Quotes About Consciousness

It takes no deep insight to see that the source of both our well-being and our maladies lies within our own hearts and minds. To change our experience of life we must inevitably change our hearts and minds, or rather our heart/minds.

Samsara is not out there, but rather in the way that we experience our environment. To target it precisely, samsara is in the quality of our minds. Our minds are not functioning in accord with reality, and therein lies the problem.

I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

Let go of any conceptual associations you have regarding visual impressions. Let go of preferences or judgments...Your likes and dislikes...Just be present with the shapes and colors...focusing on them with bare attention.

There's no one-to-one correspondence between outer events and our inner emotional states.

God, the soul, salvation, consciousness, love, free will, and purely spiritual causation may seem far more real to you than elementary particles and energy fields. I suggest that if you were able to focus your attention at will, you could actually choose the universe you appear to inhabit.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

Life is a dream. We wake up when we die" ~ B. Habyarimana.

Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union—the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

If this was a dream, he didn't want to wake up.

Yoga is about the will, working with intelligence and self-reflexive consciousness, can free us from the inevitability of the wavering mind and outwardly directed senses.

Breath is the vehicle of consciousness and so, by its slow measured observation and distribution, we learn to tug our attention away from external desires toward a judicious, intelligent awareness.

There is no difference in souls, only the ideas about ourselves that we wear.

Our flawed mechanisms of perception and thought are not a cause for grief, but an opportunity to evolve, for an internal evolution of consciousness that will also make possible, in a sustainable form, our aspirations toward what we call individual success and global progress.

The mind (manas) and the breath (prana) are intimately connected and the activity or the cessation of activity of one affects the other.

All illness fragments and so whatever integrates also heals. It is axiomatic in yoga that illness has its origin in the consciousness. Self-cultivation really begins only with total self-absorption, so anything that facilitates concentration, reflection, and inward absorption, is going to begin to heal the problems of the fissured, imbalanced self.

Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, said, "Know yourself. Know what is good. Know when to stop.

Slouching acts like a narcotic to the body. When our parents tell us not to slouch, it is because they instinctively understand that collapsing our chest caves in the very Self. It is because you mind shrinks that your soul shrinks. It is the spine's job to keep the mind alert. It is the spine's job to keep the mind alert. To do this, the spine has to keep the brain in position.

Ballet dancers have the opposite problem to most people in that, because of their excessive flexibility, their physical capacity outstrips their intellectual consciousness.

Prana is special because it carries awareness. it is the vehicle of consciousness.

If you say you are your body, you are wrong. If you say you are not your body, you are also wrong. The truth is that although body is born, lives, and dies, you cannot catch a glimpse of the divine except through the body.

Awareness: Every Pore of the Skin Has to Become an Eye

As I have said, while doing yoga, the body must tell one what to do, not the brain. Brain has to cooperate with the message it receives from the body. I will often say to a student, "Your brain is not in your body! That is why you can't get the asana." I mean of course that his intelligence is in his head and not filling his body.