Quotes About Mind

Let us remember that Transactional Psychology has proven that, contrary to common sense and the prejudices of centuries, our minds do not passively receive impressions from the external world. Rather we actively create our impressions: out of an ocean of possible signals, our brains notice the signals that fit what we expect to see, and we organize these signals into a model, or reality-tunnel, that marvelously matches our ideas about what is really out there.

This archetypal circuit is replete with what Jung called synchronicities — meaningful coincidences — which he attributed to the circuit's roots in what he called the "psychoid" level, below the personal and collective unconscious, where "mind" and matter" are not yet differentiated — the royal highway of the DNA-RNA-CNS (central nervous system) telegraph, in Tim Leary's metaphor.

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

Don't you think we all go a little mad sometimes? —Psycho

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth. Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it. Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. – John C. Lilly, M.D., The Center of the Cyclone

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet – thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.* ~•~

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

In Buddhist Logic, then: Social fields are real. Social fields are not real. Social fields are both real and not-real. Social fields are neither real nor not-real.

Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men become giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose the lesser of two evils, and accept congenial hallucination, rather than — Chaos and the Abyss.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

It is even more amusing to remember that an orange is really sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue — blue is conducted through its skin. We see orange precisely because there is no orange in the fruit — because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The substance or isness of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see.

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

Dr. John Lilly says, "In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.

R. Buckminster Fuller illustrates the metaprogramming circuit, in his lectures, by pointing out that we feel puny in comparison to the size of the universe, but only our bodies (hardware) are puny. Our minds, he says — by which he means our software — contain the universe, by the act of comprehending it.

Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

When a paradigm shift occurs — when we go from seeing things one way to seeing them another way — the whole world is remade. All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts — as Sir Humphry Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits . . .

In a non-local implicate order, information cannot have a locality, but permeates and/or transcends all localities. And information that has no locality sounds a great deal like the Hindu divinity Brahma, the Chinese concept of Tao, Aldous Huxley's Mind At Large, and the Buddha-Mind of Mahayana Buddhism. Any one of those concepts must mean information without location (if we admit they mean anything at all).

When mystics etc. talk about ordinary consciousness as sleep, dream, illusion, etc., are they talking about something very esoteric that only other mystics can understand? Or are they talking about the extent to which normal consciousness (mechanical consciousness in my sense) relates to fictitious predicates attached to groups and ignores (does not perceive) person1, person2, etc.?

The Word was made flesh." Divine Truth must be known by its effects on the body as well as on the mind.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.