Many / One

A database of 11,000+ illuminated guiding quotations in 40 categories from 600+ inspired books by our most brilliant and influential authors.
Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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1		"Nicholas de Cusa called God the 'coincidence of opposites'. Actually, this is today the way the astro-physicists view the universe – it curves back in on itself like a Mobius strip, and thus has no outside, and having no outside neither does it have an inside, or, one can say its inside is its outside: the coincidence of opposites, the universe as non-dual."

2		By reflecting on one's life through the eyes of the archetypes and mythological images common to mankind, one's awareness necessarily begins to shift to a universal perspective – a transcendent, de-personal, transpersonal view. Once this process quickens, the individual is no longer exclusively identified with just his separate-self sense and hence is no longer exclusively tied to his purely personal problems."

3		"Because these (archetypal) symbols are collective or transpersonal, to touch the archetype is actually to begin to transcend oneself, to find deeply within an intimation and pointer to the deeply beyond."

4		"The harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures. Modern science and the philosophy of organism, with its integrative levels, have come back to this wisdom, fortified by new understanding of cosmic, biological, and social evolution." Joseph Needham, 'Science and Civilization in China'

5		"All things are of the One Mind." 'Awakening of Faith', a compendium of the essence of Mahayana doctrine

6		"Whether we call him Person, or Sacerdotium, or Magna Matter, or by any other grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter names, 'That' of which our powers are measures is a syzygy of conjoint principles, without composition or duality. These conjoint principles…become contraries only when we descend from the silent level of the Non-duality to speak in terms of subject and object and to recognize the many separate and individual existences that the All or Universe presents to our physical organs of perception. And since this finite totality can only be logically and not really divided from its infinite source, 'That One' can also be called an 'Integral Multiplicity' and 'Omniform Light.'" Ananda Coomaraswamy, 'Hinduism and Buddhism'

7		"The unborn timeless Mind is working in us. The Buddha-mind and our mind are not two." Bankei, quoted in 'Living by Zen' by D. T. Suzuki, Rider, 1972

8		"The real is near, you do not have to search for it;… Truth is in what IS – and that is the beauty of it." J. Krishnamurti, 'The First and Last Freedom', Quest 1954

9		"The world as unity of opposites, from the formed towards the forming, is essentially a world from present to present; the moment of the eternal present which is the unity of opposites." Kitaro Nishida, 'Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness', East-West Press 1958

10		"The psyche is a spontaneously self-organizing system."

11		"In reality, there is Mind-only, all inclusive, non-dual, the timeless ground of all temporal phenomena, fusion without confusion, a Reality without duality but not without relations."

12		"Just as all of Infinity is completely present at every point of space, so also all of eternity is completely present at every point of time. Thus, from the viewpoint of Eternity, absolutely all time is NOW, just as to the Infinite, all space is HERE."

13		"In some sense or other, this community of the actualities of the world means each happening is a factor in the nature of every other happening….We are in the world and the world is in us." Alfred N. Whitehead, 'Modes of Thought', Macmillan, 1968

14		"Self-nature is synonymous with 'Buddha-nature', which the 'Nirvana Sutra' declares is inherent in all beings, and thus seeing into one's Self-nature is nothing less than the attainment of Buddhahood."

15		"The universe is likened to a net of glittering gems, wherein each jewel contains the reflections of all other jewels, and its reflection in turn exists in all the other gems: 'one in all, all in one,' or 'unity in diversity, diversity in unity.'"

16		"Duality and the opposites are, in short, terms of relation or of thought, but not of reality."

17		"All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible….Only awake to the One Mind." Master Huang Po, 'The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. John Blofeld

18		"At each moment Nature starts upon a long, long journey and at each moment reaches her end…All is eternally present in her, for she knows neither past nor future. For her the present is eternity." Goethe, 'Fragments on Nature'

19		"Everything you observe is none other than you who are observing it."

20		"Non-dual knowledge is the abolition of all particular view points which restrict and distort reality." T. R. V. Murti, 'Central Philosophy of Buddhism'

21		"Actually there is no merging with the Center. We are always merged with the Center. It is rather an understanding of this eternal union now, and not a manufacture of it tomorrow."

22		"Our experience is contained within the depths of Divine life itself….It is not by discarding the principle of personality that the absolutely Divine One can be attained, but rather by exploring the spiritual depths of the personality which is antinomically united to the One." Nicholas Berdyaev, 'Spirit and Reality', New York 1939

23		"We may state as a characteristic of modern science that the scheme of isolable units acting in one-way-causality has proved to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of notions like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which all signify that in the last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual interaction." Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 'General Systems Theory', G. Braziller, 1968

24		"Moment without duration, point without extension – these are the Golden Mean, and inconceivably Strait Way leading out of time into eternity, from death to immortality." Ananda Coomaraswamy, 'The Bugbear of Literacy'

25		"As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existences in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body." Sir James Jeans, quoted in 'Man and the Universe, the Philosophers of Science', Commins/Linscott, ed.