Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you.

The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.

It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.

Once you begin deliberating about where your fingers are jumping on the piano keyboard, you can no longer pull off the piece.