"All at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality-if so it were-seeming no extinction but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?
Tennyson
Instantly my surroundings disappeared. I was in the midst of a boundless ocean. Around me were innumerable columns of water, arising from the water below, and uniting in a misty unity overhead. I knew the columns of water to be human beings, who sprang from a common source, and re-united after their temporary separation in a richer unity. But the essence of the experience was this: the water-columns were people. I was one of them, and they were myself. Many of these individuals were simultaneously present in my consciousness. I knew that I, with the other beings in my vision, had arisen from a common source, and would reunite after our temporary apparent separation. the essential point of the whole experience was unity-that in reality all are one.
Arther W. Osborn
Jacob Beilhart writes, "I have no way of my own, no personal interests; for the life I am equally interested in all things, and is not centred anywhere."
Warner Allen in his book, The Timeless Moment, writes, "It flashed up lightening-wise during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Queen's Hall.....The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted so that what Mr. T. S. Eliot calls 'The intersection of the timeless moment' must have slipped into the interval between two demi-quavers.
Something has happened to me-I am utterly amazed-can this be that? ('That' being the answer to the riddle of life)-but it is too simple-I always knew it-it is remembering an old forgotten secret-like coming home- I am not 'I' I thought-there is no death-peace passing understanding-yet how unworthy I---.
"That which is the finest essence-this whole world has that as its soul. That is reality. That is Atman. That art thou." Chandogya Upanishad
"The seer sees not death nor sickness, nor any distress. The seer sees only the All, Obtains the All entirely" Maitri Upanishad
"He who seeth me everywhere, and seeth everything in Me, of him will I never lose hold and he shall never lose hold of Me. Bhagavad Gita
"Looking at it, you do not see it. You call it Invisible.
Listening to it, you do not hear it. You call it Inaudible. Touching it, you do not grasp it. You call it intangible. These three cannot be described, but they blend, and are One.
Tao Teh King
"In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, from which we are merged into that self in us which has the quality of that order. it is a knowing of the self restored to its purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. in this seeing we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there are no two. the man is changed, no longer himself or self-belonging; he is merged with the supreme, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there duality; by our holding away, the Supreme is set outside. this is why vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of the Supreme which is to be known only as one with ourselves." The Enneads of Plotinus, VI. 9, 11
"Tao that can be expressed is not Everlasting Tao. The Name that can be named is not the Everlasting Name." Tao Teh King, book 1
"Through the treasured teaching of inspired ones- never lost and never wholly given to the world, but always emerging" Edward Carpenter
"I tried to obtain by effort that which I could only obtain by ceasing all effort." Madame Guyon
"He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment."
Meister Eckhart
"He whose mind is free from anxiety amid pains, indifferent amid pleasures, loosed from passion, fear and anger, he is called a sage of stable mind."
The Bhagavad Gita
Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out." Revelation lll, 12
"I know I am deathless.....
And whether I come to my own today-or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before." Walt Whitman
"Man's creative energy is caught in the illusion of self-consciousness; and desire, which is energy, encages him in the circle of false values." "The release of that energy from the prison is man's consummation. When man lives in his pure creative energy then he knows harmony, the blessing of Truth." Krisnamurti
"Whoever thus knows 'I am Brahma !' becomes this All;
even the gods have no power to prevent his becoming thus,
for he becomes their self." Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad
There is a peace which passeth understanding. It abides in the hearts of those who live in the Eternal. There is a power which maketh all things new. it lives and moves in those who know the Self as One."
"We live in Succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul
"The soul is a spiritual being, with its home in heaven-the heaven that is within us, even while it is in the body."William Ralph Inge, The philosophy of Plotius
"I have always taught you that all phenomena and their developments are simply manifestations of mind. All causes and effects, from great universes to the fine dust only seen in the sunlight come into apparent existence only by means of the discriminating mind." Buddha, The Surangama Sutra
'The essences of our souls can never cease to be because they never began to be, and nothing can live eternally but that which hath lived from eternity. The essences of our souls were a breath in God before they became living souls; they lived in God before they lived in the created souls, and therefore the soul is a partaker in the created souls, and therefore the soul is a partaker of the eternity of God." William Law
"We must know that it is only the revelation of the Infinite which is endlessly new and eternally beautiful in us and gives the only meaning to our self." Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana
"You ask, how can we know the Infinite? I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer--in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy. It is liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness."
Plotinus, Letter to Flaccus
"But these feelings are incommunicable. We have no words to express a thousand distinctions clear to the spiritual sense. If I tell of my exaltation to another, who has not felt this himself, it is explicable to that person as the joy in perfect health, and he translates into lower terms what is speech of the gods to men."
A.E. The candle of Vision
