A Secret History of Consciousness Quotes

“Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, René Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wilson's The Outsider—the list could go on.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“In introspection, in observing and analyzing consciousness, there is the consciousness we observe and the consciousness that does the observing.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“Scientists, Moskvitin points out, will not be happy with this observation, because they want to get at the source of “the real world,” which they believe is the world they see, and pin it down once and for all. But they cannot do this because, “There will forever remain an unknown zone of ultimate causation, created by, and coinciding with that in ourselves that will forever remain unknown—the blind spot in the mind.”4”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“Moskvitin writes, “It is absurd . . . to look for an absolute cause, a source, of our existence in a world the appearance of which depends on the existence of a spectator which is exactly ourselves. . . . What is perceived can never be the perceiver.” A flashlight can never shine on itself; it can illuminate everything but its own source of light. The attempt to illuminate itself can only lead to an infinite regress.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“There were, Gödel proposed, no absolutely closed systems. There is always something in the system that points to what is beyond it. In the simplest instance we can readily see that we cannot, say, use logic to validate logic, because to do so we would have to assume the validity of what we are trying to validate. The axioms of logic cannot prove themselves. Moskvitin says something similar about the relation of the mind to itself and to the universe, and what he says seems a strong argument against there ever being an explanation of consciousness in strictly materialist terms.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“The content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our minds. . . . We receive from reality only the empty forms.”8 When neuroscientists observe the brain and its chemical reactions—the physical basis of thought—they are also observing their own thought. Consciousness is there, because it is only through consciousness that any observation can take place: we can never get at some “purely” material stuff, because any such stuff would of necessity be part of our mental world. Matter itself is an idea.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“Henri Bergson and the psychologist William James—were deeply”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness

“The world of space and time is not, then, an illusion; it is merely a limited perception, something altogether different. If we assume that what we see of the world is limited by our understanding of space and time, and that these limits are not necessarily fixed, we can use our existing perceptions as starting points for deeper, more inclusive ones. Rather than bemoan our separation from a reality we can never know, and hence make no efforts to know it, we can begin to develop our powers of perception, and try our best to grasp something of the mystery of the world.”
― Gary Lachman, A Secret History of Consciousness