Quotes About Consciousness

The moment is everything. Don't think about tomorrow; don't think about yesterday: think about exactly what you're doing right now and live it and dance it and breath it and be it.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

As a longtime practitioner of yoga and a person who's been involved in physical fitness my whole life, I can tell you, yoga helps you achieve altered states of consciousness. It is not just stretching. The only way you can say that it's stretching is if you haven't done it, or that you haven't done it rigorously for a long period of time.

I was interested in psychic things and in spiritualism even as a boy. I'd started doing yoga by the early 1970s.

Yoga means union. Union means the boundaries of the individual self-dissolve, and you experience existence as yourself.

Yoga and mediation exist whether we choose to acknowledge or practice. It's like a tree. You can walk by the tree and inhale the oxygen it provides consciously or unconsciously. You'll still be benefiting from the tree.

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you? The two are so, so different. One is an infinite consciousness capable of being and creating whatever it chooses, the other is an illusion imprisoned by its own perceived and programmed limitations.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

When a young man massacres innocents, we have been trained to believe that the act was due to improper levels of chemical enzymes and misfiring synapses. As we learn more about our cells, we forget more about our souls.

I'm not a man trapped in a woman's body. I'm a brain trapped in a human body.

It's amazing to me how people throw stuff on the ground right next to a trash can. That drives me crazy.

I think I usually have quite ordinary dreams. Sometimes my dreams take me to other dimensions. I can travel in my mind especially when I'm dreaming I focus my mind on what I want to dream. If I want to fly, I focus on flying.

I do have carbon footprints because of travel, but apart from that, I am simple guy.

When I was in my mid-20s, I traveled a lot around the world, and the question I had for everyone I talked to was, 'What is your conception of God?' I found that everybody basically felt the same: God is within and without. He's in everything.

Our bodies will be recycled one way or another, but what about our ideas and minds and characters? Primordial soup? The bourne from which no traveller returns? Interesting and exciting.

I learned at an early age how to traverse the white world, the white-dominant world. I learned, and I was successful at it. I learned the nuances - I learned how to act, how to be - but I always was conscious and aware of my blackness.

It's become more and more of a priority for me to tread as lightly as possible in the world.

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.