‘A Talk to Teachers’ is emblematic of Baldwin’s proclivity for candor over political appeasement and, like much of his work, focusses on history and the American consciousness.
I think that will be a lot of fun for audiences to get the same stream of consciousness that was going through my head at the time. It was very exciting to suddenly recall what I was feeling at the time.
If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn’t understand consciousness. We wouldn’t even understand turbulence.
Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.
I think because people are passing – people that we are aware of are passing at – I don’t say a great pace, but it seems like people are dropping, and I think it’s just making – there’s a consciousness and there’s sensitivity to it.
I’m putting my consciousness towards trying to teach people through pictures and sculptures that there’s something better in the world. That’s what the world needs more of.
In fiction, you don’t invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.
I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ – I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the ’40s and ’50s.
‘Hamlet’ is so modern; ‘Coriolanus’ is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us.
Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.
Someone who’s awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
It seems like the chaos of this world is accelerating, but so is the beauty in the consciousness of more and more people.
My parents realized the dangers of raising a daughter in a social, political, and legal climate that was growing increasingly oppressive toward women and girls. Although they fled to London when I was just three weeks old, the challenges facing women’s rights in Iran became ingrained in my social consciousness.
People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: ‘How can anyone NOT be interested in it?’ Everything you call ‘human nature’ and consciousness arises from it.
There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.
If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.
The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.
This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
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.
The addictive pleasure of abandoning yourself to a book, of losing consciousness of your worries, your body, and your surroundings, to become a ghost haunting other worlds has influenced me in many ways.
I know that you are part of me and I am part of you because we are all aspects of the same infinite consciousness that we call God and Creation.
I’m increasingly realising our consciousness and subconsciousness are extremely different, and our subconsciousness motivates us, but so far, I don’t know what drove or motivates me.
Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.
As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.
A journal of the ‘subjective’ kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.
My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50.
For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we’ve thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
We must recognize and keep in the public consciousness the significant contributions and sacrifices Americans of every community have made that have helped forge the greatest country our world has ever known.
Everybody has a high point and a lot goes into that: timing, situation, general consciousness.
Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits – and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine my subject to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of the multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us toward consciousness evolution.
Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it’s kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I’m concerned. So is there an energy that’s higher than mine? Yes.
The Natural Law which God has written into our beings cannot be entirely eradicated, but it can be gravely deformed, leading to distortion of consciousness and conscience, and hence our actions.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
I know there’s a consciousness energy that operates completely independent of the physical body you inhabit, that maintains… awareness after the body’s gone.
Consciousness is a disease.
Religion is a huge part of our consciousness. I grew up in the Bible Belt, so it’s our mythology. Those are the stories we learn as little kids at Sunday school. I’m not afraid to use the metaphors, because I think the stories are beautiful.
Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby’s large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness.
Our courts’ decisions do not permeate the public consciousness – we have no equivalent of the Brown v Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation, or of Roe v Wade, which enshrined a woman’s right to choose not just into law but into the public imagination as well.
It’s after dark that I feel most inspired, I’m a nocturnal creature. I’ll write poetry or streams of consciousness, play instruments, or teach myself to DJ by doing a silent solo set.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
To be successful in struggle requires remembrance of the Creator and the doing of good deeds. This is important because successful struggle demands that there be a kind of social consciousness. There has to be a social commitment, a social consciousness that joins men together.
The human being is flesh and consciousness, body and soul; his heart is an abyss which can only be filled by that which is godly.
I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.
What happens is consciousness operates in mysterious ways. One of those ways is that the old paradigm suddenly starts to die.
