Quotes About Consciousness

pensar no alimento como puro e simples combustível é interpretá-lo mal.

The psychedelic experience of "non-duality" suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.

How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is "authentic"? The answer is we can't;

free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment

We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words.

I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one's repertoire of conscious states.

the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure.

savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case, planet Earth.

To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.

It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.

Some scientists have raised the possibility that consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.

Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical." Self

The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.

these remarkable mushrooms produce, in addition to spores, meanings in human minds.

The myriad new connections that spring up during the psychedelic experience as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College and the disintegration of well-travelled old connections may serve simply to shake the snow globe, in Robin Carhart-Harris' phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways.

neuroscience might have at last found the address for the "But enough about you" center of the brain.

psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.

By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience.

One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself.

I asked him if he agreed with something I'd read the Dalai Lama had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without question by most scientists—"is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact." "Bingo," Jesse said. "And for someone with my orientation"—agnostic, enamored of science—"that changes everything.

Unlike these other states of consciousness, ordinary waking consciousness has been optimized by natural selection to best facilitate our everyday survival.

the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.