Quotes on Oneness

Oneness

Humankind has not woven the web of life; we are but one thread in it. What we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

–Chief Seattle

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“In spite of what the self-help books say, none of us, as an individual, can create our own reality. The cosmosophical perspective, by showing how deeply we are connected to one another and to the world in which we live, exposes how absurd this notion really is. But we do create the world we live incollectively: the stars created our world when they exploded as supernovae, seeding our planet; the first mammals created our world when they learned how to compassionately care for their young; the first humans created our world when they made the choice to walk onto the savannah and when they painted inside the caves; and we are creating the world for our children with the choices we make today. The human, like the star or the jellyfish or the dog, participates in this creation in its own unique way. The choices that so profoundly affect the future are made not only because of our intellect or our genes, but also because of our capacity to employ our imagination. Our stories and our poems and our songs tell us about our world, and we act accordingly.”

— Theodore Richards, Cosmosophia

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We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are pain and what cures pain both.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
I want to hold you close like a lute so we can cry out with loving.
You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

—Rumi

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Everything that I believe crawls from underneath the street
Everything I truly love comes from somewhere far above
Everything that I believe is wrong with you, is wrong with me
Everything I truly love, I love in you and I love in me
So give me hope, give me hope, that emptiness brings fullness
And loss of love brings wholeness to us all….

— Amy Ray/Indigo Girls, Hand Me Downs

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Lost

Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.
Listen.
It answers, I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost.
Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.

~~ David Wagoner, Collected Poems 1956-1976

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Perhaps there are events and things that work as a doorway into the mythical world, the world of first people, all the way back to the creation of the universe and the small quickenings of earth, the first stirrings of human beings at the beginning of time.

Our elders believe this to be so, that it is possible to wind a way backward to the start of things, and in doing so find a form of sacred reason, different from ordinary reason, that is linked to the forces of nature. In this kind of mind, like in the feather, is the power of sky and thunder and sun, and many have had alliances and partnerships with it, a way of thought older than measured time, less primitive than the rational present. Others have tried for centuries to understand the world by science and intellect but have not yet done so, not yet understood animals, finite earth, or even their own minds and behavior. They more they seek to learn the world, the closer they come to the spiritual, the magical origins of creation.

There is still a place, a gap between worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings.

At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery, the place of spirit…

-Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World _______________________________________________

Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply … you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father … the paper is full of everything, the entire cosmos. The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos.

— Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step

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The image of the Goddess strikes at the roots of estrangement. True value is not found in some heaven, some abstract otherworld, but in female bodies and their offspring, female and male; in nature; and in the world. Nature is seen as having its own inherent order, of which human beings are a part. Human nature, needs, drives, and desires are not dangerous impulses in need of repression and control, but are themselves expressions of the order inherent in being. The evidence of our senses and our experience is evidence of the divine – the moving energy that unites all being.
~~Starhawk
Dreaming the Dark