Stanislav Grof Quotes

There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.

Reality is mind-made.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Since consciousness is the basis of all reality, any shift in consciousness changes every aspect of our reality. Reality is created by consciousness differentiating into cognition, moods, emotions, perceptions, behavior, speech, social interactions, environment, interaction with the forces of nature, and biology. As consciousness evolves, these different aspects of consciousness also change.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

Whatever we know without inference is mental.