Cosmos And Consciousness Quotes & Sayings

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. — Neal Stephenson

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal. — Paul Bowles

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. — Carl Sagan

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world
not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. — Joseph Campbell

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all. — V.S. Ramachandran

The purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationship or bridge the distance between our cosmos and us. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world. Through going forward together with open minds and good hearts we have uncovered the nature of this ceremony — Shawn Wilson

Our concept of truth becomes more universal as we reach higher levels of consciousness and awareness, taking in a wider spectrum of information and possibility. As we adapt a more expanded perspective on our reality, our concept of what is true and meaningful changes
from local to regional, regional to global, beyond global to the galaxy, and then to the cosmos. — Robert David Steele

If consciousness is the ground of being rather than an epiphenomenon of physical processes, we may find that a basic question asked by modern astronomy and space science- 'Is there life out there?'- should be rephrased. Organic life, as well as intelligence, may already be a property enmeshed in the fabric of the cosmos, brought to fruition through the spiraling dynamics of the solar system and the galaxy, built into the structure of the universe itself. — Daniel Pinchbeck

When I feel clumsy or lost, I remind myself that nature, including me, was created by a a far wiser mind than mine. There is something in the cosmos - God, Spirit, Consciousness, Life Itself, call It what you will - that created and orchestrates nature, and did a pretty good job of it. Nature might just know what It's doing. Even when I don't. — Jeffrey R. Anderson

What does this think about that?
Nothing thinks about anything.
Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?
If it did, it would be people. . .
Why am I worrying about this?
If I think about these things,
I'll stop seeing trees and plants
And stop seeing the Earth
For only seeing my thoughts...
I'll get unhappy and stay in the dark.
And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky. — Alberto Caeiro

The mind is not limited to the thoughts and imagination, but your mind is part of the cosmos of the universe. Your mind is whole awareness field. — Roshan Sharma

There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes - that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives - until they came here, and joined ours. — Neal Stephenson

I am beautiful, one with cosmos, life force, eternal abundance, joy, vitality, infinite consciousness. — Jay Woodman

The whole cosmos is a materialized thought of the Creator. This heavy, earthly clod, floating in space, is a dream of God. He made all things out of His consciousness, even as man in his dream consciousness reproduces and vivifies a creation with its creatures. "'God first created the earth as an idea. Then He quickened it; energy atoms came into being. He coordinated the atoms into this solid sphere. All its molecules are held together by the will of God. When He withdraws His will, the earth again will disintegrate into energy. Energy will dissolve into consciousness; the earth-idea will disappear from objectivity. "'The substance of a dream is held in materialization by the — Paramahansa Yogananda

The glow flares bright - bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.

Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.

First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.

Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.

Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.

Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.

Generation to generation.

The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.

Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.

And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.

A perfect circle. — Amie Kaufman

If we make an effort to engage in conscious evolution of our awareness, we will realize that we are One with the cosmos at the very moment we realize we are One with the Earth. Earth simply provides us with a more concrete target for the path of our conscious evolution. You could call it a secret path to enlightenment, paved with only the best intentions.
Just as the Earth is the tiniest of the tiniest part of the universe, humanity is only a small segment of the life that populates her, despite our delusions of grandeur. A human being can elevate his or her consciousness enough to feel the Earth's entirety in his or her heart and to realize the Oneness that connects all of life in a web of live, pulsating energy. — Ilchi Lee

In the 16th century,parks and gardens were models of the cosmos and also tools for altering one's consciousness, possibly for changing one's destiny. — Linda Lappin

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet, and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions - from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life - will be found in not too much more time. — Bill Nye

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.
The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this very effort establishes its own uniqueness. Name another entity in the Cosmos which tries to prove it is not unique.
The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry. — Walker Percy

It may well be that the subject-object dichotomy is false to begin with and that consciousness is primary in the cosmos, not just an epiphenomenon of physical processes in a nervous system. — Deepak Chopra

There is no place where those striving after consciousness could find absolutely safety. Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this life really can gain it. A complete life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal issue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and again one will be confronted with a situation of which one will say, 'This is too much. I cannot bear it any more.' Then the question must be answered, 'Can one really not bear it? — C. G. Jung

If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape - brightly illuminating a set of points - of cosmi - that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond. — Neal Stephenson

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words! — Vladimir Nabokov

An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars ... We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work ... and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, have begun to wonder about our origins ... star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth ... Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. — Carl Sagan

The most important concept ever put forth was that matter, ALL matter, with no exceptions from stone to star to starfish to student to sovereign, is as divine as all else in the cosmos, for all flows from Consciousness, the Word that came before the World - and all, in time, will flow back. — Ki Longfellow

Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

We begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe.
- Brian Greene — Brian Greene

So he steeled himself and sent a wordless, desperate cry for aid up into the sky, hoping it would pierce the roof of the jail and the mantle of clouds and the net of stars behind that, venturing out beyond to where nothingness had no claim and there might be some consciousness, some intelligence that would listen and understand and sympathize. Something, just something. But it seemed unlikely that anything so vast would notice or care.
He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing. — Robert Jackson Bennett

The central idea of the Eastern Fathers was that of theosis, the divinization of all creatures, the transfiguration of the world, the idea of the cosmos and not the idea of personal salvation ... Only later Christian consciousness began to value the idea of hell more than the idea of the transfiguration and divinization of the world ... The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Nature is sound in many forms and states of existence. — Joao Mendes

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself. — Brian Cox

And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe - its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Perhaps the universe is a big fat consciousness and the matter is just an illusion. — Erol Ozan

When we talk about the Universe Story we are talking about the acquisition of a totally new paradigm, one which overturns many of the patterns that we unconsciously believe to be true. There is not simply the addition of new metaphors and images, but the metaphors and images themselves flow out of a new consciousness inspired by a new awareness of the cosmos. — Judy Cannato

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos. — Tadeusz Konwicki

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself. — Thomas Nagel

We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads. The moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die
we are blighted by our knowing what is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to stride along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos. — Thomas Ligotti

It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the 'rock' bottom of the cosmos - the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness - from spirit to matter - from the highest high to the lowest low. — Lon Milo DuQuette