Consciousness Quotes - Page 10

To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.

James David Lewis-Williams

Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.

James David Lewis-Williams

The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.

James David Lewis-Williams

The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati

James David Lewis-Williams

Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.

James David Lewis-Williams

It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.

James David Lewis-Williams

Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself.

According to Martindale’s view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: – waking, problem-oriented thought, – realistic fantasy, – autistic fantasy, – reverie, – hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and – dreaming.

James David Lewis-Williams

In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.

James David Lewis-Williams

The behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one’s body (less commonly understood in hunting and gathering shamanistic societies as possession by spirits).

James David Lewis-Williams

San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.

James David Lewis-Williams

There were at least four contexts in which San shamans acquired insights into the spiritual world: – the trance dance, – special curing rituals, – viewing rock art, and – dreams.

James David Lewis-Williams

The principal aim of a vision quest is to ‘see’ a spirit animal that will become the quester’s animal-helper and source of his power.

James David Lewis-Williams

Entering a cave” or rock was a metaphor for a shaman’s altered state; therefore, caves (and rocks more generally) were considered entrances or portals to the supernatural world.

James David Lewis-Williams

Consciousness is the product of electrochemical signalling in the neurons of your brain. So when the brain stops functioning fully, your consciousness, or to a broader aspect your mind ceases to exist with its unique individualistic qualities. It's like the soothing flow of water. It is only water as long as its internal realm of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, remains intact. If you break that structure which we call H20, it ceases to be water. Likewise a soul remains a soul, as longs as its neural structures remain intact. If you mess with those structure, then the entire personality of the soul may get radically altered. So, to think even further, if those neural structures inside your head stop working, then the soul ceases to exist forever. So, as long as you have a functional brain, you exist, and the moment that brain dies you die.

It is always now

Lucidity was a slippery thing and her hands were wet.

A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness–in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.

Gregory Maguire

A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

Raymond M. Smullyan

Magick is the manipulation of the Laws of Cause-and-Effect in accordance with one's Will, via states of Higher Consciousness.

The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.

James David Lewis-Williams

Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.

James David Lewis-Williams

Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic, a great deal happened in a comparatively short time.

James David Lewis-Williams

The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.

James David Lewis-Williams

Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.

James David Lewis-Williams

Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.

James David Lewis-Williams

The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.

James David Lewis-Williams

Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…

James David Lewis-Williams

Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…

James David Lewis-Williams

I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.

James David Lewis-Williams

Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.

James David Lewis-Williams

Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.

James David Lewis-Williams

Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.

James David Lewis-Williams

In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.

James David Lewis-Williams

Like any organic entity, a system of consciousness manifests itself through the orderly, differentiated development of a certain unifying reality.

Kitarō Nishida

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.

We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.

Yasmine Galenorn

Quoting Father Seraphim:Our life hangs only by a breath. It is the thread that links you to the Father, the Source, which brought you into being. Be conscious of this thread, and go where you will. (27)

Jean-Yves Leloup

The Secret to saneful living is in the Key between these two worlds. In order to serve the higher ideal, one must revert to serving the Spark within all the multiplicities herein conceivable in the apparent world. The spark in itself is not contained for it encompasses both realities, that of the inner, and the apparent

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

Scarlett Thomas

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")

Maurice Maeterlinck

In a country of ideas, consciousness is its' citizen.

Toba Beta

Islaam is the Name of the Universe. Christ is the Soul, and Abraham, the Foundation — The Rainbow At Midnight

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye.

Toba Beta

Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born.

One part of my consciousness serves only one realm.

Toba Beta

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

To duplicate meanings is to isolate the consciousness.

Floriano Martins

There are no higher levels of consciousness, there are only different ways of perceiving things.

Every age, every generation has its built in assumptions, that the world is flat, that the world is round etc. There are hundreds of hidden assumptions, things we take for granted, that may or may not be true. Of-course in the vast majority of cases historically, these things aren’t true. So presumably, if history is any guide, much about what we take for granted about the world simply isn’t true. But we’re locked into these precepts without even knowing it. That’s a paradigm.

John Hagelin Ph.D

Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.

Winifred Gallagher

Consciousness, which is the "reflective" element of Norman's conceptual brain, handles the "higher" functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business or care for your family, you soon realize that you can't grasp that process just by thinking about it. As Norman puts it, "Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, 'I'm afraid,' it's not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up.

Winifred Gallagher

Because of Mother Nature, Humans become Conscious Beings.

Moments of splendor and moments of gloom – they help maintain life’s balance. One thought is key: they all pass...

The most fundamental exercise is self-observation, which is the catalyst for inner change, it will give self-knowledge and a clear mind and perception. Without it, the attempt to reach enlightenment and awaken consciousness is destined to fail.

Belsebuub

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

Barbara Kingsolver

The collective consciousness of mankind defines the existence and sustainability of this civilization.

Toba Beta

His brain and his heart knew this, but he couldn’t stop himself, and the razor of his conscience lent the undeniable thrill of pain to the act.

No, free will is not an 'extra'; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

Raymond M. Smullyan

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