Quotes About Consciousness

by repressing disagreeable thoughts she created something like a psychic vacuum which, as usually happens, gradually became filled with anxiety. Had she troubled herself consciously with her thoughts she would have known what was lacking, and she would then have needed no anxiety states as a substitute for the absence of conscious suffering.

The unconscious is pure nature, and, like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion. But left to itself and without the human response from consciousness, it can (again like nature) destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into annihilation.

The more that Consciousness is influenced by prejudices, errors, fantasies, and infantile wishes, the more the already existing Gap will widen into a neurotic disassociation and lead to more or less artificial life, far removed from healthy instincts, nature, and Truth.

there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

I was by no means free from the bigotry and hubris of consciousness which wants to believe that any halfway decent inspiration is due to one's own merit

Dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusions are expressive of a situation.

In cases of extreme mass hysteria (which was in the past called "possession"), the conscious mind and ordinary sense perception seem eclipsed. The frenzy of a Balinese sword dance causes the dancers to fall into trances and, sometimes, to turn their weapons against themselves.

In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious.

But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it.

Here is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight world and its superficiality.

Até você se tornar consciente, o inconsciente irá dirigir sua vida e você vai chamá-lo de destino

Every concept in our conscious mind, in short, has its own psychic associations. While such associations may vary in intensity (according to the relative importance of the concept to our whole personality, or according to the other ideas and even complexes to which it is associated in our unconscious), they are capable of changing the "normal" character of that concept. It may even become something quite different as it drifts below the level of consciousness.

That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated. Failing this, their energy flows off into conscious contents which, normally, are not much emphasized, and intensifies them to pathological proportions

I had the distinct feeling that they were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living conception of the self.

A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity.

As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance: Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams.

see both sides. [We] become aware not only of [our] moral inferiorities but also, automatically, of [our] good qualities. [We] rightly say, "I can't be as bad as all that." To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.

Hence it is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, conscientiousness, patience, etc., are of great value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective selfcriticism are valuable on the intellectual side.

The foremost of his therapeutic principles is that conscious realization is an important agent for transforming the personality. The

become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking.

The more that consciousness is influenced by prejudices, errors, fantasies, and infantile wishes, the more the already existing gap will widen into a neurotic dissociation and lead to a more or less artificial life far removed from healthy instincts, nature, and truth.

The psyche is still a foreign, almost unexplored country of which we have only indirect knowledge; it is mediated by conscious functions that are subject to almost endless possibilities of deception.