Quotes About Consciousness

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

For the moment the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.

And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticiaptions, from silly notions - from all the symptoms of you. Isn't tasting me? ... I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism. And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to.

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am. (Lenina)

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.

What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges, between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress?

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless.

Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica

Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.

Knowledge is always a function of being.

That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves.

We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, "Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.

And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. 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.

Choiceless awareness - at every moment and in all the circumstances of life - is the only effective meditation.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs," the writer and philosopher recollected. "Those folds in the trousers ? what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel ? how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.

We are unable to see the mind, and find it difficult in consequence to understand its nature.

Cómo puede el cuerdo saber lo que realmente se siente cuando se está loco?

Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To