Quotes About Awareness

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct.

chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.

While the list of chimp tricks is long and dazzling, does this make them conscious beings in the same sense that humans are conscious? This is probably an ill-posed question. Perhaps the question should be "Does our conscious experience hold similar contents to that of a chimp?

Hence at any moment only part of the visual elements of a scene is available for conscious perception.

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.

So before you are aware that you're thinking about moving your arm, your brain is at work preparing to make that movement!

Awareness is the ultimate sacred wonder.

Everything seeks unity. The goal of many religions and mythic ordeals is to return to a lost state of Divine Oneness. But we have no need to return to a state of oneness because unity is axiomatic and we already are integrated in it. Barely recognizing our situation, here and now we live in a whole and beautifully harmonious wonder world. Only a self-imposed illusion of separateness keeps us from recognizing our own center of awareness and identity with the One.

What's important is growth and spirituality. Well, that's broad, you may say. It's really not. Growth is constant and never-ending improvement in life. If you don't think, you don't grow. If you don't take action, you don't grow. If you don't expand your mind, you won't get to the next level.

recognize the enemy, who doesn't just fight on the battlefield

Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few days.

Knowledge itself is never dangerous, it is how that knowledge is used that is dangerous

There is always something to see, if you only know how to look.

Impatience and stupidity claim more victims than any weapon.

But magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses.

Josh: I didn't know.... Nicholas: No reason why you should have - except that your ignorance could have gotten you killed... or worse.

And in their rush to create wonders, they have ignored the wonders all around them, ignored the mysteries, the beauty. Myths and legends walk unseen amongst them, ignored, unrecognized. It was not always so.

But what you must remember is that knowledge itself is never dangerous," Tsagaglalal insisted. "It is how that knowledge is used that is dangerous.

I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them....But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember.

You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.

Greta Thunberg, in 2019. "I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic."20

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

To experience something, you must be alive, so we cannot personally experience death. Yet we know it is real because every one of the hundred billion people who lived before us is gone. That presents us with something of a paradox.

Oscar Wilde: "Many people know the price of everything but the value of nothing.