Quotes About Consciousness

I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.

If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.

What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one's ego—that may be the key to changing one's mind.

Psychedelics are for those of us who aren't so innately gifted.

For Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence usually known only to mystics and a handful of history's great visionary artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our awareness by the "reducing valve" of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of mental filter that admits only "a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness" we need in order to survive.

If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.

Aren't we identical with our ego? What's left of us without it? The lesson of both psychedelics and meditation is the same: No! on the first count, and More than enough on the second.

Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the subjective experience of consciousness.

Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

I explored at some length what I had been surprised to discover is a universal human desire to change consciousness

You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The

Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

The clue arrived a year later, in the form of an article in a scientific journal describing the behavior of rats given a newly discovered compound called LSD. Hubbard tracked down the researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception.

I'd say that we dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

No sin, especially no great sin, is just a harm done to the individual who commits it. I believe myself that the future of the human race is bound up with that idea. The soul that is conscious of a grievous sin is conscious of a great harm done to the community - to someone else. That common hurt should now be forgiven.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.

The single guiding principle that I try to follow, assuming blindly that the rest will fall into place, is to operate squarely in the present. I think it's one of the most difficult things for anyone to do.

There's a lot of thought that goes into every single thing I wear.

You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.