Quotes About Consciousness

So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.

If you work long enough and hard enough to understand yourself, you will come to discover that this vast part of your mind, of which you now have little awareness, contains riches beyond imagination.

But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world.

The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.

We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.

And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived.

Most people most of the time make decisions with little awareness of what they are doing. They take action with little understanding of their own motives and without beginning to know the ramifications of their choices.

It is precisely because our consciousness is disordered that conflict occurs between it and the unconscious which seeks to heal it. In other words, mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual deviates substantially from the will of God, which is the individual's own unconscious will.

We are almost always less or more competent than we believe ourselves to be. The unconscious,however, knows who we really are.

Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.

Breath with awareness is prana. Breath without awareness is just air.

Assim eu, Brás Cubas, descobri uma lei sublime, a lei da equivalência das janelas, e estabeleci que o modo de compensar uma janela fechada é abrir outra, a fim de que a moral possa arejar continuamente a consciência.

Melchior foi o primeiro que voltou a si. A reflexão corrigiu a espontaneidade, e o padre reassumiu o gesto usual, com essa dissimulação que é um dever, quando a sinceridade é um perigo.

Esse primeiro palpitar da seiva, essa revelação da consciência a si própria, nunca mais me esqueceu, nem achei que lhe fosse comparável qualquer outra sensação da mesma espécie. Naturalmente por ser minha. Naturalmente também por ser a primeira.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.

We do not know what things look like, as you say," the beast said. "We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing.

Madeleine L'Engle

Look at my glasses. I can't even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it's not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it's me, Madeleine. I don't think Father's eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn't thinking, but a brain's just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.

William James wrote: "Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.

We don't know what things LOOK like, as you say, the beast said. We know what things ARE like. It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing.

He is : frog: unworried by the self-consciousness with which the human animal is stuck; it is our blessing and our curse; not only do we know, we know that we know. And we are not often willing to face how little we know.

A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully, be ontological.

Time isn't any more important than size. All that is required of you is to be in the Now, in this moment which has been given us.