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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"Beautiful you rise, O eternal living god! You are radiant, lovely, powerful. Your love is great, all-encompassing." Egyptian hymn, ca. 1550 bce
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"The Shahadah is the Islamic prayer of unity: 'La illaha illa Ilah hu' (Nothing exists save God). It is like the Jewish prayer: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.'"
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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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"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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"Mechtild of Magdeburg said: 'God is not only fatherly. God is also mother who lifts her loved child from the ground to her knee.'"
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"Our imaginations are holy, the Holy Spirit works through us when we create and participate in the ongoing Creation of self, society, universe, and mind."
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"The truth is that interdependence exists at the microcosmic and macrocosmic and psychic levels of existence."
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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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"Indeed, every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity."
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"God is a pure, clear One who is separate from all twoness." Meister Eckhart
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"The glory of humanity is to be a brilliant mirror or image of Divinity."
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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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"The Celts all considered themselves children of a Great Mother Goddess."
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"Each beautiful thing, a flower, the song of a bird, awakens in our soul the memory of our origin. Learn how to listen to the voice of beautiful things, to make us understand the voice of the soul." The Mevlevi Dervishes
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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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"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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"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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"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 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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"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 seven principles that form the basis of Kwanza celebration all center around community. They include the following: self-determination for the community; collective work and responsibility; cooperative economics; the collective vocation of building the community; and creativity whose purpose is 'to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.'"
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"From this beautiful One beauty comes to be in all beings." Thomas Aquinas
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"Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg delivered an address in 1970 on 'The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences." In that talk he called mathematics 'the archetype of the beauty of the world', and he invoked the philosopher Plotinus, who said 'Beauty is the translucence, through the material phenomena, of the eternal splendor of the 'One'.'"
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"When we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe. When we discover the Buddha that we are, we realize that everything and everyone is Buddha." Pema Chodron
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"Isness is God." Meister Eckhart
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