Quotes About Consciousness

It is possible that you have misinterpreted the situation entirely, for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious.

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.

Thus, we must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies. That makes them sophisticated. That makes them work with each other, and with the desires of other people, and with the world. It is in that manner that our desires elevate themselves. It is in that manner that they organize themselves into values and become moral. Our values, our morality—they are indicators of our sophistication.

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted—but back as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep:

La tragedia del Ser consciente de sí mismo genera sufrimiento, un sufrimiento inevitable que a su vez causa el deseo de una satisfacción egoísta e inmediata, es decir, el deseo de aquello que resulta conveniente.

It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time.

Pojavom samosvijesti zlo ulazi u svijet.

la mayor consciencia de uno mismo y el consiguiente descubrimiento de nuestro carácter mortal, así como el conocimiento del bien y del mal, se presentan en los primeros capítulos del Génesis, junto a la amplia tradición que los rodea, como un cataclismo de magnitud cósmica.

Por definición, nuestros patrones habituales de acción solo bastan para cosas y situaciones de determinada significación: solo sabemos como actuar en presencia de lo que nos es familiar. La aparición de lo inesperado nos saca de la complacencia inconsciente, axiomática, y nos obliga (dolorosamente) a pensar.

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known.

Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. Animals can't manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi-divine capacities, most certainly can.

You don't understand anything. You didn't even know that you were blind.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, a mere six hundred years ago, reality was construed as all that which human beings experience.

Nuestras mentes son mucho más antiguas que la humanidad.

Children are damaged when their "mercifully" inattentive parents fail to make them sharp and observant and awake and leave them, instead, in an unconscious and undifferentiated state. Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance.

As the Christian revolution progressed, however, the impossible problems it had solved disappeared from view. That's what happens to problems that are solved. And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view. Then and only then could the problems that remained, less amenable to quick solution by Christian doctrine, come to occupy a central place in the consciousness of the West

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.

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.

My waking life probably gave my subconscious an inferiority complex.

I'd like to think that we're not just sacks of biological goo careening through a random universe.

I opened my eyes again to keep myself with Marks, anchored in the present, among the living.

we're not actually people at all, but simulations running on an ultracomputer built by other people.

But it didn't really happen in the space of a footstep, Poincare explains. That moment of inspiration is the product of weeks of work, both conscious and unconscious, which somehow prepare the mind to make the necessary connection of ideas. Sitting around waiting for inspiration leads to failure, no matter how much of a whiz kid you are.