Quotes About Consciousness

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits.

In some ancient cultures, elder rituals helped men shift from warriors to elders. What kind of ritual might allow you to surrender instinctual masculinity for the elder's spiritual consciousness? Could you create your own ritual?

Focusing consciousness without thought into this dark and powerful center of being felt like stepping into a Jacuzzi of joy, and I recalled the ancient Hindu equation sat-chit-ananda, which roughly translates to existence, consciousness, bliss. It is all one and I am that – the incomprehensible and ineffable bliss of being. In

Thoreau got up each morning and walked to the woods as though he had never been where he was going to, so that whatever was there came to him like liquid into an empty glass. Many people taking such a walk would have their heads so full of other ideas that it would be a long time before they were capable of hearing or seeing. Most people are blinded by themselves.

Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in. Music, he said, is continuous; only listening is intermittent. John Cage, 1979, reflecting on Henry David Thoreau's solo sojourn in Walden Woods, 1845-47.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.

He who is most deeply abased and alarmed, by the consciousness of his disgrace, nakedness, want, and misery, has made the greatest progress in the knowledge of himself.

Even the wicked themselves, therefore, are an example of the fact that some idea of God always exists in every human mind.

Live in the flesh but not according to the flesh.

When we expand our thinking, we expand who we are as human beings: the perspective from which we view the world, and the concepts and values we use to guide our choices.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

The mind is a theater. It cannot be allowed to go dark. It must be maintained.

Angel and Louis in particular could have catalyzed a coma victim back to consciousness. He knew where Parker and the others were

Instead, I felt only a heaviness, like a dark, wet blanket over my consciousness.

It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes Present the object, but the Mind descries. We see nothing till we truly understand it.

If the 'I' is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware; so it cannot 28depend on any of the things which I invent in my imagination.

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever [...], still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from.

Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future.

It's the sensation that all intentionality and will is being drained from the world, all consciousness, that there is nothing in earthly activity but malign blind indifference; that even the willed behavior of persons, speaking, thinking, doing, is only mechanical ticks and tocks. Finally that they cannot even be heard or seen, because all eyes are blind, all ears are stopped. My own consciousness the only one existent to know this.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

Life as we know, and partially understand it, is a classical example of what can occur when a sufficient level of complexity is attained. Consciousness appears to be a manifestation of an even more elaborate level of organization.

When we realize the ground of being, we take responsibility directly, because what we realize is that what we do and what happens to us are the same thing.