Mind Matter Quotes

We can study various psychic functions and also the more primitive sensory functions, such as seeing, hearing, and so on, which constitute our image of our everyday world. They have a material side and the psychic side. And that is a gap which you cannot explain.

There is no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

As I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, or which [his family] profoundly disapproved. Everytime the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." After some fifty or sixty repititions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

Consciousness does affect matter.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity. You are learning now, in a three-dimensional context, the ways in which your emotional and psychic existence can create varieties of physical form. You manipulate within the psychic environment, and these manipulations are then automatically impressed upon the physical mold.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

Every atom is working and resisting every thought in the mind. Everything we see and know is but the resultant of these two forces.

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball.