Consciousness Quotes

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

For most people on the planet, consciousness can be equated with thought. They haven't experienced what it means to be conscious without thought, or they have only for very brief instants.

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

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.

Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.

A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can't tell the dancer from the dance. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body.

There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

We do not yet trust the unknown power of thoughts.

Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

It is the stillness that will save and transform the world.

Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead.

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me

There's not some idea I'm going to create a work that's going to change everybody's consciousness.

Peace is your priority, not saving the world. That follows that.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

In certain favorable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them?

When you awaken spiritually, in fact, you can use thought much more effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought. It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a tiny aspect.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

If I accept the fact that my relationships are here to make me conscious, instead of happy, then my relationships become a wonderful self mastery tool that keeps realigning me with my higher purpose for living.

All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

Some people say, the world can be so alive! It always is, you just do not know it because of the screen of your thinking. You notice it as you become more awake.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.

One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.

Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.

Hallucinogens are a value changer...like it or not, it changes your values, it opens up windows (doors of perception.)

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.

Many who know something but not enough about dreams and their meaning...are liable to succumb to the prejudice that the dream actually has a moral purpose, that it warns, rebukes, comforts, foretells the future, etc. If one believes that the unconscious always knows best, one can easily be betrayed into leaving the dreams to take the necessary decisions, and is then disappointed when the dreams become more and more trivial and meaningless...The unconscious functions satisfactorily only when the conscious mind fufills its task to the very limit.

My sense of identity broke down and was replaced by something that is very hard to put into words. Awareness, Consciousness.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

Humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming.

For many people, the first indication of a spiritual awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They become a witness to their thoughts, so to speak. They are not completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known before.

Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, nor the ego, nor the mind-stuff

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

Inside a Lover's Heart,there's another world,and yet another.

The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

Purusha is the; great attraction of the universe; though untouched by and unconnected with the universe, yet it attracts the whole; universe.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

Vigilance in oneself is very important. Vigilance means to be alert to what happens inside, so you can catch an old, collective habit pattern.

No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.

A problem cannot be solved at the level of consciousness in which it occurs.

Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening, some in the early stages, some in later stages, and it's wonderful to see.

Sometimes people need to experience acute suffering before the thinking and the awareness of the consciousness separate. People then realize there is another dimension in them that is not thinking but the ability to be aware of thinking. It is not emotion but the ability to be aware of emotion.

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.