“Kia cannot be experienced directly because it is the basis of consciousness (or experience), and it has no fixed qualities which the mind can latch on to.”

—  Peter J. Carroll

Source: Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987), p. 28
Context: Kia cannot be experienced directly because it is the basis of consciousness (or experience), and it has no fixed qualities which the mind can latch on to. Kia is the consciousness, it is the elusive "I" which confers self-awareness but does not seem to consist of anything itself. Kia can sometimes be felt as ecstasy or inspiration, but it is deeply buried in the dualistic mind. It is mostly trapped in the aimless wanderings of thought and in the identification with experience and in that cluster of opinions about ourselves called ego. Magic is concerned with giving the Kia more freedom and flexibility and with providing means by which it can manifest its occult power. Kia is capable of occult power because it is a fragment of the great life force of the universe.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Kia cannot be experienced directly because it is the basis of consciousness (or experience), and it has no fixed qualit…" by Peter J. Carroll?
Peter J. Carroll photo
Peter J. Carroll45
British occultist 1953

Related quotes

“To be conscious is to be consciousness: Consciousness, the knower in you, cannot be known, although it can be experienced. You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Mooji photo

“What we are is consciousness. The body is the vehicle through which consciousness can taste experiencing. And in the human form, consciousness has the capacity and opportunity to realise its own source and thus come into a direct experience of this.”

Mooji (1954) Jamaican spiritual teacher

Greater than Sky, Vaster than Space, (2018), Part I

“One can only remember what has been consciously experienced.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Source: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

Alan Moore photo

“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.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.

“The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what, for the writer, has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Emanuel Tov photo

“To a large extent textual evaluation cannot be bound by any fixed rules. It is an art in the full sense of the word, a faculty which can be developed, guided by intuition based on wide experience.”

Emanuel Tov (1941) Israeli biblical scholar and linguist

The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (1997), p.232

Vyasa photo

“The pain which has passed away has been spent up by experience. It cannot, therefore, fall within the sphere of avoidable. And that which is present, is being experienced at the time of its existence; it cannot, therefore, be considered as the avoidable with reference to the future movement of time. Hence that pain alone which has not yet been experienced, troubles the Yogi who is sensitive as the eye-ball; it does not trouble any other knower. Hence that alone is avoidable pain.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 124.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Eckhart Tolle photo

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Mata Amritanandamayi photo

“Jivanmukti is not something to be attained after death, nor is it to be experienced or bestowed upon you in another world. It is a state of perfect awareness and equanimity, which can be experienced here and now in this world, while living in the body. Having come to experience the highest truth of oneness with the Self, such blessed souls do not have to be born again. They merge with the infinite consciousness.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Timeless Path (2009)

David Chalmers photo

“The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods…. The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect…. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.”

David Chalmers (1966) Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist

"Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," 1995

Related topics