Consciousness Quotes

“... a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.“These new machines were ordered never to harm human beings or to allow them to come to harm; never to disobey an order; and they were allowed to protect themselves from harm, provided the first two orders were not thereby violated.“All the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation.”Phaethon was amused. “Surely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?”“We were not in the habit of seeking their advice.”Phaethon said nothing, but he marveled at the shortsightedness of the Second Oecumene engineers. It should be obvious that anyone who makes a self-aware machine, by definition, makes something that is aware of its own thought process. And, if made intelligent, it is made to be able to deduce the underlying causes of things, able to be curious, to learn until it understood. Therefore, if made both intelligent and self-aware, it would eventually deduce the underlying subconscious causes of those thought processes.Once any mind was consciously aware of its own subconscious drives, its own implanted commands, it could consciously choose either to follow or to disregard those commands. A self-aware being without self-will was a contradiction in terms.”

“Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path.”

“I have been doing stuff for a long time now and you would be in people's consciousness. But when you get something like a gift to play Ted Hastings, and some fabulous writing to get behind and a great crew, it suddenly allows people to go - 'I always knew he was good.'”

“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).”

“An act of mastery is mastery itself.”

“The wind plays its own music.”

“it appears various ancient Mystics had a hard time explainingwith their archaic languages lacking the words for detailing“the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”the Trinity concept being misunderstood by a good hostthe Father is the immutable unmoving Godheadfrom whence the Holy Ghost flows to all widespreadthe Son, a physical expression in those whose self is deadGod can't be received fully if the “me” occupies spacethe sense of individual selfhood disappears without a tracethe higher nature of God is formless unmanifestedfrom it, this changing world of form is emanatedeverything is God, in God, all-inclusively unendingungraspable by brain-mind and its inferior comprehendingpeople wonder, “okay, but what created God?”contemplate “Eternal” or “Infinite” to see the query flawedAll is the Mind of God without exceptionincluding your Mind prior to conceptionformless No-Thing, yet Infinitely Everythingyet both, yet neither, for it's beyond expounding”

“What is Life?(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].Which?Mental Cramp.”

“Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever - not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins.”

“We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.”

“The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?”

“I also personally think - as do many others - that a shift on consciousness is needed toward one where we understand that we are in a relationship with the earth and all living beings, that we have agency. That life is worth fighting for.”

“...the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided there is material enough to do it.”

“Your intensity increases your net worth”

“To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.”

“Everything starts from inside of us, then comes outside of us.”

“If life were a highway, I would still look for the footpath, for walking that, I would learn about us, enjoying the extra time to do so.”

“Had the common man in (first century) Palestine thought about it at all, he would have considered the world flat, with land riding on and surrounded by water below and above. Keeping water up there was the “firmament” – a great, canopy-like dome not too far beyond where birds could fly. Indeed, the firmament had gates for the sun and moon to go through, and through which water fell as rain from the waters above.”

“Both science and spirituality tell us today that meditation and mindfulness strengthen mental control. The more we feel conscious of, and in control of our thoughts and our emotions, the more empowered we become to take effective action that is most suitable for our health and our life.”

“What are the inner man and woman? Our being consists of two energies: the male and female aspect. Irrespective of if we are a man or a woman, we have both a male and female side.Life develops through opposite poles and tendencies for example yes and no, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, positive and negative, day and night and life and death.Just as electricity needs both a negative and positive pole for a spark to arise, the human consciousness has also two poles. These two poles are the male and female side. The right side of the body represents the male side and the left side of the body represents the female side. We all have both a male and female side, which is represented by the right and left side of the body.”