Robert Irwin Quotes

In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.

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

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

Reality doesn't bite, rather our perception of reality bites.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.

Reality is mind-made.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

None of us see the world as it is but as we are, as our frames of reference, or maps, define the territory.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.

Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain's limits, not the universe's.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

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

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.

We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.

What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Life can show up no other way than that way in which you perceive it.