Quotes About Consciousness

We mean by collective unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it consciousness has developed. In the physical structure of the body we find traces of earlier stages of evolution, and we may expect the human psyche also to conform in its make-up to the law of phylogeny.

The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and the unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indisputable to any serious psychological investigation.

It had been proved to me that I had to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego.

It is a fact that in eclipses of consciousness—in dreams, narcotic states and cases of insanity—there come to the surface psychic products or contents that show all the traits of primitive levels of psychic development.

Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state (which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4000 B.C.). And this evolution is far from complete, for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness. What we call the "psyche" is by no means identical with our consciousness and its contents.

The unconscious has still another side to it: it includes not only repressed contents, but all psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness.

Here I ought to add a word of warning against unintelligent or incompetent dream analysis. There are some people whose mental condition is so unbalanced that the interpretation of their dreams can be extremely risky; in such a case, a very one-sided consciousness is cut off from a correspondingly irrational or "crazy" unconscious, and the two should not be brought together without taking special precautions.

Snící se rozhodl žít nejen jako netÄ›lesná myÅ¡lenková bytost, nýbrž pÃ…â"¢ijmout a prožít i tÄ›lo a svÄ›t instinkt?, skute?nost problému života i lásky.

Before him exist neither question nor answer.

Unfortunately 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. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.

An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects—whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

nuestra actitud moderna habla con orgullo de las tinieblas de la superstición y de la credulidad medieval o primitiva, olvidando por completo que con nosotros llevamos todo el pasado, escondido en los sótanos del rascacielos que es nuestra conciencia racional.

He who is most guilty is most innocent; the most holy man is the one most conscious of his sin.

Les rêves sont des compensations de l'attitude consciente. (p. 220)

Theseus who descended into Hades and grew fast to the rocks of the underworld, which is to say that the conscious mind, advancing into the unknown regions of the psyche, is overpowered by the archaic forces of the unconscious.

A child, as I have said, possesses a sense of completeness, but only before the initial emergence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an adult, a sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind. Out of this union arises what Jung called "the transcendent function of the psyche," by which a man can achieve his highest goal: the full realization of the potential of his individual Self.

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while the social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

But she was still conscious. She had no concept of time or motion, but she could hear the sound of his boots scraping gravel outside the car. And she could feel the sharp prick of a needle through the fabric of her jeans into her inner thigh.

He knew he wouldn't sleep. Couldn't. The things Larry had told him swirled around the dark ceiling, darting in and out of his consciousness. He hoped strands of what he knew would somehow miraculously connect and he'd sit bolt upright with an epiphany and suddenly know the connections as well as the answers. Didn't happen.

The best camera is already always with you, because the best, sensor is your brain and the best lens is your eyes.

conscious that his right leg

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation