The holy person of our time, it seems, is not a figure like Gotama or Jesus or Mohammed, a person who could found a world religion, but a figure like Gandhi, a person who passes over by sympathetic understanding from one’s own religion to other religions and comes back again with new insight to one’s own. Passing over and coming back, so it seems, is the spiritual adventure of our time.
John S. Dunne, The Way Of All The Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion, “Preface,” Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978, p. ix, ISBN: 0-268-01928-2
Christ could be born
a thousand times in Galilee --
but all in vain
until He is born in me.
Angelus Silesius (Translator: Frederick Franck)
That art thou
Tat tvam asi
The Chandogya Upanishad
That in whom reside all beings and who resides in all beings, who is the giver of grace to all, the Supreme soul of the universe, the limitless being -- I am that.
Amritbindu Upanishad
If the believer understood the meaning of the saying 'the colour of the water is the colour of the receptacle', he would admit the validity of all beliefs and he would recognise God in every form and every object of faith.
Ibn 'Arabi in Fusûs al-Hikam
It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.
Ibn 'Arabi in Futûhât al-Makkiyya
The movement which is the existence of the universe is the movement of love.
Ibn 'Arabi, Fusûs al-Hikam
Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and the most central part of thy soul. The natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity - I had almost said the Infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the Infinity of God.
William Law
God within and God without - these are two abstract notions, which can be entertained and expressed in words. But the facts to which these notions refer cannot be realized and experienced except in the 'deepest and the most central part of thy soul'. And this is true no less for God without than for God within. Though the two abstract notions have to be realized (to use a spatial metaphor) in the same place, the intrinsic nature of the realization of God within is qualitatively different from that of the realization of God without, and each in turn is different from that of the realization of the Ground as simultaneously within and without - as the Self of the perceiver and at the same time (in the words of the Bhagvad-Gita) as 'That by which all this world is pervaded'.
Aldous Huxley's commentary on the above quote of William Law in "The Perennial Philosophy"
The man who wishes to know the 'That' which is 'thou' may set to work in one of the three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and by a process of 'dying to self' - self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling - come at last to a knowledge of the Self, the Kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside of him, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.
...see all things, not in the process of becoming, but in Being, and see themselves in the other. Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore, All is everywhere. Each is there All, and All is each. Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. But when he ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world.
Aldous Huxley's commentary on the Svetaketu story in "The Perennial Philosophy"
The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more He is without.
Eckhart
The Atman is that by which the universe is pervaded, but which nothing pervades; which causes all things to shine, but which all things cannot make to shine.
Shankara
The nature of the one Reality must be known by one's own clear perception; it cannot be known through a pundit (learned man). Similarly the form of the moon can only be known through one's own eyes. How can it be known through others?"
Shankara
Liberation cannot be achieved except by the perception of the identity of the individual spirit with the universal Spirit."
Shankara
The Atman is the Witness of the individual mind and its operations.
Shankara
Who but the Atman is capable of removing the bonds of ignorance, passion, and self-interested action?
Shankara
The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and of Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity.
Shankara
It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman.
Shankara
The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand) the desire for personal separateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginningless time. It creates the notion, 'I am the actor, I am he who experiences.' This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separateness is called Liberation.
Shankara
When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition, knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him.
Shankara
Do not ask whether the Principle is in this or that; it is in all beings. It is on this account that we apply to it the epithets of supreme, universal total ... It has ordained that all things should be limited, but is Itself unlimited, infinite. As to what pertains to manifestation, the Principle causes the succession of its phases, but is not this succession. It is the author of causes and effects, but is not the causes and effects. It is the author of condensations and dissipations (birth and death, changes in state), but is not itself condensations and dissipations. All proceeds from It and is under its influence. It is in all things, but is not identical with beings, for it is neither differentiated nor limited.
Chuang Tzu
Those who vainly reason without understanding the truth are lost in the jungle of Vijnanas (The various forms of relative knowledge), running about here and there and trying to justify their view of ego-substance.
The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb), which is not the realm of those given over to mere reasoning...
Pure in its own nature and free from category of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefined Budha-womb, which is wrongly apprehended by sentient beings.
Lankavatara Sutra
One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,
One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities,
The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water,
And all the moons in the waters are embraced in the one Moon.
The Dharma-body (the Absolute) of all the Buddhas enters into my own being.
And my own being is found in union with theirs ...
The inner light is beyond praise and blame;
Like space it knows no boundaries,
Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness.
It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;
You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it,
And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is dumb;
The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.
Yung-chia Ta-shih
Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.
Kabir
My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.
St Catharine of Genoa
In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself."
St Bernard
I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, "O thou I!"
Bayazid of Bistun
To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same.
Eckhart
The spirit possesses God essentially in naked nature, and God the spirit.
Ruysbroeck
For though she sink all sinking in the oneness of divinity, she never touches bottom. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator. And here one cannot speak of the soul anymore, for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. There she is no more called soul, but is called immeasurable being.
Eckhart
The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
Eckhart
O my God, how does this happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say that they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee.
Hans Denk
... that Every Man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ, and I saw it shine through all; And that they that believed in it came out of Condemnation and came to the Light of Life, and became the Children of it; And that they that hated it and did not believe in it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. This I saw in the pure Openings of Light, without the help of any Man, neither did I then know where to find it in the Scriptures, though afterwards, searching the scriptures, I found it
George Fox in Fox's Journal
There is something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come.
William Penn
Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived.
Theologica Germanica
When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.
Sen T'sen
The Beloved is all in all, the lover merely veils him;
The Beloved is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
They are on the way to truth who apprehend God by means of divine, Light by the light.
Philo
There is a spirit in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, itself wholly spiritual. In this principle is God, ever verdant, ever flowering in all the joy and glory of His actual Self. Sometimes I have called this principle the Tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual Light, anon I say it is the Spark. But now I say that it is more exalted over this and that than the heavens are exalted over the earth. So now I name it in a nobler fashion... It is free of all names and void of all forms. It is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it.
Eckhart
References:
1. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Flamingo
2. Bhagvad Gita
Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, (Los Angeles, 1944)
Swami Nikhilananda (Los Angeles, 1944)
Franklin Edgerton (Cambridge, Mass., 1944)
3. William Law
Serious Call
The Spirit of Prayer
The Spirit of Love
Selected Mystical Writings of William Law, by
Stephen Hobhouse (London, 1939)
William Law and Eighteenth Century Quakerism, by
Stephen Hobhouse (London, 1927)
Characters and Characteristics of William Law, by
Alexander Whyte (London, 1907)
Notes and Materials for an adequate biography of William Law, by
Christopher Walton (London, 1856)
4. Chandogya Upanishad
The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, by
R. E. Hume (New York, 1931)
The Ten Principal Upanishads, by
Shree Purohit & W. B. Yeats (London, 1937)
The Himalayas of Soul, by
J. Mascaro (Londosn, 1938)
5. Eckhart, Meister
Works, by C. B. Evans (London, 1924)
Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation, by
R. B. Blakney (New York, 1941)
6. Plotinus
The Essence of Plotinus, by
G. H. Turnbull (New York, 1934)
7. Shankara Viveka Chudamani
8. Chuang Tzu
Chuang Tzu, Mystic, Moralist,and Social Reformer, by
Herbert Giles (Shanghai, 1936)
Musings of a Chinese Mystic, (london, 1920)
Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, by
E. R. Hughes (London, 1943)
The Cloud of Unknowing, by
Justice McCann (London, 1924)
9. Lankaavtara Sutra
10. St Bernard of Clairvaux
The Steps of Humility (Cambridge, Mass., 1940)
On the Love of God (New York, 1937)
Selected Letters (London, 1904)
Mystical Doctrine of St Bernard, by
Etienne Gilson (London & New York, 1940)
11. Ruysbroeck, Jan Van
The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage (London, 1916)
Studies by Evelyn Underhill(London, 1915) and
Wautier d'Aygalliers (London, 1925)
12. George Fox Journal (London, 1911)
13. Theologica Germanica Winkworth's translation (London, 1927)
14. Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism (London, 1924)
The Mystics of the Church (London, 1925)
15. Jalal-uddin Rumi
Masnavi, by E.H. Winfield (London, 1898)
16. Patanjali Yoga Aphorisms (New York 1899)