consciousness

Peace of mind arrives the moment you come to peace with the contents of your mind.

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__ 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.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

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.

A fish cannot be aware of the ocean, before jumping up out of water.

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.

He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight.

Sooner or later on this journey, every traveller faces the same question: Are you a human intending to be a god, or a god pretending to be human?

What we call consciousness is our ability to perceive stimuli and to file it within the parameters of our personal story.

Going beyond our ordinary concept of self is what always brings us the greatest sense of joy in life. Going beyond our own boundaries brings us an ecstatic awareness of how we are truly created in connection with all that is.

The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Force is incomplete and therefore has to be fed energy constantly. Power is total and complete in itself and requires nothing from outside.

Humility and full consciousness are inseparable.

Wisdom may teach you that all places are one, but love shows you how to get there.

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.

I believe in the power of love, and planting positive thought seeds into the collective consciousness.

... a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.__hese 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.__ll the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation.__haethon was amused. __urely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?___e were not in the habit of seeking their advice.__haethon 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.