A Quote by Rollo May
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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The cognitive structure does not generate consciousness; it simply reflects it; and in the process limits and embellishes it. In a fundamental sense, consciousness is the source of our awareness. In other words, consciousness is not merely awareness as manifest in different forms but it is also what makes awareness possible.
Consciousness comes first; it is the ground of all being. Everything else, including matter, is a possibility of consciousness. And consciousness chooses out of these possibilities all the events we experience.
All speech, action and behavior are fluctuations of consciousness. All life emerges from, and is sustained in, consciousness. The whole universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion.
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
The history of human consciousness is marked by the battle between the old awareness, the ways of fear, and the new awareness, the ways of love.
As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.
What if consciousness is the ground of being? What if the possibilities discovered by quantum physics are the possibilities of consciousness itself? Remember there is already a class of people who think in this way. They are called mystics, and they say it is all God. Finally, a few scientists dared to say that some of the characteristics attributed to God are similar to what we describe as consciousness.
There is always tension between the possibilities we aspire to and our wounded memories and past mistakes.
It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.
Consciousness is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of consciousness, but awareness is beyond all--being as well as not-being.
When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen,
in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment;
fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness?
Well, that's what naturally peaceful awareness is.
Transcendental meditation is one particular form of mantra meditation that allows your mind to experience progressively abstract fields of awareness. And ultimately you settle down in the space between your thoughts. The space between your thoughts is pure consciousness, and it's a field of possibilities. It's a field of creativity. It's a field of correlation. It's also a field of uncertainty. It's also a field where intention actualizes its own fulfillment. So that meditation allows you to contact this field, which is very primordial - the ground state of our existence.
Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.
Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being its theory intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.
In our view any awareness is an increment to consciousness, an added light, a reinforcement of psychic coherence. Its swiftness or instantaneity can hide this growth from us. But there is a growth of being in every instance of awareness. Consciousness is in itself an act, the human act.
In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.
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