when we wordlessly resonate and interact with the radiant presence emanating through a baby's eyes—the capacity for it gets easily pushed into the background by our conditioned knowing.

The world and life's too big to pass for a dream

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

The surprise was worse that the pain. It showed a lack of awareness.

I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise.

The eye that looks in on us and the eye that looks out from us is not the same eye.

What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself while I'm doing it.

If our dreams are a reflection of our thoughts, then surely, our life is the foundation of our soul.

Try to persuade a person by appealing to their consciousness, by saying outright what you want, by showing all your cards, and what hope do you have? You are just one more irritation to be tuned out.