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		"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.

2		"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."

3		"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.'"

4		"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'

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

6		"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'

7		"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."

8		"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."

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

10		"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

11		"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."

12		"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

13		"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)"

14		"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'

15		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."

16		"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'

17		"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."

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

19		"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'

20		"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

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

22		"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

23		"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

24		"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

25		"Mind itself is intemporal, timeless, eternal."