everyone is the other, and no one is himself

   

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Just as the great texts say, you will begin to make a distinction between existence and inherent existence through your own experience. The great texts challenge us to avoid both the extreme of exaggerating the nature of persons and things and the opposite extreme—that people and things do not exist at all. They definitely do exist; how they exist is the issue.

When you advance toward understanding that people and things cannot be found under analysis but take to mind that they do indeed exist, you may begin to feel the impact of the statement that they exist through the power of thought.

This, in turn, will challenge you to consider further how people and things appear to your mind and will undermine your confidence in the goodness or badness of these appearances, which you previously automatically accepted as intrinsic to the objects. You will begin noticing how you assent to the appearance of objects and how you latch on to them.

In this way, meditation is a long journey, not a single insight or even several insights. It gets more and more profound as the days, months, and years pass. Keep reading, and thinking and meditating.

—the Dalai Lama
How to See Yourself
As You Really Are

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The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world.


—Aziz Nasafi

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Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. 

The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein (existence), is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.


—Martin Heidegger
Being and Time
Joan Stambaugh version

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I am large. I contain multitudes. —Walt Whitman

  

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The secret teachings lead the pupil further. They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity displayed by the body. He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing of all that is from him, is him. He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity, his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

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Celebration … is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder – the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this.


—Martin Heidegger

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I need to be silent for a while. 

Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Expands His Being

Daniel Ladinsky version

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the world is a totality

  

Päivi Oksanen

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The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. 

We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. 

Whatever is there, favorable or unfavorable, is workable: it is the universe.


—Chögyam Trungpa
Journey Without Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha

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When the mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it stays in the Heart, the names and forms disappear. Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart is what is called ‘inwardness’ (antarmukha). Letting the mind go out of the Heart is known as ‘externalisation’ (bahirmukha).

Thus, when the mind stays in the Heart, the ‘I’ which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self which ever exists will shine. 

Whatever one does, one should do without the egoity ‘I’. 

If one acts in that way, all will appear as of the nature of Siva. 

Who am I?’ is not a mantra. It means that you must find out where in you arises the I-thought which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find this vichara marga (self enquiry) too hard for you, you can go on repeating “I, I” and that will lead you to the same goal. 

There is no harm in using ‘I’ as a mantra. 

It is the first name of God.


—Ramana Maharshi 

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A person is neither a thing nor a process, 

but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. 

—Martin Heidegger

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