Quotes About Consciousness

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.

The mind is the pilot of the soul.

The mind is everything; what you think you become!

Homme, connais-toi toi-même!

Knowledge is the only virtue," because "Once a man knows good from evil, nothing on earth can compel him to act against that knowledge.

our souls also existed apart from the body before they took on human form, and they had intelligence.

On peut non seulement ce qu'on a, mais aussi ce que l'on est.

The secret is not to "think" about thoughts, but to allow them to flow through the mind, while keeping your mind free of afterthoughts.

Just look at your mind for a few minutes. You will see that it is like a flea, constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise without any reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every moment, we are the victims of the fickleness of our mind.

Whatever you find yourself thinking, let that thought rise and settle, without any constraint. Don't grasp at it, feed it, or indulge it; don't cling to it and don't try to solidify it. Neither follow thoughts nor invite them; be like the ocean looking at its own waves, or the sky gazing down on the clouds that pass through it.

What is a great spiritual practitioner? A person who lives always in the presence of his or her own true self, someone who has found and who uses continually the springs and sources of profound inspiration. As the modern English writer Lewis Thompson wrote: 'Christ, supreme poet, lived truth so passionately that every gesture of his, at once pure Act and perfect Symbol, embodies the transcendent.' To embody the transcendent is why we are here.

whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that's what we will be like at the moment of death

Do not make the mistake of imagining that the nature of mind is exclusive to our mind only. It is in fact the nature of everything. It can never be said too often that to realize the nature of mind is to realize the nature of all things.

The purpose of reflecting on death is to make a real change in the depths of your heart, and to come to learn how to avoid the "hole in the sidewalk," and how to "walk down another street.

Life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else.

Thomas Merton wrote: "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind "the wisdom of ordinariness.

The nature of mind is just too close to be recognized. Just as we are unable to see our own face, mind finds it difficult to look into its own nature. 2.

consciousness, at its subtlest level, continues without the body and goes through the series of states called "bardos.

I will abandon all grasping, yearning, and attachment, Enter undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching

Del mismo modo que si metes un dedo en el agua te lo mojas, y si lo metes en el fuego te lo quemas, si instalas tu mente en la mente de sabiduría de los budas se transformará en su naturaleza de sabiduría.

space dissolves into luminosity":

Now that the bardo of dying dawns upon me, I will abandon all grasping, yearning, and attachment, Enter undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching, And eject my consciousness into the space of unborn Rigpa; As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood I will know it to be a transitory illusion.