Quotes About Consciousness

Shallow thinkers always seem to be obsessed by the stupidity that if anything is a shadow, dream, illusion, it ceases to exist.

I became an entirely different animal. In fact, I've often thought that there isn't any I at all ; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.

No recorded vision is perfect, of high visions, for the seer must keep either his physical organs or his memory in working order. And neither is capable. There is no bridge. One can only be conscious of one thing at a time, and as the consciousness moves nearer to the vision, it loses control of the physical and mental.

Thoughts are false.

My three-dimensional mind thinks all this 'real,' a history; where at most it is a geography, a partial [62] set of infinite aspects.

In the Wind of the mind arises the turbulence called I.

Cree usted que es un bien devolverle la razón y abrirle los ojos otra vez a este mundo sucio que la rodea?

En todo cerebro bien organizado, la idea dominante, y siempre hay una, es la primera que se presenta al despertarse, como es también la última que se tiene al dormirse".

Era, por lo demás, uno de esos hombres que prefieren asistir a su propia vida y consideran improcedente cualquier aspiración a vivirla.

existen creencias colectivas por así decir asintomáticas: brotan y se propagan utilizando la conciencia individual como incubadora inconsciente y permanecen sustancialmente ilegibles hasta el momento en que emergen con la rapidez de una pandemia

You wake, you die.

I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.

So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world---just no more confusing than any other.

The problem with being me, thought Isabel, as she walked along George IV Bridge, is that I keep thinking about the problem of being me.

Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. And who am I?

There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.

people who believed not that the end was coming—as some people did—but that it had actually come, and we had simply failed to notice

One of the drawbacks to being a philosopher was that you became aware of what you should not do, and

Remember that, she said to herself; remember that in your dealings with others—they may be dying.

if you had no language, then what form did your thoughts take—if you thought at all? Of course you thought—she had never had any difficulty with accepting that—but how limited would your thoughts be in the absence of any words to express them?

Moral philosophy] also has to bear in mind who we are, our human limitations. It's not just something that one does in armchairs. As she spoke, she thought of her own armchair. The last time she had sat in it, she had drifted off to sleep while watching the news. For a moral philosopher's armchair, she thought, it's somewhat under-used.

the failure to make progress on this issue suggests a worldview in deep paradigmatic crisis.70 It's not for nothing that consciousness is considered one of the deepest mysteries facing the modern mind.

How could a man know the truth of his own soul?

That is a dream also; only he has remained asleep, while you have awakened; and who knows which of you is the most fortunate?