SPECTRUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Ken Wilber
This is a bold and well-documented plea to the world to recognize our basic consciousness as a state of at-one-ment; it makes irrevocably clear the viable presence of the sublime Godhead. This book is a cohesive bringing together of the voluminous testimony to the non-duality of nature.
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By reflecting on one's life through the eyes of the archetypes and mythological images common to mankind, one's awareness necessarily begins to shift to a universal perspective – a transcendent, de-personal, transpersonal view. Once this process quickens, the individual is no longer exclusively identified with just his separate-self sense and hence is no longer exclusively tied to his purely personal problems."
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"In some sense or other, this community of the actualities of the world means each happening is a factor in the nature of every other happening….We are in the world and the world is in us." Alfred N. Whitehead, 'Modes of Thought', Macmillan, 1968
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"Self-nature is synonymous with 'Buddha-nature', which the 'Nirvana Sutra' declares is inherent in all beings, and thus seeing into one's Self-nature is nothing less than the attainment of Buddhahood."
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"The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings." Huang Po (Bloefield, 'Zen Teachings of Huang Po')
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"Nicholas de Cusa called God the 'coincidence of opposites'. Actually, this is today the way the astro-physicists view the universe – it curves back in on itself like a Mobius strip, and thus has no outside, and having no outside neither does it have an inside, or, one can say its inside is its outside: the coincidence of opposites, the universe as non-dual."
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"Duality and the opposites are, in short, terms of relation or of thought, but not of reality."
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"Whether we call him Person, or Sacerdotium, or Magna Matter, or by any other grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter names, 'That' of which our powers are measures is a syzygy of conjoint principles, without composition or duality. These conjoint principles…become contraries only when we descend from the silent level of the Non-duality to speak in terms of subject and object and to recognize the many separate and individual existences that the All or Universe presents to our physical organs of perception. And since this finite totality can only be logically and not really divided from its infinite source, 'That One' can also be called an 'Integral Multiplicity' and 'Omniform Light.'" Ananda Coomaraswamy, 'Hinduism and Buddhism'
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"All temporal succession coincides in one and the same Eternal Now. So there is nothing past or future." Nicolas de Cusa, 'The Vision of God', ch. X
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"The harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures. Modern science and the philosophy of organism, with its integrative levels, have come back to this wisdom, fortified by new understanding of cosmic, biological, and social evolution." Joseph Needham, 'Science and Civilization in China'
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"Actually there is no merging with the Center. We are always merged with the Center. It is rather an understanding of this eternal union now, and not a manufacture of it tomorrow."
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"Each instant our Energy is constantly rising from 'below', from the Level of Mind, where it is pure, informal, non-objective, timeless and spaceless Energy that operates Now in a moment without duration."
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"This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity; And this body is the body of Buddha." Hakuin
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"In reality, there is Mind-only, all inclusive, non-dual, the timeless ground of all temporal phenomena, fusion without confusion, a Reality without duality but not without relations."
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"Our experience is contained within the depths of Divine life itself….It is not by discarding the principle of personality that the absolutely Divine One can be attained, but rather by exploring the spiritual depths of the personality which is antinomically united to the One." Nicholas Berdyaev, 'Spirit and Reality', New York 1939
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"Just as all of Infinity is completely present at every point of space, so also all of eternity is completely present at every point of time. Thus, from the viewpoint of Eternity, absolutely all time is NOW, just as to the Infinite, all space is HERE."
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"Everything you observe is none other than you who are observing it."
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"This sensation of being one with the universe is much more common than one might initially suspect, for it is the very foundation of all other sensations."
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"At each moment Nature starts upon a long, long journey and at each moment reaches her end…All is eternally present in her, for she knows neither past nor future. For her the present is eternity." Goethe, 'Fragments on Nature'
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"The Seer, the That in you which knows, in actuality is not separate from what it sees – it IS what it sees, for the Knower sees a thing by being that thing, as St. Thomas Aquinas stated, 'Knowledge comes about in so far as the object known is within the knower.' (Summa Theologica I, q. 59, a. 2)"
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"All things are of the One Mind." 'Awakening of Faith', a compendium of the essence of Mahayana doctrine
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"Mythological imagery springs from the collective unconscious, the transconscious, and it is therefore not contaminated by merely social conventions, language, logic, or the illusions of any particvular cult or individual. Furthermore, the language of mythology is associative and integrative, and…hence it more clearly and truly reflects the actual physical reality of the seamless coat of the universe, of the mutual interdependence and interpenetration of all things and events."
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"Know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never really be ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance." 'The Spiritual Teaching of Romano Maharshi', Berkeley 1972
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"The Will….is a three-dimensional act of the total organism to globally move in time towards some future end….The Will itself is an act of the person's total being. The Will is a moving prehension. It is an intentionality."
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"Non-dual knowledge is the abolition of all particular view points which restrict and distort reality." T. R. V. Murti, 'Central Philosophy of Buddhism'
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"The unborn timeless Mind is working in us. The Buddha-mind and our mind are not two." Bankei, quoted in 'Living by Zen' by D. T. Suzuki, Rider, 1972
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