Consciousness is the light from the movie projector

• The faculty of consciousness can be likened to the light from a film projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience—what I call the “forms of consciousness.” The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness. We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself.  Peter Russell
• In reality things are done to you, not by you. Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfilment or non-fulfilment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Neither is by you and for you. All is in the picture exposed on the cinema screen, nothing in the light, including what you take yourself to be, the person. You are the light only.   Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Q: If I am light only, how did I come to forget it?  M: You have not forgotten. It is in the picture on the screen that you forget and then remember.You never cease to be a man because you dream to be a tiger. Similarly you are pure light appearing as a picture on the screen and also becoming one with it.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• When you do not take yourself to be the body, then the family life of the body, however intense and interesting, is seen only as a play on the screen of the mind, with the light of awareness as the only reality.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Light can not be exhausted even if innumerable pictures are projected by it.  So does life fill every shape to the brim and return to its source, when the shape breaks down.  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Just like in a cinema all is light, so does consciousness become the vast world.  Look closely, and you will see that all names and forms are but transitory waves on the ocean of consciousness, that only consciousness can be said to be, not its transformations.  Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

To change your world, change the projector (mind), not the screen (world)

• Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.   Byron Katie
• Our minds project our memories, beliefs, thoughts, judgements, fears and desires onto the world.  To change the world, change the projector, not the screen.  Anthony Lambert
•  I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me.  A Course in Miracles
• It is neither necessary, nor possible to change others. But if you can change yourself you will find that no other change is needed. To change the picture you merely change the film, you do not attack the cinema screen!  Nisargadatta Maharaj
• These are all just thoughts. ‘Your’ complaints have nothing to do with reality. ‘Your’ complaints make up the story of ‘you.’ This story is projected outwards, just as a movie projector projects a movie onto a blank screen. Scott Kiloby
• The mechanism of perception is like a movie theater where the projector is consciousness itself. The forms on the film are the attractor energy patterns, and the moving pictures on the screen are the world that we perceive and call “reality.” We could say that the configurations on the film are the ABC attractor fields in mind and the moving picture on the screen is the A→B→C observed as the phenomenal world.   Because the world routinely applies its efforts to the screen of life at the level of A→B→C, these endeavors are ineffectual and costly.   David R. Hawkins

.

A movie analogy – by Barry Long

• Existence is a projection – just like in a cinema where the frames of film are projected singly and rapidly onto a screen by an intense focus of light behind the film.
  Each image on the ‘film’ of existence is a minute part of the whole idea of existence held in God’s unmoving intellect.
  The screen is an indefinable substance or material called sensory matter.
  The intensity of light carrying the image to the screen is God’s supreme light of intelligence, the inner sun behind all.
  And the apparent movement of the images on the screen is due to the speed of the projecting mechanism – God’s mind.
  Thus does God’s stationary intellect, through God’s ever-moving mind, present the unending dramas, romance and mystery of the earth and everything on it – certainly the greatest movie ever made, and always showing.
  The impulse in everyone and everything is to return to the source, to get back to the divine light from which we are all projected. And the great unending movie of existence is that infinitely slow process happening in timeless time.