To be conscious to have inner experience
- Consciousness is the capacity for inner experience. Peter Russell
- Consciousness is the equivalent of subjectivity or personal experience. To be conscious is to have your own inner experience of the world. Susan Blackmore
- Consciousness underlies all experience. Eckhart Tolle
- Consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment. Sam Harris
- Experiencing is the essential ingredient of the mind, the body and the world, and Consciousness is the essential ingredient of Experiencing. Rupert Spira
- Consciousness is everything you experience. It is the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate mousse, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end. Christof Koch
- Consciousness shines in every experience. Rupert Spira
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To be conscious is to experience a series of perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings…
- Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. International Dictionary of Psychology
- All my life experiences consist of only three ingredients; namely thoughts, emotions and sense perceptions (sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations). Experiencing is the flow of these objects of perception through my awareness. Anthony Lambert
- Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind. John Locke
- Mankind are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. David Hume
- Bundle theory, Theory advanced by David Hume, argues that the mind is merely a bundle of perceptions without deeper unity or cohesion, related only by resemblance, succession, and causation. Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Life is one present play of appearances: sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, feelings, experiences, states, and other things. Scott Kiloby
- When you know what is going on in your mind, you call it consciousness. This is your waking state — your consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
- Experientially, one can only state that thoughts, feelings, images, and memories come into one’s awareness in an endless progression. David Hawkins
- Right now, you are awareness witnessing a stream of experiences. Tim Freke
- What we call the mind, is only a bundle of thoughts, passions, and emotions, without any subject. David Hume
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…a unified stream of experience…
- We may be ‘just’ bundles, but these bundles are incredibly well organised. Although fragile and loose in some ways, they are very highly unified and coherent in others. Julian Baggini
- Each moment is a tapestry of ever-changing, seamless experiencing. Everywhere you look, hear, feel, sense, touch, taste, and smell, perception is happening immediately and inseparably to awareness. Scott Kiloby
- What is birth and death but the beginning and the ending of a stream of events in consciousness? Nisargadatta Maharaj
- Our experiences happen in a stream, we each have our own stream of experiences, and we do not confuse ours with others. Dan Zahav
- What is life? Life is a stream of experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions) coming and going in the ever-present now. Anthony Lambert
- This unity of consciousness is often described in three ways, all of which are implied when consciousness is likened to a theatre or a stream of experiences. First, there is the unity of those things I am experiencing in the ‘now’— that is, at ny time some things are in my consciousness while many others are not. Those nside are called the contents of consciousness: the experiences in the stream or the show on the stage of the theatre. Second, consciousness seems unified over time in that there seems to be continuity from one moment to the next, or even across a whole lifetime. Third, these conscious contents are experienced by the same ‘me’. In other words, there is a single and continuing experiencer. Susan Blackmore
- We think that we experience ‘ten thousand things’ simultaneously, and that each of these ‘things’ comes, remains and goes in its own time, However, none of these ‘ten thousand things’ is ever actually experienced as a discrete object. The totality of our experience at any moment is a seamless whole. This seamless whole may seem to comprise a complex, compound object of mind, body and world, yet it is a cohesive, unified experience. Rupert Spira
- The sensation or cluster of sensations that is referred to as ‘the body’ seldom appears without some perception of the world as well. This conglomeration of sensations and perceptions is one seamless experience. However, Consciousness arbitrarily divides this seamless experience of sensations/perceptions into two, into sensation and perception. Rupert Spira
- We do not experience a multiplicity of objects. Two objects cannot exist at the same time. We experience ‘one thing’, a multifaceted object comprising mind, body and world, and this ‘one thing’ refers to the totality of our experience at any moment. Rupert Spira
- What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity. David Hume
- When we look at nature, at the world, we feel that we are seeing something that is real, substantial. However, the world is composed only of fleeting perceptions, arising and fading moment by moment. Rupert Spira
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…a kind of inner movie running on the screen of the mind within the cinema of consciousness…
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…a fully immersive and multi-sensory 3d movie with surround sound…
- You have ultra-clear, high definition sensory experiences running through your consciousness right now. Your life is like a totally immersive movie that has 3D vision and surround sound. You have this extraordinary movie-like world called earth to play and explore in. Aimee Davies
- Let’s think of consciousness in two different ways. There are experiences of the world around us full of sights, sounds and smells. This multi-sensory, panoramic 3D fully immersive inner movie. And then there is conscious self, the specific experience of being you or me; the lead character in this inner movie and probably the aspect of consciousness we cling to most tightly. Anil Seth
- Right now, you have a movie playing inside your head. It’s an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you’re seeing and hearing right now, but that’s just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world. This inner movie has many, many dimensions. It has the dimension of vision, it has the dimension of sound—like a normal movie—but it also has touch, and taste, and smell. It has emotions, it has thought, it has a sense of one’s body. All of this is subjective experience. And it’s one of the most familiar facts in the world that we have this subjective experience, but it’s also one of the most mysterious. Why is it that these physical processes in the brain should produce subjective experience? Why doesn’t it go on in the dark without any consciousness at all? No one right now knows the answer to this question. David Chalmers
- This inner movie has many, many dimensions. It has the dimension of vision, it has the dimension of sound—like a normal movie—but it also has touch, and taste, and smell. It has emotions, it has thought, it has a sense of one’s body. All of this is subjective experience. And it’s one of the most familiar facts in the world that we have this subjective experience, but it’s also one of the most mysterious. Why is it that these physical processes in the brain should produce subjective experience? Why doesn’t it go on in the dark without any consciousness at all? No one right now knows the answer to this question. David Chalmers
- I love a real-life movie moment in living color. L’Wren Scott
- Real life is not like a movie. Even the best movies, the most rich, fleshed-out movies are not as rich and nuanced as detailed as real life or an actual human being. Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- Humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world… The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. Alexandra Horowitz
- The Earth school is not a concept. It is an ongoing 3-dimesional, full colour, hi-fidelity, interactive multi-media experience that does not end until your soul goes home (until you die). Gary Zukav
- Usually, when you go to a movie, your consciousness floats above the film. 3D sucks you in and makes it a visceral experience. James Cameron
- The cinema of the future will no longer be a visual art, but an art of consciousness. Morton Heilig
My life is a completely immersive movie that has 3-D vision and surround sound. The world I experience in this movie is a virtual reality world made of perception; not matter. In this sense, the world I experience is no more physically real than the world that Leo initially experiences in “The Matrix”. Anthony Lambert
- You move in this world with this body and experience and yet you know all this happens in the theatre of consciousness, all of this is happening on the screen of consciousness. But this is a 3 dimensional screen, not a flat screen. It has depth and time and lots of space and feeling. You are playing in your own movie and at the same time you are an audience to it. Mooji
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…a movie that is projected beyond us to appear as a convincing outside world…
- If all that we see ‘out there’ is just electromagnetic radiation, with no colour or brightness, why do we see that image out there? That is to say, why aren’t we aware of the fact that the actual image which our mind created is in our mind? Since the image is created in our mind, why don’t we see it like a projection on a screen in a cinema within the mind? Somehow our mind is very adept at creating the illusion that the overlay is outside itself. Scott Owen
- Existence is a projection from the inner through the brain producing the outer sensory world of what is an amazing complete mystery. Barry Long
- There is no world outside. It is what we project outside. Swami Turyananda
- All objects of the body, mind and world – that is, all thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions – appear equally within our self, aware Presence. However, thought exclusively identifies our self with the body and mind and, as a result, the world is projected outside, at a distance from our self, which is now considered to be ‘inside’. Rupert Spira
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…a movie that also includes thoughts, emotions and sensations…
- What makes the brain really special is not its complicated function. It is what may deserve to be called our biggest scientific surprise: the brain’s performing these various functions is accompanied by an amazing “inner movie”. Each of us is intimately familiar with this movie: it contains our visual field, our tactile experience, and all of our other sensory experiences. The movie captures what it is like to have these sensory experiences from the first-person perspective. But this is not all: curious as it may sound, the movie also captures our thoughts and the content of our imagination. We know what imagining being on Mount Everest feels like and we know what calculating the sum of 2+2 feels like simply from enjoying this inner movie. We also know our own moods and emotions this way. We don’t have to look in a mirror to see whether we are sad, we simply feel it; it is part of our subjective inner movies. These elements of our inner movies do not come as individual fragments, they come in groups or packages we usually call subjects. The fact that our experiences are bound together and grouped in such a way is usually called the unity of consciousness. Jonathan Erhardt
- If you stopped the film of your mind and sliced off one frame, it would include the visual images of your physical surroundings, but it would also include the entire contents of your mind (conscious and subconscious) at that given moment. One’s single frame might include foundational beliefs like, “I am human. I am a male (or female). I am successful. I am a failure. Life is not fair. Money is bad. That person is mean. This person is nice. And on and on deep into the subconscious mind.” These are the inner ideas, beliefs and imaginings that are projected out as one’s reality. Robin Sal
- Witnessing the process of a character’s mental functioning leads to an intimacy with his enigmatic idiosyncrasies. This privileged acquaintance between character and spectator (which other characters in the film do not share) carries added values of dramatic irony, empathy and a deeper penetration into the character’s inner life. Didier Debaise
- Our consciousness is like light, and the contents of our minds–our thoughts– are like the film we run through the projector of our imaginations. Roger Stephens
- Thoughts are like a movie that plays in front of your eyes. Are you the watcher of the movie or one of the characters on the screen? Remez Sasson
- The “cosmic motion picture” is true not only to two human senses, sight and hearing, but to all five. It is presented to us three-dimensionally and includes the illusion of smell, taste, and touch. And yet, just as the light emanating from the projection booth produces mere images of reality, so also does God’s light produce mere appearances. Swami Kriyananda
- Consciousness is an inner movie that includes not just visual and auditory perceptions but also thought, emotion and sensations. Part of the movie is projected outside of us to appear as a convincing outer world. Anthony Lambert
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…as well as memories and imagined images
- A chief cause of unhappiness is what I call mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theatre playing a horrible movie. Vernon Howard
- There are some [experiences] that… replay themselves on a loop in your mind’s home-theatre system with Dolby surround sound. Kevin Hearne
- There are some sights that, once seen, can never be unseen. They replay themselves on a loop in your mind’s home-theatre system with Dolby surround sound until you’re so desperate to be rid of them that you’ll resort to other loops simply to dislodge them for a while. Kevin Hearne
- There is a sense of identity, but it is the identity of a memory track, like the identity of a sequence of pictures on the ever-present screen. Without the light and the screen there can be no picture. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen, gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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Our consciousness can be compared to a movie screen…
- Consciousness is like a movie screen that is infinitely expanded and is aware. It is aware of images appearing on it. Rupert Spira
- The aware screen of pure knowing or being aware is watching the movie of experience that is playing upon it. Rupert Spira
- The mirror of Consciousness is the screen on which everything is experienced, and at the same time it is that which experiences everything. Rupert Spira
- The state of being is permanent and the body and the world are not. They are fleeting phenomena passing on the screen of being-consciousness which is eternal and stationary. Ramana Maharshi
- Perception appears on the screen of the mind. Anthony Lambert
- This world that we live in is really the movie screen of your mind. Maria Portas
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…existing within a movie theatre in our brain
- The Cartesian theater is what remains of Cartesian dualism after the immaterial mind is removed. Dennett envisions it as a tiny theater in your brain in which your observing self — your little homunculus — sits watching the show that your brain provides of your sensations, perceptions, images, memories, intellection, etc., presented on stage for you to experience. It is nice metaphor for the Lockean Causal Theory of Perception — for the theory that what you actually perceive is the perception in your brain, not the object of your perception in the real world. Michael Egnor
If we perceive the moon in the Cartesian theater, we merely perceive an image of it, metaphorically projected on a screen to be viewed by the homunculus in our brain. We never actually perceive the moon itself — we merely watch the matinee produced by our brain and organs of sense. Michael Egnor
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…or a canvas on which our perceptions are painted
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Like a movie, our stream of consciousness appears seamless but actually consist of discrete snapshots like a movie
- Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie? Christof Koch
- Just like watching a movie at the cinema, where the film is projected from a series of pictures on a reel, our brains perceive time in similar static slices processed into a seamless stream. Ryan O’Hare
- We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images. Michael Herzog
- We have the feeling that we experience the world like a continuously sampled data stream. If we perceive multiple objects of events seemingly at the same time, we may actually be multiplexing the several data streams; that is, we take a sample from one data stream, switch to take a sample from the next stream and so on—all on a millisecond time scale. But another possibility is that we perceive objects and events like a movie frame, where the brain takes working-memory snapshots and plays them in succession. Like still frames in a movie, if played at a high-enough speed, the frames will blend in our mind to give the illusion of continuous monitoring. William R. Klemm Ph.D.
- Our brains constantly process information fed in from our senses to build a picture of the world around us, and our place in it. But a new study suggests that rather than a smooth flow, we actually process information in small chunks of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between. Ryan O’Hare
- Consciousness is basically like a movie. We think we see the world as it is, there are no gaps, there is nothing in between, but that cannot really be true. Change cannot be perceived immediately. It can only be perceived after it has happened. Michael Herzog
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Why do we have inner movies when it could just as easily all happen in the dark?
- Consciousness is the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren’t we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I’m going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed. David Chalmers
- Why is it that all the physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? David Chalmers
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