Peter Russell > Quotes

“We have been conditioned since birth with the belief that satisfaction of these inner needs comes through our interaction with the world. We seek inner fulfillment through what we have or what we do, through the experiences the world provides, and through the ways others behave toward us. This is the meme that governs so much of our thinking and behavior: the meme that says whether or not we are content with life depends on what we have and what we do. Prevalent as this meme may be, it seldom provides any lasting satisfaction. A person may gather a great deal of wealth, but is he really more secure? More than likely, he will soon find new sources of insecurity. Are my investments safe? Will the stock market crash? Can I trust my friends? Should I employ “security” companies to protect my possessions?”
― Peter Russell, Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change

“Free won’t is true freedom of will. Freedom from the will of ego-mind.”
― Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature

“The materialistic consciousness of our culture … is the root cause of the global crisis; it is not our business ethics, our politics or even our personal lifestyles. These are symptoms of a deeper underlying problem. Our whole civilization is unsustainable. And the reason that it is unsustainable is that our value system, the consciousness with which we approach the world, is an unsustainable mode of consciousness.”
― Peter Russell

“This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.”
― Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature

“The freedom to choose not to choose. Choosing nothing instead of something.”
― Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature

“Art is long, life is short’, goes the old adage, and arranging a limited number of paintings to represent the numerous developments and styles of Western art is by all standards a Herculean task.”
― Peter Russell, The History of Art in 50 Paintings

“Our assumption that we are directly interacting with physical reality closely parallels the way we respond to the image on a computer screen. Moving a computer’s mouse appears to move the cursor around the screen. In reality, the mouse is sending a stream of data to the central processor, which calculates a new position for the cursor and then updates the image on the screen. In early computers there was a noticeable delay between issuing a command and seeing the effects on the screen. Today computers are so fast they can recalculate the image on a screen in a fraction of a second, and there is no visible delay between the movement of the mouse and the cursor on the screen. We experience moving the cursor across the screen. Our experience of daily life is similar. When I kick a stone, my intention to move my foot is communicated to my body, and my foot in the physical world moves to meet the physical stone. But I do not experience the interaction directly. The brain receives the information sent back by the eyes and body and updates my image of reality appropriately.”
― Peter Russell, From Science to God: A Physicist s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness