Quotes About Consciousness

Be food aware—remember that fresh meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, nuts, seeds and occasional fruits and starches are the foods nature intended you to eat.

As far as I can see, materialism is a view that has no very compelling argument in its favor and that is confronted with very powerful objections to which nothing even approaching an adequate response has been offered. The central objection, elaborated in various ways below, is that the main materialist view, quite possibly the only serious materialist view, offers no account at all of consciousness and seems incapable in principle of doing so.

C'était, pensa-t-elle, comme un doux peigne passant dans son cerveau, redressant les pensées et défaisant les nÅ"uds.

To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.

In a world that has come to see ideas and collective enthusiasm with horror, Hegel becomes a gateway to a new world, where ideas are the key to conciousness, where the philosopher becomes the spokesman for the times and the prophet of a united humanity. It is a world in which archaic terms like "harmony" and "humanity" still make sense—indeed, still give us something to hope for. It is a world worth, at least, considering.

Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.

Stalin's program was bound to appeal to Bolsheviks who harbored such attitudes, and his argumentation shows how conscious of this he was. "We cannot live like gypsies without grain reserves," he said in the speech of July 9, 1928. "Isn't it clear that a great state covering a sixth of the earth's surface can't get along without grain reserves for internal and external needs?

At the very least, one would hope that by becoming aware of the many ways our brain can trick us, we would arrive at the conclusion Bertrand Russell thought was a necessary consequence of the limits of knowledge: we should be less cocksure of our beliefs, hold them tentatively, and always be on guard against thinking our feeling of absolute certainty implies we're right.

Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed—that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself. "This

Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.

It is the height of stupidity to believe that in the course of your short life, your few decades of consciousness, you can somehow rewire the configurations of your brain through technology and wishful thinking, overcoming the effect of six million years of development. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.

a state of balance—a clear understanding of why we feel the way we do, conscious of our impulses so that we can think without being secretly compelled by our emotions.

what if we could look within and see the source of our more troubling emotions and why they drive our behavior, often against our own wishes?

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. –Carl Jung

It is often your own actions that stir up envy, your own unawareness. By becoming conscious of those actions and qualities that create envy, you can take the teeth out of it before it nibbles you to death.

we tend to think of our behavior as largely conscious and willed. To imagine that we are not always in control of what we do is a frightening thought, but in fact it is the reality. We are subject to forces from deep within us that drive our behavior and that operate below the level of our awareness.

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

In many ways we are more split than ever between our conscious, social selves and our unconscious Shadow. We live in a culture that enforces powerful codes of correctness that we must abide by or face the shaming that is not so common on social media. We are supposed to live up to the ideals of selflessness, which are impossible for us because we are not angels.

In other words, we do not have conscious access to the origins of our emotions and the moods they generate. Once we feel them, all we can do is try to interpret the emotion, translate it into language.

Fortunately, to acquire rationality is not complicated. It simply requires knowing and working through a three-step process. First, we must become aware of what we shall call low-grade irrationality. This is a function of the continual moods and feelings that we experience in life, below the level of consciousness. When we plan or make decisions, we are not aware of how deeply these moods and feelings skew the thinking process.

Stop Being So Nice Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego.

Having such clarity about ourselves and others could change the course of our lives in so many ways, but first we must clear up a common misconception: we tend to think of our behavior as largely conscious and willed.

That is precisely the wrong approach. What makes us go astray in the first place is that we are unattuned to the present moment, insensitive to the circumstances. We are listening to our own thoughts, reacting to things that happened in the past, applying theories and ideas that we digested long ago but that have nothing to do with our predicament in the present. More books, theories, and thinking only make the problem worse.