Quotes About Consciousness

Sometimes this not remembering appears to protect the abductees from a distress that they could not handle, especially in the case of children. But we have little understanding of how this repressing force works, or, for that matter, why an altered state of consciousness, facilitated in a caring, protective setting, is so effective in recovering abduction memories.

Something, everyone who goes through these sessions agrees, has happened to these people, whether or not it is possible to identify the source of what has occurred.

Indeed, the alien abduction phenomenon seems to open abductees and those who work with them to deeper realms of human emotion, whether or not that is a specific "purpose" of the phenomenon.

We can continue to try to make the phenomenon fit the world as we have known it, jamming it into a kind of procrustean bed of consensus reality. Or we can acknowledge that the world might be other than we have known it. Then we are free to see where our thinking leads us.

How, for example, do the aliens pass people through walls? Questions such as this might seem absurd, or suggestive only of observational error or psychosis, to those whose parameters of reality have been limited to

still greater problem resides in the fact that memory in relation to abduction experiences behaves rather strangely. As in the cases, for example, of Ed (chapter 3) or Arthur (chapter 15) the memory of an abduction may be outside of consciousness until triggered many years later by another experience or situation that becomes associated with the original event.

The loss of a sense of the sacred, the devaluation of intelligence and consciousness in nature beyond ourselves, has permitted the stronger among us to exploit the earth's resources without regard to future generations.

Ordinary dreams that contain UFO elements may be separated from dreams that recapitulate abductions in that they tend to be less vivid or intense, and the dreamer does not have the sense, as in the abduction-related dreams, that an actual experience is concealed behind the dream representations.

come to the end of this story I cannot help wondering what it might take to bring about the shift in consciousness in the society as a whole, the change of paradigm, that is implicit in what the abductees have undergone.

UFO abductions and related phenomena suggest first that humans are not the preeminent intelligent beings in a universe more or less empty of conscious life. But abductees' experiences also indicate that we are participating in a cosmos that contains intelligent beings that are far more advanced than we are in certain respects and have the power to render us helpless for purposes we are only just beginning to fathom.

Incidentally, one should make a distinction, as Freud did a long time ago, between mental items that are not conscious but that can be brought to consciousness with effort, like the things in our memories—Freud called that mental domain the preconscious—and things in the unconscious that are unavailable and cannot be recalled. We simply don't know they are there.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

doing less harm is no longer enough

In us humans evolution has now become conscious of itself. We have the freedom to choose or reject opportunities to carry the evolutionary adventure into a new future. The fact that we don't always seem to be making much headway-and indeed often seem to be regressing-is not sufficient reason for discouragement.

See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence.13

We ask ourselves: have we made progress? We are almost never aware of it. Only with effort and discipline do we become fully conscious. If we keep a journal, now and then we are startled when we peruse past entries. Worries, fears, preoccupations of the previous year seem to have evanesced. The greatest terrors and strongest urgencies of five years ago now surprise, embarrass, or encourage us. Was this me? Why was it that I could not gauge it as it was lived?

Our treatment of Indians . . . still affects the national consciousness... It seems a basic requirement to study the history of Indian people. Only through this study can we as a nation do what must be done if our treatment of the American Indian is not to be marked down for all time as a national disgrace.

Kids don't quite get what the consequences are until the consequences are due.

don't be self-conscious - other people are completely unaware of you and more concerned with how they appear ...

a dream isn't a wish - it's an altered state of consciousness ...

poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths...

we each harbor a shadow self with shadowy motives and murky desires...

time begins when we awaken and ends when we fall asleep...