Carlos Castaneda Quotes

... the daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses

I give life to that which I notice. What I don't notice dies.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

If you never noticed, it never happened.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

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 can't have a universe without the mind entering into it.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

You don't always have to look in the distance for what's going on over there, when you actually see what's right in front of you.

When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness .

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.

Art is about paying attention.

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.

I think that you really get what you recognize is in the universe.

Obviously we can't do what we do if no one is paying attention.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?