Quotes About Awareness

As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.

Consciousness is not a given, or a fact. Our mode of consciousness seems historically to have been determined by neurological (unconscious) habits. When we become aware of this, and struggle against the inertia of habit, consciousness continually mutates, becomes less particle-like and fixed, spreads like a flowing wave. It can move between the poles of pure in-DIVIDE-ualism and pure in-UNITE-ualism, and between many other poles, and can become increasingly creative and self-chosen.

You already know the Gregorian calendar. It gets drummed into our heads in our allegedly "secular" "public" schools and everybody in our society who holds Power (banks, corporations, even governments) uses it. My system intends to break the conditioning/hypnosis created by this artificial uniformity.

I passed on to the kitchen, as if Bill were not a major item of interest at the moment. That was step one; everybody, I was sure, had been treating his symptoms as a grave problem, and I wanted to give him back his sense of perspective. There were nearly three billion people on earth who didn't know and didn't care about his mental states and I was standing in for all of them.

Once you have given up asking "what day is it?" you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really "is." Then, in Melville's fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don't believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil's masquerade.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

NO "EXTERNAL" SITUATION MAKES A MENTAL STATE "INEVITABLE

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.

In daily life and in common sense, we use this agnostic caution most of the time and expect the unexpected and keep our eyes and ears open, etc. We only rush to judgment when we are under time-pressure to make a quick decision or when our prejudices are involved, as in political and religious controversy.

Metaprogramming or neurological self-criticism, developed as a habit to replace the old habit of wandering off to Real Universes, creates that kind of ecstasy more and more frequently, and it appears that one has never been using one's brain before but only misusing it.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you forget the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think I am always a weakling, quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.

Ultimately, what we find in any experience, sexual or otherwise, depends upon our own emotional energy field. We can see a small mountain above a deep valley, or a shallow valley with a tall mountain towering over it.

Against the paranoia that easily infests either Establishment dogma and anti-Establishment dogma, the only defense I see is agnosticism, well-flavored with a sense of humor, and an awareness of one's own fallibility. I suspect a great deal, but as long as Government Secrets exist, I am not sure of anything.

In brief, Intelligence Intensification means intelligence-studying-intelligence (I2), and the first thing discovered by intelligence-studying-intelligence (the brain studying the brain: metaprogramming) is that the more types of intelligence you have, the more fun it is to try to develop even more subtle, sensitive, futique levels of awareness; higher intelligence still.

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.

This is precisely the sort of thing that occurs on an LSD trip. The difference is that the noise and newly created information is coming in at the tripper, not just through words on a page, but through each of the senses, including the 17 senses that modern science has discovered in addition to the traditional sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

The Cosmic Schmuck Law, as stated in several of my books, holds that if you occasionally notice that you have said something or done something that qualifies as Cosmic Schmuckery, you might become, in time, less of a Cosmic Schmuck; but if you never notice any Cosmic Schmuckery in your own thinking/doing, you will become more and more of a Cosmic Schmuck every year.

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.

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.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.