quotations and passages on oneness and unity

The only thing which has to heal
is the illusion of being separate

Wilfried Fink

It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness
must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with
your God-centered nature. The feeling accompanying this experience
is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole. One merges
into a euphoria of absolute unity with all life.

Peace Pilgrim

Given the unity of all minds, what we do to others, and what we think
about others, boomerangs back to us. If we wish to feel peace, then
we must wish peace for others. And whatever punishment we wish
upon others, we subconsciously attract to ourselves.

Marianne Williamson

In the rush of daily living it’s easy to forget all the remarkable people, real or
fictional, who have been a part of your life. But if you just imagine they
are near for a moment, you will realize that anyone who ever touched
your heart is always with you, patiently waiting to emanate warmth and
support whenever you remember to think of them.

Barbara Sher

Gestures of kindness, courage, honesty, and love tend
to be small and quiet, and most of them are made by
ordinary human beings. But these acts create and sustain
a dense web of commitment that holds this planet and its
people together. The web is so resilient that it will
never be completely destroyed, because it is constructed
of human goodwill rather than bricks, money, or nationalism.

Sallirae Henderson

When we live moment to moment, we place ourselves at the center of life,
where infinite wisdom abides, rather than on the periphery, where things
are forever changing and we are susceptible to the vagaries of the world. It is in
our awareness each moment of our oneness with God that
our inner peace and greatest strength lie.

Susan L. Taylor

There exists a powerful energizing force in the spiritual life principle.
All energy began with the Creator, who infused it not only in all natural
processes, but also into that higher form of nature called human nature.
The more closely, then, that a person identifies with the Creator, the more
surely that person will experience within his or her own nature the
process of re-creation which operates in all creation.

Norman Vincent Peale

An excellent way to practice love is to set your intention on seeing
beyond someone’s behavior or personality. Try to realize that
beneath the surface insecurity, negative thinking, and poor
behavior, everyone is connected to God. Just as you wouldn’t
get angry at someone simply because he or she is in a wheelchair,
you need not be angry because a person hasn’t yet opened his or
her heart to the nourishment of his or her Soul. When people act
in unloving ways, it only means that they are out of touch with
their Souls and aren’t feeling spiritually nourished.

Richard Carlson

You can kiss your family and
friends good-bye and put miles
between you, but at the same
time you carry them with you in
your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in
a world but a world lives in you.

Frederick Buechner

We share with all life the capacity for feeling, the experience of having
a body, mind, and heart in continual interface with countless other bodies,
minds, and hearts. Our capacity to feel deeply means we share with all
life the possibility of experiencing delight, joy, trust, and intimacy, just as
we share in the capacity to experience pain, sorrow, grief, and fear. Living
within a physical body, we all share the experience of aging, frailty, illness,
and death, just as we share the precious times of strength, health, safety,
and vitality. Through our minds we share the capacity to experience
confusion, agitation, and complexity, just as we share the possibilities
of serenity, clarity, and balance. An understanding of this profound
interconnectedness of all life is at the root of the compassionate
heart dedicated to alleviating suffering without reservation or exception.

Christina Feldman

We’ve been invited to participate in this life, to be present, one to another,
and that’s all that’s expected of us. Our successes may bring us personal joy,
but our value as persons lies only in our being. But living fully is more than
just making an appearance, here, today. It’s celebrating our oneness—our ties
to one another—our need for one another’s presence to complete our own.
And we can be celebrants only when we’re involved and fully focused on the
experience. We capture life’s gifts, its riches, when we are intent on the
moment’s fullness. We miss what we most need when our hearts and minds are distracted.

unattributed

I was sitting alone on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed. All around me people sat bundled up in mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the track. The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale tobacco clinging to winter coats. An elderly pair exchanged words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her three bedraggled, open-mouthed children.

Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun--our entire living cohort--formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.

Aliz Kates Shulman

If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together,
that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together,
that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being
where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family.

Desmond Tutu

Articles and book excerpts on oneness:

Faith and Experience      Iyanla Vanzant
On Giving      Kent Nerburn
from On the Open Road      Ralph Waldo Trine

It is our desire that we and you should be as one heart,
one mind, and one body, thus becoming one people, entertaining
a mutual love and regard for each other, to be preserved
firm and entire, not only between you and us, but between
your children and our children, to all succeeding generations.

Kanickhungo

Humanity must never lose hope. Our present conflicts and differences
are difficult but not hopeless. We cannot expect people of such different
races, cultures, languages, ways of life and beliefs, who have lived for
thousands of years separated from each other to suddenly love each
other and work together harmoniously. It takes time and patience.
We must work on it stubbornly and not throw in the towel.

Robert Muller

And so it is true in this sense that there is essentially but one religion, the religion of the living God. For to live in the conscious realisation of the fact that God lives in us, is indeed the life of our life, and that in ourselves we have no independent life, and hence no power, is the one great fact of all true religion, even as it is the one great fact of human life. Religion, therefore, at its purest, and life at its truest, are essentially and necessarily one and the same.

Ralph Waldo Trine

The greatest thing ever known— indeed, the greatest thing that ever can be known—is that in our real essential nature we are one with the Infinite Life and Power, and that by coming into, and dwelling continually in, the conscious, living realisation of this great fact, we enable to be manifested unto and actualised within us the qualities and powers of the Divine Life, and this in the exact degree of the completeness of this realisation on our part. The one great Truth of Being, therefore, is that there is no real Life except God (Good), and that the poor excuses for lives lived by so many today is simply the result of ignorance of this fact.

What I've found to be important is mainly just the realization that
everyone has all knowledge and all humanity within themselves.
Individual minds are connected to a universal mind. All people
need to do is find out how to get it and reach it when they need it.
Karma is simple truth: you reap what you sow.

Willie Nelson

Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe.

St. Theresa of Lisieux

But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. True love
has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another.
Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no "I" and "other,"
and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love. You cannot
unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is
not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The
experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the
universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don't love another, you are another.
There is no fear because there is no separation.

Stephen Levine

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and foundation for inner security.

Albert Einstein

The mind of the human being is capable of anything, because
everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

Joseph Conrad

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds.
Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a
motherless child, which I was, it came to me: that feeling of being part of everything,
not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed
and I cried and I run all around the house. I just knew what it was.
In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it.

Alice Walker

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the
earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.
There is not any of me that is alone and absolute except my mind,
and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only
the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

D.H. Lawrence

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When we think we're separate, we lose power. Whenever I say "my," I have
lost my power. Power is not my power; it is not enlarging oneself as a
separate individual. It is only gainable as part of a larger whole. Then you
communicate with the rest of yourself--which may be a tree. You, reciprocally,
are moved by the universe. Whenever you shut down connectedness, you get
depressed. Psychic awareness breaks in as a gift. It's fearful to know we're
connected to everything in the universe, because then we're responsible.

Glenda Taylor

Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death.

the Upanishads

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we
find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

John Muir

It is possible that this unity of knowledge feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially and unchangeably and numerically one in all people, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense--that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, indefinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What objectively differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivably as it seems to ordinary reason, you--and all other conscious beings as such--are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.

Erwin Schroedinger

If all the beasts were gone, people would die from a great
loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts
also happens to the person. All things are connected.

attributed to Chief Seattle

The particular beauty of an attitude of gratitude is that it instantly
connects us to everything else. In an important way, it is a recognition
of the connection, the switch, between us and the rest of life. And
consciously recognizing it opens the flow: the more grateful we are,
the more of an abundant sense of life we will experience.

M.J. Ryan

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