Quotes About Consciousness

Why must the plastic form make up the foundation of image consciousness?

Zu den Sachen selbst!

All forms of perception, according to Husserl, presuppose an intentional structure of consciousness, and it is in this intentional structure that the primordial link between consciousness and the world is to be sought.

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.

I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.

A suspension of time, a continuous present.

Freedom begins between the ears.

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger--without even knowing it is happening to you--of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not the public view of itself.

You don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

Whenever you "see" an issue or "understand" a concept, be conscious of the lens through which you're viewing the subject. You should assume you're introducing bias. The challenge remains to identify and let go of that bias or the assumptions you bring, and actively work to see and understand the subject anew.

How curious it was, how ironic, he decided, that the human brain seemed capable of understanding almost everything but itself.

But one thing it opened her eyes to, and made certain from the first instant of her new consciousness, namely, that since she loved him she could not keep her promise to marry him.

Don't forget the time change. Tomorrow when you leave for work it will be later than when you woke up.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.

But just the same, she dared not allow her mind to look up, for she sensed that the tattered images of her dreams were still hung high on the masts of her consciousness like the ragged remainders of sails flapping after a storm.

the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

And if it is true that we acquired our knowledge before our birth, and lost it at the moment of birth, but afterward, by the exercise of our senses upon sensible objects, recover the knowledge which we had once before, I suppose that what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge . . . PLATO*

He must give up his identification with original unconscious wholeness and voluntarily accept being a real fragment instead of an unreal whole.

Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, nor does form differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form.

I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake.

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.