Quotes About Consciousness

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living.

Freedom, if it emerges like magic from consciousness (like the conjuring of consciousness itself!) seems best recognized in the choices made for love.

The difference in the quality of consciousness between dreaming and being awake was close to the difference between our old earth life and the one there.

This is why reading the scriptures as a scientific text can do violence to their purpose. They are designed to connect us subjectively, consciously, and spiritually to richer truths and meaning.

Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.

There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul.

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

We live under the knowledge illusion because we fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads. And we fail because there is no sharp line. So we frequently don't know what we don't know.

What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence.

Right now I'm having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious?

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.

Write from Beyond what you know. From the authority of your senses." -author of Meditations in Green

But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever....

Para mim, estar inocente significa não se ter nascido ou estar-se morto. Admito isto, estou pronto a reconhecer que há muitas espécies diferentes de culpa: uma culpa mais inocente do que a da maioria, e uma mais carregada, uma que transborda do sentimento da falta e outra que corre apenas gota a gota.

no experience feels real anymore—just filtered and retouched, edited and tagged. How we create curated versions of ourselves until we don't know who we really are. How our entire species is sleepwalking toward oblivion. How survival doesn't seem like a possibility. How time doesn't feel like it's passing anymore, just running out.

I was sure he knew exactly what I had experienced in the night, as strongly as if he'd spoken to one aloud. In some way, he had experienced it too, and had been shocked out of his coma.

His body had become merely a numb vessel to which his mind could return and rest, whenever astral travel became too tiring.

I rubbed my fingers together, conscious of the fact I had touched something Avirzah'e had held in his hands.