c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Quoting Father Seraphim:Our life hangs only by a breath. It is the thread that links you to the Father, the Source, which brought you into being. Be conscious of this thread, and go where you will. (27)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
The Secret to saneful living is in the Key between these two worlds. In order to serve the higher ideal, one must revert to serving the Spark within all the multiplicities herein conceivable in the apparent world. The spark in itself is not contained for it encompasses both realities, that of the inner, and the apparent
— AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity
What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.
— Scarlett Thomas
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")
— Maurice Maeterlinck
In a country of ideas, consciousness is its' citizen.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Islaam is the Name of the Universe. Christ is the Soul, and Abraham, the Foundation — The Rainbow At Midnight
— AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.
— John Leonard
Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born.
— Garey  Gordon, The Values Pursued Life: Excellence and Greatness from Within
One part of my consciousness serves only one realm.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
— E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley
To duplicate meanings is to isolate the consciousness.
— Floriano Martins
There are no higher levels of consciousness, there are only different ways of perceiving things.
— Marty Rubin
Every age, every generation has its built in assumptions, that the world is flat, that the world is round etc. There are hundreds of hidden assumptions, things we take for granted, that may or may not be true. Of-course in the vast majority of cases historically, these things aren’t true. So presumably, if history is any guide, much about what we take for granted about the world simply isn’t true. But we’re locked into these precepts without even knowing it. That’s a paradigm.
— John Hagelin Ph.D
Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.
— Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up.
— Winifred Gallagher
Because of Mother Nature, Humans become Conscious Beings.
— Joey Lawsin, Creation by Law
Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.
— Abhijit Naskar
It is always now
— Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Lucidity was a slippery thing and her hands were wet.
— Raabe Gabriel
A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness–in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.
— Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch
A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.
— Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent
Magick is the manipulation of the Laws of Cause-and-Effect in accordance with one's Will, via states of Higher Consciousness.
— J.Adam Snyder
The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic, a great deal happened in a comparatively short time.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Seeing’ two-dimensional images is therefore something that we learn to do
—  it is not an inevitable part of being human.
Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself.
— Abhijit Naskar, Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting
According to Martindale’s view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: – waking, problem-oriented thought, – realistic fantasy, – autistic fantasy, – reverie, – hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and – dreaming.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
The behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one’s body (less commonly understood in hunting and gathering shamanistic societies as possession by spirits).
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
There were at least four contexts in which San shamans acquired insights into the spiritual world: – the trance dance, – special curing rituals, – viewing rock art, and – dreams.
— James David Lewis-Williams
The principal aim of a vision quest is to ‘see’ a spirit animal that will become the quester’s animal-helper and source of his power.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Entering a cave” or rock was a metaphor for a shaman’s altered state; therefore, caves (and rocks more generally) were considered entrances or portals to the supernatural world.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Rock art sites were symbolic vaginas, and entry into the wall of a rock art site was thus akin to intercourse.
— James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
Four Characters in Consciousness—How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology
There exists a universal order that we each play a distinct role in carrying out. Light always struggles to emerge from darkness. Each of us is the bearer of our own lantern. We find ourselves when we realize our place in an interconnected world. The struggle to pierce the darkness that shrouds us from realizing a state of perceptive awareness is the biggest part of both our individual story and our communal storyline.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There are some days we can claim and there are other days that claim us.
— Kamand Kojouri
Our mistakes rewire our brain and open up new gateways of perception.
— Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy
Consciousness precedes phenomenon, and therefore consciousness can alter phenomenon.
— Shai Tubali, A Guide to Bliss: Transforming Your Life through Mind Expansion
Awareness is Brahman. The absolute cosmic consciousness. When you are aware, you are connected with Brahman.
— Banani Ray, Awakening Inner Guru
Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
— Abhijit Naskar, Either Civilized or Phobic: A Treatise on Homosexuality
Being comfortable with the lies can be catastrophic.
— Amitav Chowdhury
It is important to know what you don't want.
— Amitav Chowdhury
Juggernaut of ignorance marauds the voices of wisdom. That explains the ultra anxious, subconsciously depressed minds trying to justify their irascible behaviour. Thus, unsettling the collective consciousness before they justify their aggressive view points.
— Amitav Chowdhury
I found one observation that is people are just stuck in technology and they just want to sit next to the computer and work hard on the internet or whatever it may be and so the mind started to dominate them. Just think if all humans just want to sit next to the computer then what will happen, comfort zone demands more comfort zone. The more we lessen physical activity, more will be the frustrations and agitations, it's time to act physically more and more, our physical dimension is more powerful than psychological dimension, just work upon it by doing yoga or other intense activities, if we do these #intense activities "consciously" then the mind will work the way we want it. The act could be anything like having a cup of tea, having a drink of water, playing chess, walking, talking, listening, all these activities should come to the place in tune with #consciousness.
— Abhinav Rajput
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.
— Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
There is no such thing as divine law enforced by mankind. Cosmic laws are self-sustaining mechanisms that do not require our assistance to function.
— Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One
Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Give yourself permission to enjoy this present moment. Resist the urge to fill it with I need to's, I shoulds, I coulds. Trying to fill all your present moments is impeding the natural flow of life.
— Nanette Mathews
What you resist, persists....Let go and your life will flow.
— Nanette Mathews
When we're consciously aware, we receive the messages the universe sends to answer us through intuition that could be easily missed if we weren't living in the moment. These messages will guide us to our true path.
— Nanette Mathews
Take your life out of high gear and disengage the autopilot mode. Try living mindfully and avoid the pattern of living in a reactive manner.
— Nanette Mathews
Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
— Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Buddha: The First Sapiens
There is no place where those striving after consciousness could find absolutely safety. Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this life really can gain it. A complete life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal issue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and again one will be confronted with a situation of which one will say, ‘This is too much. I cannot bear it any more.’ Then the question must be answered, ‘Can one really not bear it?
— C.G. Jung
A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice.
— Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas
The impression she left on others and her self-perception had been sewn into a whole so consummate that she could no longer tell how much of each day was defined by what was wished upon her and how much of it was what she really wanted.--Three Daughters of Eve.
— Elif Shafak
Consciousness set goal independently, achieves them through will and evaluation of results
— Sunday Adelaja
Because if God doesn't exist we are the creaturesof highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand thepassage of time and the value off every minute of human life. Andwhat constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after oreventually . . . it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, this life . . . every second of it . . . is all we have.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.
— Erwin Schrödinger
For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Awakening means you’ve come home to yourself, that consciousness shifted back to its original nature.
— Maria Erving
The ego cleverly hides by projecting and by avoiding to look beyond what it merely believes.
— Maria Erving
The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. This infantile notion of a world governed by moral rather than physical laws, kept under control by a superordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thoughts all over the world.The sense then, of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism), may be said to constitute the frame of reference of all childhood experience no matter where in the world. No small wonder then, that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.
— Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology
Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, andnothing else, because it is false and misleading.
— Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory
[T]he understanding or the reason is the necessary being. … [I]f there were no reason, no consciousness, all would be nothing; existence would be equivalent to non-existence. Consciousness first founds the distinction between existence and non-existence. In consciousness is first revealed the value of existence, the value of nature.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Whatever comes to your consciousness is what you act out.
— Sunday Adelaja
It’s perfectly normal, perfectly natural to live in sleep. But to wake up is a revolution in consciousness. To wake up is to break free of nature. To wake up is to rise and unite with the spirit, and nature doesn’t do that for us.
— Belsebuub
Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness
— Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents
Being conscious makes our existence so heavy, and it needs nothing less than a great understanding to make it light again. We manifest the most advanced form of unconscious development within a nature which we know so little about it, more or less living a state of ignorance. This is what makes consious heavy and what makes knowledge exciting. This is what makes a mind so curious.
— Nader Ibrahim
Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.
— Greg Calvert
I think there is a process where all our consciousness goes in circles if you like from one body to the other or it goes into another dimension where your next life begins and you keep moving up dimensions like a ladder through the universe or whatever. There so many different possibilities.- If we ask, where will the human conciousness goes when they dies?But Isnt that the greatest question in the world I would love to know as Peter Pan once said "to die would be an awfully big adventure", but realy i don't know because I'm not dead yet, you know it can be one with the universal consciousness. we are one consciousness manifested in different forms.
— Marouane LAASSAFAR
Everyday conscious awareness of a human being is only the tip of an iceberg, underneath which there is a realm of relatively uncharted apparently mysterious processes, which are likely to be way more complex than the usual waking state.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Consciousness is simply the brain’s neural response to its surrounding environmental stimuli. Hence when the neural circuits malfunction, Consciousness tends to malfunction as well.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person’s shadow is embodied in a person’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person’s lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.
— Nanamoli Thera
The process of awakening or enlightenment is nothing but to empty yourself from inside, and make you encounter with the real being, where you absolutely relax yourself and feel rejuvenated to experience life again.
— Roshan Sharma
Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
The Kingdom of God is an earthly experience which manifests in an unearthly manner.
— Abhijit Naskar
Humanity has pondered over the meaning of God since its beginning. It is one of those cognitive features that came along with the advent of modern Human Consciousness.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
By studying Bhagavad-gītā, one can become a soul completely surrendered to the Supreme Lord and engage himself in pure devotional service. As the Lord takes charge, one becomes completely free from all kinds of materialistic endeavors.
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.
— Abhijit Naskar
Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull.
— Abhijit Naskar
We can tell a lot about a creature's level of consciousness by understanding their perception of death.
— Abhijit Naskar
God is simply a magnificent state of the mind, where the finite turns infinite.
— Abhijit Naskar
Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal.
— Abhijit Naskar, Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality
Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. The plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Various fascinating psychological elements are involved in the transcendental state of human consciousness. One may lose the ability to distinguish one’s self from the rest of the world in transcendence, but still it is the human brain that constructs that state of mind. Hence, even in that altered state of consciousness one is not totally devoid of one’s beliefs, conjectures, ideas and fantasies. In fact, these ideas fill up the transcendental experience with all kinds of fanatic stories that happen to be unique, based on the person’s inner urges and drives.
— Abhijit Naskar
The deep Feminine, the mystery of consciousness, She who is life, is longing for our transformation as much as we are. She holds back, allowing us free reign to choose, nudging us occasionally with synchronicities, illness, births and deaths… But when we make space for Her, she rushes into all the gaps, engulfing us with her desire for life and expression. This is what She longs for, this is what we are for: experiencing the Feminine through ourselves. We simply need to slow down, and find where to put our conscious attention. And it is this, this willingness to look again, this willingness to put consciousness onto our places of unconscious, to express what we have always avoided, which starts the process of unblocking, so that She may flow through.
— Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman
The truth is, life grows and evolved inside of you and, it has nothing to do with any other person except you. The truth of life grows and evolves, in the form of understanding.
— Roshan Sharma
The mind is not limited to the thoughts and imagination, but your mind is part of the cosmos of the universe. Your mind is whole awareness field.
— Roshan Sharma
Physical body is just an instrument, through which you experience life. You have the awareness field, along with the physical body to experience life, while the entire major functions of the physical body, is performed by the subtle strings of the soul.
— Roshan Sharma
There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.
— Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Science and Religion are two vividly different realms of the human mind. They work differently at the molecular level, but the purpose of both is alleviation of the mind from the darkness of ignorance.
— Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a Scientist Who Found Himself by Getting Lost
One of the hallmarks of great men is that they never make us conscious of their presence, instead they dwelve into our unconscious state and transform into conscious being!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
​The human brain creates everything that you are.
— Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience
Non-duality has been the root of all religious movements on this planet.
— Abhijit Naskar, In Search of Divinity: Journey to The Kingdom of Conscience
Its not the eyes, that makes the visualization of the external world possible, but its the perception out of the awareness field. Your eyes are the same, but you view two person differently.
— Roshan Sharma
Meditation gives clear understanding about body and brain interface with consciousness
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
Working hard is not a waste of time, but a state of mind. Keep pushing your limits until you reach the edge. Then be kind and rewind.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.
— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Serious spiritual practice is more than serene walks in the woods, lit candles and incense. You have to be committed. You have to be willing to enter into your own darkness and transcend it.
— Maria Erving
When the feminine and our vitality become lost to power drives and life becomes a wasteland, the stage is set for the mythic world to give rise to a hero to transform and revitalize the situation. They mythic hero is a metaphor for our struggle to transform our consciousness and bring new life to ourselves.
— Massimilla Harris, Into the Heart of the Feminine: Facing the Death Mother Archetype to Reclaim Love, Strength, and Vitality
The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can’t say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was – but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I’ve seen before – and I’ve seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn’t listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right – as it turned out, we couldn’t even help ourselves.
— Christina Engela, Space Vacation
The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
Passion Has No Paperwork
— Ellis Mnyandu
The awakening process is not about 'finding who you are' but more about finding out about the ego, about who you are not.
— Maria Erving
Even this is paradoxical because even though the ego does all the spiritual practice in the beginning,it’s the Truth that has orchestrated it all.
— Maria Erving
You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
My philosophy: Don't get caught with a fixed philosophy, a setof safe beliefs, a particular way of life.Experiment! With live, with love.Run an exploration of the real and the true degrees of freedomof life, of love, of the human condition, inside self and in one'sstyle of life.Move! Into new spaces beyond one's present concepts of possible/probable/certain real spaces.Far vaster than I now know are the innermost/outermost realities.Far more interesting than I now feel are the deeps of the space, the beyond within, the infinite without.Love and loving are basic.Hostility is redundant.Fear is non-sense."Death" is a myth.I am I.
— John C. Lilly
I feel that I am merely an agent, giving you some keys that have been given to me to pass on to you. These keys are to unlock doors out of your present prison. Doors opening onto new vistas. Doors beyond where you are now.
— John C. Lilly
God is not an Almighty Being watching over life on earth. God is the Event Horizon of Human Consciousness.
— Abhijit Naskar
When religion starts within human being? Unless the divine consciousness of the body being manifested pours grace on the seer religion will not start. This divine consciousness takes the form of a living human being and as God-the-preceptor appears in the body in 12 years 4 months age, though it is individualistic.
— Sri Jibankrishna or Diamond
Consciousness blooms with the expansion of the heart.
— Lindsay Godfree
All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Get to know who you are not, because when you know your ego the Truth of who you are will also become clear.
— Maria Erving
Everything is consciousness. YOU are consciousness and everything around you is a reflection of your [state of] consciousness.When you shift your consciousness, when you change, your life changes too.
— Maria Erving
Just look around! This immense universe is functioning so perfectly well that nothing can be added to it. It needs no improvement. Seeing this, one relaxes. If stars can go on dancing and flowers can go on blooming and birds can go on singing, why not you? You also belong to this universe. You are part of it. In fact, you are the most valuable part of it, the greatest flowering is going to happen in you—the flowering of consciousness, the golden flower of being.
— Osho, The Secret of Secrets
Consciousness of unconsciousness
— Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
When human consciousness stops fooling itself and looks at the situation straight on, it can't cope.
— Fuminori Nakamura, Evil and the Mask
When our consciousness is open to the Love and Light of the SOUL, our lives gain a new perspective. The LIGHT illuminates all that may be still obscure and doubtful in our minds. The presence of LOVE dissolves fear and protects us, and at the same time it radiates to everyone around us!
— Angie karan
Many scientific disciplines begin by not observing any sort of vital spark or consciousness in material events and proceed to deny that these things exist in living things, including themselves. Because consciousness does not fit into their mechanistic schemes they declare it illusory. Magicians make exactly the reverse argument. Observing consciousness in themselves and animals, they are magnanimous enough to extend it to all things to some degree—trees, amulets, planetary bodies, and all. This is a far more respectful and generous attitude than that of religions, most of whom won't even give animals a soul.
— Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that’s the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The power of an idea whose time has come is really the power of Spirit at work. Equality for all is how God is, for instance, and we seek to be like God. When enough of us, along with one or two at visionary consciousness, begin to contemplate these in-Spirit ideas, they can't be stopped.
— Wayne W. Dyer, Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling
With an advanced worldview we will know and experience that the whole universe is conscious and infinitely connected and we are connected to all the cosmos and life
— Jonathan R Banks
Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).
— Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
If you could observe every thought in your brain the magnitude of it's vastness would drive you insane.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world: we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, we immediately took off in two directions, splitting ourselves down the middle. One half became dedicated to apologetics, even celebration, of our new toy of consciousness. The other half condemned and occasionally launched direct assaults on this "gift.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Hitting bottom is an inside job — it's something that happens within our consciousness.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Be the celebrators, celebrate! Already there is too much—the flowers have bloomed, the birds are singing, the sun is there in the sky—celebrate it! You are breathing and you are alive and you have consciousness, celebrate it!
— Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
A scientist first has to presuppose any theory based on available relevant data. In terms of such presupposition, a scientist begins his journey of scientific exploration as a philosopher.
— Abhijit Naskar, Homo: A Brief History of Consciousness
People tend to romanticise consciousness, as if it’s something spiritual. It’s just a word we use to describe complexity.
— David  Walton, Superposition