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Consciousness

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Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives. ~ Susan Schneider
Evolution, as we understand it, and as it must be studied by the human intellect, is the story of the evolution of consciousness, and not the story of the evolution of the form. This latter evolution is implicit in the other, and of secondary importance from the occult angle. ~Alice Bailey
Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue. ~ Helena Blavatsky

Consciousness is "sentience or awareness of internal or external existence". Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes some kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness.


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • The emergence of consciousness, like the unfolding of a leaf, relies upon restraint. Richness, the richness of the perceived world and the richness of the imagined worlds of literature and art—the human spirit—is the consequence of controlled, not precipitate, collapse.
    • Peter Atkins, Creation Revisited (1994)

B

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  • Neurologists who routinely evaluate patients with head injuries define consciousness in terms of waking EEG, the ability to answer questions, report perceptual events, show alertness to sudden changes in the environment, exercise normal voluntary control over speech and action, use memory, and maintain orientation to time, place, and self. ...Physicians make life-or-death decision on the basis of these observable events, and in practice this works very well. Very similar criteria are used in psychological and brain research. Thus medicine and science seem to agree with traditional philosophy that consciousness and subjectivity can be identified in practical ways. ...The empathy criterion is far more demanding.
  • Consciousness is always accompanied by subjectivity.
    • Bernard J. Baars, ibid., "Understanding Subjectivity: Global Workspace Theory and the Resurrection of the Observing Self" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 3, 1996, pp. 211-16
  • Evolution, as we understand it, and as it must be studied by the human intellect, is the story of the evolution of consciousness, and not the story of the evolution of the form. This latter evolution is implicit in the other, and of secondary importance from the occult angle.
  • Let me assure you that under the pressure of modern life, under the strain of the imposed present conditions and civilisation, plus the mental concern, the terror of marching armies, the thunder of the many voices, and the stress of world wide economic stringency, the human consciousness is rapidly awakening from its long sleep. That great and fundamental reality, which we call the "human state of mind", is just beginning to focus itself upon the things which matter, and to express itself in a living fashion.
    • Alice Bailey in The Destiny of the Nations, Lucis Trust, 1949, p. 26
  • When we recognise the fact that the average man is as yet fully conscious only on the physical plane, nearly conscious on the emotional plane, and only developing the consciousness of the mental plane, it is obvious that his comprehension of cosmic data can be but rudimentary.
    • Alice Bailey in Initiation, Human,and Solar, Lucis Trust, 1922, p. 4
  • The development of the human being is but the passing from one state of consciousness to another. It is a succession of expansions, a growth of that faculty of awareness that constitutes the predominant characteristic of the indwelling Thinker. It is the progressing from consciousness polarised in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine.
    • Alice Bailey in Initiation, Human,and Solar, Lucis Trust, 1922, p. 7
  • These realizations, or apprehended expansions of consciousness, are under natural law, and come in due course of time to every soul without exception.
    • Alice Bailey in Initiation, Human,and Solar, Lucis Trust, 1922, p. 176
  • To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause — dimly formulated in the “Unconscious” and “Unknowable ” of current European philosophy — is the rootless root of “all that was, is, or ever shall be.” It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is “Be-ness ” rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation. This “Be-ness” is symbolised in the Secret Doctrine under two aspects. On the one hand, absolute abstract Space, representing bare subjectivity, the one thing which no human mind can either exclude from any conception, or conceive of by itself. On the other, absolute Abstract Motion representing Unconditioned Consciousness. Even our Western thinkers have shown that Consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change, and motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic. This latter aspect of the one Reality, is also symbolised by the term “The Great Breath,” a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute — Be-ness — symbolised by finite intelligence as the theological Trinity.
  • Parabrahm (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object. Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective. Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the great Breath assumes the character of precosmic Ideation. p. 15
  • Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue. The “Manifested Universe,” therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its existence as “manifestation.” p.15
  • What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.
  • Our consciousness depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in... categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it. [Difficulties] arise from this remarkable and wholly human gift that allows us first of all to separate ourselves from the outside world. ...[W]e are able to rearrange it in our heads ...And with that goes inevitably a sense of ourselves, sometimes also as an outside person. The Cartesian dualism between mind and body arises directly from this, and so do all the famous paradoxes, both in mathematics and in linguistics...
    • Jacob Bronowski, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
  • Consciousness... is our mode of analysis of the outside world into objects and actions. ...it at once posed a problem... that we also think of ourselves as objects and we therefore also apply language to ourselves. We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols of it. And all of the difficult paradoxes which go right back to the Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.

C

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  • Consciousness is a strange thing; no one has yet succeeded in defining it. One of its characteristics is that we are the only species fully aware of its own mortality. Other animals fear imminent death, and express that terror—we humans can daily contemplate a finite life, and it seems reasonable to assume that the knowledge of death (as distinct from the fear of death) gives us a very different attitude toward life.
  • We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
  • Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? ...We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap [a term due to J. Levine, "Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64:354-61, 1983] between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it.
  • The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ...The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. ...When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.
  • Another useful way to avoid confusion [used by e.g. Allen Newell 1990 Unified Theories of Cognition] is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena... If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.
  • In place of great thinkers physics turned to number crunching and atom smashing, which remains its chief occupation, now on a billion-dollar scale. There were exceptions like John von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and David Bohm, who continued the search for a link between mind and matter. Respected but sidelined in favor of bigger particle accelerators and telescopes, all of these thinkers now enjoy a latter-day revenge, so to speak. Having exhausted the models of reality that discounted and ignored consciousness, forward-looking physicists now realize that mind must be accounted for, which seems like a simple realization except that it was clouded behind a screen, the biggest factor being naïve realism. Satisfied with the common-sense view of reality in their everyday life, physicists were happy to think of mind as “not my job.”
    A huge hurdle remains, however, which is the enormous seduction of physical explanations. What is science without them? What is life if we get rid of relying on the five senses? These aren’t rhetorical questions. Life would be transformed if we abandoned the lure of the physical world and the mistaken data of the five senses. The human mind is uniquely able to go beyond appearances, and when we do, the destination is always consciousness.
  • There’s no need to call it “higher” consciousness. A better term is “total” consciousness, the ground state of everything in existence. Account for consciousness and you explain everything. No models are needed. The everyday mind is the arena of consciousness. Stick with it, experience it deeply, and be self-aware. Only then will reality be fully comprehended, absent any model at all.
  • Since the problem of consciousness is such a central one, and since consciousness appears so mysterious, one might have expected that psychologists and neuroscientists would now direct major efforts toward understanding it. This, however, is far from being the case. The majority of modern psychologists omit any mention of the problem, although much of what they study enters into consciousness. Most modern neuroscientists ignore it. ...Not only because of experimental difficulties but also because they considered the problem both too subjective and too "philosophical," and thus not easily amenable to experimental study.
    • Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)
  • There may be several forms of visual awareness and, by extension, even more forms of consciousness in general.
    • Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)

D

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  • Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.
  • “Continuously Updated Virtual Reality” is the idea that every brain constructs a virtual reality model of the world through which the animal is moving. The virtual reality software is continuously updated in the sense that, although it might theoretically be capable of simulating scenes of wildest fantasy (as in dreams), it is in practice constrained by data flowing from the sense organs. What the animal perceives is a virtual reality rendering of objects in the real world. Visual illusions such as Necker cubes and other alternating figures are best interpreted in these terms. The data sent to the brain by the retina are equally compatible with two virtual models of a cube. Having no basis to choose, the brain alternates. The virtual world that our brain constructs is, no doubt, very different from that of a squirrel, a mole, or a whale. Each species will construct virtual models that are useful for its particular way of life.
  • Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. ...Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all earlier mysteries, there are many who insist—and hope—that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.
  • We now understand how very complex and even apparently intelligent phenomena, such as genetic coding, the immune system, and low-level visual processing, can be accomplished without a trace of consciousness. But this seems to uncover an enormous puzzle of just what, if anything, consciousness is for. Can a conscious entity do anything for itself that an unconscious (but cleverly wired up) simulation of that entity couldn't do for itself?
    • Daniel C. Dennett, "The Evolution of Consciousness," Consciousness and Emotion in Cognitive Science: Conceptual and Empirical Issues (1998) ed. Josefa Toribio & Andy Clark
  • The scientific course is to put the burden of proof on the attribution. As a scientist, you can't just declare, for instance, that the presence of glutamate molecules amounts to the presence of mind; you have to prove it, against a background in which the "null hypothesis" is that mind is not present. There is substantial disagreement among scientists as to which species have what sorts of mind, but even those scientists who are the most ardent champions of consciousness in animals accept this burden of proof—and think they can meet it, by devising and confirming theories that show which animals are conscious. But no such theories are yet confirmed, and in the meantime we can appreciate the discomfort of those who see this agnostic, wait-and-see policy as jeopardizing the moral status of creatures that they are sure are conscious.
  • The 1982 Aspect Experiment in France demonstrated, that two once-connected quantum particles separated by vast distances remained somehow connected. If one particle was changed, the other changed - instantly. Scientists don't know the mechanics of how this faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel can happen, though some theorists suggest that this connection takes place via doorways into higher dimensions.
    So contrary to what those who pledge their allegiance to the traditional paradigm might think, the influential, pioneering individuals I spoke with felt that we have not reached the pinnacle of human development, we are connected, rather than separate, from all of life, and that the full spectrum of consciousness encompasses both physical and a multitude of non physical dimensions of reality. At core, this new world view involves seeing yourself, others, and all of life, not through the eyes of our small, earthly self that lives in time and is born in time. But rather through the eyes of the soul, our Being, the True Self. One by one, people are jumping to this higher orbit.

E

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  • A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
    • Albert Einstein in Condolence letter to Norman Salit, (4 March 1950); also quoted in "The Einstein Papers. A Man of Many Parts" in The New York Times (29 March 1972)

F

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  • Consciousness is the ability to understand, that is, to be able to have a sentient experience of sensations and feelings and to understand their meaning. This goes beyond what a computer can do. Consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from a deeper reality that cannot exist in space-time and cannot be explained by classical physics. Only the 'quantum state' can describe conscious experience, so by necessity consciousness must exist before matter, energy, space and time. Physical phenomena, which are more virtual than real, are the creation of a conscious field that observes objects moving in spacetime through the body controlled by the field. The quantum state of the field is the representation of qualia, i.e. the sensations and feelings that constitute a conscious experience. Qualia can only be known by the field that is in that state and go beyond what is representable by a mathematical concept.
  • Cognition... is not an individual process of any theoretical particular consciousness. Rather it is the result of a social activity, since the existing stock of knowledge exceeds the range available to any individual.

G

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  • The investigation of the possibility that animals might think in terms of concepts and even categories of important objects has been seriously impeded because comparative psychologists have seemed to be almost petrified by the notion of animal consciousness. Historically, the science of psychology has been reacting for fifty years or more against earlier attempts to learn how we think by thinking about our thoughts. ...In other realms of scientific endeavor we have to accept proof that is less than a hundred percent rigorous... think of cosmology, think of geology. And Darwin couldn't prove the fact of biological evolution in a rigorous way.
  • Consciousness means to become aware of something by oneself. This, in turn, does not mean to discover something that others do not know, nor does it mean that one should not learn from others. To become aware of something by oneself refers to things, no matter whether learned from others or discovered by oneself, that one digests deeply in one’s mind and makes one’s own. Moreover, if we distinguish consciousness in terms of social class, we come up with several differences. The consciousness of a priest is not the same as that of a politician. The consciousness of a priest is also probably different from that of a philosopher. In fact, even priests, depending on their geographic location and historical period, cannot be said to all be the same. Thus, there are myriad differences in consciousness, depending on the person, time, and place; however, there must be something that is common to them all. There must be something that is at stake for all of them, as they all live in this world. The learned and the uneducated, the noble and the lowly, the rich and the poor – there is something they must become conscious of through cooperation. This is what I call “common consciousness”.

H

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  • Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
    • Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion (2014), p. 54

J

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  • The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
  • The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

"The problematic symmetry between brain birth and brain death" (1998)

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Jones, D. G. (1998). "The problematic symmetry between brain birth and brain death". Journal of Medical Ethics. 24 (4): 237–242. doi:10.1136/jme.24.4.237. PMC 1377672. PMID 9752625.

  • The quest for a neurological marker of the first events of human life owes its impetus to the perceived symmetry between processes at the beginning and end of life. Burgess and Tawia write: "If conscious experiences ... are the aspect of our lives we value when we look forward, considerations of symmetry dictate that we first acquire a capacity for what we most value in our lives when we first become conscious". They view the beginning of consciousness as the beginning of "cortical life". A concrete expression of this trend has been provided by Sass, who advocates the legal protection of "personal life (animate life) from the beginning of brain functioning (brain life) to its end (brain death)".
    • p.237
  • The symmetry argument also simplifies brain death criteria by overlooking the most appropriate definition of brain death, either loss of function of the whole brain (destruction of the cerebral hemispheres plus brain stem, or brain stem alone since this is a precursor of whole brain death), or irreversible loss of higher brain functions (total loss of consciousness and awareness, loss of cognitive faculties, representing widespread destruction of the cerebral hemispheres). This is a distinction between a vitalist interpretation, with its emphasis on biological integration, and a personalist interpretation, stemming from the significance of sentience or consciousness for the existence of persons. The contrast is between "mere human biological life" and "being alive as a person".
    • p.237
  • Numerous writers have attempted to pinpoint what they regard as the biological substratum for personal life, with attention on development of the cerebral cortex and on identifying the first moments of conscious experience. Some have set this at 25-40 days gestation. For others, eight weeks gestation represents the point at which the brain is capable of consciousness. From this point onwards, the "biography" of the individual has begun; alternatively, this level of brain activity signifies the emergence of a person, makes possible an holistic level of life,' leads to affective recognisability by other people, or denotes the beginnings of sentience.
    • pp.238-239
  • In contrast, a second definition may be determined by the beginning of consciousness at 24-36 weeks gestation. This is brain birth II, which parallels the personalist overtones of the higher brain definition of death, with a sufficiently well-developed neural organization to serve as the substratum from which self-consciousness and personal life subsequently emerge.
    • p.240
  • Even brain birth II is surrounded by ambiguity, although neural integration and the potential for consciousness, as depicted by cerebral cortical development, point to a relatively mature nervous system.
    • p.240
  • Even brain birth I does not signify the first beginnings of the nervous system. This happens with the appearance of the neural plate (18 days gestation), and then more obviously with the slightly later appearance of the neural tube (closing around 27 days). These early stages in nervous system development do not generally feature in discussions of brain birth, although they may be utilized in connection with the significance of the primitive streak or even with the onset of consciousness.
    • pp.240-241

K

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  • René Descartes developed the idea that human beings have a dual nature: they have a body... of material substance, and a mind, which derives from the spiritual nature of the soul. ... It is remarkable to reflect that these seventeenth century ideas were still current in the 1980s. Karl Popper... and John Eccles... espoused dualism all their lives. They agreed with Aquinas that the soul is immortal and independent of the brain. Gilbert Ryle... referred to the notion of the soul as "the ghost in the machine." Today, most philosophers of mind agree that what we call consciousness derives from the physical brain, but some disagree with Crick as to whether it can ever be approached scientifically. A few, such as Colin McGinn, believe that consciousness cannot be studied... At the other extreme, philosophers such as Daniel Dennett deny that there is any problem at all. Dennett argues much as... John Hughlings Jackson did... that consciousness is not a distinct operation of the brain; rather it is a combined result of computational workings of higher-order areas of the brain... Philosophers such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel take a middle position, holding that consciousness is a discrete set of biological processes... very complex and... more than the sum of their parts.
  • Sicut ignoras quomodo anima coniungatur corpori sic nescis opera dei.
    • You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God’s works.
  • Consciousness becomes a matter of philosophical debate; it's not scientifically reliable.
    • Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003) Ed. John Brockman

L

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  • Issues associated with the science of pain have been discussed extensively elsewhere. For the purposes of this briefing we will simply state our position very briefly. The ascribing of the term 'pain' to the responses of a fetus to stimuli is perhaps best understood as an emotional process on the part of those who do so, rather than an objective analysis of pain. Since a fetus moves, or screws up its face, it can appear to be 'suffering pain'. However, the fact that no-one has any memory of being born - which if a fetus can indeed feel pain would be expected to be a very painful process indeed - suggests that there is a great deal of difference between what might look like pain, and what the experience in fact constitutes. What needs to be said is that fetuses do not, can cannot, feel pain - not at 10 weeks, 26 weeks or 30 weeks - because pain-experience depends on consciousness and fetuses are not conscious.
  • Some investigators contend that EEG patterns denoting wakefulness indicate when consciousness is first possible. Wakefulness is a state of arousal mediated by the brainstem and thalamus in communication with the cortex. In preterm neonates, the earliest EEG pattern representing wakefulness appears around 30 weeks’ PCA. However, wakefulness alone is insufficient to establish consciousness, as unconscious patients in a persistent vegetative state may also have wakeful EEGs.

M

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  • Life is not determined by Consciousness, but Consciousness by life.
  • It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
    • Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
  • [T]o emotionally experience pain, we must be cognitively aware of the stimulus (a cortical process), and this in turn requires that we must be conscious.
    The key question then is not about the anatomic completion or functionality of nociceptive pathways in utero, but whether the fetus is ever conscious and thus aware.
  • The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world. Physicists and chemists long ago demonstrated that the real world of our experience is very different from the inanimate universe of physics and chemistry. The sounds and colors we perceive, the apparent objects that integrate them, the space in which those objects are located, the values we attach to them, the intentions we attribute to others -all these fundamental aspects of the real world of our experience are adaptive interpretations of the really real world of physical science.
    • George A. Miller, Trends and Debates in Cognitive Psychology (1981)
  • Some form of self-awareness is surely essential to highly intelligent thought... On the other hand, I doubt that any part of a mind can see very deeply into other parts; it can only use models it constructs of them.
  • Consciousness is a suitcase-like word that we use to refer to many different mental activities, which don't have a single cause or origin—and, surely, that is why people have found it so hard to "understand what consciousness is." …this produced a problem that will remain unsolvable until we find ways to chop it up. ...we can replace that single, big problem by many smaller, more solvable ones.
  • B. F. Skinner actually put forward – and this is a measure of scientific desperation over consciousness – the idea that consciousness was a weird vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. That we did not actually think. We thought we thought because of this weird vibration caused by the vocal cords. This shows the lengths that hard science will go to to banish the ghost from the machine.
  • The primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control. Consciousness in a mere automaton is a useless and unnecessary epiphenomenon.
    • C. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1894), p. 182

N

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  • All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.

P

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  • The last leap to the cortex is crucial, because this wrinkly top layer of the brain is believed to be the organ of consciousness, the generator of awareness of ourselves and things not ourselves (like a surgeon’s knife). Before nerve fibers extending from the thalamus have penetrated the cortex — connections that are not made until the beginning of the third trimester — there can be no consciousness and therefore no experience of pain.
  • The youngsters, ages 1 to 5, are shown smiling, laughing, fussing, crying; they appear alert and aware of what is going on around them. Yet each of these children was born essentially without a cerebral cortex. The condition is called hydranencephaly, in which the brain stem is preserved but the upper hemispheres are largely missing and replaced by fluid.
    Merker (who has held positions at universities in Sweden and the United States but is currently unaffiliated) became interested in these children as the living embodiment of a scientific puzzle: where consciousness originates. He joined an online self-help group for the parents of children with hydranencephaly and read through thousands of e-mail messages, saving many that described incidents in which the children seemed to demonstrate awareness. In October 2004, he accompanied the five on the trip to Disney World, part of an annual get-together for families affected by the condition. Merker included his observations of these children in an article, published last year in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, proposing that the brain stem is capable of supporting a preliminary kind of awareness on its own. “The tacit consensus concerning the cerebral cortex as the ‘organ of consciousness,’” Merker wrote, may “have been reached prematurely, and may in fact be seriously in error.”
    Merker’s much-discussed article was accompanied by more than two dozen commentaries by prominent researchers. Many noted that if Merker is correct, it could alter our understanding of how normal brains work and could change our treatment of those who are now believed to be insensible to pain because of an absent or damaged cortex. For example, the decision to end the life of a patient in a persistent vegetative state might be carried out with a fast-acting drug, suggested Marshall Devor, a biologist at the Center for Research on Pain at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Devor wrote that such a course would be more humane than the weeks of potentially painful starvation that follows the disconnection of a feeding tube (though as a form of active euthanasia it would be illegal in the United States and most other countries). The possibility of consciousness without a cortex may also influence our opinion of what a fetus can feel. Like the subplate zone, the brain stem is active in the fetus far earlier than the cerebral cortex is, and if it can support consciousness, it can support the experience of pain. While Mark Rosen is skeptical, Anand praises Merker’s work as a “missing link” that could complete the case for fetal pain.
    But anatomy is not the whole story. In the fetus, especially, we can’t deduce the presence or absence of consciousness from its anatomical development alone; we must also consider the peculiar environment in which fetuses live.
  • IN FACT, “THERE may not be a single moment when consciousness, or the potential to experience pain, is turned on,” Nicholas Fisk wrote with Vivette Glover, a colleague at Imperial College, in a volume on early pain edited by Anand. “It may come on gradually, like a dimmer switch.” It appears that this slow dawning begins in the womb and continues even after birth. So where do we draw the line? When does a release of stress hormones turn into a grimace of genuine pain?
  • The most that the extra-neural environment can ever do is partially select which of a finite menu of mind/brain/virtual world states is instantiated at a given moment. Subjects can never, directly, do more than apprehend their own mind/brain/virtual-world states. The values they appear to find in the mind-independent world are instead intrinsic features of particular states of their own brains.
  • In retrospect, today's entire dreaming and waking consciousness may prove to be only minor variants on a theme whose motif can't be grasped from within.
  • We couldn’t be representing objects unless, in all cases of such representing, we could also become conscious of our representing. ... All consciousness ... is a species of self-consciousness, representing objects is at the same time attending to the mind’s activities. … Although the object of my intending is some state of affairs or other, I am also potentially aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of remembering, thinking, or imagining. My asserting that S is P is not an assertion of mine unless I am implicitly aware as I assert that I am asserting, not entertaining the possibility that, S is P.
    • Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press: 1989), pp. 20-21
  • Life-force vitalists are rare today, but they have been replaced by those who believe that human consciousness has some special property that goes beyond the laws of physics. Such neovitalists, searching for the roots of consciousness beyond material reality, might be in for another disappointment.
    • Heinz R. Pagels, “Uncertainty and Complementarity” in Timothy Ferris (ed.) The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics (p. 110)
  • You who are sitting before me have the power to change my consciousness into painting, poem, melody or anything else.

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  • In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence in the fetus, it was apparent that connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation. After 24 weeks there is continuing development and elaboration of intracortical networks such that noxious stimuli in newborn preterm infants produce cortical responses. Such connections to the cortex are necessary for pain experience but not sufficient, as experience of external stimuli requires consciousness.

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  • Consciousness does not begin until after 20 weeks’ gestation. 12 13 Thus we do not begin to exist as persons, as morally relevant entities, until at least 20 weeks of fetal gestation. The question of when and if killing occurs does not even arise until at least 20 weeks’ gestation.
    On this account, killing a fetus before 20 weeks is not killing a person, it is preventing a person coming into existence.
  • Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.
    • Susan Schneider, Introduction, to The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Susan Schneider and Max Velmans (2008)
  • Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question. p. 16
  • Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Complete unconsciousness is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are awake. p. 56
  • I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate.
  • It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there's no one thing for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g., different kinds of perception, learning, knowledge, attention control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc.
  • ... the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don’t have to think about it (it’s really much better not to). You just have to have it. It’s true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.
  • Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

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  • The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.
    If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won't be able to stay conscious when something "goes wrong" or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests.
  • Only people who are in a deeply negative state [of consciousness], who feel very bad indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how they feel. Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. Its a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.
  • See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
  • Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.
    • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997), p.67
  • If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation.
    • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997), p.67
  • Open your eyes and see the fear, the despair, the greed, and the violence that are all-pervasive. See the heinous cruelty and suffering on an unimaginable scale that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict on each other as well as on other life forms on the planet. You don't need to condemn. Just observe. That is sin. That is insanity.
    • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997), p.71
  • If a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work. If you don't like the word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt.
    • Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997), p.71
  • When such challenges come, as they always do, make it a habit to go within at once and focus as much as you can on the inner energy field of your body. This need not take long, just a few seconds. But you need to do it the moment that the challenge presents itself. Any delay will allow a conditioned mental-emotional reaction to arise and take you over.
  • It is misleading to say that somebody "chose" a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great.
  • We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. “A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm.
  • This book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness; that is to say, to awaken. In that sense, this book is not “interesting”. Interesting means you can keep your distance, play around with ideas and concepts in your mind, agree or disagree. This book is about you. It will change your state of consciousness or it will be meaningless. It can only awaken those who are ready. Not everyone is ready yet, but many are, and with each person who awakens, the momentum in the collective consciousness grows, and it becomes easier for others.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • Until very recently, the transformation of human consciousness – also pointed to by the ancient teachers – was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because it was not yet imperative. A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005) p.67
  • Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005) p.101
  • Until very recently, the transformation of human consciousness – also pointed to by the ancient teachers – was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because it was not yet imperative. A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • To sum up: Enjoyment of what you are doing, combined with a goal or vision that you work toward, becomes enthusiasm. Even though you have a goal, what you are doing in the present moment needs to remain the focal point of your attention; otherwise, you will fall out of alignment with universal purpose. Make sure your vision or goal is not an inflated image of yourself and therefore a concealed form of ego, such as wanting to become a movie star, a famous writer, or a wealthy entrepreneur. Also make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank. An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don't empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the unmanifested Source of all life through you for the benefit of all.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005), Ch. 10,
  • “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the biblical prophet (Revelation 21:1). The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven – the awakened consciousness. The earth – external reality – is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence. So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore not arising at all.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • The outward movement into form does not express itself with equal intensity in all people. Some feel a strong urge to build, create, become involved, achieve, make an impact upon the world.... Others, after the natural expansion that comes with growing up has run its course, lead an outwardly unremarkable, seemingly more passive and relatively uneventful existence. They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world... Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being... On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on his planet. I call them the frequency holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through “just being.”

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  • Consciousness emerges from the shadows, lives on them, feeds on them and finally regenerates them still denser than before through the very questions it puts to itself by virtue of its lucidity and as a direct consequence of that lucidity.

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See also

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