Iain McGilchrist Quotes

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

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 experience is subjective.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

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.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

As you are, so is the world.

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

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

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

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

To know the world, one must construct it

What you believe you experience.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

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.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.