Quotes About Consciousness

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.

Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is.

Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.

nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.

Bir iç çekiÅŸ yaln?zca iç çekiÅŸ deÄŸildir. Dünyay? içimize çekeriz, soluÄŸumuzla birlikte d?? dünyaya anlam da veririz. YapabildiÄŸimiz sürece. YapabildiÄŸimiz kadar?yla.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence:

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.

A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.

if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.