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1 " Imagine a great net spread across the universe. Each juncture is a “being,” and if we imagine that consciousness as a drop of dew, we can see that in each shining drop resides the reflection of every other drop on the net. "
― , Opening the Lotus: A Woman's Guide to Buddhism
2 " You are nothing but your consciousness. That consciousness is universal. "
3 " I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness. "
― Graham Hancock
4 " Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference. "
― Dan Simmons , The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)
5 " 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. "
6 " Awakening means you’ve come home to yourself, that consciousness shifted back to its original nature. "
7 " In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution.If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten. "
― Erwin Schrödinger , What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
8 " Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names - such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity: though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinancies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.But that long day ends at last; yields to the night-time of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean; that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present, and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell - except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool? "
― Christopher Isherwood
9 " In my youth once when I had a really exquisite toothache I suddenly realized that my tooth had temporarily become the centre of the universe that its outcries were more important than anything else and that I would do absolutely anything to placate it. And as one gets older and starts worrying about cancer one becomes more and more conscious of the fragility of the whole body and with that consciousness comes a new and degrading kind of fear. It is degrading because it strengthens the desire to survive on any terms and the desire to survive on any terms is the most base of all our instincts. "