Ken Wilber Quotes

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

We use concepts like "consciousness"---"mind"---"personality," but we don't really know yet what these things are.' He was shaking his head. 'Not really. Not at all.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

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

We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of anoyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.

I think and that is all that I am.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

Life is but thought.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

At times I think and at times I am.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.