This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure. Thus one realizes the truth of non-duality." - Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL
"Since there is really no duality, separation is unreal. Until duality is transcended and at-one-ment realized, enlightenment cannot be attained... All phenomena are your own ideas, self-conceived in the mind, like reflections in a mirror. To know whether or not this is true, look inside your own mind." - Padmasamabhava, "The Lotus-Born", aka Guru Rinpoche "Precious Guru" or Lopon Rinpoche or Padum in Tibet NULL
"Cause and effect: such a duality probably never occurs - in reality there lies before us a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest... Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. for love is most free and at the same time most bound." -
"How does one find Reality? Truth is radical subjectivity. With the collapse of the illusions of duality, including the supposed `reality’ of a separate `self’, there remains only the state of the Infinite `I’, which is the manifestation of the Unmanifest as the Self. There is neither subject nor object. Like infinite space, there is no distance, time, duration, or locality. All prevails simultaneously. All is self-evident, self-aware, self-revealing, and total." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"Love is beyond duality; it does not need a subject or an object. It is a quality of Reality which is independent of circumstances." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"Nothing in nature needs to do anything; all merely appears to be becoming that which it is. There is no doer of actions; the actions are the doer. One sees potentiality actualizing. In duality, there is a `this’ (me) that is imagined to be the `cause’ of `that’ (action). In Reality, the action and self are one and the same. There is no thinker separate from the thoughts. It is the thoughts themselves that are the only thinker of the moment; they are not different or separate." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"What I wish to emphasize is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: there is no single answer. For his different purposes man needs different structures, both small ones and large ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive… For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite direction.)" - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"Whatever you see as duality is unreal." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"Mind cannot be reduced to body, nor can mind be expressed without some form we call body. We are faced with a primal duality at the root of manifestation." - Arthur W Osborn
"Nothing exists in isolation. The very concept of isolation is a philosophical abstraction. It does not exist in nature any more than does a wave without water. The universe exhibits a duality of concreteness and fluidity. Neither is ultimately real; each is the condition of the manifestation of all that exists. Every particular is embraced within a whole, and every whole extends beyond itself to other wholes, circles within circles and so on ad infinitum." - Arthur W Osborn
"There never is any duality. The principle of awareness, Atman, never engages in any activity, although from this pure principle alone, the luminous, transparent, insubstantial universe spontaneously unfolds. When the practitioner is consciously identified, not with any expression of awareness but with the living principle of awareness... there remains no sense of intrinsic involvement with polarities such as good and evil, virtue and vice, self and other, existence and nonexistence. However, when one identifies with activity rather than with principle, manifesting an ego that claims to generate various chains of events, then the tensions between polar opposites split that person’s consciousness, creating various forms of obvious and subtle suffering." -
"We must face the recognition that what the early Christians saw in Jesus Christ, and what we must accept if we look at him rather than at our imaginations about him, was not a person characterized by universal benignity, loving God and loving man. His love of God and his love of neighbor are two distinct virtues that have no common quality but only a common source. Love of God is adoration of the only true good; it is gratitude to the bestower of all gifts; it is joy in holiness; it is "consent to Being." But the love of man is pitiful rather than adoring; it is giving and forgiving rather than grateful. It suffers for them in their viciousness and profaneness; it does not consent to accept them as they are, but calls them to repentance. The love of God is nonpossessive Eros; the love of man pure Agape; the love of God is passion; the love of man, compassion. There is duality here, but not of like-minded interest in two great values, God and man. It is rather the duality of the Son of Man and Son of God, who loves God as man should love Him, and loves man as only God can love, with powerful pity for those who are foundering." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"Confused by thoughts, we experience duality in life. Unencumbered by ideas, the enlightened see the one Reality." - Dajian Hui-neng or Huineng
"I have put duality away and seen the two worlds as one. " - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Most of us don't realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality — that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"There is nothing but God. He is the only Reality, and we all are one in the indivisible Oneness of this absolute Reality. When the One who has realized God says, “I am God. You are God, and we are all one,” and also awakens this feeling of Oneness in his illusion-bound selves, then the question of the lowly and the great, the poor and the rich, the humble and the modest, the good and the bad, simply vanishes. It is his false awareness of duality that misleads man into making illusory distinctions and filing them into separate categories." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"The individual mind is the seat of the ego or the consciousness of being isolated. It creates the limited individuality, which at once feeds and is fed by the illusion of duality time and change. So, in order to know the self as it is, consciousness has to be completely freed from the limitation of the individual mind. In other words, the individual mind has to disappear but consciousness has to be retained." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"In God-realization, the soul drops its separate consciousness and transcends duality in the abiding knowledge of its identity with the Infinite Reality." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"The seeker who does not find is still entrapped by his illusion of two worlds: one of perfection that lies beyond, of peace without struggle, of unending joy; the other the everyday meaningless world of pain and evil which is scarcely worth relating himself to. Secretly he longs for the former even as he openly despises the latter. Yet he hesitates to plunge into the teeming Void, into the abyss of his own Primal-nature, because in his deepest unconscious he fears abandoning his familiar world of duality for the unknown world of Oneness, the reality of which he still doubts. The finders, on the other hand, are restrained by neither fears nor doubts. Casting both aside, they leap because they can't do otherwise--they simply must and no longer know why--and so they triumph." - Philip Kapleau
"There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. ... Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic, and we observe that out vital attention fastens more and more on internal things.. ..Modern man –although a unity of body, mind and soul – exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract. It is the same with art. Art will become the product of another duality in man: the product of cultivated externality and of inwardness deepened and more conscious. As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
"My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"I went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can't survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.)" - Stephan Jay Gould
"Can quantum mechanics represent the fact that an electron finds itself approximately in a given place and that it moves approximately with a given velocity, and can we make these approximations so close that they do not cause experimental difficulties?" - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"People often try to control countries or companies with rules, regulations and policing. This feels like it should work since we can control our car or build structures with principles, checking etc." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures." - Vimala Thakar