ONE RIVER, MANY WELLS: WISDOM SPRINGING FROM WORLD FAITHS
Matthew Fox
In this book I try to go to the core of human religious traditions as we know them to find the spirituality that is there. It is clear that once we return to the depth or core of religion we find much more than dogmas, concepts, institutions, commands. We find a striving for experience of the Divine, however that be spoken of, we find both form and formlessness, male and female, experience and practice. We also find that in their core and depth we do not encounter many different religions so much as one experience that is expressed variously and with great diversity and color flowing in the name of different traditions and cultures.
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"Joy is our true nature and finding the eternal now is doable. It returns us to our origins of joy."
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"Human life is one and all men are members one of another." Martin Luther King
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"The African universe is conceived as a unified spiritual totality….all being within it is organically interrelated and interdependent." Dona Richards, African-American philosopher
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"My neighbor and I have the same origins; we have the same life-experience and a common destiny; we are the obverse and reverse sides of one entity; we are unchanging equals; we are the faces which see themselves in each other." The Zulu Personal Declaration of 1825
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"Today we are told that atoms are not impenetrable – they are more like bubbles than like billiard balls and their linking up is what forms molecules, whose linking up forms cells, whose linking up forms organisms, whose linking up forms communities. Behold! Now we have a basis in physics once again to honor community."
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"Muhammad said: 'All people are equal, as equal as the teeth of a comb.'"
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"Ramakrishna teaches about the Divine Mother when he says: 'Whatever we see or think about is the manifestation of the Mother, of the Primordial Energy, the Primal Consciousness.'"
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"Your existence, my dear, O love my dear, has been sealed and marked 'too sacred', 'too sacred', by the Beloved – to ever end! Indeed, God has written a thousand promises all over your heart that say, Life, life, life is far too sacred to ever end." Hafiz, 'God's Bucket'
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"Humanity is made, as the Hebrew Scriptures put it, in the image and likeness of God the Creator."
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"Creation is the extension of God. Creation is God encountered in time and space. Creation is the infinite in the garb of the finite. To attend to Creation is to attend to God." Ancient Rabbinic teaching
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"From the lowliest insect to the most perfect sage, there breathes the same Universal Spirit, which assumes innumerable forms." B. K. S. Iyengar, 'Light on Yoga'
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"The Spirit is the supreme abode wherein dwells all that moves and breathes and sees….His radiance illumines all Creation." Mundaka Upanishad
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"The Celts all considered themselves children of a Great Mother Goddess."
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"We all possess a little fragment of the first bit of life on earth. Consequently, everything that's alive is related." David Brower
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"The truth is that interdependence exists at the microcosmic and macrocosmic and psychic levels of existence."
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"There is one underground river – but there are many wells into that river: an African well, a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a Goddess well, a Christian well, and aboriginal wells. Many wells but one river."
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"For primal peoples, because the landscape itself is sacred it therefore embodies a divinity that it shares with everything that is part of nature, including human beings, animals, plants, rocks….everything." Jamake Highwater
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"The Spirit who is in the body does not grow old and does not die, and no one can ever kill the Spirit who is everlasting. This is the real castle of Brahman wherein dwells all the love of the universe. It is Atman, pure Spirit, beyond sorrow, old age, and death." The Upanishads
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"God is breath. All that breathes resides in the Only Being." New Testament, John 4:24, Aramaic translation
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"The Divinity we image is a light-filled, light-making, enlightening, warm, radiant, glorious face."
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"Divinity is always one."
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"All men of wisdom have one religion; they all have one caste; they all behold the face of the One!" Dadu, 16th century Indian saint-poet
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"All Creation is on fire with sacredness; the Buddha nature and the Cosmic Christ and the image of God reside in the very light (photons) present in every atom in the universe."
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"Everything teems with richness, everything aspires to ascend and be purified. Everything sings, celebrates, serves, develops, evolves, uplifts, aspires to be arranged in oneness." The Kabbalah
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"Instant by instant the unvierse creates itself as a bonded community. To hear how omnipresent community is in the universe is to encourage our own difficult steps in community-building. The effort at community is an effort to imitate the universe. Therefore, it is a good effort. Therefore, it cannot fail."
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We are gathering together the primary insights of spirituality and bringing them together into one place.
This archive contains 11,750 quotes, taken from 635 references,
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