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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Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber
Ken Wilber
This book is the compelling story of the five-year journey of psychologist Ken Wilber and his wife Treya, through Treya's illness, treatment, and finally death. Wilber's philosophy coupled with Treya's journal writing create a vivid portrait of wholeness and harmony, suffering and surrender.

1 "Spirit exists, God exists, a Supreme Reality exists. Brahman, Dharmakaya, Kether, Tao, Allah, Shiva, Yahweh, Aton – they call Him many who is really One."

2 "Since we are all one in the same Self, or the same mystical body of Christ, or the same Dharmakaya, then in serving others I am serving my own Self."

3 "You are always already one with Spirit and that awareness is always already fully present, right now. You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness. There is nowhere Spirit is not."

4 "The Tibetans have a practice where, on the outbreath, you are actually supposed to mix the mind with all space, or mix the mind and sky. This means, when you breathe out, you simply feel your separate identity going out with the breath and then dissolving into the sky in front of you – dissolving, in other words, into the entire universe. It's very powerful."

5 "There is only awareness. And this awareness, exactly and precisely as it, without correction or modification at all, is itself Spirit, since there is nowhere Spirit is not."

6 "I agree that those mythic forms are collectively inherited in the psyche. And I agree entirely with Jung that it is very important to come to terms with those mythic archetypes."

7 "This, then, is the message of the saints, sages, and mystics, whether Amerindian, Taoist, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, or Christian: At the bottom of your soul is the soul of humanity itself, but a divine, transcendent soul, leading from bondage to liberation, from dream to awakening, from time to eternity, from death to immortality."

8 "All things, high or low, sacred or profane, are fully and equally perfect manifestations or ornaments of Spirit, of Buddhamind."

9 "The human spirit universally grows intuitions of the Divine. And those intuitions and insights form the core of the world's great spiritual or wisdom traditions. And although the surface structures of the great traditions are most certainly quite different, their deep structures are quite similar, often identical."

10 "The entire world is nothing but the reflection of your own Self, reflected in the mirror of your own awareness….There is ONLY the Self, there is ONLY God."

11 "If Spirit has any meaning, it must be omnipresent, or all-pervading and all-encompassing. There can't be a place Spirit is not, or it wouldn't be infinite. Therefore, Spirit has to be completely present, right here, right now, in your own awareness. That is, your own present awareness, precisely as it is, without changing it or altering it in any way, is perfectly and completely permeated by Spirit."

12 "Your own primordial mind is unborn and undying; it was not born with this body and it will not die with this body. Recognize your own mind as eternally one with Spirit."

13 "The whole point of meditation or contemplation – whether it appears in the East or in the West, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu – is to free ourselves from the 'optical delusion' that we are merely separate egos set apart from each other and from eternal Spirit, and to discover instead that, once released from the prison of individuality, we are one with Godhead and thus one with all manifestation, in a perfectly timeless and eternal fashion. And this is not a mere theoretical idea; it is a direct and immediate experience, which has been reported the world over from time immemorial, and which is essentially identical wherever it appears."

14 "In the deepest part of my own awareness, I directly intersect eternity."

15 "Everpresent Self is one with all space."

16 "We are drenched in awareness, in experience, and have no choice but to go with it on some profound level."

17 "For the mystics – Shankara, Plato, Augustine, Eckhart, Garab Dorje, and so on – archetypes are the first subtle forms that appear as the world manifests out of formless and unmanifested Spirit. They are the patterns upon which all other patterns of manifestation are based."

18 "Your real being is everything you are now looking at….you are literally one with all manifestation, one with the universe."

19 "Since Spirit is the suchness or condition of all things, it is perfectly compatible with all things."

20 "In the deepest part of your being, in the very center of your own pure awareness, you are fundamentally one with Spirit, one with Godhead, one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and unchanging fashion."

21 "The Self can't be threatened since, being the All, there is nothing outside of it that could harm it."

22 "In principle, your transcendent Self is of one nature with God (however you might wish to conceive it.) For it is finally, ultimately, profoundly, God alone who looks through your eyes, listens with your ears, and speaks with your tongue."

23 "The perennial philosophy first arose in matriarchy, and thus cannot be charged with inherent sexism; it arose in illiterate peoples, and thus is not logocentric; and it first flourished in what are now Second and Third world countries – it is hardly Eurocentric. Furthermore, it offers what 'politically correct' thought cannot: an integrative vision that, while allowing each expression its own free space, points to a better state of affairs, namely, the supreme Identity. It thus has inherent in it a genuine liberal agenda: increasing freedom on both an individual and societal level."

24 "We don't let anybody vote on the truth of the Pythagorean theorem; we let trained mathematicians vote on that truth. Likewise, meditative spirituality makes certain claims – for example, that the inward sense of the self is, if you look at it closely, one with the feeling of the external world – but that is a truth to be checked experimentally and experientially by you and anybody else who cares to try the experiment. And after something like six thousand years of this experiment, we are perfectly justified in making certain conclusions, making certain spiritual theorems, as it were. And those spititual theorems are the core of the perennial wisdom traditions."

25 "The universe is a play of the Divine, and you (and all sentient beings as such) ARE the Divine."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite