Quotes About Consciousness

Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.

If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.

How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.

So per esperienza che il rimorso è capace di irrompere da una breccia piccolissima e inondare il paesaggio, dimorandovi in pozze e umori con la stessa naturalezza dell'acqua.

Leaving here is like waking from a trance.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable.

There's a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of Mother and Father.

My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience.

The question is this: What if waking life is incapable of adequately attuning us to the needs of our unconscious minds?

A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.

My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.

The word 'feminine,' as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

what it's all for. We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop. They say in the next twenty years we're going to merge with computer chips to cure aging and become immortal. Who wants an eternity of being a machine?

Would it be so strange to think that upon death, when there is no newly created consciousness in the continuation of our histories, we might experience ourselves in God as participants in God's own life? And

Would it be so strange to think that upon death, when there is no newly created consciousness in the continuation of our histories, we might experience ourselves in God as participants in God's own life? And if such could happen, would it not be the case that as God experiences the continuing events of the world, we who are held in the life of God would also experience the continuing stories of earth?

NDEs seem instead to provide direct evidence for a type of mental functioning that varies "inversely, rather than directly, with the observable activity of the nervous system." Such evidence, we believe, fundamentally conflicts with the conventional doctrine that brain processes produce consciousness, and supports the alternative view that brain activity normally serves as a kind of filter, which somehow constrains the material that emerges into waking consciousness.[

There is a level accessed in meditation that is beyond the neuron. This level has many names; one we could use is infinite awareness.

suggest that the meditation and near-death experiences reported by many are glimpses into a higher reality—and by this I mean a reality more subtle than the one to which our nervous system usually has access. At those moments in our lives when the mind has been quieted, we may indeed go "beyond" our nervous system's usual capacities. Then the consciousness within us, freed from perceiving the machinations of the mind, is able to perceive its own expanded form.

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

meditation is not just about creating states of well-being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn't matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.