Quotes About Consciousness

It was all those counterproductive forces that the Egyptians were attempting to conceptualize in the figure of Set, the enemy of illumination, enlightenment, vision, and consciousness.

Because we are so scientific now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist.

You look at the world through a story. You can't help it.

Faith in the part of us that continues across those deaths is a prerequisite to thinking itself.

Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world.

The scientific world of matter can be reduced, in some sense, to its fundamental constituent elements: molecules, atoms, even quarks. However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.

If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking.

True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself.

People think they think, but it's not true. It's mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare - just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It's difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree.

It is the case, instead (and this is a genuine reversal of the presumption in question), that we directly and naturally perceive reality as personified, and then must work very diligently to strip that personification away, so that we can detect "objective reality.

We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically. No currency has a value that exceeds it. Children, adults, and societies wither on the vine in its absence. To have others attend to what you find important or interesting is to validate, first, the importance of what you are attending to, but second, and more crucially, to validate you as a respected center of conscious experience and contributor to the collective world.

Hemos perdido el universo mítico de la mente preexperimental, o al menos hemos dejado de propiciar su desarrollo. Esa pérdida ha dejado nuestro creciente poder tecnológico más peligrosamente a la merced de nuestros sistemas de valoración, que todavía son inconscientes.

A cegueira voluntária é a recusa em saber algo que pode ser conhecido. É a recusa em admitir que aquele som é alguém a bater à porta. É a recusa em ver o enorme gorila na sala, o elefante debaixo do tapete, o esqueleto no armário. É a recusa em admitir erros enquanto seguimos com o plano.

the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Mantenerse erguido con los hombros hacia atrás es aceptar con los ojos bien abiertos la terrible responsabilidad que supone vivir.

We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the animal, and the untouched cathedral-like old-growth forest. We find respite in such things. We worship them, even if we are self-proclaimed atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human sort. The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is paradisal. But we are no longer one with God and Nature, and there is no simple turning back.

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit that even tragedy could not shake.

Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.

Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the active rejection of potentially conscious psychological material from awareness—which he termed "defense mechanisms.

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? —William Blake, from "A Memorable Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The philosopher's stone remains undiscovered in the gutter; and the information hidden in the round chaos, beckoning, remains unexplored. Such omission is the voluntary refusal of expanded consciousness. After all, the pathway to the Holy Grail has its beginnings in the darkest part of the forest, and what you need remains hidden where you least want to look.

Tan solo el ser humano podía concebir el potro de torturas, la doncella de hierro y el aplastapulgares. Tan solo el ser humano hará sufrir únicamente por el gusto de hacer sufrir. Esta es la mejor definición del mal que he sido capaz de formular. Los animales son incapaces de hacer algo así, pero los humanos, con sus atroces capacidades de semidioses, sí que pueden.

Maybe your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank. Maybe your misery is your attempt to prove the world's injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your own missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and to live. Maybe your willingness to suffer in failure is inexhaustible, given what you use that suffering to prove. Maybe it's your revenge on Being.