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

SHOW detailed search and navigation | Quotes | References | JoAnn

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		"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'

3		"This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity; And this body is the body of Buddha." Hakuin

4		"Know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never really be ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance." 'The Spiritual Teaching of Romano Maharshi', Berkeley 1972

5		"The archetypes…are the first point where our formless or seamless organismic consciousness starts to take on an animate form."

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

7		"I venture to call it (Mind) indestructible since it has a peculiar time-table, namely Mind is always Now. There is really no before and after for Mind." Erwin Schroedinger, 'What is Life? And Mind and Matter'

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

9		"There is thus an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many. Such are the beginnings and endings of worlds and of individual beings: expanded from a point without position or dimensions and a now without date or duration." Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

10		"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'

11		"This sensation of being one with the universe is much more common than one might initially suspect, for it is the very foundation of all other sensations."

12		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."

13		"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.'"

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

15		"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."

16		"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

17		"The unconscious is that immortal sea which brought us hither; intimations of which are given in moments of 'oceanic feeling'; one sea of energy or instinct, embracing all mankind, without distinction of race, language, or culture; and embracing all the generations, past, present, and future, in one mystical body." Norman O. Brown, 'Love's Body', Vintage 1966

18		"Every thing simultaneously includes all (other things) in perfect completion, without the slightest deficiency or omission, at all times. To see one object is, therefore, to see all objects, and vice versa. This is to say a tiny individual particle within the minute cosmos of an atom actually contains the infinite objects and principles in the infinite universes of the future and of the remote past in the perfect completeness without omission." Chang, 'Buddhist Teaching of Totality'

19		"All temporal succession coincides in one and the same Eternal Now. So there is nothing past or future." Nicolas de Cusa, 'The Vision of God', ch. X

20		"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

21		"The Seer, the That in you which knows, in actuality is not separate from what it sees – it IS what it sees, for the Knower sees a thing by being that thing, as St. Thomas Aquinas stated, 'Knowledge comes about in so far as the object known is within the knower.' (Summa Theologica I, q. 59, a. 2)"

22		"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."

23		"Each instant our Energy is constantly rising from 'below', from the Level of Mind, where it is pure, informal, non-objective, timeless and spaceless Energy that operates Now in a moment without duration."

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

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