Quotes About Consciousness

But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone's consent, in six months' time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?

Intenté no pensar en nada. Intenté existir, nada más.

fought the waves of sleep that kept threatening to wash over me.

If you didn't think about it, your breath just traveled in and out of your body regardless. Didn't matter what you did, running, riding, sleeping, it just went in and out, doing its job, keeping you alive. As soon as you thought too hard about it, it became a passive thing. Waiting for you to fill your lungs. Stalling when you thought bad thoughts, when you felt your stomach tighten with fear.

I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm.

Never do anything out of obligation. Do everything with gratitude and love.

know that I'm not a human being having a spiritual experience. I'm a spiritual being having a human experience.

It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles...

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.

when we "lose our mind" and "come to our senses" in the fullest possible way, the chattering, texting, e-mailing, twittering mind will eventually quiet down and almost silence itself. This is a sacred and connected silence...It's like a deep, still pond reflecting the stars of the night sky. I believe this is the baseline for human consciousness, and I'm convinced that the birds are the best mentors in the natural world for bringing us to it.

Let us build our houses with our own hands. And grow the wheat, and bake the bread. Then we'll know what the earth is. Now, we turn the knob: the water runs. I have no idea from where or how. Electricity... We buy the bread: we don't know who bakes it, how, where. The same with our lives now. We live, but we don't know how, where, why. And it has no taste.

What we know about fishes is only a tiny slice of what they know.

For science the great miracle to be explained is the physical universe. For esoteric philosophy the greater miracle is human consciousness.

Am I the same person that I dream about?

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.