more quotes, quotations and passages on oneness and unity

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

Wilfried Fink

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

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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

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

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become
lost in war and politics. We have reached the point of regarding each
other only as members of a people either allied with us or against us
and our approach: prejudice, sympathy, or antipathy are all conditioned
by that. Now we must rediscover the fact that we-- all together-- are
human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other
what moral capacity we have.

Albert Schweitzer

In everything you recognize yourself. The tiny beetle that lies
dead in your path-- it was a living creature, struggling for existence
like yourself, rejoicing in the sun like you, knowing fear and pain
like you. And now it is no more than decaying matter-- which is what
you will be sooner or later, too.

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

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

I have often felt myself to be a point of light, connected to everyone I have
ever loved or mattered to, each also being a point of light, in turn connected
to those they love, so that somehow we are all part of a vast web of twinkling
lights. I think that each individual light can grow brighter or dimmer over the
course of a lifetime, and that whenever a light goes out on this web, it affects
me. It feels as if everyone who acts compassionately, works to raise
consciousness, to save the planet, to make a difference in some
significant way is linked to everyone else who also does.

Jean Shinoda Bolen
Crossing to Avalon

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.

community - God - oneness

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

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
Attitudes of Gratitude

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than
all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.

Simone de Beauvoir

Buddhism stresses the interconnectedness of all life. It is only the
limited capacity of our senses that causes us to place so much stock
in the separation between "them" and "us." Because of this
interconnectedness, by using violence, you not only injure or destroy
the other person but also yourself. Those who use violence and
devalue others' lives actually devalue and ruin their own lives.

Daisaku Ikeda
Buddhism Day by Day

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community - God - oneness

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

"Cut off" is our customary state of being. But there is within us
the constant yearning for connectedness, a yearning--"Ah!-- to
live without the slightest partition between our souls and the distant
stars, between ourselves and the world's otherness. We yearn for
community with each other because we know that with it we would
feel more at home in our lives, no longer strangers to one another
and aliens to the earth.

Parker J. Palmer
The Courage to Teach

When you have a hand and you have only the separate fingers, it is
easy for people to break the fingers. But when you put the fingers
together it is difficult to break them. Let us come together and be
one, let us be people of peace, let us be people of harmony.

Desmond Tutu
Believe

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flaunt.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle and took him in.

Edward Markham
"Outwitted"

The true wonder of the world is available everywhere, in the minutest
parts of our bodies, in the vast expanses of the cosmos,
and in the interconnectedness of these and all things.

Michael Stark

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and
frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or
hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present,
we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the
experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect
ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and
integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that people
and our present experience are one, and that no
separate “I” or mind can be found.

Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity

When you are truly joined in spirit, another person's good
is your good, too. You work for the good of each other.

Ruth Senter

We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood.
To hate people because they were born in another country,
because they speak a different language, or because they
take a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly.
Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human. . . .
Let us have but one end in view: the welfare of humanity.

Johann Amos Comenius

The drop of water is only weak when it is removed from the ocean;
replace it and it is as powerful as the ocean. . . . If a portion of one
unit excludes itself from the whole, it makes no difference to the
Principal Being, but it makes a vast difference to the unit. The ocean
is not conscious of the removal of a drop of water, but the drop
is very conscious of the ocean when it is returned.

Baird Spaulding

We all want to be happy, and feeling a sense of unity and belonging is essential to our happiness. Feeling part of something is an important aspiration that we have as human beings--part of a relationship, a family, a group of friends, a sports team, a choir, or just part of an experience, like when we are totally absorbed in a piece of music or immersed in the adventures of a book. Feeling connected to life and to other people makes us feel good.
In a world where separation and isolation are becoming part of our modern culture, and where our minds are filled with stories advocating the importance of speed, success, money, and productivity, mindfulness of the natural world has never been more important for our well-being. As we deepen our appreciation of nature toward an understanding of the unity of life, we begin to awaken to the fact that our separation, our loneliness, and our quest for meaning are all just constructs of the mind.

Claire Thompson
Mindfulness and the Natural World

The prayer of power is not reaching toward anything above or around
or beneath. It is knowing that you are one with all there is. It is an
understanding that the substance of your being is the one
and only substance there is in the universe.

H.B. Jeffery

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within
the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with
the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the
universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really
everywhere, it is within each of us.

Nicholas Black Elk

When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other,
that we are all members of one body? Until the spirit of love for our
fellow people, regardless of race, color, or creed, shall fill the world,
making real in our lives and our deeds the actuality of human brother-
and sisterhood, until the great mass of the people shall be filled with
the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare,
social justice can never be attained.

Helen Keller

I think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that
monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions
can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands,
and ants bury their dead. That there isn't their life and our life.
Nor your life and my life. That it's just one teetering and endless
thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it
as deep as entanglement goes.

Kate Forster

Creative Oneness
Wilferd A. Peterson

Centuries ago, a Hindu sage warned mankind of the evil of exclusion. "Slay the sense of separation which weans you from the rest of the world," he wrote.

Ashley Montagu, a modern anthropologist, declared that there is no such thing as race, and that all people spring from common ancestors. "The existing varieties of humankind are derived from the same ancestral group," he pointed out, "and belong to a single species."

In living with others on this earth we need to recognize the reality of our commonalities. We are brothers and sisters. There are no born bigots. The thought patterns, habits, emotions, and ideals that motivate us are acquired. Biologically we are one, and our task is to create a mental and spiritual oneness. We must stop incorrect thinking before incorrect thinking stops us.

Albert Schweitzer proclaimed a universal ethic that I believe has great power to help us achieve creative oneness. He expressed this ethic in three dynamic words: Reverence for life.

When we have reverence for life, we will never do anything to harm, hinder or destroy life. Instead we do everything we can to help life fulfill its highest destiny. We come to realize that when we proclaim war on life, we proclaim war on ourselves, for the same life flows through all of us.

We will not achieve creative oneness in a moment, but it should always be our ultimate goal. Our creative thinking should be concentrated on bringing people together in all those areas that contribute to our common good. We should cooperate instead of fight, believe instead of doubt, save instead of destroy, love instead of hate.

Exclusion builds walls between people. It tears people apart. It separates races, colors, religions, and nations. It divides life. But creative oneness will turn us around. Instead of shaking fists, we will join hands; instead of slamming doors, we will swing them open; instead of building walls, we will tear them down. And instead of rejecting people, we will accept them.