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Many see God as the creator of the universe…

• If God is the Creator of the entire universe, then it must follow that He is the Lord of the whole universe. No part of the world is outside of His lordship. That means that no part of my life must be outside of His lordship. C. Sproul
• It’s crazy, if you think about it. The God of the universe – the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor – loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what is our typical response? We go to church, sing songs, and try not to cuss. Francis Chan
• God created the universe out of nothing in an act which also brought time into existence. Recent discoveries, such as observations supporting the Big Bang and similar astronomical phenomena, are wholly compatible with this view. Henry Margenau
• Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei
• Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. Benjamin Franklin
• The universe must exist for the self-expression of God and the delight of God. Ernest Holmes
• The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God. Edgar Allan Poe
• If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written. Dean Koontz
• This most beautiful system The Universe could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. Isaac Newton

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…and the entity that maintains and runs the universe

• Science books are letters from God, telling how He runs His universe. Toyohiko Kagawa
• Doesn’t the God who created the universe out of nothing and put all the stars in place, have the power to take care of your situation? Jim Cymbala
• Nothing in all the vast universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally purposed. Here is a foundation of faith. Here is a resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate, unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own good pleasure and for His own eternal glory. Arthur W. Pink
• This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. D. Salinger
• In a universe governed by God there are no chance events. Indeed, there is no such thing as chance. Chance does not exist. It is merely a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. But chance itself has no power because it has no being. Chance is not an entity that can influence reality. Chance is not a thing. It is nothing. C. Sproul
• God is running the universe. We ought not think like scientists, but think like psalmists. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Let me remind you that this is God’s universe, and He is doing things His way. You may think you have a better way, but you don’t have a universe to rule. Vernon McGee
• Nobody seriously believes the universe was made by God without being persuaded that He takes care of His works. John Calvin
• God keeps the entire Universe in order, and still finds time to take a personal interest in you and me. Mother Angelica
• God is the great janitor of the universe. Why things don’t work is that we have a janitor in charge, and we keep looking for the landlord. Richard Kadrey
• God’s Providence controls the universe. It is present everywhere. Anthony the Great
• Without God upholding the universe from moment to moment, nothing could continue to be. C. Sproul

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Some see the universe as being a thought in God’s mind…

• The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind. Woody Allen
• The universe is a thought of God. Friedrich Schiller

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…while others see God as being entirely separate from the universe

• God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not bound by nature’s ways. He is the Holy God, the everlasting Father, who is totally other than His creation. And He does not die, as nature dies; He is not subject to the bonds of death. Achtemeier
• God is not in any of those things He has made, and He is not to be identified with them. Elizabeth Achtemeier
• He is the Holy One, says Isaiah — that is, He is totally other, completely different from anything He has made in all of creation. And so, agree the Ten Commandments, you shall not worship such a God in anything that is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in anything that is in the waters under the earth. For to whom will you compare me, that I should be like him? asks the Holy One through His prophet; the answer is no one, no thing, nothing in all creation. Elizabeth Achtemeier
• We are not to consider the world as the body of God: he is an uniform being, void of organs, members, or parts; and they are his creatures, subordinate to him, and subservient to his will. Isaac Newton
• If God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are. Francis Collins
• In such thinking God has to be transcendent, totally other. This idea of God’s absolute otherness is even more strongly reflected in Christian thinking about creation. A commonly held Christian belief is that God created ex nihilo, out of nothing. God did not need any matter, any material, in order to create and nothing existed prior to God’s creation. This belief affirms God as fully transcendent and all powerful. God is powerful and sovereign enough to bring everything into being out of nothing. The presence of anything else, the preexistence of any matter, would diminish or defile God. Flora A. Keshgegian

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Some see God as the soul of the universe…

• There is no dialogue in this universe. The entire universe is a monologue. The Self is talking to itself with the apparent sense of another. Mooji
• We can say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the land, its bones are the structure of the rocks . . . its breathing and its pulse are the ebb and flow of the sea. Leonardo Da Vinci
• Soul of the universe, Sire, God, Creator, Lord, I believe in Thee, ‘neath all these names: And without having need to hear thy word, In the sky’s brow my glorious creed I trace. Alphonse de Lamartine
• 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
• The Self 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 Vivekananda
• There is but one soul throughout the universe, all is but one existence – “Thou art in the woman, thou in the man, thou in the young man walking in the pride of youth, thou in the old man tottering on his stick – thou art All – in all, in everything, and I am thee, because I am made from thee. Swami Vivekananda
• There is only one Soul in the Universe. There is no ‘you’ or ‘me’; all variety is merged into the absolute unity, the one infinite existence – God. Swami Vivekananda
• At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us. Black Elk
• We consider that the whole universe is animated, and that all the globes, all the stars, and also the noble earth have been governed since the beginning by their own appointed souls and have the motives of self-conservation. William Gilbert

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…and the universe as the body of God…

• In some forms of monism, everything in existence is part of the body of God. Other forms of monism view the universe as made of only one substance. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• The universe is like the hand of God. The world is God’s body. Michael Dowd
• If we imagine the cosmos as God’s body, then we never meet God unembodied. Sallie McFague
• The purpose of using it is to ‘cause us to see differently’, to ‘think and act as if bodies matter’, and to ‘change what we value’. If we imagine the cosmos as God’s body, then ‘we never meet God unembodied’. This is to take God in that cosmos seriously, for ‘creation is God’s self-expression’.  Sallie McFague
• The world seen as God’s body chimes strongly with a feminist and panentheist stress on God as the source of all relationship. Sallie McFague
• Sin, in this view, is a matter of offence against other parts of the ‘body’ (other species or parts of the creation) and in that sense only against God. Sallie McFague
• I say the Intelligent Design-evolution debate misses the point. It trivializes God and it trivializes science. The universe is like the hand of God. The world is God’s body. Michael Dowd
• What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? Thomas Pynchon
• The manifest universe is the body of God … all people are incarnations of the One Spirit. Ernest Holmes
• I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it’s a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. Edgar Mitchell
• Now I will explain to you the ultimate mystery: your exact and true relationship to Me. YOU ARE MY BODY. As your body is to your mind and soul, so, too, are you to My mind and soul. Therefore:  Everything I experience, I experience through you. Neale Donald Walsch
• All is divine, even this earth and its creatures, in ways we do not understand but of which we can become increasingly certain. And how does one become certain? Not by thinking or even believing, but by living within the world as if it were the body of God. Sallie McFague
• It is one thing to construe the world ‘as if’ it were God’s body and quite another to construe the world ‘as’ God’s body. David Tracy
• While God and the world – God’s reality and ours – are not identical, they are ontologically related. That is, the world’s reality derives from God, but just as important, the world is God’s beloved which is joined to God: the world is God’s body. Sallie McFague
• The model of the world as God’s body suggests that God loves bodies,” and consequently, that “the basic necessities of bodily existence – adequate food and shelter, for example – are central aspects of God’s love for all bodily creatures and therefore should be central concerns of us, God’s co-workers. Sallie McFague
• Let us consider the world as God’s “body.” While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation — the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Sallie McFague
• All human beings are limbs of the same body. God created them from the same essence. If one part of the body suffers pain, then the whole body is affected. If you are indifferent to this pain, you cannot be called a human being. Saadi
• The universe has a body and soul and evolves through cosmic time. As microcosms of stardust, we do the same. Deepak Chopra
• Life is perception. We perceive through different parts of the body of the universe. Frederick Lenz
• Love is the face and body of the Universe. Barbara Brennan
• When you awaken, you will see that this is Heaven on Earth, and everything in physical form is the body of God. Leonard Jacobson
• God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has often been said by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. Frank Lloyd Wright
• What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? Lawrence Durrell
• Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains. John Updike

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…or the house of God

• If this universe is the House of God, then I must say it is quite a dark house despite several hundred billion suns! Mehmet Murat Ildan
• In the immense cathedral which is the universe of God, each person, whether scholar or manual laborer, is called to act as the priest of his whole life–to take all that is human, and to turn it into an offering and a hymn of glory. Paul Evdokimov

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Some see God as actually being none other than the universe…

• The name, “universe,” is superimposed on Brahman, but what we call the “universe” is really nothing but Brahman. Adi Shankara
• The Absolute did not create, but is the universe. Timothy Sprigge
• The universe is truly Brahman, … for that which is superimposed (the universe) has no separate existence from its substratum (Brahman). …. The name, “universe,” is superimposed on Brahman, but what we call the “universe” is [really] nothing but Brahman. Adi Shankara
• God is the common nature of things; also the force of fate and the necessity of future events. In addition he is fire, and the aether . .; also things in a natural state of flux and mobility, like water, earth, air, sun, moon and stars; and he is the all-embracing whole. Zeno
• There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken. Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. God is the indwelling, and not the transient cause of all things. Baruch Spinoza
• The universe is but one vast Symbol of God. Thomas Carlyle
• The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul. Chrysippus
• Be it God or a “big bang” creation event, both theories rest upon the same belief: something always existed, i.e. “god” and/or the “singularity.” And both god and the universe are self-creating. God became god by creating the universe and thus God created God by the act of creation. The Universe became the universe by creating itself and thus the universe created the universe by the act of creation. Be it the Jewish/Christian religion, or the “big bang” theorists, all assume something existed which gave rise to the universe; i.e. god or a singularity. According to Lemaitre, God is that singularity. The universe, therefore, is not just a manifestation of the creative act, but is also god. The universe is god since all things come from God. Every galaxy, stars, planet, human, dog, cat, molecule, atom–all come from God, and in the beginning were one with god–this singularity. And in the end, all will return to god, becoming one with god. So in the end, is, as the beginning: A oneness from which all existence emanates and returns. The parallels with Hinduism, Taoism, atomic theory, and quantum physics–as will be explained–are striking.  Rhawn Joseph
• God is the Seed; The Universe is the Tree, Impulses and passions are the branches, Intelligence is the flower, Pure Consciousness is the fruit, Love is the sweetness in the fruit. Sathya Sai Baba

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…including the laws of the universe…

• Order is manifestly maintained in the universe… governed by the sovereign will of God. James Prescott Joule
• God is the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion. Robert Boyle

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…the space that pervades and contains the universe…

• God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite. The Shadow of God is the Infinite Space that accommodates the infinite Gross Sphere which, with its occurrences of millions of universes, within and without the ranges of men’s knowledge, is the Creation that issued from the Point of Finiteness in the infinite Existence that is God. Meher Baba

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… the creative, evolutionary impulse of the universe as it unfolds…

• God is the evolutionary impulse of the universe. God is infinite creativity, infinite love, infinite compassion, infinite caring. Deepak Chopra
• God to me is the universe unfolding. Jan Phillips
• God is to me that creative force, behind and in the universe, who manifests Himself as energy, as life, as order, as beauty, as thought, as conscience, as love. Henry Sloane Coffin
• Man is flawed; universe is imperfect; the functioning of the cosmos is defective! Everything seems to be severely punished by the imperfection! May be the real challenge of men is to correct all these flaws! It is possible to think that God is an evolutionary perfectionist! He creates things as unimportant and faulty; then let them all alone and fateless to evolve to perfection! Mehmet Murat Ildan
• I think God is the creative force of the universe. I think it is the raw material from which life emerges. Neale Donald Walsch
• An unconscious universe is a dead universe, while the universe that human beings experience is alive, creative, and evolving toward magnificent structures that are even more creative. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafato

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…and nature itself

• The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Gilbert K. Chesterton
• My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That’s God. Everything is God. I’m a child of that. Alice Walker

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God, in this view, is the very substance of the universe…

• The whole world and heaven are the substance of god. Zeno
• God, being eternal and existing throughout all matter, makes everything. Zeno
• The term cosmos is used by them … of God himself, the individual being whose quality is derived from the whole of substance; he is indestructible and ungenerable, being the artificer of this orderly arrangement of things, who at stated periods of time absorbs into himself the whole of substance and again creates it from himself. The world . . . is ordered by reason and providence, inasmuch as reason pervades every part of it, just as does the soul in us. Zeno
• There is nothing but God’s grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe. Robert Louis Stevenson
• Because God is always incarnational, always embodied, we can see God’s transcendence immanently. Meeting God is not a momentary “spiritual” affair; rather, God is the ether, the reality, the body, the garden in which we live. God is never absent; God is reality (being). Sallie McFague

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…and the totality of all that exists

• The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans–in pure principle–we do not and never will know all the principles. Buckminster Fuller
• I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. Donald Miller
• Chaos is not disorder. Chaos is the totality of existence. You could call it God. You could use the term, the Tao. I like chaos. It means more to us in English. Chaos is all things, wild and wonderful, connected perfectly by the life force. Frederick Lenz
• Consciousness is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of consciousness, but awareness is beyond all–being as well as not-being. Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The belief that God is the universe, and nothing else, is called pantheism…

• The heart of Pantheist philosophy is a belief in the sanctity of Nature. This means that we hold reverence for the inconceivable evolutionary processes that created us; for the unfolding of the stars in the Universe and the life on our home planet Earth.  In short–we put our faith in our Creator–meaning not only all past events and shapes and patterns, but also the now, for Creation is a continuing process and exists within us and around us this very instant.  Harold W. Wood, Jr.
• The pantheist essentially says that the universe is all that there is, but that it makes sense to call the universe God. If the universe and God are identical, then God is not something supernatural, but just a poetic name for something much larger and more mysterious than ourselves. Pantheism is like a spiritual form of atheism – Richard Dawkins calls it “sexed up atheism.” Sam Woolfe
• Pantheism, which means “all-God,” is the view that the universe and God are one and the same. Any reverence or worship is directed not to a god in human form, or in any form at all, but to the whole of the cosmos, and spirituality is centered not on a traditional deity but on nature. Dale McGowan
• It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called “Pantheism,” which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations of absolute being. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation. John Burroughs
• If the pantheist starts with the belief that the one great reality, eternal and infinite, is God, he sees everything finite and temporal as but some part of God. There is nothing separate or distinct from God, for God is the universe. If, on the other hand, the conception taken as the foundation of the system is that the great inclusive unity is the world itself, or the universe, God is swallowed up in that unity, which may be designated nature. The Columbia Encyclopedia
• In the second century A.D. the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius may have best defined pantheism when he wrote, “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. Sharman Apt Russell
• With pantheism…the deity is associated with the order of nature or the universe itself…when modern scientists such as Einstein and Stephen Hawking mention ‘God’ in their writing, this is what they seem to mean: that God is Nature. Victor J. Stenger
• While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can’t figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn’t prove there’s a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature. Tony Campolo
• Pantheism teaches that every thing is intrinsically good and pure; all originally one with divinity, and that every appearance of wrong or guilt exists but in idea, or depends on the conventional idea entertained of it. Hence its dangerous influence on the moral life and character; for by whatever subtlety of language the meaning may be disguised, and however men may cling to a belief in the all-regulating power of conscience, yet, if this destructive principle be admitted as a ruling fact, the conduct of individuals will be considered as of slight importance, and the eternal distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, set aside, and finally rejected. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
• I am a PAN-THEIST, from the Greek roots pan, meaning “all, of everything” and theos meaning “god, divine”… or “all” = “god” Jon Hoskins
• Pantheism is the view that the natural universe is divine, the proper object of reverence; or the view that the natural universe is pervaded with divinity. Jon Hoskins
• Pantheism: A doctrine which identifies God with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of God.
• The word pantheism derives from the Greek words pan (=’all’) and theos (=’God’). Thus pantheism means ‘All is God’. In essence, pantheism holds that there is no divinity other than the universe and nature. Pantheism is a religious belief that reveres and cares for nature, a religion that joyously accepts this life as our only life, and this earth as our only paradise, if we look after it. Pantheism revels in the beauty of nature and the night sky, and is full of wonder at their mystery and power. Pantheism believes that all things are linked in profound unity … All things interconnected and interdependent. In life and in death we humans are an inseparable part of this unity, and in realising this we can find our joy and our peace. Paul Harrison
• Scientific pantheism goes beyond atheism in offering a positive approach to the world and a reverent attitude towards nature and the universe. It affirms our unity with these, and rejects the idea of human mastery over nature or human pre-eminence in the cosmos. It takes our relationship to nature and to the universe as the center of our religion, our ethics and our aesthetics. Paul Harrison
• Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things. Ann Voskamp
• Pantheism is the belief that nature or the universe is identical to God. Unlike theists, pantheists do not believe in a personal god who interacts with people, performs miracles, listens to prayers or judges what we do as being morally right or wrong. Unlike atheists, pantheists do believe in some sort of god. Some people say that pantheism is the complete opposite of atheism since it says that everything is God, whereas atheists believe in no god anywhere. San Woolfe
• Pantheism rejects the idea that God is transcendent. According to traditional Western conceptions of God, He is an entity that is above and beyond the universe. So, although God may be fully present in the universe, He is also outside of it. Simply put, He transcends the totality of objects in the world. When pantheists say that “God is everything and everything is God,” this is meant to capture that idea that God does not transcend the world. Laura Maguire

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…a belief in the sacredness of matter rather than spirit…

• How can we feel gratitude or love or worship towards impersonal matter? Matter is not impersonal: it is our very substance.  If we cannot love matter, then we cannot love ourselves as we are.  Almost everyone loves nature, even though it is impersonal, and often indifferent or cruel.  We can feel gratitude, too, to nature and the universe, for giving us the privilege of conscious life. Paul Harrison
• Most modern pantheists are monists in the sense that they believe there is only one basic type of substance – matter – rather than two different and distinct types, spirit and matter. Paul Harrison

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…which some argue is not far from atheism

• Pantheism is sexed up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. Richard Dawkins
• Pantheism, in fact, asserts two relations of identity. First, God is identified with the universe (or vice versa), and second, all things within the universe are identified into a single unity. Joanna Leidenhag
• Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. Arthur Schopenhauer
• For most cosmologists, a supernatural God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Gary Sloan
• Maybe there isn’t a God after all, maybe there’s only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone. Gao Xingjian
• We may wonder if there’s much difference between pantheism and atheism. After all, pantheism denies the existence of a transcendent, personal God, which is the God of traditional theism. Laura Maguire

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Atheists go a step further and argue that if God is none other than the universe, why call it God?

• The chief objection I have to pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word “world”. Arthur Schopenhauer
• It’s not clear what exactly pantheists are talking about when they talk of “God.” If pantheists just consider God to be the totality of all existence, then why talk of “God” at all? Moreover, if that’s what “God” means to the pantheist, then the slogan “God is everything and everything is God” now seems circular and redundant. Laura Maguire
• Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal. Steven Weinberg

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Others assert that pantheism is not atheism, and in some ways, the very opposite of it

• Pantheism is the belief that nature or the universe is identical to God. Unlike theists, pantheists do not believe in a personal god who interacts with people, performs miracles, listens to prayers or judges what we do as being morally right or wrong. Unlike atheists, pantheists do believe in some sort of god. Some people say that pantheism is the complete opposite of atheism since it says that everything is God, whereas atheists believe in no god anywhere. San Woolfe
• Looking at other non-theistic religious traditions, we find many conceptions of a divinity that pervades all existence, like Lao Tzu’s Tao, Sankara’s Brahman, and arguably also Hegel’s Geist and Plotinus’s One. To call all these views “atheist” simply because they reject the traditional theistic conception of a personal, transcendent God is to miss the point. Atheism, after all, is not a religion. Laura Maguire

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Pantheism provides a way to fuse religion and science

• Pantheism is the belief that the universe is divine and nature is sacred. It fuses religion and science, and concern for humans with concern for nature. It provides the most solid basis for environmental ethics. It is a religion that requires no faith other than common sense, no revelation other than open eyes and a mind open to evidence, no guru other than your own self. Paul Harrison
• Pantheism is the metaphysical position that best supports the pursuit of science. It is the reasoning person’s religious response to the world because it doesn’t interfere with science. Philosophers tend to think about science and faith as pulling in opposite directions. Laura Maguire

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Hindu and Taoist philosophies are pantheistic in some ways

• Hindu and Taoist philosophy is pantheistic in some ways. In the ancient Hindu text, the Vedas, Brahma (or God) is said to be the basis of the whole universe and also that the whole universe is pervaded by Brahma. Brahma is in minerals, plants, animals and humans equally. Taoism is also similar to the outlook of a pantheist. Sam Woolfe
• Taoism is a strongly pantheistic religion .. Its central focus is the Tao or Way, conceived of as a mysterious and numinous unity, infinite and eternal, underlying all things and sustaining them. Paul Harrison
• When asked where the Tao was, Zhuangzi replied that “There is nowhere where it is not…There is not a single thing without Tao. Sam Woolfe
• Underlying all sects of Hinduism is usually some sort of pantheism. Francis Potter

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The belief that God is present in the universe but also beyond it is called Panentheism…

• Panentheism, which literally means “all in God;’ connotes this idea that God is to be found in creation. God contains the world and is present in and to the world. The transcendence of God is not otherness, defined as total separation. Transcendence is not opposed to immanence. Indeed, it might be imagined through immanence, transcendence in immanence. This does not mean that the divine is equivalent to the world, an idea often referred to as pantheism, that “all is God.” God is in, yet distinct from, creation. The divine is not exhausted by presence in creation, but neither does God shrink away from it. Flora A. Keshgegian
• What is the difference between pantheism and panentheism? Panentheists and pantheists share the view that the universe and every natural thing in it is in some sense worth of reverence.  However, pan-en-theos means “all-in-God” – that is, the universe is contained within God, not God in the universe. Panentheists believe in a God who is present in everything but also extends beyond the universe. In other words, God is greater than the universe. Often they also believe that this God has a mind, created the universe, and cares about each of us personally. Pantheists believe that the universe itself is the prime focus for reverence. They do not believe in personal or creator gods.  Paul Harrison
• Panentheism suggests that interconnection is an expression of divine presence. Everything exists in relation to everything else because all is contained in God. The divine is active in and through everything, weaving relations. God’s will is for interrelationship. God created and infused all with divine presence. Flora A. Keshgegian

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…a belief in a God that includes all but also transcends all

• God is both manifest as the Totality and Allness of Creation and simultaneously unmanifest as the Godhead, the Infinite Potentiality and source or ‘void-ness’ prior to form. David R. Hawkins
• God includes all that is, but God also transcends all that is. Carolyn Jane Bohler
• Right discrimination is of two kinds analytical and synthetical. The first leads one from the phenomena to the Absolute Brahman, while by the second one knows how the Absolute Brahman appears as the universe. Ramakrishna
• After he had created it, he entered into it; after he had entered into it, he was: The being and the beyond… Reality and unreality… The formed and the unformed, The mortal and immortal. The abiding and the fleeting. Upanishads
• God is beyond all the forms of life, but also indwells every form of life as their essence. God is both beyond and within. Eckhart Tolle
• God is to me that creative Force, behind and in the universe, who manifests Himself as energy, as life, as order, as beauty, as thought, as conscience, as love. Henry Sloane Coffin

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God as the universe, some would argue, points to a God that is not personal

• I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. Albert Einstein
• We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism.  But pantheism is a misleading word.  It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all.  The idea is trans-theological.  It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being. Joseph Campbell
• The Absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is impersonal principle. Swami Vivekananda
• God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain . . . Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone. Baruch Spinoza
• Pantheism is the belief that nature or the universe is identical to God. Unlike theists, pantheists do not believe in a personal god who interacts with people, performs miracles, listens to prayers or judges what we do as being morally right or wrong. San Woolfe
• Einstein was a pantheist but rejected any notion of a personal God. And like Einstein, for many pantheists rejection of a personal deity is the definitive mark or most important element of their position. William Mander
• A second important difference between pantheism and traditional theistic religions is that pantheists also reject the idea of God’s personhood. The pantheist God is not a personal God, the kind of entity that could have beliefs, desires, intentions, or agency. Unlike the traditional God of theism, the pantheistic God does not have a will and cannot act in or upon the universe. These are the kind of things that only a person, or a person-like entity, could do. For the pantheist, God is the non-personal divinity that pervades all existence. It is the divine Unity of the world. Laura Maguire

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However, others disagree

• Many pantheists have thought mind-like attribution of some form or other to the cosmos absolutely central to their position. Spinoza’s God is an “infinite intellect”, all knowing, and capable of loving both himself—and us, insofar as we are part of his perfection. And if the mark of a personal being is that it is one towards which we can entertain personal attitudes, then we should note too that Spinoza recommends amor intellectualist dei (the intellectual love of God) as the supreme good for man. William Mander
• Another notable pantheist to insist that the supreme being is personal was Gustav Fechner, who develops a form of panpsychism according to which all organised matter must be thought of as possessing its own inner life or soul. The more complex and developed its structure, the more sophisticated its spiritual life; from the lowest soul-life of plants, through our own mental life, which is just the inner side of our bodies, through the soul-life of the planets and stars up to the most developed spirit of all, God, the consciousness which corresponds to the most complex organism there is, the cosmos itself. William Mander
• The Stoics believed in a personal deity. Just as they construed human beings as physical creatures animated by a physical soul, so too they regarded God as the mind of the world—with the cosmos as his body. Like a vast biological individual, to them God was a conscious rational being, exercising providence over life and to whom we might approach in prayer. William Mander

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Some argue God as the universe points to a God that is indifferent…

• The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. Joan Holmes
• Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty? Jack Kerouac
• My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? S. Lewis

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…rather than hostile or benevolent

• The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe. Albert Einstein

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Others disagree, pointing to an inherent benevolence underlying the universe

• Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question. Lao Tzu
• Through these things, I see the footprints of a benevolent Mystery unfolding and I look out into the vast night sky and I smile at the stars and the moon content in the knowledge that the universe smiles back. Anthony Lambert
• Deep down in your heart know that all is well. Understand that the Universe is your friend and can never hurt you. It is the substratum of all existence which is love! When you develop a loving consciousness there can be no problems. Robert Adams

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Some argue God as the universe points to a God beyond ethics…

• All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics. Arthur Schopenhauer
• We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• If all things are divine, including you and me, then there is no God who is Lord over nature and history, and who gives us sovereign commands. The God of the Bible says, “You shall not kill,” but since we ourselves are gods instead, we can abort one-and-a-half million children every year, or we can decide that an elderly person is no longer useful to society and urge them to commit suicide. Elizabeth Achtemeier
• If we have a religion of nature, it is natural to hate our enemies isn’t it; to try to get back at those who have wronged us, to carry a grudge, to vow vengeance, to give back evil for evil? Elizabeth Achtemeier

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…while others point out that a reverence for the universe (and the life it contains) is the very essence of ethics

• When we say that the cosmos is divine, we mean it with just as much conviction and emotion as believers say that their god is God. But we are not making a metaphysical statement that is beyond proof or disproof. We are making an ethical statement that means no more, and no less, than this: We should relate to the universe in the same way as believers in God relate to God. That is, with humility, awe, reverence, celebration and the search for deeper understanding. Paul Harrison
• Sin, in this view, is a matter of offence against other parts of the ‘body’ (other species or parts of the creation) and in that sense only against God. Sallie McFague

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If God is the universe, there is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects

• God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. Baruch Spinoza
• Pantheism means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects. Charles Hartshorne
• Malebranche teaches that we see all things in God himself. This is certainly equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown. Moreover, according to him, we see not only all things in God, but God is also the sole activity therein, so that physical causes are so only apparently; they are merely occasional causes. And so here we have essentially the pantheism of Spinoza who appears to have learned more from Malebranche than from Descartes. Arthur Schopenhauer

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If God is the universe, then God manifests as all things

• Even in a single leaf of a tree, or a tender blade of grass, the awe-inspiring Deity manifests Itself. Urabe-no-Kanekuni
• I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon, and stars….I awaken everything to life. Hildergard of Bingen
• Source manifests as ‘all that is’ Leo Hartong
• God is all that is. Since everything that exists is God, in one form or another, the only way that God can make a tree is by becoming the tree. Likewise, the way God made you was by becoming you. Tolly Burkan
• We are ‘collectively’ the manifestation of God, together with all the plants and animals and every other living and non-living thing in existence that makes up the physical Universe. Poffo Ortiz
• God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds. Giordano Bruno

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If God is the universe, we are surrounded by a fertile mystery

• We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. Henry David Thoreau
• Awareness of an all-pervading mysterious energy articulated in the infinite variety of natural phenomena seems to be the primordial experience of human consciousness, awakening to an awesome universe filled with mysterious power. Thomas Berry
• It is the nature of God to reside in mystery–ineluctable, inexhaustible mystery. And we do not need to understand the cabala of mathematical physics to apprehend the mysterium tremendum.  We need only look out the window.  Chet Raymo
• Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us. Thomas Nagel
• Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn’t matter to me. Jeanette Winterson
• Malebranche teaches that we see all things in God himself. Arthur Schopenhauer

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God has become the world

• The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called lila, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play. Fritjof Capra

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The universe is full of God

• We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world. Chapman Cohen
• To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes. Thomas Carlyle
• One universe, four forces, billions of galaxies. The precision and complexity of our world is enough to make even the famous cosmologist go just a little bit crazy. How does it all fit together? Is there a single, overarching design to the cosmos? And if we find it, will we glimpse the mind of God? Morgan Freeman
• The universe is filled with the evidence of God’s greatness. In awesome wonder we can consider the worlds He has made. David Jeremiah

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God is not out of the universe any more than the universe is out of God

• The universe shows us the life of God, or rather it is in itself the life of God. We behold in it his permanent action, the scene upon which his power is exercised, and in which all his attributes are reflected. God is not out of the universe any more than the universe is out of God. God is the principle, the universe is the consequence, but a necessary consequence, without which the principle would be inert, unfruitful, impossible to conceive. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

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God is everywhere

• Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Something of God… flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself. S. Lewis
• Nature is God’s workshop. The sky is his resume. The universe is his calling card. You want to know who God is? See what he has done. Max Lucado
• And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything. William Shakespeare
• In a panentheistic universe, trees reveal the stature of God. Mountains tell of the grandeur of God. Flowers, in all their variety and riot of colors, gesture to the transcendence of God. Rivers and oceans express the energy and power of God. Human beings reflect the glory of God. Divine mystery is as close as breath. Flora A. Keshgegian
• The abode of God, too, is wherever is earth and sea and air, and sky and virtue. Why further do we seek the Gods of heaven? Whatever thou dost behold and whatever thou dost touch, that is Jupiter. Lucan
• God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child’s smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying. D. Wilson
• You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. Shams Tabrizi
• We live in a spiritual Universe. God is in, through, around and for us. Ernest Holmes
• The universe is wired with the electricity of God, and each of us is a lamp. Marianne Williamson
• God is present in everything. In the universe in creation, in me and all that happens to me, in my brothers and sisters, in the church – everywhere. Thea Bowman
• My God is not a religious God. My God is nature. My God is everything there is. That’s God. Everything is God. I’m a child of that. Alice Walker
• God is all that is. Everything. Everything. Breath, life. Just get Webster’s Dictionary and throw it on the floor. It’s everything… God is everything. Iyanla Vanzant
• I think God is everything. Human beings created the punitive, vengeful deity who considers us to be innate sinners. Alanis Morissette

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God is fertility, creativity and multiplicity

• The unimaginably vast universe contains billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. It extends beyond the limits of our ability to observe it, beyond the event horizon from which we can receive light or any other form of electromagnetic radiation. It contains countless atoms, molecules, crystals, stars and galaxies. On earth there is an immense diversity of living forms. In the human realm, there is a great variety of languages, cultural forms, social patterns, technical innovations, novels and films, sports, video games and so on. One essential feature of the universe seems to be fertility, multiplicity and creativity. Rupert Sheldrake

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If God is everything including us, we are divine

• If God is in all things, then all things and creatures in our environment are divine, and they must be preserved and treated with reverence. Elizabeth Achtemeier
• As I have come to realize that we all live and move and have our being in God, the names of each person, species, creature, and element are superimposed over God’s name. God is reality; God is the source of reality of each of us. Panentheism seeing the world as in God – puts God’s “name” first, but each of our names are included and preserved in their distinctiveness within the divine reality. Sallie McFague

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Each of is the universe (God) experiencing itself …

• And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. Kim Stanley Robinson
• Each of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. Alan Watts
• I used to feel like a guy experiencing the universe and now I feel like the universe experiencing a guy. Jim Carey
• Life is the universe’s way of experiencing itself. Awareness is Life’s way of experiencing the universe. Anthony Lambert
• Man is a piece of the universe made alive. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Once the conviction: ‘I am not the body’ becomes so well grounded that he can no longer feel, think and act for and on behalf of the body, he will easily discover that he is the universal being, knowing, acting, that in him and through him the entire universe is real, conscious and active. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• Sight, sound, and all other qualities arose so that the universal mind could experience itself. Deepak Chopra
• The only real “you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. Alan Watts
• The universe delights in itself through the form. Eckhart Tolle
• The universe is a giant perceptual matrix. It perceives itself through its substance. Frederick Lenz
• The universe is experiencing itself for a brief moment as a human being. And as a plant. Eckhart Tolle
• Each person’s life – each life-form, in fact – represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself. And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end – one of countless worlds. Eckhart Tolle
• The universe wants to experience itself more fully through you. The universe is conscious through you. Anthony Lambert
• Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. Alan Wilson Watts
• We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody’s eyes, you’re looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self. Alan Watts
• We are the universe pretending to be individuals. Deepak Chopra
• We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. Alan Wilson Watts
• You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Alan Watts
• You are the universe experiencing itself. Ziad Masri
• You are the universe expressing itself as a temporary form. Eckhart Tolle
• Your self is the universe, and you perceive the universe through a state of mind. Frederick Lenz

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… the universe (God) becoming conscious of itself …

• Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself. Thomas Nagel
• Evolution is the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around it. It is a progressive change from the unconscious to the conscious. We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its own destiny. Man is God in the process of coming into existence. James Hart
• He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog’s brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire. Greg Iles
• It’s taken 14 billion years for matter to gain the capacity to become conscious of itself. If this is true, it wouldn’t make any sense that the whole point of enlightenment would be to escape from the whole process at the very instant that the universe is beginning to awaken to itself. Andrew Cohen
• Matter has reached the point of beginning to know itself. . .. Man is a star’s way of knowing about stars. George Wald
• The “secret intention” of the Lila is the “transformation” from unconscious matter to conscious beings to individuals in the cosmos who recognize their place in the Divine and the Sachchidananda that permeates life and existence with that level of awakening. Matthew W. Morey
• The All is conscious. It is self-aware. Adyashanti
• The scientific story of the evolving cosmos is a new version of this ancient myth. It relates how the oneness of unconscious nature has become conscious of itself through evolving into ever more complex forms, until it reaches the human form in which it is conscious of being conscious. Tim Freke
• The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future–though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively. Thomas Nagel
• Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. Paul Davies
• Through you, the universe is becoming aware of itself! Eckhart Tolle
• We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself. Deepak Chopra
• We are the universe itself becoming aware. Natalie Batalha
• With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
• You are a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. Eckhart Tolle
• You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.  What an amazing miracle.  Eckhart Tolle
• You are the Universe expressing itself as a human for a little while. Eckhart Tolle
• You are the universe which is becoming conscious through you. Eckhart Tolle
• We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. Carl Sagan
• The human is that being in whom the Universe activates, reflects upon, and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness. Thomas Berry

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… the universe coming to know itself through us

• Evolution is the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around it. It is a progressive change from the unconscious to the conscious. We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its own destiny. Man is God in the process of coming into existence. James Hart
• Matter has reached the point of beginning to know itself. . . . Man is a star’s way of knowing about stars. George Wald
• Our universe is still unfolding and human beings are active and creative participants. Creativity is both the universe’s ordering principle and its process, part of the greater creativity of nature. Gregory Cajete
• Sight, sound, and all other qualities arose so that the universal mind could experience itself. Deepak Chopra
• The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.  We are a way for the universe to know itself.  Carl Sagan
• The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future–though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively. Thomas Nagel
• The vastness carries a non-personal desire to experience itself. This appears to be the purpose of human life-for the vastness to meet itself everywhere it turns.  Suzanne Segal
• There is nothing else in perfect Oneness. There is only Beingness itself, self-aware. Everything we see and experience in the universe is a form of consciousness projected by this infinite Beingness so that it can experience itself in relation to itself and learn from the experience. We thus experience ourselves to be an individual soul that is evolving. Ziad Masri
• This is a cyclical process of expansion that is literally endless. As one cycle comes to completion, the universe is “completed” and another is born to allow for more experience and expansion. Ziad Masri
• We are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe. Brian Cox
• We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is God in the process of coming into existence. James Hart
• We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” Carl Sagan
• While the functions continue to function, it is now seen that they have always been engaged not for a personal purpose, but to do whatever the vastness deems obvious in the service fo freedom. The vastness has its own non-personal desire to perceive itself directly through itself using the circuitry of every human being.    Suzanne Segal
• Without us here to witness, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding. Daniel H. Wilson
• Man know thyself; then thou shalt know the Universe and God. Pythagoras

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The oneness of the universe reflects the oneness that is God…

• Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated “building blocks,” but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer. Fritjof Capra
• Heaven and I were created together, and all things and I are one. Zhuangzi
• Pantheism finds a unity in everything that exists and in this unity a sense of the divine. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
• Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir
• When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been. Sen T’sen
• I believe the universe is one being; all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole … The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God; rather than inwards on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions- the world of spirits. Robinson Jeffers
• God is one with His world. The Creator is identical with His creation, and everything is divine. Elizabeth Achtemeier
• The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities. Alfred North Whitehead
• The physical universe was created when Oneness became duality, and we can see this duality, this yin and yang, everywhere in the universe, in every atom, every action, and in every function of the human body. Yin and yang are manifest everywhere, except at the very center of being, the perfect point of balance, at that infinite moment where the future becomes the past. Robert Tisserand
• Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. Erwin Schrodinger
• Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated “building blocks,” but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer. Fritjof Capra
• I think the understanding of oneness and interconnectivity of the whole Universe is something we have innately, something we’re born with. We are however very skillful at ignoring and pretending we don’t have or know it. Brad Warner
• The greatest power in the universe is the power of unity, of oneness. All other powers are secondary. Frederick Lenz
• Zen goes directly to your own experience of the oneness of the universe, of your interconnectedness with all things. You learn to distrust whatever you clung to in your old sense of separation, and that realization can be the most liberating thing in your life, a freedom beyond anything you could have imagined. Jean Smith
• It’s difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. Russell Brand
• The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to yin and yang. Yin and yang give birth to all things… The complete whole is the complete whole. So also is any part the complete whole… But forget about understanding and harmonizing and making all things one. The universe is already a harmonious oneness; just realize it. Lao Tzu
• All things in the universe are one. They began as one. They may end as one. They are all made of the same basic matter/energy, and they interact with one another, constantly.
• All things on earth are one: plants, animals, rocks, oceans and atmosphere. All living creatures had a common origin, all depend on each other, and shape and are shaped by non-living things. Paul Harrison

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…for the universe as God is an infinite and perfectly interconnected whole

• The universe as a whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts – thus it’s wrong to say a single part is equivalent to God, for the holistic system is infinitely greater. If everything together, as a single unity, is God, then it would be wrong to single out a single speck within God as being God. Levite
• All are embedded within larger wholes – atoms in molecules, organelles in cells, animals in ecosystems, the earth within the solar system, the solar system within the galaxy – and all have their own ends and attractors. Rupert Sheldrake
• He saw holism as the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organising, regulative activity in the universe, which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physico-chemical structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind in animals to Personality in man. The all-pervading and ever-increasing character of synthetic unity or wholeness in these structures leads to the concept of Holism as the fundamental activity underlying and co-ordinating all others, and to the view of the universe as a Holistic Universe. Jan Smuts
• The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Robinson Jeffers
• The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object. Aldous Huxley
• Every form, not being the whole, must, of necessity, be imperfect; less than the whole, it cannot be identical with the whole, and being less than the whole and, therefore, imperfect by itself, it shows imperfection as evil, and only the totality of a universe can mirror the image of God. Annie Besant
• God has arranged everything in the universe in consideration of everything else. Hildegard of Bingen
• I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy… parts of one organic whole…. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. Robinson Jeffers

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God as the universe is the one being the many…

• Yet at the same time things are many. Matter-energy is embodied in many different particles and bodies. Life has evolved into many unique species – at least 1.5 million that we know of – and each individual of each species is unique. Diversity is essential to the beauty and interest of nature and the universe. Without it everything would be blank and monotonous. Paul Harrison
• The One is the Many. The One is manifested only in and through the Many. It has no separate existence apart from the Many. Paul Harrison
• Equally the Many are the One. Even during their temporary separation, they are always part of the One, and always united with the One. Every one of us is always part of the One, and can unite with the One at any time we choose. Paul Harrison
• The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many. Joseph Wood Krutch

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…and each of the many then returning to oneness…

• All these beings have their own separate existence. Existence as a separate individual is always more or less temporary, from the day’s life of a mayfly to the billions of years of a star. Sooner or later, humans, cats, trees, planets, stars will end their temporary existence and be reabsorbed, recycled and recreated as part of new phenomena. Yet even if their existence is temporary, this does not mean that it is unreal or unimportant. Paul Harrison

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…creating a profound harmony between unity and multiplicity

• Philosophical systems that talk about unity tend to deny or play down diversity, as if it were in some way not real, or not important. Yet this devalues individual things and creatures. It makes us look at them in a distant and abstract way, makes us ignore their particularity. Paul Harrison
• Other systems focus too much on diversity and ignore the ways in which things are united and interdependent. This too carries the risk that we see ourselves only as isolated individuals, in competition with each other. Paul Harrison
• Yet we do not have to make an all-or-nothing choice between unity and multiplicity. Both exist and for wholeness we must embrace both. Paul Harrison
• Imagine you are standing on a rocky shore by the ocean, on a breezy day. The reach ahead of you is ultimately linked with every stretch of sea on the planet. It is a unity, a vast watery whole. But in front of you, where water interfaces with air, what you see is waves, hundreds of thousands of waves: some enormous, others smaller, others again tiny waves on the backs of waves. Each of these waves is a distinct entity, with its own characteristics. They are a multiplicity. The Multiplicity and the Unity are one and the same thing, a thing that is both many and one at the same time. The waves, and the currents underwater, make up the ocean. The ocean is the underlying basis for every wave. Neither the ocean, nor the waves, can be understood in isolation from each other. Paul Harrison
• We need a sense of the unity of life and of humans for the sake of human welfare and for the survival of the planet. We need a sense of unity with the cosmos so that we can connect with Reality. But we also need a sense of individuality, for the sake of our own dignity and independence and of the loving care for others. We need it to appreciate each natural form, each animal and plant, each human person in their uniqueness. Paul Harrison
• We must preserve the sense of unity and the sense of diversity and multiplicity. We must recognize that the One and the Many are the same thing viewed from different angles. Paul Harrison

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We are not separate from the universe, and therefore not separate from God

• Most people are on the world, not in it–have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them– undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching, but separate. John Muir
• If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth.  And this is the voice of the earth.  Joseph Campbell
• The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Rudolf Steiner
• Standing alone on a mountain top, it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make–leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents of piled stone–we all dwell in a house of one room… John Muir
• I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun: If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Mikhail Gorbachev
• At the deepest level of ecological awareness you are talking about spiritual awareness. Spiritual awareness is an understanding of being imbedded in a larger whole, a cosmic whole, of belonging to the universe. Fritjof Capra
• We should feel that we are constantly in communion with those numinous cosmic forces out of which we are born. Thomas Berry
• 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
• When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism. Dag Hammarskjold
• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein
• We are part and parcel of the web of life and exist in interdependence with all other beings, both human and nonhuman. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts it in a moment of insight: “I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in process of becoming”. Or, as the poet Wallace Stevens says, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations and interconnections” (Stevens, 163). The evolutionary, ecological perspective insists that we are, in the most profound way, “not our own”: we belong, from the cells of our bodies to the finest creations of our minds, to the intricate, ever-changing cosmos. We both depend on that web of life for our own continued existence and in a special way we are responsible for it, for we alone know that life is interrelated and we alone know how to destroy it. It is an awesome — and unsettling — thought. Sally McFague
• We are part of Nature as a whole whose order we follow. Baruch Spinoza
• Each body in the universe is both unique and interrelated to everything else. Sally McFague
• All things are linked with one another, and this oneness is sacred; there is nothing that is not interconnected with everything else. For things are interdependent, and they combine to form this universal order. There is only one universe made up of all things, and one creator who pervades them; there is one substance and one law, namely, common reason in all thinking creatures, and all truth is one-if, as we believe, there is only one path of perfection for all beings who share the same mind. Marcus Aurelius
• Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. Marcus Aurelius

Each of us are cells making up the universe that is God…

• The sum total of all the cells in an organism is one person; so each soul is like one cell and the sum of them is God, and beyond that is the Absolute. Swami Vivekananda
• Each and every living being in nature is part of God’s body. Mata Amritanandamayi
• When we have completed all the journeys and adventures through our variety of lives we are supposed to return to the creator with our accumulation of knowledge. It is then absorbed. In this way we are considered cells in the body of God. Dolores Cannon
• Christ states that those who see themselves as “separate” and not “divine” hinder humanity’s ability to spiritually evolve. Those who deny their own “divinity” are like “cancer cells” in the body of God. Barbara Marx Hubbard
• For ye are a corpuscle in the body of God; thus a co-creator with Him, in what ye think, in what ye do. Edgar Cayce

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…each of us a part of God’s body

• The ultimate intelligence of all things is your essence. Your mind is the universe. Your body is all things. Frederick Lenz
• Simply see that you are at the center of the universe, and accept all things and beings as parts of your infinite body. When you perceive that an act done to another is done to yourself, you have understood the great truth. Lao Tzu
• To the enlightened man… whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his ‘body’, while the physical body becomes the manifestation of the universal mind. His inner vision an expression of the highest reality, and his speech an expression of eternal truth and mantric power. Anagarika Govinda
• At the most basic level, experience is embodied; we are bodies that experience. Sally McFague
• The individualistic, self-centered mentality of contemporary life ignores: the incredible uniqueness of every single body in the universe as well as the interconnectedness of every body, of every embodied being, with all the other bodies in the universe. Sally McFague
• Through our bodies, in their agonies and ecstasies that lie behind and beyond all linguistic expression, we are bound into a network of relations with our natural environment and experience ourselves as bodies with other bodies. Whatever else experience means, it includes bodily experience as a primordial reality, uniting us in ever-widening concentric circles with the entire planet in all its diverse, rich forms of embodiment. Sally McFague

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The universe is sacred…

• The world is a sacred place and a sacred process…and we’re part of it. Daniel Quinn
• The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred. N. Scott Momaday
• The Universe is sacred. You cannot improve it, if you try to change it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it. Lao Tzu
• What I know in my bones is that I forgot to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy.  We are holy. All life is holy.  Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.  Terry Tempest Williams
• The birds and animals, trees and grasses, rocks, water and wind are our allies. They waken our senses, rouse our passions, renew our spirits and fill us with vision, courage, and joy… David Gaines
• In my own quasi-agnostic way, I must resolve to believe in the sacred, because it makes good sense, because it coheres with my experience of the value that surrounds me, because when I am at my most perceptive, it rings true. Bron Taylor
• Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. Daniel C. Dennett
• All things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. Walt Whitman
• The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of man’s overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. Aldous Huxley
• We must reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed in the natural world. To encounter the sacred in the natural world moves us to resist its destruction. To know that every snowflake is unique opens up our understanding of creativity. To give up humanity as the apex of creation allows us to see the grandeur of the cosmos, the complexity of life, and the dependence of humans on the earth community. Religious consciousness arises from the cosmic processes. Ioanna Sahinidou

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…something many have lost sight of

• Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the high places and along the banks of the sacred streams.  We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism.  Annie Dillard

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The universe is the art of God

• Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Let the magnificence of the universe be your religion

• A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge. Carl Sagan
• Your god is too small for my universe. Carl Sagan
• 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
• To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. William Blake
• When theists look at a forest, or at a cell, or at a galaxy, they feel that they are contemplating the reflected glory of an invisible creator, or they are staring at God’s impenetrable veil. When pantheists do so, they are directly witnessing the glory of divine being.  They are gazing on the unveiled face of God. Paul Harrison
• Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion. John Burroughs
• The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. John Muir

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Appreciate the divine beauty of the universe

• Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world. Jane Smiley
• I have to seek God beauty. Because isn’t my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things. Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature. Ann Voskamp
• I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.  John Muir
• When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. John Muir
• Beauty is the shadow of God on the universe. Gabriela Mistral
• The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty. Alfred North Whitehead

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Feel the divine wonder that is the universe

• The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human. Brian Swimme
• A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. Walt Whitman
• The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reasoning. Dag Hammarskjold
• From wonder into wonder existence opens. Lao Tzu
• Nearly everyone feels deeply awed or moved when looking at nature or the night sky. Most people explain those feelings in terms of the religion they were taught as children. Scientific pantheism proposes that those feelings are older and more basic than any traditional religion: they are a natural part of our existence as natural material beings. They are a recognition of our participation and belonging as members of nature and the universe. Scientific pantheism takes those feelings as its basic foundation. Paul Harrison
• Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction. Rachel Carson
• Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see. Rachel Carson
• As soon as we allow ourselves to think of the world as alive, we recognize that a part of us knew this all along. It is like emerging from winter into spring.  Rupert Sheldrake

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Treat the world with the reverence and respect you would show God

• My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. George Santayana
• Despite great diversity, there is a shared worldview and ethics in both super-naturalistic and naturalistic forms of contemporary nature-oriented spirituality. The common perception can be stated succinctly: The earth and all its life forms and processes are sacred.  We belong to them and they to us — we are kin.  We should, therefore, act lovingly, reverently, and respectfully toward them. We must not unnecessarily injure these beings and processes when we take from them what we need to live.  The key to contemporary earth-based spirituality and ethics is, therefore, a felt sense of “connection,” kinship, and loyalty to earth, her life forms, and living systems.  Bron Taylor
• …as long as the birds return and the flowers bloom, I will dream of a time when we value blue skies more than new automobiles, count our wealth in joy rather than possessions, and dwell in peace and balance with the Earth. I am not without hope. David Gaines

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Love the earth…

• Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach. Henry Beston

…and care for it

• The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only hope. Wendell Berry
• The crisis we face today demands more than superficial adjustment. Increasingly, it is realized that any efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment needs to be infused with a vision of the sacred. Carl Sagan
• I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth. Edward Abbey
• We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. Rachel Carson

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• Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything. Ambrose Bierce
• Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes. Tom Stoppard

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