“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein
"...I and the Father are one... Before Abraham was, Iam."
Jesus of Nazareth
Who is God ? I can think of no better answer than. He who is. Nothing is more appropriate to the eternity which God is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, or anything else of this sort, it is included in these words, namely, He is.
St. Bernard
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is mystery”
Albert Einstein
The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content;
nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.
Goethe
He knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. 'I' was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Psalms 103:14, 139:15
“The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to 'die to self and so make room, as it were, for God…”
“So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about…”
Huxley then goes on to end with;
“This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That.”
Aldous Huxley
Foregoing self, the universe grows 'I'
Sir Edwin Arnold
One of the greatest favors bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly that it cannot comprehend God at all. These souls are herein somewhat like the saints in heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incom- prehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so clearly as do these others how greatly He transcends their vision.
St. John of the Cross
When I came out of the Godhead into multiplicity, then all things proclaimed, * There is a God' (the personal Creator). Now this cannot make me blessed, for hereby I realize myself as creature. But in the breaking through I am more than all creatures; I am neither God nor creature ; I am that which I was and shall re- main, now and for ever more. There I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. By this thrust I become so rich that God is not sufficient for me, in so far as He is only God in his divine works. For in thus breaking through, I perceive what God and I are in common. There I am what I was. There I neither increase nor decrease. For there I am the immovable which moves all things. Here man has won again what he is eternally and ever shall be. Here God is received into the soul.
Eckhart
The Godhead gave all things up to God. The Godhead is poor, naked and empty as though it were not; it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though it were not.
Eckhart
O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state (the *intermediate state* immediately following death, in which the soul is judged or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after-life it shall have). In this Bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or centre. At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state. I, too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.
The Tibetan Book Dead
Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not- image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothing- ness to nothingness.
Eckhart
The significance of Brahman is expressed by neti neti (not so, not so) ; for beyond this, that you say it is not so, there is nothing further. Its name, however, is 'the
Reality of reality.' That is to say, the senses are real, and the Brahman is their Reality.
Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad
The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscur- ity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of trans- cendent beauty. . . .
We long exceedingly to dwell in this trans- lucent darkness and, through not seeing and not knowing, to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge d by the very fact of neither seeing Him nor knowing Him. For this is truly to see and to know and, through the abandonment of all things, to praise Him who is beyond and above all things. For this is not unlike the art of those who carve a life-like image from stone: removing from around it all that impedes clear vision of the latent form, revealing its hidden beauty solely by taking away. For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise Him by taking away than by ascription; for we ascribe attributes to Him, when we start from universals and come down through the intermediate to the particulars. But here we take away all things from Him going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.
Dionysius the Areopagite
Meanwhile, I beseech you by the eternal and imperishable truth, and by my soul, consider ; grasp the unheard-of. God and God- head are as distinct as heaven and earth. Heaven stands a thou- sand miles above the earth, and even so the Godhead is above God. God becomes and disbecomes. Whoever understands this preaching, I wish him well. But even if nobody had been here, I must still have preached this to the poor-box.
Eckhart
There is a distinction and differentiation, according to our reason, between God and the Godhead, between action and rest. The fruitful nature of the Persons ever worketh in a living differentia- tion. But the simple Being of God, according to the nature thereof, is an eternal Rest of God and of all created things.
Ruysbroeck
(In the Reality unitively known by the mystic), we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Per- sons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the Godhead is in simple essence without activity. Ruysbroeck The holy light of faith is so pure that, compared with it, par- ticular lights are but impurities ; and even ideas ofthe saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in His purity.
J. J. Olier
Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not- image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothing- ness to nothingness.
Eckhart
“Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit”
(Called or uncalled, God is present.)
Desiderius Erasmus
"Universal Spirit by Self-contemplation evolves Universal Substance. From this it produces cosmic creation as the expression of Itself as functioning in Space and Time. Then, from this initial movement, it proceeds to more highly specialised modes of Self-contemplation in a continually ascending scale, for the simple reason that Self-contemplation admits of no limits, and therefore each stage of Self-recognition cannot be other than the starting-point for a still more advanced mode of Self-contemplation, and so on ad infinitum."
Thomas Troward.
“Fundamentally not one thing exists”
Huineng (The sixth Patriarch)
All matter is created out of some imperceptible substratum . . . nothingness, unimaginable and undetectable. But it is a particular form of nothingness out of which all matter is created.
Paul Dirac
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the mystical female.
The door of the mystical female is the root of heaven and earth.
It seems to be continuously within us.
Use it, and it will never fail.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 6
Translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English
Man is not the body. The heart, the spirit, is man.
And this spirit is an entire star, out of which,
he is built. If therefore a man is perfect in his
heart, nothing in the whole light of nature is hidden from him.
Paracelsus
“We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art”
Henry James
"And so, for the first time in my life perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seemed clear, I went down into my inmost self to the deepest abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came — arising I know not from where — the current which I dare to call my life”
Tielhard De chardin
“When form matter and energy are present, but not yet separate we call this separate… if one looks there is nothing to see, if one listens there is nothing to hear…”
I Ching “Chen”
The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of sub-stance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. For example, cow and horse belong to the category of substance. He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. White and black belong to the category of quality. Having money orpossessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity, because it is without activity 'at rest, without parts or activity,' according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is 'without a second' and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the ‘One before whom words recoil’.
Shankara
He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all.
The Upanishads
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