Self

"When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self."

"There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains, and other things infinite. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among infinite natures and individual circumscriptions [or individuals]. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided."

"The Self is the same self because that is what it is: what other self could it be? In our moments of awakening we are quite untheoretically aware of the identity of what wakes here and what woke then (from which experience, more theoretically, we may infer the possibility of transcending time). To wake up is to know ourselves, so far. By the same token it may well occur to us, in ratiocinative mood, that the Self in me is just the same as that in you; that only the One Self attends on parallel and successive states of mind and action, separating itself out as One in Many. What makes my self is no other than what makes yours, and the differences between us lie at the level of what that attends on, or how it is—as it were—refracted. That is indeed an inference that Averroistic interpreters of Aristotle (and non-dualist Vedantins) have preferred; there is one nous only, and that the divine mover. But at the level of particulars, the Self here and the Self over-there are differently reflected."

"Open Individualism thus at least on an initial analysis into the moral arena presents us with a scenario in which the one person who is everyone seems to be a far cry from anything like a perfect being. On the contrary. It is a Being that can be seen in some ways as being at least as sick—as mentally ill—as it is powerful and, in other ways, as it is wondrously benevolent. It is only intermittently conscious and that only in its lower, not higher, cognitive functions. In many ways it is like an unimaginably brilliant and precocious child with a variety of horrible disorders that even with all its intelligence it can barely begin to understand—from autisms and agnosias to paranoias and schizophrenias, coupled with extreme savantism."

"The universal Intellect is the intimate, most real, peculiar and powerful part of the soul of the world. This is the single whole which filleth the whole, illumineth the universe and directeth nature to the production of natural things, as our intellect with the congruous production of natural kinds."

"It is manifest [...] that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity [...] The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe [...] Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it."

"By such sentences as "That thou art," our own Self is affirmed. Of that which is untrue and composed of the five elements—the Shruti (scripture) says, "Not this, not this.""

"Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of all souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was fifteen years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul."

"For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was out only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking [...] After a few months I gave up trying to make converts. When some friend would come up to me and say cheerfully, "How's cosmajoonity doing today?" I would just answer, "Fine, thank you," and let it go at that."

"Enlightenment came to me suddenly and unexpectedly one afternoon in March [1939] when I was walking up to the school notice board to see whether my name was on the list for tomorrow's football game. I was not on the list. And in a blinding flash of inner light I saw the answer to both my problems, the problem of war and the problem of injustice. The answer was amazingly simple. I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody. There is no problem of injustice because your sufferings are also mine. There will be no problem of war as soon as you understand that in killing me you are only killing yourself."

"This force of nature, this will, continues to exist when "we" die, and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself, just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me."

"The idea that the "I" is more than just the present experience but something that can, as one and the same, have various experiences and could have other experiences, without this sameness being reducible to anything else (e.g. to any inter-experiential relations), has its root in the fact that every experience in its mere being-experienced essentially already implies a synchronic and diachronic transcendence of "me" qua consciousness with regard to this experience, a transcendence in which the being-experienced of the experience itself consists."

"Buddhism invites us to reflect on our own being and holds that what we will find are all kinds of transient phenomena (the five skandhas), but nothing like a stable 'self'. With regard to each of the skandhas one should understand: 'this is not mine; this am not I; this is not the Self of me' (Sam˙yutta Nikaya XXII.59). This insight leads us to the liberation from the illusion of self. Yet the question is: If there is nothing but these transient phenomena that constitute our being (in other words: if this simply is what we are)—who is it then that is not identical to all this? Who is it who can say of her body, her thoughts, etc. 'this am not I'? This 'who' is, I wish to suggest, nothing but the experiencing consciousness in which all the passing phenomena have their manifestation and which Advaita Vedānta regards as our 'self'."

"I am no one in existence but myself, so — Whom do I treat as foe and whom do I treat as friend? Whom do I call to aid my heart, pierced by a penetrating arrow, When the archer is my eyelid, striking my heart without an arrow? Why defend my station? It matters little to me; what do I care? For I am in love with none other than myself, and my very separation is my union."

"If we take the unintelligibility of an I-plurality seriously, I think we are left with the only choice of either returning to a reductionist view of the self, denying that there is any I as the abiding where or to-whom of experiential givenness and that I as one and the same exist as the experiencer of many different experiences and could as well have totally different experiences, this sameness not being constituted by any more fundamental facts—or embracing the non-multiplicity view. I am well aware that most people would choose otherwise—but for me, at least, the no-I view is much harder to believe than the one-I view."

"When you've seen beyond yourself Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there And the time will come when you see we're all one And life flows on within you and without you"

"I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly."

"Human speech is inadequate to express the reality. The soul [atman] is unborn and indestructible. The personality perishes, must perish. Individuality is and is not even as each drop in the ocean is an individual and is not. It is not because apart from the ocean it has no existence. It is because the ocean has no existence, if the drop has not, i.e., has no individuality. They are beautifully interdependent."

"In one sense the Reality is creatures; in another sense, It is not. [...] Whether you assert that It is undivided or divided, the Self is alone. The manifold [universe] exists and yet it does not exist. Therefore, know your Self, who you are, what is your identity. [...] Consider well in what way you are Haqq, and in what way Khalq, as being separate, other."

"There's certainly a lot of things I don't understand. This light of yours, or whatever you like to call it, how does it decide that you are you and I am me?' 'That could be another illusion. Look, along one wall of our office we have one complete set of pigeon holes, all in their nice tidy sequence. Along another wall we have another set of pigeon holes. Two completely different sets. But there is only one light. It dances about in both sets of pigeon holes. Wherever it happens to be, there is the phenomenon of consciousness. One set of pigeon holes is what you call you, the other is what I call me. It would be possible to experience both and never know it. It would be possible to follow the little patch of light wherever it went. There could be only one consciousness, although there must certainly be more than one set of pigeon holes.' I found this a staggering idea. 'If you're right it would be possible to be a million people and never know it.'"

"[L]et's not lose track of the purpose of all this imagery, which is to suggest helpful ways of imagining what a human soul's essence is. If we map each tree (or nucleus) in the crystal lattice onto a particular human brain, then in the tight-binding model (which corresponds to the caged-bird metaphor), each brain would possess a unique soul, represented by the cloud of timid butterflies that hover around it and it alone. By contrast, if we think of a metal, then the cloud is spread out across the whole lattice — which is to say, shared equally among all the trees (or nuclei). No tree is privileged. In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak's view in I Am You), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms."

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather."

"'It would be possible to be much more than that. It would be possible to be every creature on every system of planets throughout the universe. My point is that for every so-called different creature, for every different person, you need a separate set of pigeon holes. But the consciousness could be the same. There could even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying nucleus. Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay of a nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a doomsday machine. Let it be capable - if exploded - of wiping out all life on the Earth. Let the whole thing go for a critical few seconds, you remember we were considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds? Do we all survive or don't we? 'My guess is that inevitably we appear to survive, because there is a division, the world divides into two, into two completely disparate stacks of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and wipes us out. But the pigeon holes in that case never contain anything further about life on the Earth. So although those pigeon holes might be activated, there could never be any awareness that an explosion had taken place. In the other block, the Earth would be safe, our lives would continue - to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever the spotlight of consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware of the Earth and we should decide the bomb had not exploded.'"

"It is none other than He who progresses or journeys as you. There is nothing to be known but He; and since He is Being itself, He is therefore also the journeyer. There is no knower but He; so who are you? Know your true Reality. [...] He is the essential Self of all. But He conceals it by [the appearance of] otherness, which is "you.""

"The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That thou art'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is."

"All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible."

"One who sees all beings in the self alone, and the self of all beings, feels no hatred by virtue of that understanding. For the seer of oneness, who knows all beings to be the self, where is delusion and sorrow?"

"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."

"I claim that the borders between us are more like borders between oceans than like the borders between pebbles or lakes and though we can for practical and social purposes use them to draw boundaries between us, the boundaries we draw—on a deeper level—do not really matter, in the sense that they do not track any deep metaphysical truths about the nature of persons. The boundaries we draw along the borders between us exist only in our maps of ourselves, not in ourselves as we are: personal identity is not border-bound."

"For just as in dreams, all the persons that appear to us are but the masked images of ourselves; so in the dream of our waking life, it is our own being which looks on us from out our neighbours' eyes, though this is not equally easy to discern. Nevertheless, tat tvam asi."

"The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maya); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys."

"Individuation is merely an appearance, born of Space and Time; the latter being nothing else than the forms under which the external world necessarily manifests itself to me, conditioned as they are by my brain's faculty of perception. Hence also the plurality and difference of individuals is but a phaenomenon, that is, exists only as my mental picture. My true inmost being subsists in every living thing, just as really, as directly as in my own consciousness it is evidenced only to myself. This is the higher knowledge: for that which there is in Sanskrit the standing formula, tat tvam asi, that art thou."

"The view of things [...] that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; — this theory [...] may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated."

"[W]hat looks forth from another’s eyes, what feels itself in the writhing of a worm, what perhaps throbs with felt if dim emotion within an electron, is really that very thing which, when speaking through my lips, calls itself 'I'."

"(In respect of monopsychism) The action of the possible intellect consists in receiving the objects understood and in understanding them. And the action of the agent intellect consists in causing things to be actually understood by abstracting species. But both these functions pertain to one particular man. This man, for example, Socrates or Plato, receives the objects understood, abstracts the species, and understands what is abstracted. Hence the possible intellect as well as the agent intellect must be united to this man as a form. And so both must be numerically multiplied in accord with the number of men concerned. [...] Since the agent intellect and the possible intellect are united to us as form, we must acknowledge that they pertain to the same essence of the soul. Whatever is formally united to another thing, is united to it either in the manner of a substantial form or in the manner of an accidental form. If the possible intellect and the agent intellect were united to man after the fashion of a substantial form, we would have to hold that they share in the one essence of that form which is the soul, since one thing cannot have more than one substantial form. On the other hand, if they are united to man after the fashion of an accidental form, neither of them, evidently, can be an accident of the body. Besides, the fact that their operations are performed without a bodily organ, as we proved above, shows that each of them is an accident of the soul. But there is only one soul in one man. Therefore the agent intellect and the possible intellect must inhere in the one essence of the soul."

"You are me and I am you I’ll always be with you"

"'Do you now understand,' continued the old man, 'that Lailie is you, and the warriors you put to death were you also? And not the warriors only, but the animals which you slew when hunting and ate at your feasts, were also you. You thought life dwelt in you alone, but I have drawn aside the veil of delusion, and have let you see that by doing evil to others you have done it to yourself also. Life is one in them all, and yours is but a portion of this same common life. And only in that one part of life that is yours, can you make life better or worse—increasing or decreasing it. You can only improve life in yourself by destroying the barriers that divide your life from that of others, and by considering others as yourself, and loving them. By so doing you increase your share of life. You injure your life when you think of it as the only life, and try to add to its welfare at the expense of other lives. By so doing you only lessen it. To destroy the life that dwells in others is beyond your power. The life of those you have slain has vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. You thought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs, but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time nor space. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousand years: your life, and the life of all the visible and invisible beings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alter it, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. All else, but seems to us to be.'"

"[O]rdinarily, and in most philosophical works, too, we take it that each individual experience is perfectly private to, or is enjoyed only by, just that very individual [...]. But, for both so many philosophers and so many philosophically innocent thinkers, that may be no more than an enormously widespread and deeply ingrained error. In point of fact, the real situation may be that each of these experientially similar individuals is similarly related to the very same single experience [...] with me and all my overlappers, it really may be that each of us is having—in the way of having quite peculiar to experiences—on and the same individual experience."

"As the various rivers which flow into the ocean and become the ocean itself, losing their individuality they know not that, "I'm this river", "I'm that river". Likewise though all creatures here in this world have come forth from Being they do not know that they have come forth from Being."

"When to a man who understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be, to him who beholds that unity."

"The wise man, having realized Atman as dwelling within impermanent bodies but itself bodiless, vast, and all-pervading, does not grieve."

"As long as you think you are the ego, you suffer attachment and endless sorrow. But, realising you are the Self, limitless consciousness, you are freed from sorrow. When you realise you are the Self, the supreme source of love, you transcend the duality of life and enjoy the unitative state of non-duality."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"In some cases, the psychological need for more or the feeling of not enough that is so characteristic of the ego becomes transferred to the physical level and so turns into insatiable hunger. The sufferers of bulimia will often make themselves vomit so they can continue eating. Their mind is hungry, not their body. This eating disorder would become healed if the sufferers, instead of being identified with their mind, could get in touch with their body and so feel the true needs of the body rather than the pseudo needs of the egoic mind. p. 31"

"If you have a compulsive behavior pattern such as smoking, overeating, drinking, TV watching, Internet addiction, or whatever it may be, this is what you can do: When you notice the compulsive need arising in you, stop and take three conscious breaths. This generates awareness. Then for a few minutes be aware of the compulsive urge itself as an energy field inside you. Consciously feel that need to physically or mentally ingest or consume a certain substance or the desire to act out some form of compulsive behavior. Then take a few more conscious breaths. After that you may find that the compulsive urge has disappeared for the time being. or you may find that it still overpowers you, and you cannot help but indulge or act it out again. Don't make it into a problem. Make the addiction part of your awareness practice in the way described above. As awareness grows, addictive patterns will weaken and eventually dissolve. Remember, however, to catch any thoughts that justify the addictive behavior, sometimes with clever arguments, as they arise in you mind. Ask yourself, Who is talking here? And you will realize the addiction is talking. As long as you know that, as long as you are present as the observer of your mind, it is less likely to trick you into doing what it wants. p. 149"