Quotes About Consciousness

The buddha-dharma … is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes … , not according to some … program of dos and don'ts.

W]ith the sense of self gone, ... actions naturally become uncalculated and free.

When we see Reality, we are completely beyond the world of words and concepts. We experience what words cannot express, what ideas cannot contain, what speech cannot communicate.

Truth and Reality are … not found in the way we frame our thoughts.

W]e reject … experience in favour of what we think.

Conscious experience is very much like a movie. It's just one moment – one still – after another. But because these seem to occur in rapid succession, we adopt the contradictory belief … there are … persistent things out there that nevertheless change.

Reality is not going to change with your perception of it.

Why would anyone want to awaken to the Reality that they're not even here in the first place?

Try as we will, we'll not find any workable, definable thing in actual experience for this 'I' to refer to.

It's not as if, when you see, the world winks out of existence.

Those who are aware," he said, "do not die. Those who are ignorant are as if dead already.

The Buddha encouraged people to "know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong. And when you do, then give them up. And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them.

He knows only what is right in front of him; she is aware of every incoming sensation that glances obliquely against her soft, fragile core

Life exists so the Universe can experience itself.

Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.

These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.

Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up—not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.

Psychological flexibility can be defined as contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, fully and without needless defense—as it is and not as what it says it is—and persisting with or changing a behavior in the service of chosen values.

The "I/here/nowness" of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

Self awareness gives us ultimate human freedom.

It isn't only that we know less than we pretend about the outside world; we don't even know ourselves all that well.

It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn't arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class consciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.