Quotes About Consciousness

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.

The I think, I am , is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.

Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous.

Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur sein. Hier also, in der absoluten Identität des Geistes in uns und der Natur außer uns, muß sich das Problem, wie eine Natur außer uns möglich sei, auflösen.

I lie on the bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its powers and its infinite life as my own.

Notons qu'un soi-disant "sociobiologiste"-- ce mot est tout un programme -- a poussé l'ingéniosité jusqu'à remplacer la matière par des "gênes" dont l'égoïsme aveugle, combiné avec un instinct de fourmis ou d'abeilles, aurait fini par constituer non seulement les corps mais aussi la conscience et en fin de compte l'intelligence humaine, miraculeusement capable de disserter sur les gênes qui se sont amusés à la produire.

Selon une belle expression du Sheikh Ahmed Ben Allioua, « l'invocation de Dieu est comme le va-et-vient qui affirme la communication de plus en plus complète jusqu'à l'identité entre les lueurs de la conscience et les éblouissantes fulgurations de l'Infini ».

Dieu permet parfois des faiblesses afin de pouvoir susciter ensuite — moyennant le contraste entre ces infirmités accidentelles et l'être essentiel — des vertus d'autant plus profondes. Les qualités qui ont poussé dans l'engrais de quelque misère sont comme douées de conscience : elles connaissent toute la vanité de l'erreur d'une manière concrète.

Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD? And here's a bonus question: 2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is "higher" and the other is "mundane" is like eating a banana and complaining it's not a very good apple.

You've won all creation. It's yours to do with it as you please- and you discover what pleases you most is doing the right thing for all creation in moment after moment.

You can't live in paradise - but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Water, foam, and flame are mind. Flowers in the spring and the moon in the autumn are also mind. Each moment is mind. And yet mind can never be destroyed. That's why everything that's real is mind, and the Buddhas along with other Buddhas are mind.

At every moment, no matter what we're doing, we need to understand that not being a jerk is how someone becomes enlightened. This state has always belonged to us. Cause and effect makes us act. By not being a jerk now, you create the cause of not being a jerk in the future. Our action is not predestined, nor does it spontaneously occur.

we forget our ideas of self when we stop concentrating exclusively on how we experience the universe and learn how the universe experiences us.

In zazen we practice the oneness of reality.

Each time I get caught up in thought, I adjust my posture. I have never once found myself caught up in thought and not had my posture go subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) wrong. The body follows the mind.

At every moment of every day, no matter how I feel about the situation, whether it is mind-blowingly thrilling or completely brain-numbing, I am the totality of the universe experiencing the fullness of itself. Even if I don't notice it.

Consciousness is just part of what we are, and not even the most significant part. Form (or matter) is equally important, as are the other skandhas .

Bradford Morrow

My last conscious thought was that although I lay in squalor, my mouth was minty fresh.

As a painter paints pictures on a wall, the intellect goes on creating the world in the heart always.