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		"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

2		"The Will….is a three-dimensional act of the total organism to globally move in time towards some future end….The Will itself is an act of the person's total being. The Will is a moving prehension. It is an intentionality."

3		"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

4		"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.'"

5		"The very root 'layer' of the unconscious is the universe itself. The sun, moon, and stars, the mountains, clouds, and waters, even the cars, planes, and trains: these truly are some of the 'contents' of our base unconscious."

6		"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.

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

8		"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

9		"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."

10		"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'

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

12		"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."

13		"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'

14		"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

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

16		"Mythological imagery springs from the collective unconscious, the transconscious, and it is therefore not contaminated by merely social conventions, language, logic, or the illusions of any particvular cult or individual. Furthermore, the language of mythology is associative and integrative, and…hence it more clearly and truly reflects the actual physical reality of the seamless coat of the universe, of the mutual interdependence and interpenetration of all things and events."

17		"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

18		"The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings." Huang Po (Bloefield, 'Zen Teachings of Huang Po')

19		"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'

20		"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'

21		"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

22		"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

23		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."

24		"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'

25		"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."