Quotes About Consciousness

The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.

You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people's thoughts about you. The life story is not the work of a historian [...]; it is more like a work of historical fiction that makes plenty of references to real events and connects them by dramatizations and interpretations that might or might not be true to the spirit of what happened.

Our life is the creation of our mind

We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. —BUDDHA2

There is no reality, only perception.

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

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly.

Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless. ANDREW SOLOMON, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

Everyone who's conscious deserves some level of expectation, not dismissal as a throwaway.

Prima ho parlato della paura: quel che provavo allora non lo chiamerei paura, comunque non una paura schietta e consapevole, era un disagio quasi fisico, come un prurito che non si può grattare, concentrato sulle parti cieche del corpo, la nuca, la schiena, le natiche.

I'm going to be dead for a long time. Let me be awake as much as I can for now.

Some sexual theorists have argued that the perceptual link between orgasm and death is traceable to the elevated state in which orgasm in a rare few cases is accompanied by a loss of consciousness. Another explanation for the petit mort idea is inherent in a rare but persistent folk belief, of uncertain origin but found in cultures from Europe to the Far East, that a person is born with a certain number of orgasms in him or her, and that when the last is used, the person died.

But remember this. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.

I am trying to be more attentive to the moment and appreciative of where I am at. That's part of wisdom, right?

the greatest challenge comes when we are least conscious of the presence of a challenge.

We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.

Time snapped back into one piece. I was wholly in the present, alert and questioning.

My mind works on several levels at once.1

Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.

then lost consciousness, and pitched sideways into the water. A grim-looking Alice switched off the wireless. The three

Is negative space the space you don't like, or the space that is not there? And if it's not there how can you tell?

Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real?