#consc

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate. ↗

— Christopher Janaway

#desire #determinism #free-will #pleasure #satisfaction

some of the happiest moments of my life have occurred just before I fall asleep or wake up, when I linger in that twilight world between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a state of somnolent repose but also savoring the vital goodness of remaining this close to the vegetative in myself ↗

— Irving Singer

#harmony #intellect #nature #repose #sleep

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life. Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too. A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#life #loss #sacrifice #life

What is seen by mind, is an environmental image that projected by public consciousness in vicinity. ↗

— Toba Beta

#projected-image #public-consciousness #environmentalism

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. ↗

— Steven Biko

#black #call #consciousness #emanate #life

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this! ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#did #freud #functions #know #knowledge

Strangers still leave me self-conscious. ↗

— Alan Ladd

#me #self-conscious #still #strangers

I've never seen a truly great fighter get knocked onto the ropes unconscious... knocked out cold before... and I saw Roy Jones get knocked out twice in a row. ↗

— Jim Lampley

#cold #fighter #get #great #i

There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things. ↗

— Mike Leigh

#consciousness #constant #drip #goes #into

The inner world is very potent for me - I don't ascribe to any God or Jesus or Buddha - I just have a sense of it and revere it along with the natural world and human consciousness. ↗

— Annie Lennox

#any #ascribe #buddha #consciousness #god