“Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached "reality"; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion].”
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Helena Petrovna Blavatsky69
occult writer 1831–1891Related quotes
Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor
Quote of Naum Gabo, 1950; as cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 31
1936 - 1977
Stanisław Lem book Solaris
Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 6: "The Little Apocrypha", p. 72
Context: We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are seaching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.
Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist
Source: Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (1984), p. 293.
Robert Greene (1959) American author
Chap. 8 : Change Your Circumstances by Changing Your Attitude
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)
Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy
Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege...
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 23, William Haussmann translation
Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques
Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 4 : The Quest for Power, p. 43
Context: While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.
“We only see shadows of reality. We shouldn't expect those shadows to behave sensibly.”
Lawrence M. Krauss (1954) American physicist
Source: Paraphrased from a response to an audience questions at FREEOK 2013 Lawrence Krauss The Higgs and the Story of Science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iPZNgzi9Aw