Carlos Castaneda Quotes

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.

Your perception of the world is ... really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true.

What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

The senses don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

How we see the world changes all the time. It all depends on our mood.

I think that you really get what you recognize is in the universe.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.