Quotes About Consciousness

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gram and only am.

That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.

There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.

In the final stage of ego-lessness there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is In all - that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to 'perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe'.

Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It'll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.

Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha.

The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.

The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground

At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

If one would live well, one must live completely, with the whole being—with the body and the instincts, as well as with the conscious mind. A life lived, as far as may be, exclusively from the consciousness and in accordance with the considered judgments of the intellect, is a stunted life, a half-dead life.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. WILLIAM BLAKE

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more - when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future - it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self? William Law

For now there is only the darkness expanding and deepening, deepening into light; there is only this final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this illumination . . .

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.