Metaphysics

"Let us know that highest great lord of lords, the highest deity of deities, the master of masters, his high power is revealed as manifold, as inherent, acting as force and knowledge. There is no master of his in the world, no ruler of his, not even a sign of him, He is the cause, the lord of the lords of the organs, and there is of him neither parent nor lord. He is the one God, hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the self within all beings, watching over all works, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the perceiver, the only one, free from qualities. The wise who perceive Him dwelling within their self, to them belongs eternal happiness and serenity, not to others, He who knows this God as primal cause, through Sāṁkhya (reason, reflection) and Yoga (self-discipline), achieves Mukti (freedom, moksha)."

"[F]or there is but one monad, mind, which is in all things; monad has no plural."

""My real pleasure was never in earthly things — in husband, wife, children, and other things. For I am like the infinite blue sky: clouds of many colours pass over it and play for a second; they move off, and there is the same unchangeable blue. Happiness and misery, good and evil, may envelop me for a moment, veiling the Self; but I am still there. They pass away because they are changeable. I shine, because I am unchangeable. If misery comes, I know it is finite, therefore it must die. If evil comes, I know it is finite, it must go. I alone am infinite and untouched by anything. For I am the Infinite, that Eternal, Changeless Self." — So sings one of our poets."

"This is the secret of spiritual life: to think that I am the Atman and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings—scenes on a canvas—of which I am the witness."

"For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation."

"So after you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience of before you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after people die. Other people are born. And they're all you, only you can only experience one at a time. Everybody is I, you all you're you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't make a difference. You are all of them and when they come into being as you come into being."

"The thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way. A way that ignores, or screens out, the fact that every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. You see, it's as if you had a light covered with a black ball, and in this ball were pinholes, and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out. So in that way, every one of us is, actually, a pinhole through which the fundamental light—that is, the existence itself—looks out. Only, the game we're playing is not to know this. To be only that little hole, which we call "me," "my ego," my specific "John Jones," or whatever."

"[T]he non-locality of vision and language still affords a deeper conception of "We" than the classical I and You. It is I think captured well by Kolak's idea of "Open Individualism," according to which the boundaries between individuals are blurred in much the way as the boundaries between oceans. The North Pacific is not the same as the South Atlantic, but at the level of the shared unconscious we are all part of the (one) ocean, and in intra-action we form temporary unities of consciousness, even if experienced from separate points of view."

"There is really only one world soul [Weltseele], which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others."

"There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world is my world". The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world."

"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me." You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth…" "All you. Different incarnations of you." "Wait. I'm everyone!?" "Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back. "I'm every human being who ever lived?" "Or who will ever live, yes." "I'm Abraham Lincoln?" "And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added. "I'm Hitler?" You said, appalled. "And you're the millions he killed." "I'm Jesus?" "And you're everyone who followed him." You fell silent. "Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."

"We might express this as "all persons are I" or rather as "you and I are the same person"."

"We must see that all places, times and conscious organisms are equally "this one". For a failure to see this must distort our view by forcing us to accommodate in it what seems to be our own special objective status; and that awkward accommodation must then ruin any prospect of discovering the truly objective universal principles that govern the world."

"[T]here is only one way we can ever identify ourselves. That is through subjective experience. And subjective experience is universal. Its relation to anything possessing it is contingent. This means two things. First, it makes no sense to think of ourselves as one producer of our experience rather than another that would do as well—actual or possible. We certainly couldn't discriminate one of these from another through our experience anyway. And second, even if this identification had significance, it would gain us nothing because the experience itself, which is all we would have available to us of ourselves, would not cohere subjectively as we have already seen. That a body or mind or self continues on into the future is cold comfort, even if we arbitrarily and ignorantly identify ourselves with some one such particular, if its continuity cannot be translated into the sort of continuity of subjective experience that we can truly possess, where one moment belongs to another. That each of two moment instances somehow belongs to some third thing like a body is not interesting."

"In all conscious life there is only one person—I—whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience—its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms."

"Think about what you ordinarily would recognize to be 'these experiences', 'mine'. What makes them 'mine' for you? Is it the detail of their content? If the colours you were seeing had been different, would the experiences have failed to be these, yours? Think of all the features of this experience that could be varied while its character of being 'mine' remained untouched. If you had fallen asleep and were now in the midst of a wild dream that had little in common with any of the usual content of your experience, would that experience have therein failed to be experienced as 'mine'? If you had eaten different particular items of food over the past years (as you might so easily have done), so that all the particular atoms in the structure of the body were different in numerical identity from those in your body now, would the experience have failed to have that character of being 'mine'? Must you take care with the particularity of the food that you eat because it is determining the identity of an experiencer, of the subject of self-interest? If the experience were had in a different location, if it were at a different time, would the experience not still have had that same character within it of being this and being mine?"

"You possess all conscious life. Whenever in all time and wherever in all the universe (or beyond) any conscious being stands, sits, crawls, jumps, lies, rolls, flies or swims, its experience of doing so is yours and is yours now. You are that being. You are fish and fowl. Deer and hunter. You are saints and sinners. You are Germans, Jews and Palestinians. This is an important result. What else can come close to it in importance? And perhaps the spread of this knowledge among the intelligent beings that are you can help you to stop yourself from hurting yourself because you mistake yourself for another."

"I am countless conscious organisms, but each of these possesses only one package of experiential content, isolated from that of every other. And within any of these packages only that much of the content of experience is displayed as having the quality of immediacy that makes experience be mine. So being mine is naturally confused in each with being the experience of only that organism. One must be jolted into realising that being mine is instead an abstract quality like being red. And, further, that this is a quality that must pervade all experience. For what could count as experience that didn't have that quality? I hope that I have succeeded now in doing that jolting."

"What makes an experience yours is none of the specification of its content or of the particularity or other properties of its possessor. All that is required for an experience to be yours, to be 'mine', is that it be immediate in its character as its character is experienced within it, that it be first person. My pains are pains that are not remote like those that belong to another. My pains are those that are immediate. They have internality. They are experienced in a first person way. They are subjectively at the center of the world, here in me. But all real pains must be had with this quality of immediacy that makes them 'mine'. What could really be a pain without its thus hurting?"

"[M]y self-interest reaches fully into the life of every conscious organism, each of which I equally am, and that the death of any one of these does not annihilate me so long as there still is any other conscious thing anywhere in all reality—since I will be that thing. And every experience in any time is experienced by me with all the same urgency of its happening now. All of it equally is mine and now."

"[I]nflicting pain as retribution for wrongs is a horrible mistake: The person wronged and the person punished are one and the same."

"In sum, rather than being, in Guyer's dismissive phrase, "an anodyne recommendation of epistemological modesty," transcendental idealism, as here understood, is a bold, even revolutionary, theory of epistemic conditions."

"According to transcendental idealism, we can know the fundamental laws of nature with complete certitude because they are not descriptions of how things are in themselves independently of our perception and conception of them, but are rather the structure that the laws of our own minds impose upon the way things appear to us – and the laws of the mind themselves are not hidden mysteries that can be discovered only by the empirical researches of psychologists or neuroscientists, but can readily be discovered by every normal human being competent at elementary arithmetic, geometry, and logic. But precisely because the most fundamental laws of nature are in fact only our own impositions on the appearance of reality, we can also believe that our own choices, contrary to their appearance, are not governed by the deterministic laws of nature, but can be freely made in accordance with and for the sake of the moral law. At the same time, Kant will argue, the very “fact of reason” (as he calls it) that we are free to act for the sake of and in accordance with the moral law also implies that we are free to flout it, and thus that the possibility of doing evil is equally fundamental to the human will as the possibility of doing right, thus that all human beings are at risk of doing evil not because of the original sin of some distant ancestors but because of the radical nature of freedom itself."

"Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he were Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly, there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."

"Realism is not a dirty word. If you wonder why all scientists, philosophers, and ordinary people, with rare exceptions, have been and are unabashed realists, let me tell you why. No scientific conjecture has been more overwhelmingly confirmed. No hypothesis offers a simpler explanation of why the Andromeda galaxy spirals in every photograph, why all electrons are identical, why the laws of physics are the same in Tokyo as in London or on Mars, why they were there before life evolved and will be there if all life perishes, why all persons can close their eyes and feel eight corners, six faces and twelve edges on a cube, and why your bedroom looks the same when you wake up in the morning."

"The belief in an external world independent of the percipient subject is the foundation of all science. But since our sense-perceptions inform us only indirectly of this external world, or Physical Reality, it is only by speculation that it can become comprehensible to us. From this it follows that our conceptions of Physical Reality can never be definitive; we must always be ready to alter them, that is, [to alter] the axiomatic basis of physics, in order to take account of the facts of perception with the greatest possible logical completeness."

"Standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of this occasion, feeling the emotions which no one may know until he senses the great weight of responsibility for himself, I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers."

"Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late."

"Ask counsel of both times—of the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest."

"[The argument of Alcidamas:] Everyone honours the wise. Thus the Parians have honoured Archilochus, in spite of his bitter tongue; the Chians Homer, though he was not their countryman; the Mytilenaeans Sappho, though she was a woman; the Lacedaemonians actually made Chilon a member of their senate, though they are the least literary of men; the inhabitants of Lampsacus gave public burial to Anaxagoras, though he was an alien, and honour him even to this day."

"Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart sorrow falls, memory's pain, and to us, though against our very will, even in our own despite, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God."

"The question is, whether, like the Divine Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming wise to God."

"For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit."

"What in me is dark, Illumine, what is low, raise and support."

"The wise man is but a clever infant, spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity."

"And he is oft the wisest man Who is not wise at all."

"Wisdom is the gray hair unto men, and an unspotted life is old age."

"Wisdom sits alone, Topmost in heaven:—she is its light—its God; And in the heart of man she sits as high— Though grovelling eyes forget her oftentimes, Seeing but this world's idols. The pure mind Sees her forever: and in youth we come Fill'd with her sainted ravishment, and kneel, Worshipping God through her sweet altar fires, And then is knowledge "good.""

"Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, Obtained with labour, for mankind employed, And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed."

"The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light."

"Isthuc est sapere non quod ante pedes modo est Videre sed etiam illa, quæ futura sunt Prospicere."

"The Prophet's words were true; The mouth of Ali is the golden door Of Wisdom." When his friends to Ali bore These words, he smiled and said: "And should they ask The same until my dying day, the task Were easy; for the stream from Wisdom's well, Which God supplies, is inexhaustible."

"By Wisdom wealth is won; But riches purchased wisdom yet for none."

"The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance."

"Happy those Who in the after-days shall live, when Time Hath spoken, and the multitude of years Taught wisdom to mankind!"

"A short saying oft contains much wisdom."

"As for me, all I know is that I know nothing."

"Melius in malis sapimus, secunda rectum auferunt."

"Nulli sapere casu obtigit."

"Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life—in a firmness of mind and mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do, as well as to talk; and to make our actions and words all of a color."