Carlos Castaneda Quotes

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.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

We live on the leash of our senses.

The greatest gift is our own eyes, sense of smell, and abilities to deduce.

The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

The five senses are the ministers of the soul.

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.

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.

All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

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.

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

The forms of my awareness are richer than yours.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

Comprehension follows perception.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

Use all of your senses.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .