Quotes About Consciousness

Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds.

Become a minimalist. Eliminate clutter from your life by living with the 100 things that you wear and use the most.

Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: 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.

can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness.

Is true freedom even possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice. Therefore, I see no reason why a person couldn't perfectly banish the illusion of the self. However, just the ability to meditate—to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought—can offer a profound relief from mental suffering.

Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves?

there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation

Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others.

It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.13

is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.

It is always now

the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—

Nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence for it in the universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.10

The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.

Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self.

In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

It really is possible to look for the feeling you are calling "I" and to fail to find it in a way that is conclusive.

Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.

The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control.

This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

mindfulness" is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are.

there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts "objectively.