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In some religions, there can be a tendency to see God as separate from us

• 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
• Christianity, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God. Sam Harris
• 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. S. Lewis
• In our culture, God is at a distance to ourselves. Rupert Spira
• 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
• Separation to God, separation from the world, is the first principle of Christian living. Watchman Nee
• Many religions, Christianity being a prime example, declare that God sits in heaven, unapproachable except by faith, prayer, death, or the intervention of saints.  Deepak Chopra
• The (Christian) desire to maintain individuality after death and to live in eternal direct communion with God is a desire of the Ego. We need to drop all desires, including this one.  Alan H. Dawe
• 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
• We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us. Franz Kafka
• There’s no room in my life for religion. Religion is separation and segregation of God. How can you segregate the Almighty? Ben Harper
• Man must begin to the unitary principle of man – knowing that there are not separate men or separate individuals, but hat the whole man idea is one. He must know that all mankind is connected with every other part of mankind, all geared together by the one omnipresent Light of God which centers all as ONE and motivates all as ONE. Until man knows that separation from God is impossible, even for one second, he does not begin to have knowledge. Walter Russell
• God is not separate from anything, or anyone. Yehuda Berg
• God is not separate from us. The essence of God is in our hearts. Though we have veils between God and us on the physical level; on the level of the human body that does not mean God is separate from us. Maleeha Yousuf Bertin

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God is believed to be transcendent, existing outside the universe

• 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
• God has never spoken yet; He has been remaining in silent for millions of years somewhere outside our universe! Mehmet Murat Ildan
• Yahweh may have wound up “in a realm apart”—a remote, even transcendent God, whose presence is felt subtly. Robert Wright

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God is sometimes even seen as aloof, watching us from afar…

• God is seen to sit separate and aloof from us, looking in, while we suffer. Anthony Lambert
• God is watching us. God is watching us. God is watching us. From a distance. Bette Midller
• God looks through the window of infinite consciousness on the films of finite happenings of the past, present, and future shown on the screen of time and space, continuously moving backward and forward in an eternal now.  Paramahansa Yogananda
• 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. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester. Chila Woychik
• God’s on the outside looking in. Kenneth Copeland
• I just knew that God wasn’t there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.  Frances Farmer
• If God is watching us, as some believers suggest, as though we were a television show and God had a lot of free time, the deity would surely be bemused by how dumbed-down devotion has sometimes become in this so-called modern era. How might an omnipotent being with the long view of history respond to those who visit the traveling exhibit of a grilled-cheese sandwich, sold on eBay, that is said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary? It certainly argues against intelligent design, or at least intelligent design in humans.  Anna Quindlen
• 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
• 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
• They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse. Emily Dickinson
• There is one God, and he lives in the sky, and he hears all of us. It is just that here on earth, we are confused about how to believe in him. But what does it matter, as long as we trust he is there? Kristin Harmel
• Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent. T. Wright
• Oh, to know God’s private address. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

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… somewhere out there in the sky

• I talk to God but the sky is empty. Sylvia Plath
• 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
• Don’t look for God in the sky; look within your own body. Rajneesh
• Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there. Nikita Khrushchev
• I am high in the sky, and still I do not see the face of god. Gherman Titov
• 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
• I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. Jack Kerouac
• I looked up in the sky and trusted in God. Anne Frank
• I talk to God but the sky is empty. Sylvia Plath
• The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God. Pierre-Simon Laplace
• With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.  Erich Maria Remarque
• When asked where God is, people point towards the sky or some far and distant region. Sathya Sai Baba

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Sin is believed to separate us from God

• 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
• Our sin is what separates us from God, but it’s our self righteousness that keeps us from running to Him for the grace He willingly gives to all who come. Paul David Tripp
• You and your sins must separate or you and your God will never come together. Charles Spurgeon
• 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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Hell is believed to be a permanent separation from God

• I think that hell essentially is separation from God forever. And that is the worst hell that I can think of. But I think people have a hard time believing God is going to allow people to burn in literal fire forever. I think the fire that is mentioned in the Bible is a burning thirst for God that can never be quenched. Billy Graham

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We long for union with God

• 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
• Many want, above all, to think of God as with them. Carolyn Jane Bohler

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To feel separate from God is a form of suffering and alienation

• Another Christian form of suffering is the feeling of alienation from God through sin and rebellion. Who is alienated from God? It is the Ego. The Higher Self is God-Consciousness, so we cannot be alienated from God unless we are completely alienated from ourselves. Remember that God is closer “than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”  Alan H. Dawe
• Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator.  A Course in Miracles
• The belief that a personal life exists apart from God creates experience disconnected from God. This is painful and frustrating. Michael Beckwith
• The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness. Albert Einstein
• Your separation from God is the hardest work you will ever do. Hafez

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To feel separate from God leads to fear and a host of other problems

• 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
• 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  
• 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
• All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause. Timothy Keller
• 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 Hawkins
• If you subscribe to the notion of God as being separate from you, than you will always be lost, because you can’t even trust in your own untrustworthiness. Wayne Dyer

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To feel separate from God is not to feel worthy

• What surprises me most about God is that the creator of the universe should want a relationship with me. Rick Warren

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To feel separate from God is a form of bondage…

• The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand) the desire for personal separateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginningless time. It creates the notion, ‘I am the actor, I am he who experiences.’ This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separateness is called Liberation. Shankara

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…and an obstacle to self-realisation

• 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
• Divine seperateness is the beginning of spiritual awakening because it gives rise to the aspiration for God-realisation.  Meher Baba
• You obtain God only when you get rid of the notion of separateness from God. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

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To feel separate from God leads to a dysfunctional relationship with God

• The sense that we are separate from God leads to a dysfunctional relationship with God. We project our guilt onto God and fear God’s judgement. We feel as if God is watching us. We feel like a tiny, fragmented entity, at the complete mercy of God. Anthony Lambert

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To feel separate from God causes us not to live

• 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

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Eastern religions and mystic traditions emphasise our oneness with God

• 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! It is materialism – downright materialism. When babies think this way, it may be all right, but when grown – up men try to teach such things, it is downright disgusting – that is what it is. It is all matter, all body idea, the gross idea, the sense idea. Every bit of it is clay and nothing but clay. Is that religion? Swami Vivekananda

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Some even argue it is blasphemy to say we are not one with God for it insinuates God is not infinite

• Blasphemy is the claim that ‘I am God’. However, the separate entity is entirely non-existent, so there is no question of its being God, or anything else for that matter. The real blasphemy is to think, ‘I am a separate entity’. With that thought Consciousness denies its own unlimited, universal sovereignty. It surrenders its Freedom.  Rupert Spira
• To say you exist as a separate entity from God is to imply that God is not infinite. Anthony Lambert
• 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
• Nothing exists separate from Gods infinite being (God). If something stood out apart from Gods infinite being, God would not be infinite.  Rupert Spira

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We are not separate from God

• 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
• 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
• Everything borrows its isness from Gods infinite being. Nothing is separate from God. Rupert Spira
• How can you be apart from God? How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source? A Course in Miracles
• God is inclusive. I think that the idea of God somehow being separated from us was more man’s idea. Jay Bakker
• 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
• God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality. Stephen Levine
• God isn’t separate from us, because He’s the love inside our minds. Every problem, inside and out, is due to a separation from love on someone’s part. Thirty-five thousand people a day die of hunger on earth, and there’s no dearth of food. The question is not ‘what kind of God would let children starve?’ but rather, ‘What kind of people let children starve?’ Marianne Williamson
• I am like God and God like me. I am as large as God. He is as small as I. He cannot be above me nor I beneath him be. Angelus Silesius
• 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
• There is no God separate from you, no God higher than you, the real “you.” Swami Vivekananda
• 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
• 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
• God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.  S. Lewis
• 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
• We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing – your sense of division from God.   Elizabeth Gilbert
• 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
• There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. Frank Herbert
• It is because we are Divine, a part of Him, that we are unable to find lasting satisfaction in anything material. Paramahansa Yogananda

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God is nearer to us than near

• 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
• I believe one day the distance between myself and God will / disappear. Franz Wright
• 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
• We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us. Simone Weil

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We are one with God

• 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
• 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
• Man has hypnotized himself into thinking that he is a human being, whereas in reality he is one with God. Paramahansa Yogananda 
• Only the knowledge of Vedas can help to take away the veil that hides truth from your eyes. God and you are one! so you should identify yourself with Atman, not with human limitations. The idea that you are bound to this world is only an illusion. Adi Shankaracharya
• 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
• This life is now lived in a constant, ever-present awareness of the infinite vastness that I am. Suzanne Segal
• 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
• We are not these bodies; we’re neither our accomplishments nor our possessions—we are all one with the Source of all being, which is God.  Anita Moorjani
• We are, quite literally, one with God, and God is, quite literally, one with us. Bernard Haisch
• We are the vastness, and we contain everything — thoughts, emotions, sensations, preferences, fears, ideas, even identifications. Nothing has to go anywhere. In any case, where would it go? Suzanne Segal
• When asked Who I Am, the only answer possible is: I am the infinite, the vastness that is the substance of all things. I am no one and everyone, nothing and everything — just as you are. Suzanne Segal

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We are not a part of God but the whole

• … 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
• All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. Kabir
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

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We are like waves on the ocean of God

• God is not a person, but an infinite ocean of pure consciousness. From this ocean, arise each of our individual souls, which can be imagined as waves on the surface. Pulkit Mathur
• 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
• Though 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
• 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
• If God is the ocean, we are the waves, so that in describing our relation to God we can say, paradoxically, that we are “not one, not two.” Tom Harpur
• You have come from God, you are a spark of His Glory; you are a wave of that Ocean of Bliss; you will get peace only when you again merge in Him. Sathya Sai Baba
• When a wave settles down, then it instantly recognizes that its source in ocean – infinite, silent, and unchanging – was always there. Tom Von Deck
• Our minds are just waves on the ocean of consciousness. As waves they come and go. As ocean they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence. These are all metaphors of course; the reality is beyond description. You can know it only by being it. Nisargadatta Maharaja
• If the ocean was pure mind and I was a wave, I would be in terror if I tried to distinguish myself from the water that produced me. What is a wave without water, and what is a mind without God?  Hugh Prather

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God is the ground of all being, including our own

• And then I was overwhelmed by the realization that God isn’t a being, but a state of being…and I was now that state of being!  Anita Moorjani
• 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
• 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
• The spiritual self is in fact “an eternally real component of ultimate reality. Chaudhuri
• God is not separate from us; God is indwelling in us, in our unconscious. Consciousness is the ground of all being, which includes us. Amit Goswami

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God is our very own self…

• 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
• 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 Hawkins

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… our very own inner being…

• God is our inner being, experiencing through the world through us. Anthony Lambert
• True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to “know God” – not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being. Eckhart Tolle

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… none other than our own consciousness within us

• I am Brahman… 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
• If the God Consciousness is at the centre of Indra’s Net and the diamonds of the net are our individual consciousnesses then his consciousness is in all of us, and ours in his. Ultimately, we and God are one. And that is the essence of enlightenment. That is the supreme prize awaiting us all.  Michael Faust
• God is not separate from us; God is indwelling in us, in our unconscious. Consciousness is the ground fo all being, which includes us. Amit Goswami
• An individual should hold an awareness of God and His love all the time. He should not separate his consciousness from the Divine while he journeys on the way, nor when he lies down nor when he rises up. Nahmanides

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God dwells in us, as us

• 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
• God dwells in you, as you, and you don’t have to ‘do’ anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state. Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your ego mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry Meditation is a direct and immediate way.  Ramana Maharshi
• Light and darkness cannot coexist any more than God and creatures can. If God is to enter, then the creatures must leave. Meister Eckhart
• You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. Alan Watts
• 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

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God is appearing as everyone and everything

• 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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We exist in God

• Many techniques suggest that something must be eliminated, stopped or purified in order for us to become who we really are.  But the vastness is everything at all times.  Nothing exists outside it, and nothing needs to be excluded from it.  Suzanne Segal

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In God there is no duality

• 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

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There is no individual ‘I’ separate from God

• In fact, there is no individual ‘I’ who can figure out how to find the infinite again. More importantly, where would the infinite go? I mean, we aren’t talking about something that could hide under the rug. If you could see things as only and exactly what they are, you would see that the ‘you’ that is seeing is the vastness itself. Suzanne Segal
• Is there nothing, then, but this great I? Am I to be permitted no individuality for myself? I hear you ask. No, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that is not a part of Me, controlled and ruled eternally by Me, the One Infinite Reality. As for your so-called individuality, that is nothing but your personality still seeking to maintain a separate existence. Soon you shall know there is no individuality apart from My Individuality, and all personality shall fade away into My Divine Impersonality. Yes, and you shall soon reach that state of awakening where you will get a glimpse of My Impersonality, and you will then desire no individuality, no separation for yourself; for you will see that is but one more illusion of the personality. Sieber Benner

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There is only God and no other

• In a room containing you and me, there is only God conversing with Godself. And any thought of you and me is not our illusion. It is God’s illusion.  Anthony Lambert
• 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
• Where God is, there is no other.  Swami Vivekananda

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God is immanent as well as transcendent, personal as well as supra-personal

• 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 to this conception. Aldous Huxley

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God is the universe…

• 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
• 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
• God and World, the Creator and the Created are not two distinct entities but only they appear to be so. Nithin Sridhar
• In the Vyavahrika plane (the Mundane/Relative), the Man, World and the God appear and function as distinct from one another, but in Paramarthika plane (The Absolute plane) there is only One, call it God or Brahman or Atman. In other words, God is the sum total of all existence.  Nithin Sridhar
• God does not create any universe separate from it but only has manifested it out of his own-self in other-words God has himself become Cosmos.  Nithin Sridhar
• God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called Ma, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play.  Fritjof Capra
• Pantheists and some others would have us believe God is in his Creation and not outside it at all. Alan H Dawe
• The world/cosmos with all its multiplicities are not separate from God but have their origin in him and they sustain in him and merge back into him. Brahman is both the material and intelligent cause for this universe. Nithin Sridhar
• For God, the whole manifestation is just Lila/ a Divine play. It is a spontaneous manifestation for Brahman. Nithin Sridhar
• God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. … Her pan-deism is a pandemonium.  Henry Grattan Guinness
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…and we too are not separate from the universe

• We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. Alan Watts

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We need never feel cut off from God

• Nobody at any time is cut off from God. Meister Eckhart
• Nothing can separate me from the love of God. Ayrton Senna
• 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
• When you are wired to God in a unique way, nothing can separate you from the love of God. B. Joshua
• 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
• God has created the world out of his own being.   Johannes Scotus Eriugena

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We have no life independent of God

• …to live in the conscious realisation of the fact that God lives in us, is indeed the life of our life, and that in ourselves we have no independent life, and hence no power, is the one great fact of all true religion, even as it is the one great fact of human life. Religion, therefore, at its purest, and life at its truest, are essentially and necessarily one and the same. Ralph Waldo Trine
• 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

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We must transcend all sense of separation from God

• A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct.  A Course in Miracles

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Our sense of separation from God arises due to our judgement and negativity

• 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

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Our sense of separation from God arises through the thought we are

• The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God. Thomas Keating
• Dying is all about letting go and letting be, as is the awareness of God. People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes. Union is seen to be the fundamental reality and separateness a highly filtered mental perception.  Martin Laird

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We must let all idea of sense of separateness go and see all as God

• “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This sentence alone would save mankind, if all books and prophets were lost. This purity of heart will bring the vision of God. It is the theme of the whole music of this universe. In purity is no bondage. Remove the veils of ignorance by purity; then we manifest ourselves as we really are and know that we were never in bondage. 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
• 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

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To transcend our sense of separation from God, we must transcend the ego

• Even God is taken as an other (He/She), and thus does not in that form exist unless we believe we are the separate ego. When the identification with the ego is no more, God and Self are known to be one and not different, and one is not other than the Love of God. “The Father and I are one”, is a statement of that realization.  Jonathon Kalman
• Only the word “I” divides me from God.  Yunus Emre
• The problem is that we have allowed our egos, the part of us which believes that we are separate from God and separate from each other, to dominate our lives. Wayne Dyer
• There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving, and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature. Wayne Dyer

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When we transcend the illusion of “I”, only God remains

• When you know yourself, your ‘I’ness vanishes and you know that you and Allah are one and the same.  Ibn Arabi
• The ‘I’ casts off the illusion of the ‘I’ and yet remains ‘I’. Such is the paradox of Self-realization. The Realized do not see any paradox in it. Consider the case of the worshipper. He approaches God and prays to be absorbed in Him. He then surrenders himself in faith and by concentration. And what remains afterwards? In the place of the original ‘I’, self-surrender leaves a residuum of God in which the ‘I’ is lost. That is the highest form of devotion or surrender and the peak of detachment. Ramana Maharshi
• 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

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Through self-realisation, we recognise our oneness with God

• 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
• Be happy! God sees in you another God. God sees you as another God. God sees you and He as One. Sri Chinmoy
• To become conscious of God, to become God’s consciousness, to become God, to be God and to be beyond God, God being beyond God, God having an existence separate from the creation, to be that, to merge with that, to lose one’s self and find one’s self endlessly again and again in that is self-realization. Frederick Lenz

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If we believe we are separate from God, it implies that God makes us suffer…

• I am mortal, born to love and to suffer.  Friedrich Holderlin
• To believe I am separate from God (not God being me) is potentially fall into the belief that God created a fallible creature to suffer, spy on and judge. Anthony Lambert
• To believe we are separate beings from God is to believe that God created us as separate and limited beings whose role it is to suffer.  Anthony Lambert

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…and that we are “playthings” of God…

• We are the playthings of the gods. Roger Ebert
• Our lives are just spectacles. We are like dolls, in a sense, to be observed and played with – often with cruel and deceitful intentions – in an unreal world. Kathryn Lasky
• With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.  Erich Maria Remarque

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…which can cause anger for God to arise and even revolt…

• I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe in that He ought to be whipped from pilar to post and back again for His shameful actions toward Humanity. Benjamin Franklin
• 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

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…especially when we believe God, unlike us, is beyond all suffering

• Some people say: “There is no God; because, if there was a God, God would stop all the suffering.” Nonsense! God is oblivious to suffering. God is beyond suffering. That’s what makes God, God, by definition.  Frederick Lenz

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We believe God is apart from us, playing favourites

• 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

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To sense our oneness with God is to realise that God is experiencing life as each of us…

• Consciousness I am perceiving and experiencing through a human form. Anthony Lambert
• Every one of our experiences is God’s experience. Alan H. Dawe
• God is a verb, living within you and me, fleshing our flesh, rejoicing our joy, crying our sorrow and empowering us to swim upstream. Kris Minister
• I am a vehicle through which God experiences this world of form. Anthony Lambert
• I am an experience God is having. Anthony Lambert
• I am the supreme being, conscious through ‘Tim’ Tim Freke
• Life is an endless experience of God’s. Frederick Lenz
• The main purpose that God-Consciousness has for His universe is experience. Alan H. Dawe
• You are the universe experiencing itself. Ziad Masri
• You are not on a journey to God; you are on a journey with God.  Steve Maraboli
• We are embodied aspects of Brahman experiencing Itself. Sri Aurobindo

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…and that God suffers as us

• Don’t be afraid. Human birth is full of suffering and one has to endure everything patiently, taking the Name of God. None, not even God in human form can escape the sufferings of the body and mind.  Sarada Devi
• God lives, feels and suffers in every one of us, and in course of time, His attributes, knowledge, beauty and love will be revealed in each of us. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
• God suffers when we suffer. when “I was hit, God was hit; when I was bruised, God was bruised; when I could not bear the pain anymore, neither could God.” Sarah Rebecca Freeman
• Conventional spiritual narratives denote an external God who unleashes suffering on us and is indifferent to our suffering. In this narrative, it is God who suffers through us. God experiences our suffering and our joy. Anthony Lambert
• I floated the idea that God could be suffering with him, not making him suffer. Carolyn Jane Bohler
• Eternal consciousness is not above the world’s suffering, but shares and participates in it. Timothy Sprigge
• To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience. A. Carson
• Would a benevolent, all powerful Being create and subject fallible beings to the suffering brought about by disease, disasters, evil and “sin.” No, God is experiencing through us as us and suffering through us. Anthony Lambert
• People have a need to feel their pain. Very often pain is the beginning of a great deal of awareness. As an energy centre, it awakens consciousness.  Arnold Mindell
• This not a God that sits separate from the Earth, in judgement of it, sending natural disasters to test our faith. This is a God who is immersed in the experience of Life. You cannot find a God more involved with his creation than that.  When we suffer,, it is God who is suffering through them.  Anthony Lambert

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To know we are one with God is to transcend the fear of death…

• How can you fear personal death if you are really part of God?—V. S. Ramachandran

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…and to transcend the fear of hell for God would not send Himself to hell

• If your soul is immortal and you end up in Hell, condemned to eternal suffering, unceasing torture, and everlasting separation from God — forget it. It is not going to happen. A God who created everything that exists and who is omnipresent cannot suddenly be separated from you, and He is not going to seek to experience eternal suffering and torture. He is also omniscient, so He is not stupid. Give the God you love some credit, and realise your Ego is the Adversary, the Deceiver, the Enemy, the Tempter, and the Satan you fear.   Alan H. Dawe

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Birth is apparent separation from God while death is a return to the All

• All birth means separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All. Hermann Hesse

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Some argue to see God as king, parent or friend is to imply dualism

• A dualism of king and subjects is intrinsically hierarchical and encourages hierarchical, dualistic thinking of the sort that has fueled many kinds of oppression, including (in addition to that of the nonhuman by the human) those arising from the cleavages of male/female, white/colored, rich/poor, Christian/non-Christian, and mind/body. the monarchical model encourages a way of thinking that is pervasive and pernicious, in a time when exactly the opposite is needed as A basic pattern. Sallie McFague
• 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 to worship God is to imply dualism

• 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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Some argue to pray is to imply dualism

• Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. as soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Some argue to seek God is to imply dualism

• When one first seeks the truth, one separates oneself from it.  Dogen

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Some argue to believe in God and the soul is to imply dualism

• God, in relation to the soul, presumes a duality—the Object to be perceived, God; and the perceiver or experiencer, the soul. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Some argue to see God as a concept or object is to imply dualism

• What is God? Can the answer to that question be anything other than a concept? The mind can only think about God, entertain a conceptual definition of God, or hold a belief about God. Is God a concept? When God is reduced to a concept, there is automatically separation between you and God. “You” are a mental concept who is looking for a union or a better relationship with another concept called “God.” Do you see how the mind can only think of “you” and “God” as separate mental concepts? Can you see how this is a recipe for a sense of separation from God? Simply notice the concept “God” as it arises. As the concept is seen, notice the spacious awareness that is looking at the concept. Do you see that the mind has reduced God to an image? The timeless awareness that sees that image is your true nature. There is no separation except in the mind. Do not go to the mind to find God. The word God has always been pointing to presence—the essence of who you are prior to the timebound, thought-based self you take yourself to be. That essence is already at one with God. They are not two. Another way of saying this is that the concept “God” is not independent of the presence from which the concept appears. That is the end of the illusory separation between “you and God.” Scott Kiloby

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Some argue even to see us as separate parts of God is to imply dualism

• 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

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Others argue these practices are fine and worthwhile for there is room for both union and communion 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
• Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict. Rabindranath Tagore
• 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

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Being one with God and being in love with God are both equally valid

• Being one with God and being in love with God are paralogically different ways of experiencing the same awakened state. Tim Freke
• Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate, individuality. 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