authors-from-the-netherlands

"Ibn Warraq's book will either be ignored with deadly thoroughness or cause an enormous riot."

"Nothing from the contents of Ibn Ishaq is confirmed by inscriptions or other archeological material. Testimonies from non-Muslim contemporaries do not exist. Greek, Armenian, Syriac and other sources about the beginnings of Islam are very difficult to date, but none of them is convincingly contemporary with the Prophet of Islam. Under such circumstances, no biography can be a scholarly work in the modern sense of that word, not even with the help of an omniscient Ibn Ishaq."

"“for every event which took place in the life of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq meticulously recorded in his Sira in which month it took place,” and “this meticulous and systematic dating by month which is Ibn Ishaq’s wont, is, of course, one of the main reasons why Western historians classified his book as historiography in the normal sense of that word.”... “How then,” asks Jansen, “is it possible that not a single one of the numerous events Ibn Ishaq describes and attaches a date to, took place during a leap month? If his narrative of the life of Muhammad would be based on historical memories and on real events, however distorted, but remembered by real people, how can half a solar year (or more) remain unmentioned and have disappeared from the record?”... Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham’s biography, Jansen observes, “can only date from a period in which people had forgotten that leap months had once existed.”... “These stories by Ibn Ishaq,” concludes Jansen, “do not attempt to describe memories of events that took place in the past, but they want to convince the reader that the protagonist of these stories, Muhammad, is the Messenger of God.”59"

"I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters."

"The brain isn't the cause of experience for the same reason that lightning isn't the cause of atmospheric electric discharge, or that flames aren't the cause of combustion. Just as flames are but the image of the process of combustion, the body-brain system is but the image of localized experience in the stream of universal consciousness."

"When a monk complained about the world's evil, the Buddha stretched his hand toward the Earth: "on this Earth I attained Liberation.""

"I am neither I nor Other, both I and other…"

"How old are you? As old as the Buddha. And how old is the Buddha? As old as I am"

"all at once I saw that the sun was round! Since then I have been the happiest man on Earth!"

"The Tao cannot be divided, it cannot be shared"

"The clearsighted eye turns the light back to see its own Original Nature…"

""What are you?" — I am no What!I am only I … In relation to you!"

"The Void is a living void … pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. The great Void does not exist as Void, it embraces all Being/non-Being"

"Do you believe in God? I, I believe in nothing but God!"

"Do you believe in God?" "Which one?"

"The religions are delusional constructs formed around an infallible core."

"It is not that things are delusory but their separateness in the fabric of the Whole that is illusory…"

"People walking? Karma walking … Buddha nature walking..!"

"… each dot: the center of a circle without circumference …"

"In the beginngless beginning there was the Meaning"

"When the Christ says I: it is the I of all the Masters: the Way, the Truth, the Life"

"I and the Father are not-two!"

"the grasses whisper "This is my Body""

"Innumerable Buddhas Enlightened… innumerable Christs crucified… always the same Christ, the same Buddha!"

"Even if there had never been a Buddha nor a Christ CHRIST NATURE IS! BUDDHA NATURE IS!"

""Nothing burns in hell but ego" says Tauler. Does anything live but Buddha Nature, Christ Spirit?"

"The cross of the Cruxifixion — without the cross of the Resurrection is the symbol of a mutilated Christianity."

"They do not see what they look at, hence they know not what they do."

"the distance between this pigeon's brain and mine is minute compared to that between mine and Bodhi's Wisdom Compassion"

"Life ends with the previous thought It is resurrected with the subsequent One"

"Above all else, Franck was a bridge builder whose marvelous combination of art and spirituality points to a new way of being in the twenty-first century. He calls it transreligious: "outside the categories of both 'interfaith' and 'ecumenical' . . . even less a syncretistic scrambling together of symbols, concepts, and rituals of the various religious traditions." He clearly had great respect for each tradition and found in his art and writing ways to convey "the inner experience in which these traditions converge.""

"If you still have to talk about Ultimate Reality See how it manifests itself nakedly in Every thing!"

"Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of nature?" the monk asked. The Master answered: "Yes! Your awareness, your understanding of the wonders of nature."

"a single leaf falling autumn is everywhere…"

"Illusion is the mantle of the Real"

"The sinner's ego is crude that of the saint refined, distilled. Careful! It may be more poisonous!"