quotes, quotations and passages on oneness and unity

It’s only in our minds that we are
separate from the rest of the world.

Gay Luce

Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God. Peace Pilgrim

A miracle is nothing more or less than this: Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his or her true identity, of his or her oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him or her. Ralph Waldo Trine

Even as the scent dwells within the flower, so God resides always within your heart. Traditional Sikh Wisdom Our bread and water are of one table: the progeny of Adam are as a single soul. Muhammad Iqbal

Whatever books you may read, you cannot realize the Divine merely by intellectual effort. One must put it into practice. That sense of oneness can only be promoted by the practice of love and not by any other means. Sri Sathya Sai Baba

All things are linked with one another, and this oneness is sacred; there is nothing
that is not interconnected with everything else. For things are interdependent,
and they combine to form this universal order. There is only one universe made up
of all things, and one creator who pervades them; there is one substance and
one law, namely, common reason in all thinking creatures, and all truth is one--if, as we
believe, there is only one path of perfection for all beings who share the same mind.

Marcus Aurelius

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The news of the day may steer me toward seeing the world as unfriendly
and chaotic, but the divisions I see reflected in the news are misleading.
There are no true divisions between me and my fellow human beings.
We are united by the spirit of the Divine which is within each of us.

unattributed

All are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a
single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you
ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until
I am what I ought to be.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and
the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states
we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware
of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical
tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.

William James

You are a second world in miniature; the sun and moon are within you, and also the stars.

Origen

If you wish to know the Divine, feel the wind
on your face and the warm sun on your hand.

Buddha

Ye are all leaves of one tree and the fruits of one branch.

Bahá'u'lláh

I came to a clear internal realization that there was nothing I could do as a separated self that would ever fulfill me.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe.

Peggy Jenkins

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

Joy Harjo

As long as there’s that us-ness and me-ness and you-ness, there will
never be an all of us together. What we need to do is go up in a
spaceship together and look down at Earth and recognize that
we are all inhabitants of this fragile little planet. Instead of looking for
the things that separate us, instead of building more weapons to destroy
us, we must begin looking for ways that we can all get along.

Wayne Dyer
Happiness Is the Way

If you pay attentions to anything that is alive, you will see that it is intimately linked to the rest of nature. The importance of interconnectedness also applies to our everyday lives. Notice how what you do or say impacts on other people's lives. Everywhere, life is primarily about connections and relationships with others. See how encouraging compassion, communication, and cooperation in everyday life leads to greater results than resigning yourself to isolation and generating conflict. Understanding that we can't live under the illusion that we are entirely separate from the rest of the world around us is important for our own well-being as well as for the well-being of the rest of the life on the earth. Our entire lives, the food we eat, the clothes we own, the activities we engage in, the people we spend time with, all depend on developing and nurturing infinite numbers of connections. See if you can become more aware of these connections in your everyday life.

Claire Thompson
Mindfulness and the Natural World

The fundamental delusion of humanity is
to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yatsutani Roshi

community - God - oneness 2

When we are afraid of someone or something, it is because we do not feel
that particular person or thing is a part of us. When we have established
conscious oneness with the Absolute, with the Infinite Vast, then
everything there is part of us. And how can we be afraid of ourselves?

Sri Chinmoy

All know that the drop merges into the ocean,
but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

Kabir

How could the drops of water know themselves
as a river? Yet the river flows on.

Antoine de Saint Exupery

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand
fibers connect us with our fellow humans.

Herman Melville

I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease. . .
observing a spear of summer grass.

Walt Whitman

Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state
of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility.
However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our
assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem.

Suzuki Roshi

When I speak about attention, I mean literally, "How much attention
can we pay to ourselves?" As children, sometimes we cannot hold
our attention for more than a couple of seconds. Over the years we
are able to attend to more and more. Yet, we're seldom schooled
to hold life in respect, to enlarge our ability to love, take care of,
and be respectfully connected with all things around us.

Brooke Medicine Eagle

We don't exist without the rest of the natural world. The products of the
human mind; our abstract ideals, our beliefs our political systems, our
economic systems will never persist if we continue to assume that we are
separate from nature. Think about the natural law of gravity. We all have
direct experience of this. Would you ever try to defy gravity? Would you
ever go and jump off a cliff and hope to stay alive?
Almost certainly not.
It is the same with the other rules that govern the natural world. When
we bring our awareness to nature, we soon understand that one of the
essential natural laws is interconnectedness. Life is fundamentally one.
We are life. What we do to one part of life, we do to the rest of life,
including ourselves. The eventual consequence of denying that nature
is sustaining our life on this planet could be the end of humanity itself.

Claire Thompson
Mindfulness and the Natural World

Articles and book excerpts on oneness:

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

It seems to me that there is in each of us a capacity to comprehend
the impressions and emotions which have been experienced by
humankind from the beginning. This inherited capacity is a sort of
sixth sense--a soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all in one.

Helen Keller

Joy is the realization of oneness, the oneness of our soul
with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme love.

Rabindranath Tagore

No one is an island, entire of itself; everyone is a piece of Continent,
a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is
the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor or thy
friends or of thine own were; any person's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Humankind.

John Donne

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Can we recognize our oneness, though? And what will happen if we
not only start to see that we are connected to the other human beings
in our lives, but also start to live as if that were true? Would we
become more compassionate if we were to recognize the same hopes
and dreams that we have, there in someone else? Would we be able
to help someone else feel more hope in their lives? Would we feel
more at home and at peace in our own places in this world if we were
to keep in mind that we are an important part of the human race, and
that we have many chances every day to improve the lot of humanity
by improving the life of a fellow human being, even in tiny ways?

tom walsh

Whatever task God is calling us to, if it is yours it is mine, and if it is
mine it is yours. We must do it together--or be cast aside together.

Howard Hewlett Clark
Anglicans

We live in succession, in division, in part, in particles. Meantime within
us 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"

Oren Lyons was the first Onandagan to enter college. When he returned to his reservation for his first vacation, his uncle proposed a fishing trip on a lake. Once he had his nephew in the middle of the lake where he wanted him, he began to interrogate him. "Well, Oren," he said, "you've been to college; you must be pretty smart now from all they've been teaching you. Let me ask you a question. Who are you?"

Taken aback by the question, Oren fumbled for an answer. "What do you mean, who am I? Why, I'm your nephew, of course." His uncle rejected his answer and repeated his question. Successively, the nephew ventured that he was Oren Lyons, an Onandagan, a human being, a man, a young man, all to no avail.

When his uncle had reduced him to silence and he asked to be informed as to who he was, his uncle said, "Do you see that bluff over there? Oren, you are that bluff. And that giant pine on the other shore? Oren, you are that pine. And this water that supports our boat? You are this water."

Huston Smith

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a
European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why
it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of
humankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality,
by tradition, it breeds violence. So one who is seeking to understand
violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any
political party or partial system; this person is concerned
with the total understanding of mankind.

J. Krishnamurti

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into
wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you,
there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see
reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that
unless we live for each other and in and through each other,
we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really
be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Frederick Buechner

I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore also of humanity.
What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul.

Mohandas Gandhi

We are bound together by a more primitive and fundamental unity
than any unity of thought and doctrine; we all have the same human
nature and, considered in their extra-mental reality,
the same primordial tendencies.

Jacques Maritain
Ransoming the Time

When we turn to each other, and not on each other, that's victory.
When we build each other and not destroy each other, that's victory.

Jesse Jackson

It is unity we are talking about, not uniformity. What is needed
is to respect one another's points of view and not to impute unworthy
motives to one another or to seek to impugn the integrity of the other.
Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to
disagree and yet continue to love one another and to cherish
one another and seek the greater good of the other.

Desmond Tutu
Believe

None of us seems to accept that we are incredibly precious--
that when I dehumanize you, I am dehumanized. . . . God's
dream is that we could know that we are members of one family.
There are no outsiders--black, white, rich, poor, male, female,
gay, lesbian, and so-called straight. Bin Laden. Bush. Sharon.
They all belong.

community - God - oneness 2

This is one of the most important factors in the development
of human beings, the recognition--profound and complete
recognition--of the law of universal unity and coherence.

Mabel Collins

Realize that each soul is related to you. When you recognize that everyone
is part of you, you will find you cannot withdraw from another.

Elsie Morgan

I note the obvious differences between each sort and type,
But we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.

Maya Angelou
"The Human Family"
I Shall Not Be Moved

Friend do it this way--that is, whatever you do in life,
do the very best you can with both your heart and mind.
And if you do it that way, the Power Of The Universe
will come to your assistance, if your heart and mind are in unity.
When one sits in the Hoop Of The People,
one must be responsible because
All of Creation is related.
And the hurt of one is the hurt of all.
And the honor of one is the honor of all.
And whatever we do affects everything in the Universe.
If you do it that way--that is, if you
truly join your heart and mind as One--
whatever you ask for, that's the way it's going to be.

Pte Ska Win (White Buffalo Calf Woman)

You walk outside and it is snowing. You carelessly shake the
snow from your sleeves. It attracts your attention: a lacy
snowflake glistens in your hand. You can't help looking at it.
See how it sparkles in a wonderfully intricate pattern. Then it
quivers, and the delicate needles of which it consists contract.
It melts and lies dead in your hand. It is no more. The snowflake
which fluttered down from infinite space upon your hand, where
it sparkled and quivered and died-- that is yourself.
Wherever you see life-- that is yourself!

Albert Schweitzer