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In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are seen as separate from God…

• In the Judeo-Christian tradition, duality is central to the perception of reality. The basics of life and the cosmos involve relationships—often encompassing tension or conflict—between the individual versus nature or the individual self and its relationship to a deity that is separate. Robert Lanza
• From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it. C. S. Lewis
• Many would say that God (whom they view to be distinctly outside them as a separate grand entity) created a solid physical universe, as well as a heaven and a hell, and that he presides over all of this creation, independent of it. Ziad Masri
• It’s astonishing that people were ever persuaded to love a God who is set apart from them—usually we fear and distrust “the other.” But religion has built in a large dose of fear along with love, as anyone who has ever heard of mortal sin, hell, and damnation knows. Deepak Chopra  
• Dualism overshoots the mark when it perceives each Jivatman is ontologically independent from one another and the larger scope of Ultimate existence. Dualism as a system of thought acknowledges the individualization of Brahman into component parts as if it were entirely separate from other individual soul forms and also form the universal Divine. Chaudhuri
• There is an idea in Kabbalah that the creation of the world is created through space. God is an ever present Being, and in order for anything outside of Him to exist, like this world for example, there needs to be what’s called a TumTum[a], or a withdrawal of Godly-like. And that withdrawal happens not by connection but actually by separation. Conflict. And in the gap of that conflict is where the world is situated. That’s where the world is created and lived. Matisyahu
• In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy. Sam Harris
• For centuries church altars were up against the wall and the priests, facing the altar, turned their backs to the congregation. The message conveyed by this arrangement was clear: God’s presence was outside the community gathered. No one was looking at one another. Everyone was facing in the same direction, toward God. The clergy said their prayers to the heavens beyond the sanctuary, where presumably God resided. God was transcendent, the transcendent one dwelling, as the familiar hymn states, “in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.” God was not among the people, not even in the church. Flora A. Keshgegian

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…and to say otherwise, some say, is blasphemy

• The moment you proclaim your Oneness with God, others will proclaim your partnership with Satan. Neale Donald Walsch

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God and the soul are seen as separate entities

• God, in relation to the soul, presumes a duality—the Object to be perceived, God; and the perceiver or experiencer, the soul. Paramahansa Yogananda
• God can be understood as a supreme person with qualities of love and compassion towards creatures. On this theistic view the soul remains distinct from the Lord even in liberation. Professor Gavin Flood
• The Dvaita (dualistic) school believes that all souls are individual and self-contained, and they are always separate from God. This school often holds that all souls are all created at the same time, but they reincarnate into different shells in order to experience different types of existence. Beings on this earth are not yet worthy of being with God, so they must build up merit, either through, acts or devotion. Eventually these souls do enough good works, or repeat enough mantra or ritual enough acts to sit next to Vishnu in Heaven. Gary Gomes
• God created individual souls, state Dvaita Vedantins, but the individual soul never was and never will become one with God; the best it can do is to experience bliss by getting infinitely close to God. Thomas Padiyath

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The more we sin, the more separate we are seen to be from God

• You and your sins must separate, or you and your God will never come together. Charles Spurgeon
• If you allow one little sin to creep into your life, and think it doesn’t matter, it will grow and grow until it affects your whole spiritual life, deflecting you from your primary aim of serving God. Angus Buchan
• Sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed of all love, wisdom or good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God’s immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish, and achieve our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell – the loss of our capacity for giving or receiving love or joy. Timothy Keller
• It is the very nature of sin to prevent man from meditating on spiritual things. Mary Martha Sherwood
• Our sin is what separates us from God. Paul David Tripp
• Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less. Simon Mawer
• Sin is essentially a departure from God. Martin Luther
• Sin is whatever obscures the soul. Andre Gide
• Sin is not wrong doing, it is wrong BEING, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. Oswald Chambers
• You never lose the love of God. Guilt is the warning that temporarily you are out of touch. Jack Dominian
• Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony. John Stott
• To be a Christian is to realize that in your sin, you were separated from God’s presence, and you deserved nothing but God’s wrath. David Platt

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Our sense of separation from God greatly effects how we relate to God

• The dualist’s approach to God may correspond, in type, to any one of our earthly relationships: it may be that of the servant, the child, the parent, the husband, the lover or the friend. Christopher Isherwood

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Some argue our sense of separation from God causes anguish…

• In order to project the world of illusion, the ego-self experiences itself as separate from its own creation. The greater the feeling of separation from God, the greater the anguish. As a consequence, the self now fears annihilation, death, and even worse—perhaps endless suffering at the hands of an angry, retaliatory God who has been made angry by sin. The lower levels of perception become preoccupied with energies of negativity that are the ego’s conceptions of itself at the lowest levels. David R. Hawkins
• The (false) suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God is the root of every form of anxiety in the universe, and the cure for it—which I received partially within the Gateway and completely within the Core—was the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God, ever. Eben Alexander
• The belief that a personal life exists apart from God creates experience disconnected from God. This is painful and frustrating. Our spiritual work is to break down the illusion that we have a life here and that a life of God is somewhere else. Michael Beckwith
• To be a Christian is to realize that in your sin, you were separated from God’s presence, and you deserved nothing but God’s wrath. David Platt
• I think that hell essentially is separation from God forever. And that is the worst hell that I can think of. Billy Graham

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…and that our sense of separation from God stops us from truly knowing God

• Man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. Aldous Huxley
• No one sees Him except Himself, no one reaches Him except Himself and no one knows Him except Himself. He knows Himself through Himself and He sees Himself by means of Himself. No one but He sees Him. Balyani
• This treasure of the Kingdom of God has been hidden by time and multiplicity and the soul’s own works, or briefly by its creaturely nature. But in the measure that the soul can separate itself from this multiplicity, to that extent it reveals within itself the Kingdom of God. Here the soul and the Godhead are one. Meister Eckhart
• One has to understand that the search for reality, or God and the search for the self are the same; when one is found, all are found. When ‘I am’ and ‘God is’ become in your mind indistinguishable, then something will happen and you will know without a trace of doubt that God is because you are, you are because God is. The two are one. Nisargadatta Maharaj

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In many eastern religions, God is seen as an absolute Oneness beyond all duality

• God, the Sole Life, is Absolute Unity. Paramahansa Yogananda
• All is divine, all is God, and unity is divinity. Sathya Sai Baba
• God is the oneness of being that is arising as all beings. Tim Freke
• In everything there is a sign that points to the Oneness of Him. Ibn’ Ata’
• God is immanent as well as transcendent, Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir
• Life is light and consciousness. Beyond this world and other worlds, beyond time and space and dimension, beyond what we call duality, is God. Frederick Lenz
• Oneness of the Divine. It may be given a thousand names such as The Primary Cause / God / Energy / I. All that is created has its Self in this Oneness. Sathya Sai Baba
• I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. . . . I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone. Mahatma Gandhi
• Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness. Meister Eckhart
• Though One, Brahman is the cause of the many. There is no other cause. And yet Brahman is independent of the law of causation. Such is Brahman, and ‘thou art That.’ Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness. Shankara
• In God there is no duality. In that Presence “I” and “we” and “you” do not exist. “I” and “you” and “we” and “He” become one…. Since in the Unity there is no distinction, the Quest and the Way and the Seeker become one. Mahmud Shabistari
• Brahman is said to be the sole reality, a transcendent intelligence beyond all attributes: unchanging, infinite, immanent; the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything in this Universe and whatever others there may be. Bernard Haisch
• Brahman is the only Reality, ever pure, ever illumined, ever free, beyond the limits of time, space, and causation. Though apparently divided by names and forms through the inscrutable power of maya, that enchantress who makes the impossible possible, Brahman is really One and undivided. Ramakrishna
• To me, neither the elemental particles Nor the entire universe exists; Brahman alone is everything. Where, then, are the castes or the stages of life? I always recognize everything As the one indivisible Reality. That undivided One constitutes the world, The Void, all space, and the five elements. The Avadhuta Gita
• Thou art God, who by Thy Divinity supportest all things formed; and upholdest all creatures by Thy Unity. Thou art God, and there is no distinction between Thy Godhead, Unity, Eternity or Existence; for all is one mystery; and although each of these attributes is variously named, yet all of them point to One. Salomon Ibn Gabirol
• If I were to say “God exists,” this would not be true. He is beyond being. He is a no-thing-ness beyond being. This is why St. Augustine says “The best thing to be said about God is silence.” You must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-Sun, not-image, but as He is – sheer, pure absolute Oneness, without any duality. Meister Eckhart
• We were not simply created by an all-powerful Creator who is completely apart from us and resides in some place separate from us, but rather that we are all literally aspects of the One Infinite Creator who encompasses everyone and everything, always. And if you are religious, then I submit to you that God is in everyone and everything because God is literally everything; One Consciousness appearing as the entire physical and nonphysical universe and beyond, intertwined and interlinked as One Infinite Essence. Ziad Masri

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That we are one with God is what mystics (including Christian mystics) have been telling us for centuries and even millennia

• Are the mystics and sages insane? They all tell the same story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. It’s at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? … Just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane? … And I think [the sages] point to the same depth in you, and in me, and in all of us. I think they are plugged into the All…. Your identity is indeed the All, and you are no longer part of that stream, you are that stream, with the All unfolding not around you but in you. Ken Wilber
• As the soul becomes more pure and bare and poor, and possesses less of created things, and is emptied of all things that are not God, it receives God more purely, and is more completely in Him; and it truly becomes one with God, and it looks into God and God into it, face to face as it were; two images transformed into one. Meister Eckhart
• In that breaking-through, when I come to be free of my own will and of God’s will and of all His works and of God Himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Meister Eckhart
• You should know (God) without image, unmediated and without likeness. But if I am to know God without mediation in such a way, then “I” must become “he”, and “he” must become “I”. More precisely I say: God must become me and I must become God, so entirely one that “he” and this “I” become one “is” and act in this “isness” as one, for this “he” and this “I”, that is God and the soul, are very fruitful. Meister Eckhart
• For though she sinks all sinking in the oneness of divinity, she never touches bottom. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator. And here one cannot speak of the soul any more, for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. There she is no more called soul, but is called immeasurable being. Meister Eckhart

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God is seen as Unity

• Unity is the ultimate goal of all the ways of God. Abraham Kuyper
• God, Most High, is the very one who Himself affirms His unity by the tongue of whatever of His creatures He wishes. If He Himself affirms His unity by my tongue, it is He and His affair. Otherwise, brother, I have nothing to do with affirming God’s Unity. Mansur Al-Hallaj
• If God and man are in themselves one, and if religion is the human side of this unity then must this unity be made evident to man in religion, and become in him consciousness and reality. David Friedrich Strauss
• Look out into the universe and contemplate the glory of God. Observe the stars, millions of them, twinkling in the night sky, all with a message of unity, part of the very nature of God. Sai Baba
• God, when I listen to the voices of animals, the sounds of trees, the murmurings of water, the singing of birds, the whistling of the wind, or the boom of thunder, I see in them evidence of Your unity. Paulo Coelho
• Union with God is really possible. Unity with God I presume, is what is meant by Heaven, but that too is available in this life for the humble of heart. Thomas Keating
• The great lesson is, that unity is behind all. Call it God, Love, Spirit. Allah, Jehovah – it is the same unity that animates all life from the lowest animal to the noblest man. Swami Vivekananda
• The life of God – the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things – may be described as a play of love with itself… Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• The Stoics also teach that God is unity, and that he is called Mind and Fate and Jupiter, and by many other names besides. Diogenes Laertius
• Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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We seen as not separate from God

• My father and I are one. Jesus Christ
• Your separation from God is the hardest work you will ever do. Hafez
• There is nothing higher than him, nothing other than him. The Upanishad
• I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear. Franz Wright
• The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. Meister Eckhart
• There is not an infinite I and a finite I. There is only Gods infinite I. There is no separate I. Rupert Spira
• A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. Meister Eckhart
• You obtain God only when you get rid of the notion of separateness from God. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
• God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Nicolas of Cusa
• He fills the cosmos, yet he transcends it. The Lord of Love is one. There is indeed No other. The Upanishad
• God is inclusive. I think that the idea of God somehow being separated from us was more man’s idea. Jay Bakker
• We are part of the Mind and the Will of God in which there is no separation. Nothing is outside of it. Neale Donald Walsch
• This universe comes forth from Brahman, exists in Brahman, and will return to Brahman. Verily, all is Brahman. The Upanishad
• The illumined man knows this truth of life. For him the universe is his garment And the Lord not separate from himself. The Upanishad
• There is a universal intelligence that we call God or Soul or Spirit or Consciousness, and it is everywhere and in all things. Wayne Dyer
• The seeing of ‘many’ is the great sin of all the world. See all as Self and love all; let all idea of separateness go. Swami Vivekananda
• There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message – Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene. Amit Ray
• In truth, we are one with God and each other. The belief that we are separated from God and other people is just that: a belief. Doreen Virtue
• Some simple people think that they will see God as if He were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one. Meister Eckhart
• There is no yawning gulf between man and God. Through his aspiration and meditation, Man can become conscious of his oneness with God. Sri Chinmoy
• Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual : In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours. Meister Eckhart
• Nothing but the Reality is; there is no separate being, no arriving and no being far away. This is seen in true vision; when I experienced it, I saw nothing but Him. Ibn ‘Arabi
• There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other. Ken Wilber
• All that is real in me is God; all that is real in God is I. The gulf between God and me is thus bridged. Thus by knowing God, we find that the kingdom of heaven is within us. Swami Vivekananda
• If separation from God leads to fear, persecution, and evils done in the name of God, then the only escape is to heal separation. Only a God who is inseparable from us can be real. Deepak Chopra  
• What is the idea of God in heaven? Materialism. The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in every one of us. God sitting up on a cloud! Think of the utter blasphemy of it! Swami Vivekananda
• As God’s beloved, I live in the bliss knowing that my soul is never separated from Him, for I learn to know Her in all that I see. God dissolved my mind-my separation. I cannot describe now my intimacy with Him. Teresa of Avila
• I believe that evidence shows that there is a real spirit, a real Beach, but it is beneath no pavement whatsoever, for all pavements arise within it: Spirit is all-encompassing. It transcends everything, it includes everything. Ken Wilber
• There is no separation between us and God-we are divine expressions of the creative principle…there can be no real lack or scarcity; there is nothing we have to try to achieve or attract; we contain the potential for everything within us. Shakti Gawain
• Far beyond your intellect, far beyond your understanding, lies inexhaustible knowledge and wealth, strength and power, peace and joy. Do not use your intellect to find the answers for God and his manifestations. Everything is God. Vishnudevananda Saraswati
• You must stop seeing God as separate from you, and you as separate from each other. […] Nothing exists in the universe that is separate from anything else. Everything is intrinsically connected, irrevocably interdependent, interactive, interwoven into the fabric of all of life. Neale Donald Walsch
• God is nearer to us than any man at every time. He is nearer to me than my raiment, nearer than the air or light, nearer than my wife, father, mother, daughter, son, or friend. I live in Him, soul and body. I breathe in Him, think in Him, feel, consider, intend, speak, undertake, work in Him. John of Kronstadt
• If you take a glass of water and separate it from its source – the ocean – then pour the water away from its source and ask it to sustain life, it flitters away. It just evaporates. It can’t sustain life. That’s a metaphor for us when we separate ourselves from our source and believe that God is separate from us. Wayne Dyer
• It is none other than He who progresses or journeys as you. There is nothing to be known but He; and since He is Being itself, He is therefore also the journeyer. There is no knower but He; so who are you? Know your true Reality. He is the essential self of all. But He conceals it by [the appearance of] otherness, which is “you.” Ibn ‘Arabi
• God is not a person; God is manifestation itself. We think that God is a superhuman person, but God is not a person. He is not a subject. We can never experience God in a subject/object experience. God is what makes a subject/object experience possible. We can never see God or experience God as separate from ourselves. God is a being but there is no division. Ricky Ray
• The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life. Our created essence and our life are attached to it without mediation as to their eternal cause. Ruysbroeck
• Most important, do not ever think that you and God are separate. Think always, “God is with me; He is inside me; He is around me. All there is is God. I myself am God. I am the Infinite, the Eternal. I am not two; I am one, only one. There is no one else besides me. I and God are one and the same.” To realize this Unity, the first step is to develop Self-confidence. It comes when you realize that God is not outside of you. Sathya Sai Baba
• I am often asked if I believe in God and I reply ‘I don’t believe in anything but God’. It’s all God. We are all God. There is only God. God is not some distant figure somewhere in the sky. God is my own deepest nature and yours too. We are God playing a game of hide and seek. Pretending to be separate individuals and then awakening to our deeper nature, so that we realize something extraordinary. Essentially there is one of us. How exquisite! Tim Freke
• I am definitely questioning the atonement and trying to discover how we can see it in a different way. We’ve got this image of God who needs some sort of flesh, some sort of blood, that needs some sort of vengeance to pay for sin. My experience of a loving God who’s asked me to love my enemies – this isn’t a God that demands something before you are accepted. I think Jesus died because Jesus was inclusive. God is inclusive. I think that the idea of God somehow being separated from us was more man’s idea. Jay Bakker
• I now understood more fully why we don’t feel our Oneness with God moment to moment, constantly, while on the earth plane. We feel separated because of our physical bodies; we think we ARE the body and are therefore physical, yet we know that God is Spirit. Thus the sense of separation. In both worlds there is nothing but energy, invisible and visible; we are spiritual beings wherever we may be. We are energy and God is energy, and energy cannot be broken up or separated. Born of God, we are spirit, and cannot be anything else. All is mind – one mind. We are that mind asleep – yet awakening, and God is that mind eternally aware. Jan Price
• He is fire and the sun, and the moon And the stars. He is the air and the sea, And the Creator, Prajapati. He is this boy, he is that girl, he is This man, he is that woman, and he is This old man, too, tottering on his staff. His face is everywhere. He is the blue bird; he is the green bird With red eyes; he is the thundercloud, And he is the seasons and the seas. He has no beginning; he has no end. He is the source from whom the worlds evolve. From his divine power comes forth all this Magical show of name and form, of you And me, which casts the spell of pain and pleasure. Only when we pierce through this magic veil Do we see the One who appears as many.  The Upanishad
• The great central fact of the universe is that spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all, that manifests itself in and through all. This spirit of infinite life and power that is back of all is what I call God. I care not what term you may use, be it Kindly Light, Providence, the Over-Soul, Omnipotence, or whatever term may be most convenient, so long as we are agreed in regard to the great central fact itself. God then fills the universe alone, so that all is from Him and in Him, and there is nothing that is outside. He is the life of our life our very life itself. We are partakers of the life of God; and though we differ from Him in that we are individualized spirits, while He is the Infinite Spirit, including us, as well as all else beside, yet in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same, and so are one. They differ not in essence or quality; they differ in degree. William James

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We are one with God as a wave is one with the ocean

• If something is infinite, it cannot be divided into separate individual parts, otherwise it will cease to be infinite and become the finite. Therefore, just as a wave cannot be separated from the ocean, our souls too are an indivisible and integral part of God and are necessarily, omnipresent, formless, eternal, immortal and infinite. Pulkit Mathur
• Just as a wave on the surface of the ocean is composed of the same water as the ocean, and can never be separated from it, so too are our souls made from the same substance as God and we are eternally joined with Him. Pulkit Mathur
• Just as the ocean is one continuous mass of water, so too is God one unbroken mass of consciousness. There is no boundary that can separate our soul from the rest of God because it is the same substance (consciousness) that is present everywhere. All is One Existence. Pulkit Mathur
• To become aware of our soul as apart from our body is the first step towards realizing God. For God is the infinite ocean of consciousness and our souls are like individual waves on its surface. If we know the wave then we have known the ocean too. Pulkit Mathur
• It is not to be wondered that men have worshiped the ocean, for in his depths they have seen mirrored the image of Eternity of Infinity. Here they have seen the symbol of God’s great plan of oneness with His creatures, for the sea is the union of all infinite particles, and it takes the whole to make the one. Elbert Hubbard
• Just as the ocean is one continuous mass of water, so too is God one unbroken mass of consciousness. There is no boundary that can separate our soul from the rest of God because it is the same substance (consciousness) that is present everywhere. All is One Existence. Pulkit Mathur
• When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream. William Marks

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Everything and everyone is God, for God is all there is

• Everything is the face of God. Sufi saying
• There is only one I in the universe. Barry Long
• In the Vedānta philosophy, nothing exists except God. Alan Watts
• There are not millions of beings; there is just one Being. Swami Ashokananda
• To see God is to be God. There is no ‘all’ apart from God for Him to pervade. He alone is. Ramana Maharshi
• This one (God) is here, there and everywhere; there is not a pinhole where this one will not be found. Swami Nityananda
• The name, “universe,” is superimposed on Brahman, but what we call the “universe” is [really] nothing but Brahman. Adi Shankara
• If God pervades all, if God is immovable, full, undivided, then I see no division. How can He have an exterior or interior? Swami Ashokananda
• God is within everything because Awareness is within everything. There is nothing outside God, because there is nothing outside Awareness. Peter Wilberg
• You want to see God in all, but not in yourself? If all is God, are you not included in that all? Being God yourself, is it a wonder that all is God? Romana Maharshi
• There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other. Ken Wilber
• This is the final declaration of the Vedanta: Brahman is all; It is this universe and every creature. To be liberated is to live in the continual awareness of Brahman, the undivided Reality. Adi Shankara
• The Divine is present in everyone, in all beings, in everything. Like space it is everywhere, all pervading, all powerful, all knowing. The Divine is the principle of Life, the inner light of consciousness, and pure bliss. It is our very own Self. Amma
• I am often asked if I believe in God and I reply ‘I don’t believe in anything but God’. It’s all God. We are all God. There is only God. God is not some distant figure somewhere in the sky. God is my own deepest nature and yours too. We are God playing a game of hide and seek. Pretending to be separate individuals and then awakening to our deeper nature, so that we realize something extraordinary. Essentially there is one of us. How exquisite! Tim Freke
• The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor. Adyashanti
• The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: There is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate- each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other. Ken Wilber

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God is the universal one life, and so are we

• God, the Sole Life, is Absolute Unity. Paramahansa Yogananda
• You are a temporary expression of the One Eternal Life. Eckhart Tolle
• Enlightenment is your realisation of your oneness with the Universal One Life. Eckhart Tolle
• The heart of the matter is always our oneness with divine spirit, our union with all life. Nhat Hanh
• Life in its infinite forms exists as one organic unity. We are part of it: the part should feel reverence for the whole. Rajneesh
• If we go deep enough, we discover that we are God, The Source of all life. We are also life in all its manifestations. David Sunfellow
• We each have a sixth sense that is attuned to the oneness dimension in life, providing a means for us to guide our lives in accord with our ideas. Henry Reed
• You don’t ‘have’ a life, you ‘are’ life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Eckhart Tolle
• What is God? God is the eternal one life underneath all the forms of life. What is love?  Love is to feel the presence of that one life deep within yourself and within all creatures.  To be it.  Therefore, all love is the love of God.  Eckhart Tolle
• That has been my personal relationship with God–a connection with the powerful, loving, wise energy in all of us, in all creation. It is the life force itself. We can all have contact with it each moment in our lives, but it takes commitment and practice.  We must be willing to move through all our deepest fears, doubts, and misunderstandings.  Shakti Gawain

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God is energy and so are we

• I now understood more fully why we don’t feel our Oneness with God moment to moment, constantly, while on the earth plane. We feel separated because of our physical bodies; we think we ARE the body and are therefore physical, yet we know that God is Spirit. Thus the sense of separation. In both worlds there is nothing but energy, invisible and visible; we are spiritual beings wherever we may be. We are energy and God is energy, and energy cannot be broken up or separated. Born of God, we are spirit, and cannot be anything else. All is mind – one mind. We are that mind asleep – yet awakening, and God is that mind eternally aware. Jan Price
• Just as a wave is a movement of the whole ocean, you are the energy of the cosmos. Don’t underestimate your power. Deepak Chopra
• This universe is a pulsing web of relations. The emphasis here is on interrelationship, interdependence, and dynamic connection. Everything is in relation with and affects everything else. Human beings are part of the web of creation. We are no longer the center of the universe nor are we the pinnacle of a hierarchy. Rather everything that is manifests God as the energy for life. Flora A. Keshgegian
• In a quantum universe all of existence consists of a frenzy of subatomic energetic activity which can be characterized as possessing pure potentiality, and all of which are linked and entangled as a basic oneness which extends in all directions and encompasses all dimensions including time. Rhawn Joseph
• To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy, which expresses itself in the galaxies, is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever it is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.. Alan Watts
• We ARE all God, but we are the differentiated, dispersed, individualized units or scattered pockets of energy that make up the potential form of God. The mind and intellect of God will not exist as a conscious, moral agent until we collectively develop OUR sense of logic and reason and establish a firm grasp of right and wrong on a global scale. Poffo Ortiz
• We are pockets of energy within the ocean of energy that is God. Anthony Lambert

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God and the soul (Self) are one for God is indivisible

• The seer (soul) is the absolute knower.  Yogasutra
• Brahman is all, and the Self is Brahman (God). The Upanishad
• Know thy own soul, for only then can you know God. The Upanishads
• You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love. Rumi
• The jiva or the individual soul is not different from Brahman (God). Adi Shankara
• The Atman (soul) which is akin to or even identical with Brahman (God). Aldous Huxley
• Each soul is not just a portion of God, but in actuality the whole of Him. Pulkit Mathur
• The jiva (soul), in reality, is the Supreme Self (God); all else besides is unreal. Adi Shankara
• The personal soul (atman) is not different from the Universal Soul or God. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The spirit is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being. Aldous Huxley
• The Atman (soul) is the Brahman (God), the Brahman is the Atman, each self is non-different from the infinite. Arvind Sharma
• To gauge the soul, we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. Meister Eckhart
• As the Godhead is nameless, and all naming is alien to Him, so also the soul is nameless; for it is here the same as God. Meister Eckhart
• Some simple people think that they will see God as if He were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one. Meister Eckhart
• The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God . Giordano Bruno
• I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore also of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul.  Mohandas Gandhi
• The Self (soul) when it appears behind the universe is called God. The same Self when it appears behind this little universe – the body – is the soul. Swami Vivekanada
• Philosophical schools such as Advaita (non-dualism) see the “spirit/soul/self” within each living entity as being fully identical with Brahman– the universal soul. Arvind Sharma
• The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same-one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving. Meister Eckhart
• Only those of tranquil minds, and none else, can attain abiding joy, by realizing within their souls the Being who manifests one essence in a multiplicity of forms. Rabindranath Tagore
• The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. Meister Eckhart
• Among the instruments of emancipation, the supreme is devotion. Contemplation of the true form of the real Self (the Atman which is identical with Brahman) is said to be devotion. Shankara
• Brahman the Absolute (God) alone is real; this world is transient, cannot be defined, cannot be translated as unreal, but the jiva or the individual soul is not different from Brahman. Adi Shankara
• The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul. And that he, a boy, could perform miracles. Paulo Coelho
• Just as the Atman (soul) is the reality underlying the conscious powers of an individual, so the Supreme Soul (God) is the eternal quiet underneath the drive and activity of the universe. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
• One possessing Vairagya does not understand by Atman (soul) the individual ego but the All-pervading Lord, residing as the Self and Internal Ruler in all. He is perceivable by all as the sum total. Swami Vivekananda
• The mystery of being is arising as all individual beings. This profound idea brings us to the greatest teaching found at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world: Atman is Brahman. The soul is God. Tim Freke
• I am Brahman (God)… I dwell within all beings as the soul, the pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena… In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as being separate from myself. Now I know that I am All. Shankara
• When is a man in mere understanding? I answer, ‘When a man sees one thing separated from another.’ And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: ‘When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding. Meister Eckhart
• The Upanishads declare Tat twam asi – “You are That One”. That immanent one (God), is the same that is in the human soul. Not only that but you are Him – you are that one principle that has been manifesting itself as this variety of Creation. Pulkit Mathur
• Tomorrow’s God says that every church is ‘his church,’ and every faith is ‘her faith,’ and every soul is God’s soul, because it shares the same soul with God! And no person or living thing in the universe stands outside the community of God. Neale Donald Walsch
• The fool thinks, “I am the body”; the intelligent man thinks, “I am an individual soul united with the body.” But the wise man, in the greatness of his knowledge and spiritual discrimination, sees the Self (soul) as the only reality and thinks, “I am Brahman (God). Adi Shankara
• Spirit forgets that it’s Spirit and condenses to a smaller version of itself, which is soul. Soul forgets that it’s soul and condenses to mind. Mind forgets that it’s mind and condenses to body. Body forgets that it’s body and condenses to the lowest dimension that you can have, which is matter. Ken Wilber
• The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman (God), the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman (soul), the reality within. Fritjof Capra
• Followers of the Advaita Vedanta tradition maintain that the soul and God are ultimately identical and liberation is achieved once this has been realised. This teaching is called non-dualism or advaita because it claims there is no distinction between the soul and the ultimate reality. Professor Gavin Flood
• The schools of nondualism recognize only one type of Self (soul), the Supreme Self or Brahman (God). The individual Self is considered an illusion or a projection of the Supreme Self only. The projection is withdrawn when a person achieves liberation, just as a wave rises from the ocean and subsides into it. Jayaram V
• This treasure of the Kingdom of God has been hidden by time and multiplicity and the soul’s own works, or briefly by its creaturely nature. But in the measure that the soul can separate itself from this multiplicity, to that extent it reveals within itself the Kingdom of God. Here the soul and the Godhead are one. Meister Eckhart
• The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (‘That art thou’); the Atman (soul), or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is. Aldous Huxley
• The Neo-Platonic philosophers describe God as the ‘mystery of being’, which is in the process of ‘becoming’ all that is. The mystery of being is arising as all individual beings. This profound idea brings us to the greatest teaching found at the heart of the spiritual traditions of the world: Atman is Brahman. The soul is God. Tim Freke
• There is one soul that connects and exists in all living beings, regardless of their shapes or forms, and there is no distinction, no superior, no inferior, no separate devotee soul (Atman), no separate god soul (Brahman). The oneness unifies all beings, there is divine in every being, and that all existence is a single reality. A Rambachan
• He lives as all beings; it is only Him everywhere…. He takes the form of the limited soul, appearing to be bound; but, in fact, He is forever free. Brahman appears as Creator, and also as the limited soul. He is the Power that creates the appearance of the world. Yet He remains unlimited and unaffected by these appearances. Svetasvatara Upanishad
• That hidden Unity is beyond what is visible. All men have this capacity of knowing themselves, for the soul has the Logos within it, which can be known when the soul is evolved. What is within us remains the same eternally; It is the same in life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age; for, It has become this world, and the world must return to It. Heraclitus
• Tat twam asi – You are That. That immanent one (God), is the same that is in the human soul. The Supreme Soul (who is one), resides within all his creations (as many). Herein lies the true source of morality; the unifying principle that connects us all; that we are all children of one Supreme God, and by hurting another, we are in reality hurting not only God but ourselves. The Chandogya Upanishad.
• When God reveals Himself, He is not seen as something or someone apart. The soul is lifted up to identify with God, so there is no longer a soul, but God Himself is revealed as one’s Self. That Self is eternal, beyond all manifestation, never affected by the ongoing drama of world experience. It masquerades as every being, all the while remaining purely Consciousness and perfect Bliss. Swami Abhayananda
• Our self (Soul) is maya (an illusion) where it is merely individual and finite, where it considers its separateness as absolute; it is satyam (truth) where it recognizes its essence in the universal and infinite, in the Supreme Self, in paramatman (God). This is what Christ means when he says, Before Abraham was, I am (i.e. before Abraham was God, who is the same that is in my soul – I am That.) Rabindranath Tagore
• This tremendous equation –the Self (soul) is Brahmanis (God) the central discovery of the Upanishads. Its most famous formulation is one of the great formulae: Tat tvam asi, You are That. That is the characteristic way the Upanishads point to a Reality that cannot be described; and you, of course, is not the petty, finite personality, but that pure consciousness which makes the eye see and the mind think: the Self. Eknath Easwaran
• Because Hinduism is based upon the assumption that Brahman (God), or infinite consciousness, is the underlying substance of the entire world, there has to be a part of each individual that is in fact Brahman. Hindus use the term Atman to describe this component of one’s self (soul), and it is considered in similar fashion to the western notion of a soul. It is assumed that just as Brahman is the underlying force of the universe, the Atman, or pure consciousness, or the True Self, is what precedes over all activities and bodily functions of every individual in the world. Patrick Zeis
• He is the immutable Foundation of all that exists; those souls who realize Him as their very own Self are freed forever from the need for rebirth. When that Lord, who pervades all the worlds everywhere, gave birth to the first motion, He manifested Himself as creation. It is He alone who is born in this world. He lives as all beings; it is only Him everywhere…. He takes the form of the limited soul, appearing to be bound; but, in fact, He is forever free. Brahman appears as Creator, and also as the limited soul. He is the Power that creates the appearance of the world. Yet He remains unlimited and unaffected by these appearances. When one knows that Brahman, then that soul becomes free. The forms of the world change, like clouds in the sky; but Brahman, the Lord, remains One and unchanged. He is the Ruler of all worlds and all souls. Through meditation on Him, and communion with Him, He becomes known… and one therefore becomes freed from illusion. (Svetasvatara Upanishad)

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God dwells within us, as us

• God dwells within you, as you. Elizabeth Gilbert
• Many want, above all, to think of God as with them. Carolyn Jane Bohler
• We live in a spiritual Universe. God is in, through, around and for us. Ernest Holmes
• I am God having an experience. You are God having an experience. I look into your eyes and I see myself.  Anthony Lambert
• When my Beloved appears, with what eye do I see Him? With His eye not with mine; for no one sees Him except Himself. Ibn ‘Arabi
• There is no God outside of us designing our next moment. We do that! We are that God.  The God who dreams he is not God.  Peter O. Erbe
• He manifested Himself as creation. It is He alone who is born into the world. He lives as all beings; it is only Him everywhere. Ancient Indian text
• The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. Rabindranath Tagore
• Eternally, all creatures are God in God. … So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less. Suso
• The deeper we move into the human soul, the closer we come to the Divine. The nearer we are to our true selves, the more we sing the song of Divine Love. Doug Hammack
• Those who follow the path of spiritual wisdom see that where there is One, that One is me (God); where there are many, all are me; they see my face everywhere. The Bhagavat Gita
• The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same-one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving. Meister Eckhart
• That in what reside all beings and what resides in all beings, the giver of grace to all, the Supreme Soul of the universe, the limitless existence; I am that. Amritbindu Upanishad
• Let’s not forget that what is looking out of your eyes and hearing with your ears right now is already Spirit. And that Spirit, that I AMness, is always present in all sentient beings. Ken Wilber
• If God is the essence of the whole of creation, then God is the essence of every creature, and every person. This is why the search to discover the nature of one’s own innermost essence is the search for God. Peter Russell
• He is this boy, he is that girl, he is this man, he is that woman, and he is this old man, too, tottering on his staff. His face is everywhere. He is the blue bird, he is the green bird with red eyes, he is the thundercloud, and he is the seasons and the sea. The Upanishad (Shvetashvatara IV. 3–4)
• For many people, God is a frightening idea. Asking God for help doesn’t seem very comforting if we think of Him as something outside ourselves, or capricious, or judgmental. But God is love and He dwells within us. We are created in His image, or mind, which means that we are extensions of His love, or Sons and Daughters of God. Marianne Williamson
• ‘Who am I?’ The answer is ‘I am God’. The body comes and goes, but the Atma is permanent. The body has birth and death, but the spirit does not have any of these. You reach the stage where you say, ‘I am God’, but even there, there is duality, ‘God and I’. That is not the full Truth. When we breathe, the breath makes the sound of ‘So-Hum’, ‘He am I’. There is still the body consciousness, the ‘I’. But in deep sleep, the declaration of ‘He’ and ‘I’ falls away and only ‘0’ and ‘M’ remain, ‘Om’; there is only the One. Sathya Sai Baba
• There is no existence save His existence. … This means that the existence of the beggar is His existence and the existence of the sick is His existence. Now, when this is admitted, it is acknowledged that all existence is His existence; and that the existence of all created things, both accidents and substances, is His existence; and when the secret of one particle of the atoms is clear, the secret of all created things, both outward and inward, is clear; and you do not see in this world or the next, anything except God. Ibn ‘Arabi

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God is the one experiencing being the many…

• God is Unity, but always works in variety. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• He, the Indivisible One, appears as countless beings. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The truth of nonduality—that the many is the One and that the One is ultimately who we always are. Andrew Cohen
• God then enriches himself by living through all the life-forms that the Universe can provide… us included. Bernard Haisch
• There is one awareness imagining itself to be everything and everyone, and meeting itself in all its many different disguises. Tim Freke
• He who has no form assumed many forms; He who is infinite appeared finite; He who is everywhere assumed a place; He who is all wisdom caused ignorance. The Upanishad
• God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good—and is no sillier than any other theology. Robert A. Heinlein
• So we are in reality one with the Lord, but the reflection makes us seem many, as when the one sun reflects in a million dew-drops and seems a million tiny suns Swami Vivekananda
• The One becomes many. When we see the One, any limitations reflected through maya disappear; but it is quite true that the manifold is not valueless. It is through the many that we reach the One. Swami Vivekananda
• From his divine power comes forth all this Magical show of name and form, of you And me, which casts the spell of pain and pleasure. Only when we pierce through this magic veil Do we see the One who appears as many. The Upanishad
• That is the great mystery. If the One, the Godhead, is an absolutely perfect Spirit, resting in formless emptiness, delighting in its own eternal bliss and omniscience, not bound by space and time, why did it choose to “do something”? The One decided to create a Universe in which it could experience the Many. Bernard Haisch
• In the beginning, there was Existence alone – One only, without a second. It, the one, thought to itself. `Let me be many, let me grow forth. ‘ Thus, out of itself, It entered into every being. All that is has itself alone. Of all things it is the subtle essence. It is the truth. It is the Self. And you are that. Daniel Matt
• Spirit was Joy, but there was no one else to taste of this Joy, so Spirit divided Itself to become the Enjoyer, the act of enjoying, and the thing enjoyed—the Knower, the process of knowing, and the thing known. This triune division of Spirit into Knower, Knowing, and Known was accomplished by the law of relativity (cosmic delusion or maya). Spirit, being one and indivisible, had to imagine and will Itself to be many. Paramahansa Yogananda

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…in order to come back to a recognition of oneness

• The All is The One experiencing through the many. In order to come back to the recognition of its unity. Mooji
• The One is experiencing being separate, then rediscovering and experiencing its Oneness by recognising itself in another.  Anthony Lambert

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God is none other than our inner being…

• Your inner being is he who men call God. Neville Goddard
• God is not a ‘being’ removed from creation, ruling it from outside in the manner of a patriarchal ruler; God is the source of being that underlies creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality. Rosemary Radford Ruether
• Suddenly, a great stillness arises within you, an unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the innermost core, there is the sacred, the immeasurable, That which cannot be named. Eckhart Tolle

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…the ground of all being…

• I don’t call it finding God, because how can you find that which was never lost, the very life that you are? The word God is limiting not only because of thousands of years of misperception and misuse, but also because it implies an entity other than you. God is Being itself, not a being. There can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is. The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can become conscious of God but that you are not conscious of God. Eckhart Tolle

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…none other than our inner awareness or consciousness (our very self)

• Consciousness is the ground of all being. Amit Goswami, Ph.D
• Our consciousness is a part of the Creator’s consciousness. Bernard Haisch
• God is not found in places. God is found in consciousness. Joel Goldsmith
• Consciousness, fully awake to itself, is the Light of God. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
• If God is reality, And if reality is consciousness, Then God is consciousness. Deepak Chopra
• The experiencer behind all experiences (the Consciousness I Am), is none other than God. Anthony Lambert
• He is the never-created Creator of all. He knows all, He is pure consciousness. Shvetashvatara Upanishad
• Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart, or the Seat of Consciousness, it is all the same. Ramana Maharshi
• There is a universal intelligence that we call God or Soul or Spirit or Consciousness, and it is everywhere and in all things. Wayne Dyer
• There is only one shared consciousness that experiences all of our lives, and you can call it God if you insist on naming it. Brendan Punsky
• Before perception, before a preceiver, existence was – is. This is the consciousness that we refer to as nirvana, God, eternity. Frederick Lenz

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Our soul is a microcosm of the whole, containing The All (God)

• In my soul, the music of the universe can be heard. Eric Honeycutt
• All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. Kabir
• In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence. Kahlil Gibran
• In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore, what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe. David Bohm
• Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it. Giordano Bruno
• When is a man in mere understanding? I answer, ‘When a man sees one thing separated from another.’ And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: ‘When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding. Meister Eckhart
• Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore, All is everywhere. Each is there All, and All is each. Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. But when he ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world. Plotinus
• … not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ‘Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Erwin Schrodinger

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We look for God out there, in the sky…

• There is one God, and he lives in the sky, and he hears all of us. Kristin Harmel
• I am high in the sky, and still I do not see the face of god. Gherman Titov
• I looked up in the sky and trusted in God. Anne Frank
• Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me. Barbara Brown Taylor
• I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books. John Shelby Spong
• When asked where God is, people point towards the sky or some far and distant region. Sathya Sai Baba

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…separate and distant from us in a realm apart…

• Yahweh may have wound up “in a realm apart”—a remote, even transcendent God, whose presence is felt subtly. Robert Wright
• God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. Chila Woychik
• Oh, to know God’s private address. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
• I do not share her sense of God as a distant One, aside from and apart from humanity, who allows the death of certain individuals and handpicks others to live. Victoria Weinstein
• God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us from a distance. Bette Midler
• I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. Rainer Maria Rilke

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…a kind of absentee landlord

• Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent. T. Wright
• I talk to God but the sky is empty. Sylvia Plath
• Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there. Nikita Khrushchev
• The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God. Pierre-Simon Laplace
• They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse. Emily Dickinson
• Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe? Thomas Carlyle

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The truth is that God is not in the sky but in us and one with us

• You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. Alan Watts
• Don’t look for God in the sky; look within your own body. Rajneesh

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All separation (including the separation of God and the soul) is an illusion, part of the play of existence

• Each finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature; thus, in the diversity of His creatures, God’s infinity, unity and oneness appear to be broken into an effulfgence of manifold rays. Edith Stein
• God divides the stillness of His omnipresent Oneness into mated pairs, and simultaneously multiplies their power to simulate His omnipotence and omniscience through fast centripetal motion. He then unites His mated pairs to simulate His Oneness, and simultaneously multiplies their speed of centrifugal motion until they disappear into His omnipresent stillness. Walter Russell
• Our self (Soul) is maya (an illusion) where it is merely individual and finite, where it considers its separateness as absolute; it is satyam (truth) where it recognizes its essence in the universal and infinite, in the Supreme Self, in paramatman (God). This is what Christ means when he says, “Before Abraham was, I am” (i.e. before Abraham was God, who is the same that is in my soul – I am That.) Rabindranath Tagore
• The jeeva Atman is the individual entity which, upon investigation is found to be utterly non-existent. It is not, therefore, that the jeeva Atman is the same as the Param Atman but rather that there is always only the Param Atman, pure Awareness, ‘I,’ seemingly veiled ‘sometimes’ by the arising of dualising thought and appearing, as a result, as an imaginary separate entity (the jeeva Atman) but never actually being or becoming anything other than its own eternal, infinite Self. Rupert Spira

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To see God as a separate is to see an all-powerful deity imposing suffering on separate, fallible creatures

• Or, perhaps, as some religions curiously suppose, He has done this so that there may be inferior creatures who will praise and glorify Him for his eternal goodness, wisdom, bliss and omnipotence and try feebly to come an inch nearer to the goodness in order to share the bliss, on pain of punishment—by some supposed eternal—if, as the vast majority must by their very imperfection, they fail in their endeavor. But to the doctrine of such a Lila so crudely stated there is always possible the retort that a God, himself all-blissful, who delights in the suffering of creatures or imposes such suffering on them for the faults of his own imperfect creation, would be no Divinity and against Him the moral being and intelligence of humanity must revolt or deny His existence. Sri Aurobindo
• To believe I am separate from God (not God being me) is potentially to fall into the belief that God created a fallible creature to suffer, spy on and judge. Anthony Lambert
• What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It’s a mystery. Fred Melamed

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To see God as one with us is to instead see God as experiencing through us, as us…

• I am an experience God is having. Anthony Lambert
• You are the universe experiencing itself. Ziad Masri
• I am the supreme being, conscious through ‘Tim’ Tim Freke
• We are embodied aspects of Brahman (God) experiencing Itself. Sri Aurobindo
• I am a vehicle through which God experiences this world of form. Anthony Lambert
• Consciousness I am perceiving and experiencing through a human form. Anthony Lambert
• Each of us is a little spark of divinity, out here having a life experience. Marc & Angel
• The main purpose that God-Consciousness has for His universe is experience. Alan H. Dawe
• What knows my experience? Gods infinite eternal awareness. Gods infinite Being. Rupert Spira
• God experiences Life through each of us, and we experience Life thanks to God. Peter Shepherd
• At the back of every experience is the Self and its interest in the experience. Nisargadatta Maharaja
• Who exactly is the ultimate experiencer — the Self or the Unknown? The Self, of course. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The Biblical creation story gets one crucial thing right. God entered his creation in order to enjoy it. Deepak Chopra

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…and therefore, suffering through us, as us

• If there is suffering in life, it is God that suffers through “us” for a purpose. Anthony Lambert
• Eternal consciousness is not above the world’s suffering, but shares and participates in it. Timothy Sprigge
• Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire. Timothy Keller
• God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. Bono
• God cares so much about human suffering that God also feels our pain. This God is not outside looking in but is present with us in suffering. God suffers alongside us and even in us. In that way God experiences human suffering. She does not remain separate or apart from human travail. God’s love includes sharing in our suffering. Flora A. Keshgegian

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Realise and sense your oneness with God…

• All things are one. Heraclitus
• Be happy! God sees in you another God. God sees you as another God. God sees you and He as One. Sri Chinmoy
• I am like God and God like me. I am as large as God. He is as small as I. He cannot above me nor I beneath him be. Angelus Silesius
• Simple people imagine that they should see God as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one. Meister Eckhart
• I belong to Christ and nothing will separate me from the love of Christ. It was that oneness, oneness with God in the Holy Spirit. Mother Teresa
• I am converted into Him in such a way that He makes me one Being with Himself-not a similar being. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction! Meister Eckhart
• In this breaking-through I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things. Meister Ekhart
• Tantra is the perception of the oneness and the perfection of all things. Not just the perception of light, but the perception of darkness, seeing God in both beauty and horror. Frederick Lenz
• Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. Thomas Merton
• I believe that Jesus realized his oneness with God and he showed, what he attempted to do was show the way to all of us, how to realize our own onenes with God also, so he’s a precursor. Eckhart Tolle
• No doubt we should not speak of seeing, but instead of seen and seer, speak boldly of a simple unity. For in this seeing we neither distinguish nor are there two. The man is merged with the Supreme … one with it. Plotinus
• We are, quite literally, one with God, and God is, quite literally, one with us. Bernard HaischThough difference be none, I am of Thee, Not Thou, O Lord, of me; For of the sea is verily the Wave, Not of the Wave the Sea. Shankara
• 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.  B. Jeffery
• He who has realized oneness with God possesses all knowledge contained in Him. Knowing the Lord as Beginning and End of all beings and worlds, a true Brahmin has knowledge of the hereafter and of the workings of nature on this plane of existence. Paramahansa Yogananda
• There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God. Emily Carr
• As the soul becomes more pure and bare and poor, and possesses less of created things, and is emptied of all things that are not God, it receives God more purely, and is more completely in Him; and it truly becomes comes one with God, and it looks into God and God into it, face to face as it were; two images transformed into one…. Some simple people think that they will see God as if He were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one…. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction! Meister Eckhart

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…by attaining unity consciousness

• Unity Consciousness is the experience of the 7 billion plus people on the planet being moved by the same force, which is God. It is the awareness to see what we really are: One Living Being. However, this is a truth that really can’t be explained with words; the minute you say it, it is no longer truth. Miguel Angel Ruiz
• When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self. Words that proceed from the Source of Truth have real meaning. But when men speakthese words as their own, the words become meaningless. Meher Baba
• Wisdom leads to unity, but ignorance to separation. So long as God seems to be outside and far away, there is ignorance. But when God is realised within, that is true knowledge.  Ramakrishna
• Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all. Joseph Campbell

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Realising our oneness with God is the essence of true religion and spirituality

• ye that dwell on earth! The religion of God is for love and unity; make it not the cause of enmity or dissension. Bahá’u’lláh
• Man-made religions find fault with one another, whereas God-made religion is eternally a oneness-song – God-manifestation through human aspiration on earth. Sri Chinmoy
• The message of all spirituality is that, in some mysterious way, we are all one—that therefore the joy and the sorrow of any one of us is the joy and the sorrow of all of us. Ernest Kurtz
• Its unadulterated belief in the oneness of God and a practical application of the truth of the brotherhood of man for those who are nominally within its fold are two distinctive contributions of Islam. Mahatma Gandhi
• If we live in our oneness-heart, we will feel the essence of all religions which is the love of God. Forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, brotherhood and the feeling of oneness are the signs of a true religion. Sri Chinmoy
• The belief that a personal life exists apart from God creates experience disconnected from God. This is painful and frustrating. Our spiritual work is to break down the illusion that we have a life here and that a life of God is somewhere else. Michael Beckwith
• In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living. Erich Fromm
• Things are a great deal better when the transcendent, omnipotent personal God is regarded as also a loving Father. The sincere worship of such a God changes character as well as conduct, and does something to modify consciousness. But the complete transformation of consciousness, which is ‘enlightenment/ ‘deliverance,’ ‘salvation,’ comes only when God is thought of as the Perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal and when religious practices are adapted. Aldous Huxley
• The Shema, which we recite multiple times over the course of the holidays, is not really a prayer, but a few verses of Torah that we use to wake ourselves up, saying: “Listen! YHVH our God YHVH is One.” The word for “one”—Echad—can be understood here as a name for divinity. What is the nature of One-ness? In the Jewish mystical tradition, the Biblical idea that “the earth is filled with God’s Presence” means that, in fact, everything is God. We perceive ourselves and the people and things around us as separate entities, separate from one another and from God, yet seek a deeper reality. Echad is a powerful metaphor for experiencing the fundamental connection of all living beings. It expresses the idea that Whatever God might be, It is right here, in our experience of each moment, accessible in all aspects of our lives, because ultimately, Godliness is the stuff of all existence. Rabbi Toba Spitzer

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Conceiving the soul as entirely separate from God is a hindrance to spiritual awakening

• The belief in a soul struggling to become pure enough to be worthy of unification with God, carrying its karma from lifetime to lifetime like a shell on a snail, sustains and even amplifies the belief in a separate self. Anthony Lambert
• The eternal soul theory ‘I have a soul’ and the material theory ‘I have no soul’ are both obstacles to self-realization or salvation. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera
• If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness. Joel Salatin

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Nothing can separate us from God

• Nobody at any time is cut off from God. Meister Eckhart
• Nothing can separate you from His love, absolutely nothing, neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature… We do not need to beg Him to bless us, He simply cannot help it. Therefore God is enough! God is enough for time, God is enough for eternity. God is enough! Hannah Whitall Smith
• That experience showed me that I-from moment to moment-am the only person in control of my connection to God. It’s not that God is deciding to connect with me, depending on whether I had a good day, or did good or bad deeds. It’s all up to me. God, the awareness of God, the love of God, the blessings of God-that lively ecstasy-is always there. It’s me who separates from God by judging, by indulging in negativity, by criticizing myself, as well as others. Barbara De Angelis
• The term ‘Self’ also overcomes the dualistic notion that one is separated from God. Historically, the picture that there is a sinner down here on Earth and there is a God up there somewhere in heaven is the viewpoint of the ego. Thus, to most people, the term ‘God’ implies ‘otherness’. However, there is no separation in the Allness of Creation, so it is impossible for the created to be separate from the Creator. David R. Hawkins
• The most common predicament people bring to me is is the experience of being “cut off” from the infinite. They find this particularly painful if they have had clear experiences of the vastness which they feel has “gone away”. They want to know how they can stay in contact with the infinite at all times.  This very question contains two implicit assumptions that pass themselves off as truth – that there is an “I” who is cut off from the infinite who could “apply itself” to reconnecting if it had the proper technique, and that the infinite has gone somewhere.  These are prime examples of how ideas masquerade as truth.  In fact there is no individual “I” who can figure out how to find the infinite again. More importantly, where would the infinite go? If you could see things as only and exactly as they are, you would see that the “you” that is seeing is the vastness itself.  Suzanne Segal

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Union (a deep sense of oneness) with God is the ultimate spiritual state

• The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe. Novalis
• Souls which have come to the unitive knowledge of God are, almost nothing in themselves and all in God. Benet of Canfield
• The soul cannot live unless it is ineffably and without confusion united to God, who is truly the life eternal. Saint Simeon
• Resolve that you will now lay aside all else and concentrate upon the attainment of conscious unity with God. Wallace D. Wattles
• I am converted into Him in such a way that He makes me one Being with Himself-not a similar being. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction! Meister Eckhart
• All. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive knowledge of God. My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself. St. Catherine of Genoa
• Genius is the union of man and God in the acts of the soul. Great men are always greater than their deeds. They are in connection with a reserve power that is without limit. Wallace D. Wattles
• To lose ourselves in God is simply to give up our own will to Him. When a soul can truly say Lord I have no other will than Thine it is truly lost in God and united to Him. Saint Francis de Sales
• To be alive spiritually man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart from this union his religious life will be an empty drudgery, a mere imitation of true spirituality. Alan Watts
• The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God. William James
• No devotee should be satisfied until he has sufficiently developed his intuition—by impartial introspection and deep meditation, as in Kriya Yoga—to experience the communion of soul and Spirit. Paramahansa Yogananda
• My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless ; ‘Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved. I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call. Rumi
• It is only by worshiping God and His presence in Nature, and then by worshiping God as unmanifested Spirit, by Spirit-and-soul union, that the devotee reaches the final state of emancipation, from which there is no fall. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Since the Atman is considered to be part of the one divine reality known as Brahman (God), the ultimate goal of Hindus is to attain self-realization so that they can unify their Atman (soul) with the underlying force of the greater universe. Patrick Zeis
• Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence. Meister Eckhart
• We try to realize the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our mind. Rabindranath Tagore
• God has stolen my [illusory] “I” from me and has broght me near to my [real] “I” … The colors have returned ot the pure primoridal white. The voyage has reached its end and everything other than Him has ceased to exist. All attribution, every aspect and all relation being abolished, the original state is re-established. Abd el-Kader
• When I stood in my first cause, I ‘then had no ‘God,’ and then I was my own cause. I wanted nothing, I longed for nothing, for I was empty Being and the only truth in which I rejoiced was in the knowledge of my Self. Then it was my Self I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted and so I stood empty of God and every thing. Meister Eckhart
• You should know (God) without image, unmediated and without likeness. But if I am to know God without mediation in such a way, then “I” must become “he”, and “he” must become “I”. More precisely I say: God must become me and I must become God, so entirely one that “he” and this “I” become one “is” and act in this “isness” as one, for this “he” and this “I”, that is God and the soul, are very fruitful. Meister Eckhart
• The devotee who feels God as the only reality existing within him, and himself existing in God, is united with God, one with God in unconditional union. That devotee inwardly perceives: “When I eat, I am eating for Him. When I serve, my hands are His. When I speak, my voice is His. It is God who is feeling and loving through me.” Such a devotee looks after the body as the temple of God. He realizes that it is God who has incarnated in the body. Paramahansa Yogananda
• If you both agree at a conscious level that the purpose of your relationship is to create an opportunity, not an obligation—an opportunity for growth, for full Self expression, for lifting your lives to their highest potential, for healing every false thought or small idea you ever had about you, and for ultimate reunion with God through the communion of your two souls—if you take that vow instead of the vows you’ve been taking—the relationship has begun on a very good note. Neale Donald Walsch
• Freedom from anger, from excitement, from rage, from greed, from perplexity, from hypocrisy, from hurtfulness (from injury to others); Speaking the truth, moderate eating, refraining from calumny and envy, sharing with others, avoiding accepting gifts, uprightness, forgiveness, gentleness, tranquility, temperance, amity with all living creatures, yoga, honorable conduct, benevolence and contentedness – These virtues have been agreed upon for all the ashramas; he who, according to the precepts of the sacred law, practices these, becomes united with the Universal Self. Apastamba Dharma Sūtra
• Any personalized communion with God or worship of a conceptualized aspect or attribute of Divinity maintains the duality of worshiper and Worshiped, the ecstatic relationship sometimes preferred by saints. But the even higher state referred to by Jesus, beyond dualistic devotion, is Oneness with the Object of worship, and specifically, the ultimate union: oneness of the soul with Spirit. God as Spirit, the Absolute, beyond form, qualities, manifestations, cannot be perceived, but only experienced by the supreme realization of Spirit and soul union. This ecstasy, a supernal Bliss that no human tongue can tell or rational thought conceive, is described simply by India’s rishis: “He who knows, he knows; naught else knows. Paramahansa Yogananda

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A sense of union (oneness) with God is attained through contemplation…

• Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind is against surrender; the mind is very cunning and calculating. Rajneesh
• Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being. The highest prayer is the most passive. Inevitably; for the less there is of self, the more there is of God. Aldous Huxley
• Mystic: A person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect. Oxford Dictionary
• There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God. Emily Carr
• In our contemplative tradition, God is not a presence that is separate from us but rather the energizing Reality that makes us humanity. God is the presence of love at the heart of creation, and the presence of life at the center of human beings, in the heart of all matter in the universe.  Doug  Hammack

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…through prayer and awareness…

• Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God. Peace Pilgrim

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…through complete surrender to God and life…

• And after you surrender–then what? Your entire life should be characterized by an eagerness to maintain unbroken fellowship and oneness with God. Oswald Chambers
• Surrender means seeing that “I am not separate” – just SEEING that “I am not separate.” Nothing is surrendered, nothing is dropped; just a nonsense idea, a dream is no more there because you are awake. Rajneesh
• The essence of all religions is One. Surrender is the main duty of everyone. Surrender means the feeling of oneness, I and God are One. Why? The reason is that the One who is present in you is present in me. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• Whether we view religion from the human side or the divine—as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul—in either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to be a far-off vision, and has become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of the Infinite. John Caird

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…through stillness, meditation and / or yoga…

• In meditation have a complete focus on light, brightness, spiritual oneness, God, infinity, eternity. Frederick Lenz
• The experience of yoga is unspeakable. It’s the experience of samadhi. It’s the experience of connectedness, of oneness, boundlessness, merging with God consciousness… even if it’s just for an instant. Beryl Bender Birch
• The soul, seeking God, scans the inner darkness, as though to discover another, as though awaiting something external to itself to make its presence known. But as the concentration focuses within, the mind becomes stilled, and suddenly the seeking soul awakes. No external has made its appearance; it is the soul itself, no longer soul, which knows itself to be the All, the One. Like a wave seeking the ocean, the seeker discovers that it is, itself, what it sought. When God reveals Himself, He is not seen as something thing or someone apart. The soul is lifted up to identity with God, so that there is no longer a soul, but God Himself is revealed as one’s own Self. That Self is eternal, beyond all manifestation, never affected by the ongoing going drama of worldly experience. It masquerades as every being, all the while remaining purely Consciousness ness and perfect Bliss. Swami Abhayananda

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… through pureness of heart …

• All. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive knowledge of God. My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself. St. Catherine of Genoa

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… and through the practice of love

• Love is the reflection of God’s unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation. Meher Baba
• Whatever books you may read, you cannot realize the Divine merely by intellectual effort. One must put it into practice. That sense of oneness can only be promoted by the practice of love and not by any other means. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
• Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict. Rabindranath Tagore
• So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself. Eckhart Tolle
• The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God – that is love. Love is the salute of the angels to the stars. How sad is the heart when rendered sad by love! How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. Victor Hugo
• The universe could no more be separate from God than my body could be separate from its cells. Moreover, over, the only emotion that I would associate with God is love, but it would be more accurate to say that God is love than God is loving. Allan Smith
• To enable each one to love God, love all, serve all, and have respect for all, as God is immanent in all forms. My goal is that of oneness. I spread the message of oneness in life and living.This is the way to peace on earth. This is the mission of my life, and I pray that it may be fulfilled. Kirpal Singh

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A sense of union (oneness) with God brings the deepest peace and joy

• To be at one with God is to be at peace. The child simplicity is the greatest agency in bringing this full and complete realization, the child simplicity that recognizes its true relations with the Father’s life. There are people I know who have come into such a conscious realization of their oneness with this Infinite Life, this Spirit of Infinite Peace, that their lives are fairly bubbling over with joy. Ralph Waldo Trine
• In the same way, no one can hinder this man, for he intends and seeks and takes delight in nothing but God, for God has become one with the man in all his intention. And so, just as no multiplicity can disturb God, nothing can disturb or fragment this man, for he is one in that One where all multiplicity is one and is one multiplicity. Meister Eckhart
• 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

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To realise God as oneness is to recognise God in all

• In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass. Walt Whitman
• He is a liberated man who sees only the Lord in all creatures and in all creation. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The wise man beholds all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings; for that reason he does not hate anyone. Swami Nikhilananda
• Each man is, as it were, a new window through which all others may look upon the Infinite, each life a new name for That which we call God. Sister Nivedita
• I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass. Walt Whitman
• He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature…seeing the same Lord everywhere, he does not harm himself or others. Krishna from The Bhagavad Gita
• When we admit that our enemies are really a part of ourselves they help us (or force us) to incorporate the unity of God and of creation into our lives. Moshe Schatz
• I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. . . . I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone.  Mohandas K. Gandhi
• What is God? God is the eternal one life underneath all the forms of life. What is love?  Love is to feel the presence of that one life deep within yourself and within all creatures.  To be it.  Therefore, all love is the love of God.  Eckhart Tolle
• Feel the love of God; then in every person you will see the face of the Father, the light of love which is in all. You will find a magic, living relationship uniting the trees, the sky, the stars, all people, and all living things; and you will feel a oneness with them. This is the code of divine love. Paramahansa Yogananda
• When we see the world through our limited ideas, we think somebody is good, somebody is bad, somebody is great, somebody is small. Instead, we want to go beyond all these external differences and see oneness. Therefore, we must learn to fill our mind with the knowledge of God, with the knowledge of the Absolute. From this viewpoint, we see the world as filled with Consciousness. Swami Nityananda

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To recognise God in another is the true meaning of Namaste

• There is one word sums up The Law of Divine Oneness nicely – Namaste. What it means is I honor the place in you where the light of God abides. When I am in that place in me and you are in that place in you – there is one of us. Christin Sander
• Meaning of Namaste: “I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you, which is of love, of truth, of light and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one. Ram Das
• There is one word sums up The Law of Divine Oneness nicely – Namaste. What it means is I honor the place in you where the light of God abides. When I am in that place in me and you are in that place in you – there is one of us. Christin Sander
• The Indian blessing Namaste (nam ass tay) is accompanied by bringing the palms together in front of the heart center, when meeting or taking leave of someone. It means, “I recognize the Divinity in you which is also the Divinity in me” or in other words, “We are the same Oneness.” If it’s not comfortable for you to say it aloud, think it silently every time you meet someone. Roger Gabriel (Raghavanand)

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For the soul to know itself as God is for it to recognise the oneness of all things

• When everything is known as the Self, not even an atom is seen as other than the Self. Shankara
• Joy is the realization of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world- soul with the supreme love. Rabindranath Tagore
• The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God. Giordano Bruno
• Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover. Rabindranath Tagore
• Each soul in entering the material experience does so for those purposes of advancement towards that awareness of being fully conscious of the oneness with the Creative Forces. Edgar Cayce
• Atman (The soul) is universal oneness, present in all living beings. Atman connects and prevades in everyone. Hurting or injuring another being is hurting the Atman, and thus one’s self that exists in another body. Isha Upanishad
• We try to realize the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our mind. Rabindranath Tagore
• Atman (soul)-knowledge is the state of full awareness, liberation, and freedom that overcomes dualities at all levels, realizing the divine within oneself, the divine in others, and in all living beings; the non-dual oneness, that God is in everything, and everything is God. Arvind Sharma
• The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of men when they realise their relationship, their Oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realise that at the centre of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us. Black Elk
• Within you lies the sun, the moon, the sky and all the wonders of this universe. The intelligence that created these wonders is the same force that created you. All things around you come from the same source. We are all one. Every being on this Earth, every object on this Earth has a soul. All souls flow into one, this is the Soul of the Universe. Robin S. Sharma
• Look at the waves in the sea. Not one wave is really different from the sea, but what makes the wave apparently different? Name and form; the form (body or shape) of the wave and the name (classification into plants, animals, mankind etc.) which we give to it. This is what makes it different from the sea. When name and form go, it is the same sea. So this whole universe is that one Unit Existence; name and form have created all these various differences. Swami Vivekananda
• Any personalized communion with God or worship of a conceptualized aspect or attribute of Divinity maintains the duality of worshiper and Worshiped, the ecstatic relationship sometimes preferred by saints. But the even higher state referred to by Jesus, beyond dualistic devotion, is Oneness with the Object of worship, and specifically, the ultimate union: oneness of the soul with Spirit. God as Spirit, the Absolute, beyond form, qualities, manifestations, cannot be perceived, but only experienced by the supreme realization of Spirit and soul union. This ecstasy, a supernal Bliss that no human tongue can tell or rational thought conceive, is described simply by India’s rishis: “He who knows, he knows; naught else knows. Paramahansa Yogananda

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To reach union with God does not mean we can’t also commune with God

• “God and I are one,” say those who stress unity between humans and the Divine. Others think, “Blasphemy! God transcends anything human.” Persons with each view could applaud—even if they do not use the same terminology—the fact that there are varieties of religious infinities. Mystics could state their infinite potential and be of God, but not God. While at the same time, those, such as theologian Karl Barth, who hold to the radical difference and distance between humans and God, could be satisfied that humans and God are radically of different orders. The centuries-old debate over union or communion with the Deity could be answered by saying yes to both. Carolyn Jane Bohler
• Being one with God and being in love with God are paralogically different ways of experiencing the same awakened state. Tim Freke
• The liberated soul is at liberty to choose either the state of blissful absorption in Nirguna Brahman or the state of rapturous communion with the Saguna Brahman. Chaudhuri
• Visistadvaita is mistaken in emphasizing the Saguna aspect of Brahman at the cost of the Nirguna aspect. Brahman is at once Nirguna and Saguna. And the liberated soul is at liberty to choose either the state of blissful absorption in Nirguna Brahman or the state of rapturous communion with the Saguna Brahman. Chaudhuri