Quotes About Consciousness

When once you realize your own Self, and that there is nothing other than this Self, you will come to look upon the whole universe as the Self.

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

he is that Self. Then, only, can he view everything as a form of the Self.

To see the false as the false, you need to lay aside all the search-oriented teachings, and focus on (contemplate) the reality that your presence and the Absolute presence cannot be other than the same presence.

Ramana says: "Love is not different from the Self…[in this sense] God is love…. Love itself is the actual form of God…. Call it pure bliss, God, or what you will.

The wise one lives without the feeling of I-ness or mine-ness. What is this I, or what is "mine"? Be devoid of the feeling of mine-ness and I-ness, knowing for certain that Nothing is—in Me, individual selves rise and disappear.

The immanent Reality alone is. It is infinite. There arises, from it, this finite [extension of] consciousness, taking on a limited form [mind].

thoughts have their origin in this stillness.

When I understood this much about the People, I realized how truly different their reality was. My reality is made in my head; I create roles for myself, I create a structure that requires certain activities and prohibits others. I live in time; I have an agenda. Their existence had no reality until they lived it.

In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn't really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that "form is not-self." We are not our bodies.

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

Certainly the prefrontal cortex is an important thing; I'm as proud of mine as the next guy.

meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of

Robert Wright

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

the thoughts are arising, and there's a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it's not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there's this very strong habitual identification. This is how we've lived our lives, and it takes practice to try and break this conditioning- to be mindful of the thought, rather than be lost in it.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

If I let go of that feeling and cease to identify with it—in other words, take a step toward the interior version of the not-self experience—I'm rejecting natural selection's insistence that I consider myself special. Take that, natural selection!

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self.

At the dawn of organic sentience

Y tal vez eso es lo que es el «yo», lo que «tú» eres, una vez que se abandona la idea de yo: un tipo de forma de conciencia purificada.