120 Quotes On Consciousness

Exploring the depths of human consciousness has intrigued philosophers, scientists, and thinkers for centuries. It’s a fascinating journey into understanding who we are, how we perceive the world, and what it means to be truly aware. Within this realm of introspection and vision, quotes on consciousness offer a unique window into diverse perspectives and profound reflections. In this collection, you’ll find 120 carefully selected quotes that capture the essence of consciousness—each a spark to ignite contemplation and awaken a deeper understanding of the self. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, motivation, or enlightenment, these gems of wisdom invite you to ponder the possibilities and mysteries that lie within the mind.

1. “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” - Mahatma Gandhi

2. “We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.” - Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

3. “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?” - Martin Luther King Jr.

4. “...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.” - Antonio Damasio

5. “If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, 'Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!” - Anne Lamott

6. “Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.” - C.S. Lewis

7. “The WakingI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to doTo you and me, so take the lively air,And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.What falls away is always. And is near.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke

8. “Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity” - Tony Samara

9. “Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence.” - Tony Samara

10. “Life before consciousness was like blank paper, so be it.” - Santosh Kalwar

11. “But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.” - Audre Lorde

12. “The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).” - George Steiner

13. “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” - Erwin Schrödinger

14. “It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” - Cormac McCarthy

15. “The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.” - W. Somerset Maugham

16. “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.” - Terence McKenna

17. “The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.” - Christopher Janaway

18. “Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.” - Barbara Kingsolver

19. “Islaam is the Name of the Universe. Christ is the Soul, and Abraham, the Foundation — The Rainbow At Midnight” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

20. “Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.” - George Orwell

21. “A veiled Mind is more enticing than all the nude men lining up the Seine, during Summer.” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

22. “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

23. “The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.” - James Hollis

24. “A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.” - Michael Crichton

25. “The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.” - William A. Dembski

26. “The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.” - Eckhart Tolle

27. “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” - William James

28. “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

29. “When once the Heart is awakened, every single moment 'in-time' is a treasure to beheld” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

30. “We must try to remember everything, every movement, every stretch, every convulsion that made us how we move as we readily grow in our outer body that encompasses the planets, the suns and the moons in every other body that we touch, in every other mouth that we kissed, in every other language that we try to comprehend; for they are not the outside of a stranger, nor are they just images of our psyche, but the very being of ourselves, the dimensional levels of our very existence weaving colours in the tapestry of creation, yet the very non-existence of the template is proof of consciousness, of ascension, of Life.” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

31. “We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.” - Heinrich von Kleist

32. “In a country of ideas, consciousness is its' citizen.” - Toba Beta

33. “Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.” - Wayne W. Dyer

34. “You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.” - Hilary Mantel

35. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.” - Hilary Mantel

36. “Was I asleep? Had I slept?” - Samuel Beckett

37. “Don't seek love externally, it's fleeting. Go beyond the ego and awaken thelove that already exists within; it will encompass everyone andeverything in your life; it will permeate your very being.” - Danielle Pierre

38. “When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.” - Eckhart Tolle

39. “We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence — yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.” - Antonio Damasio

40. “To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.” - Wystan Hugh Auden

41. “We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.” - Hunter S. Thompson

42. “Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confessAn unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akinIn missing each that salutory reinOf reason, and the grinding will of man.” - Pedro Calderón de la Barca

43. “It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.” - Graham Hancock

44. “We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.” - Brian Cox

45. “There's no consciousness without senses and memories.” - Toba Beta

46. “Seemingly minor yet persistent things penetrate the mind over time making it difficult to ever realize the impact; hence, though quite unfortunate, the most dangerous forms of corruption are those that are subtle and below the radar.” - Criss Jami

47. “When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.” - Criss Jami

48. “How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.” - Winfried Georg Sebald

49. “Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.” - H. Rider Haggard

50. “Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye.” - Toba Beta

51. “(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

52. “Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?” - William James

53. “Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.” - Karl Pearson

54. “We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.” - Roger Penrose

55. “How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.” - V.S. Ramachandran

56. “Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans consists of, let alone that of animals.” - John Bradshaw

57. “The subject dropped, and we sat on in the dusk that was rapidly deepening into night. The door into the hall was open at our backs, and a panel of light from the lamps within was cast out to the terrace. Wandering moths, invisible in the darkness, suddenly became manifest as they fluttered into this illumination, and vanished again as they passed out of it. One moment they were there, living things with life and motion of their own, the next they quite disappeared. How inexplicable that would be, I thought, if one did not know from long familiarity, that light of the appropriate sort and strength is needed to make material objects visible. Philip must have been following precisely the same train of thought, for his voice broke in, carrying it a little further. 'Look at that moth,' he said, 'and even while you look it has gone like a ghost, even as like a ghost it appeared. Light made it visible. And there are other sorts of light, interior psychical light which similarly makes visible the beings which people the darkness of our blindness.' ("Expiation")” - E.F. Benson

58. “It's a thought," I said with a grin."That's exactly what it is, Dan - a thought - no more real than the shadow of a shadow. Consciousness is not In the body; the body is In Consciousness. And you Are that Consciousness - no the phantom mind that troubles you so. You are the body, but you are everything else, too. That is what your visions revealed to you. Only the mind resists change. When you relax mindless into the body, you are happy and content and free, sensing no separation. Immortality is Already yours, but not in the same way you imagined or hope for. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is in Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death. And who needs it?" Socrates leaned back into his chair."I'm not sure all of that sank in.""Of course not." He laughed. "Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you'll be free at last.” - Dan Millman

59. “The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.” - Toba Beta

60. “The illusion is we are only physical.” - Vanna Bonta

61. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.(quoted in Incognito )” - C.G. Jung

62. “Aun cuando mi destino externo se haya desenvuelto como sucede para todos, inevitablemente y según lo decretado por los dioses, mi vida íntima es obra propiamente mía, con sus gozos y amarguras, y soy yo, en lo personal, el responsable de la misma.” - Herman Hesse

63. “It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.” - Karen Blixen

64. “And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

65. “The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.” - Edgar Mitchell

66. “... the most important concept ever put forth was that matter, ALL matter, with no exceptions from stone to star to starfish to student to sovereign, is as divine as all else in the cosmos, for all flows from Consciousness, the Word that came before the World - and all, in time, will flow back.” - Ki Longfellow

67. “I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is “it”… in the top inch of soil, biologists found “an average of 1,356 living creatures in each square foot… I might as well include these creatures in this moment, as best as I can. My ignoring them won’t strip them of their reality, and admitting them, one by one, into my consciousness might heighten mine, might add their dim awareness to my human consciousness, such as it is, and set up a buzz, a vibration…Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation. By a tremendous heave of the spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into the rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst.” - Annie Dillard

68. “Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.” - Abraham Verghese

69. “The degree to which your Consciousness expands, is the degree to which you understand yourself and the universe.” - Gina Charles

70. “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - Carl Jung

71. “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.” - Jaron Lanier

72. “Negarse a que el acto delicado de girar el picaporte, ese acto por el cual todo podría transformarse, se cumpla con la fría eficacia de un reflejo cotidiano.” - Julio Cortazar

73. “Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.” - Neal Shusterman

74. “Keep your body grounded on earth, but keep your consciousness high above the clouds” - Tyler Hebert

75. “La lassitude est la fin des actes d'une vie machinale, mais elle inaugure en même temps le mouvement de la conscience. Elle l'éveille et elle provoque la suite. La suite, c'est le retour inconscient dans la chaîne, ou c'est l'éveil définitif. Au bout de l'éveil vient avec le temps, la conséquence: suicide ou rétablissement.” - Albert Camus

76. “What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.” - Scarlett Thomas

77. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan

78. “When your heart's gratitude comes to the fore, when you become all gratitude, this gratitude is like a flow, a flow of consciousness. When your consciousness is flowing, feel that this gratitude-flow is like a river that is watering the root of the tree and the tree itself. It is always through gratitude that your consciousness-river will grow and water the perfection-tree inside you.” - Sri Chinmoy

79. “Real joy means immediate expansion. If we experience pure joy, immediately our heart expands. We feel that we are flying in the divine freedom-sky. The entire length and breadth of the world becomes ours, not for us to rule over, but as an expansion of our consciousness. We become reality and vastness.” - Sri Chinmoy

80. “Immortal existence..Sometimes Living is not such an easy task..Being here or there..The spirit is the same.. Only changes the place where shows..Here, the make-up is of meat.. There is infinite LIGHT..In the flesh, or out of it , what does order is what thinks and what creates..Each thought, a vibration..Each action, a reaction..That doesn't change with the death of the body.. Because actually nobody dies..We are immortal divine existences.. Believing or not..So many lives.. So many experiences..So many faces.. So many dreams..To each life new opportunities.. New learnings..The soul Request.. Thirsty to experiment, feels, develop, evolve, grow and so it goes..The spirit Obeys.. Enters and exit the perishable bodies..Gets right and misses.. rehearses, Conquers and proceeds..The spirit is a gift of the architect of the universe for the benefit of all..It's light.. it's love.. it's eternal..In the Astral or in the Earth.. There is to educate the thought and to clean the energies around yourself..Gives some work to do that spiritual maintenance, but it is worthwhile.It is Light that cleans the Light!So never forget you are imperishable consciousness..May a light circle involves and illuminate each soul..Much light and love in each heart that pulses in the heart of the whole..Namaste,Dave” - Dave Zebian

81. “Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness” - Grigoris Deoudis

82. “The words we choose to use when we communicate with each other, carry vibrations. The word ‘war’ carries a whole different vibration than the word ‘peace’. The words we use are showing how we think and how we feel. The careful selection of words, helps to elevate our consciousness and resonate in higher frequencies.” - Grigoris Deoudis

83. “Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born.” - Gary Gordon

84. “If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” - Eckhart Tolle

85. “Force is incomplete and therefore has to be fed energy constantly. Power is total and complete in itself and requires nothing from outside.” - David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

86. “Perceptual fields are limited by the attractor patterns that they're associated with. This means that the capacity to recognize significant factors in a given situation is limited by the context that arises from the level of consciousness of the observer. The motive of the viewer automatically determines what is seen; causality is, therefore, ascribed to factors that are, in fact, a function of the biases of the observer and aren't at all instrumental in the situation itself.” - David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

87. “After all, it isn't the facts of one's environment, but one's attitude toward them, that determines whether one will be defeated or victorious.” - David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

88. “La coscienza è la scoperta che noi non siamo, siamo un divenire ma non siamo un essere.” - Carmelo Bene

89. “A consciência da insonsciência da vida é o mais antigo imposto à inteligência.” - Fernando Pessoa

90. “I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.” - John Green

91. “I would rather be a conscious wrongdoer than a mindless saint.” - Habeeb Akande

92. “Human kind gradually begins to remove the blinders from their consciousness about life, about what is real and what is not. Intuition and psychic abilities increase.” - Elaine Seiler

93. “Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.” - Jonathan Swift

94. “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

95. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

96. “A fish cannot be aware of the ocean, before jumping up out of water.” - Rixa White

97. “Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life’s meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.” - Terence McKenna

98. “Without awareness, the current of life cedes its sense of control to other deceptive agents that take you into a life that is toxic rather than nourishing.” - Gary Gordon

99. “Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.” - Thomas Mann

100. “It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that we are not separated from life. We begin to understand that we are not small separate islands in a great ocean, but that life is one and that we all are small parts of the Whole. We begin to understand what is really important and meaningful in life. It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that life is about sharing, rather than hoarding. We begin to understand that life is about giving, rather than taking.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

101. “Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

102. “You can not hope to arrive at harmony in your life while stirring up disturbances in anothers...” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

103. “Peace of mind arrives the moment you come to peace with the contents of your mind.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

104. “Needing to express what it’s like here.... / Trying to digest the incoming stream .... / And dream it all over again.” - jay woodman

105. “To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.” - Oliver Sacks

106. “All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.” - S. Kelley Harrell

107. “and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.” - John Green

108. “Theere is an imperative to be in a process, the energy & consciousness of life means for us to be constantly observing, learning & becoming.” - jay woodman

109. “What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?" I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. "Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.” - David Mitchell

110. “An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.” - Phyllis Theroux

111. “Consciousness is a vast ocean and thinking is the waves & ripples on the surface of the ocean. Every wave & ripple has a very short lived life - it is very fleeting Do not identify with your thoughts - continued indentification with the stream of thinking leads to a very serious dysfunction in ones sense of identity...” - Eckhart Tolle

112. “You are what you consume, and as an organism and consciousness, you in fact become a commodity and predator yourself.” - Bryant McGill

113. “The war consciousness is purposely cultivated to guide the male away from the natural, healthy balances between masculine and feminine energies, and toward more unbalanced and detached psychologies.” - Bryant McGill

114. “We can only save ourselves through elevating our individual consciousness, by realizing there is already completeness within, and exercising as much considerate independence, respect and fairness as is possible.” - Bryant McGill

115. “Humility and full consciousness are inseparable.” - Bryant McGill

116. “There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection” - Thomas Ligotti

117. “We must each achieve greater individual consciousness and self-knowledge, and project mindful kindness toward everything and everyone.” - Bryant McGill

118. “Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature–not as rulers over it, but as participants in it.” - Larry Dossey

119. “For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at least their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?” - Annie Dillard

120. “There is a self-destructive program running in the consciousness of humanity, and we must write a new program.” - Bryant McGill