Quotes About Consciousness

Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice--and therefore awareness itself--is freedom.

But staying with the emptiness -entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself - that´s radical

What we are looking for is who is looking

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

Nice people were not supposed to be able to recognize certain things, because they were supposed to be so untainted that they couldn't even think about them.

My sone, God, of his endelees goodnesse, Walled a tonge with teeth and lippes eke, For man sholde him avise what he speeke.

Jeder Mensch ist ein Abgrund, es schwindelt einem, wenn man hinabsieht.

The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: "All life is Yoga." (Aurobindo 1976, 4)

It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.

The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself — whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance — is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality — of what is essentially and ultimately true and real — of spirit as the true and essential bein

The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness.

Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.

Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of [the divine] substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams.

Los griegos han tenido eticidad; pero Sócrates se propuso enseñarles las virtudes, los deberes, etc., morales, que tiene el hombre. El hombre moral no es el que quiere y hace lo justo; no es el hombre inocente, sino el que tiene conciencia de su acción.

Todos los atenienses estaban iniciados en los misterios eleusinos; solo Sócrates no lo estaba, porque quería conservar las manos libres para que, si fundaba algo en el pensamiento, no le acusasen de haberlo sabido por los misterios eleusinos. Sócrates sabía que la ciencia y el arte no brotan de los misterios y que la sabiduría jamás se halla en el secreto. Antes bien, la verdadera ciencia está en el campo abierto de la conciencia.

The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized.

The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The only things we perceive are our perceptions.

I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

Esse est percipi.

THE SECOND DIALOGUE