“Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.
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Pearl Baby (p. 211)Robert Charles Wilson
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Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words "conscious" or "consciousness" in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means "consciousness" in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness.
P. D. Ouspensky
It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.
Peter Singer
The higher dimension of religion has also always been practiced by a relatively few uncommon individuals. Indeed, it was largely the response to the more conventional or superficial aspects of such extraordinary personalities that produced the great cultic movements of exoteric religion among the masses. But such cultic movements are created by and designed for the instruction and social improvement of ordinary people, not men and women of the more highly evolved or awakened type. Therefore, alongside the development of exoteric religions there have always been secret societies and esoteric groups founded on practice of higher personal, moral, and biologically evolutionary disciplines.
Adi Da
The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language, the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds.
William Ralph Inge
Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck originally evolved for this purpose. The neck may have first lengthened in context of a different use, and then been coopted for better dining when giraffes moved into the open plains. Or the neck may have evolved to perform several functions at once. We cannot learn the reasons for historical origin simply by listing current uses.
Stephen Jay Gould
Wilson, Robert Charles
Wilson, Robert Woodrow
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