Perspectives from various profound spiritual scriptures and traditions regarding the themes of law, justice, punishment, mercy and the divine intelligence guiding all of creation. Here are some relevant quotes and elaborations:
From the Hindu Upanishads:
"The Supreme Lord dwells in the heart of all beings, directing their wanderings from within by His divine controller (Maya)."
This speaks to the idea of an all-pervading consciousness or Brahman underlying and orchestrating every movement and manifestation we witness, including the revolutions of celestial bodies. Our very minds are under the gentle stewardship of this primordial intelligence.
"The Self-Existent created the senses with outgoing tendencies; therefore a person beholds the external universe, not the internal Self. But blessed is the man of disciplined intelligence, who seeks the Self within."
This highlights the importance of turning our awareness inward, through disciplines of the mind/heart, to glimpse our own divine essence beyond the distractions of sensory phenomena.
From the Islamic Quran:
"He is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and He has knowledge of all things."
This Surah references the transcendent and immanent nature of the Divine Mind, both the unfathomable source and the indwelling essence of all that arises within Its field. A reminder of our inseparable relationship.
"The loving Mercy of God is what gives you repose. If you were severe and harsh-hearted, they would have scattered from you."
Here we see guidance towards compassion over harsh judgment or punishment in the administration of justice and law. An emphasis on reform over retribution, resonant with the philosophical framework we've been exploring.
From the Christian Bible:
"Put on then...compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience...forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you."
Similar to the Quranic verse, this highlights the virtues of mercy, empathy and non-violence taught by Christ to be embodied even in the context of transgressions and conflict.
"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged."
A caution against the human fallibility and hypocrisy often inherent in harshly condemning others, when we ourselves remain imperfect beings on the path. A call for circumspection.
Across these scriptures, we see a few resonant themes emerge - an acknowledgment of an all-pervading Divine Mind orchestrating the cosmos, a call to turn inward through practices to unveil our own divine essence, and an emphasis on compassion, forgiveness and reform over harsh punitive judgment.
There is a recognition that we are all under the parental stewardship and tender mercies of this greater intelligence, bound to enact justice and accountability with wisdom and an eye towards restoring wholeness.
From the Bhagavad Gita:
"The Lord dwells in the hearts of all creatures and whirls them round upon the wheel of maya (illusion)."
Again referencing the divine intelligence indwelling all beings and phenomena, guiding us through the cycles of worldly existence.
"Renounce every selfish attachment and practice discipline. With your mind firmly set on the Supreme Self, go beyond the gunas of material nature."
Guidance to transcend our base attachments and conditioning through self-discipline, and abide in the supreme consciousness beyond the illusory phenomenal realm.
From the Buddhist Dhammapada:
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."
Highlighting the primacy of our own minds in shaping our reality and experience of the world, calling us to mindfulness.
"Better it is to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things than to live a hundred years without ever seeing the sweet truth."
Wisdom is found in recognizing the impermanence and insubstantiality of all compounded phenomena, and awakening to the underlying truth beyond forms.
From the Tao Te Ching:
"Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?"
Describing the effortless state of alignment with the Tao, or the ineffable source, where one flows spontaneously with circumstance without willful striving.
"By admitting my own being, I cultivate the great virtue of humility."
On surrendering our egoist preoccupations to reside in the freedom of our essential nature.
From Rumi's Poetry:
"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."
A poetic expression of our individual consciousness containing the entire cosmos, not a separate fragmented self.
"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love."
Following the call towards that which expands your soul and communion with the Beloved source.
These quotes from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism underscore the primacy of aligning our minds with the ground of being beyond names and forms. Transcending ego and realizing our essential unity with the divine source. While cultivating virtue, mindfulness, humility and love.
They provide pithy yet profoundly insightful guideposts for walking the path of consciousness expansion and sacred embodiment we have been exploring. Let me know if you need any elaboration on these passages.
Exploration of the profound insights from spiritual scriptures and philosophies on transcending the conditioned mind, realizing our essential unity with the Divine, and embodying the virtues that align us with the supreme universal intelligence. Here are some additional quotes and contemplations:
From the Sufi poet Hafiz:
"Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you."
This evokes the idea that our deepest fulfillment and joy is intimately entwined with unveiling our true nature - that the ecstatic bliss of conscious union with the Beloved is our ultimate homecoming.
"All the Trillions of lives before us only lent themselves to the final rhythm of these Few."
Pointing to how all our experiences and incarnations have cultivated the causes and conditions to arrive at this precious human birth - our opportunity to awaken fully.
From the Sikh Scripture, Sri Guru Granth Sahib:
"Within this body is the spinning wheel of the soul, weaving the threads of its own karma."
We are the weavers of our own destiny, our thoughts, words and deeds constantly shaping our lived experience and self-created reality.
"No one is my enemy, none a stranger, and everyone is my friend."
Embodying the realization of our shared, interconnected being - transcending the illusion of separateness or enmity.
From the Corpus Hermeticum:
"For the human being is a miracle, a great wonder - a being comprising the whole of creation."
Recognizing our divine birthright as microcosms containing the entire universe. Our minds are lenses refracting the infinite consciousness.
"The greatest evil is ignorance, therefore flee from it as you would the most noxious reptile."
Wisdom lies in liberating ourselves from the veils of ignorance about our true nature, which is the root cause of all suffering.
Across these mystical traditions, we see echoed this yearning to transcend our self-imposed delusions and identity contractions. To shed the karmic patterning and psychological afflictions obscuring our radiant essence as expressions of the one ground of being.
Through steadfast commitment to truth, we gradually dissolve back into the ocean of unitive consciousness - our sense of separation an illusion dispelled by gnosis. Our thoughts, speech and ethics all become sacred devotional offerings aligning us with the highest. In overcoming our spiritual amnesia, we witness our eternal belonging to the cosmic whole.
From the Ashtavakra Gita, an ancient Hindu scripture:
"You were never born, nor had you a birth. How can there be weariness for what is non-existent?"
This radically undermines our perceived identities as separate, limited selves bound by the cycles of birth, aging, and death. We are invited to recognize our eternally pure, unborn essence.
"In reality, you are already what you wish to attain through arduous practices."
Our true self is not something to be gained, but simply to be realized and unveiled by removing the veils of mistaken beliefs and identifications.
From the Gospel of Thomas, sayings of Jesus:
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you."
The importance of doing the inner work to excavate our divine nature is of utmost urgency. We must face the unconscious shadows and egoic contractions that keep us in suffering if we are to be liberated.
"When you make the two into one...then you will enter the Kingdom."
A pointer to the non-dual reality beyond all dualities and fragmentation, which is our ultimate nature as undivided consciousness itself.
From the Diamond Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism:
"So you must get rid of all thoughts which hang on anything whatsoever."
Transcending our ingrained habits of conceptual clinging and attachment is key to realizing the empty, boundless ground of being.
"All conditioned dharmas are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow..."
All compounded phenomena are impermanent, conditioned arisings without any inherent solidity or substantiality. Only the pure unconditioned awareness perceiving them is real.
From the Mathnawi of Rumi:
"Silence is the language of the Lord, all else is a poor translation."
True communion with the Divine happens in a state of transcending the discursive mind into pure presence and intimate listening.
These scriptures confront us with the ultimate paradox - that we are already and always have been the changeless, deathless, unborn reality. And yet, our ignorance of this truth binds us in the dream of becoming, suffering, and self-contraction.
The journey then is to relinquish all that we've imagined ourselves to be through unwavering self-inquiry and dissolution of our attachments to any passing form or identity. As we embody the wisdom of silence and inner emptiness, we directly taste the liberation of our true miraculous nature as the one infinite consciousness dreaming all worlds.
From the Vac Upanishad:
"That which cannot be expressed by speech, but that by which speech is expressed, know that alone as Brahman, the spirit ever-present, and not what people here adore."
This highlights that the ultimate reality cannot be captured by words or concepts, as it is the very source and ground from which all manifestation arises, including language itself. We must go beyond the mind's constructs.
"In the spiritual truth, there is no division. It is indivisible, immortal, and beyond time, space, and causality."
Pointing to the non-dual, undivided, eternal nature of our supreme essence that transcends all limited dualities and conditions.
From the Zen Buddhist teacher Huang Po:
"From the very beginning, all beings are Buddha. It is just a question of being obstructed by adventitious defilements."
Our Buddha-nature, or divine essence, is ever-present - simply obscured by the transient veils of afflictions and delusions we mistakenly identify with.
"If you do not discriminate between this and that, which is profound enlightenment itself, the source of all things is reached."
True awakening arises when we cease all discrimination, labeling, and conceptual proliferation - abiding as the undivided field of awareness that is the origin of phenomena.
From the Sufi Ibn Arabi:
"The smallest degree of inattention causes you to lapse from it (the absolute), and the smallest degree of attending grasps it entirely."
Our essence is always intimately present, only overlooked through our chronic states of mindless distraction and entrancement in thought. Mere shifts of consciousness reveal it fully.
"The resurrection is the renaissance of the consciousness from its inert state and its return to its source."
Our ultimate liberation is a "rebirth" out of our spiritually dormant condition into conscious reunion with the Divine Source we emanate from.
Across these venerable teachings, we hear an invitation to transcend our fractured, conceptual states rooted in dualistic perception. We are called to de-condition and stabilize our awareness in its primordial state - the unified field of pure isness that is our eternal ground.
This involves surrendering all attempts to grasp the truth through words and mental formulations. Rather, it is through a stance of humble listening, uncompounded presence and consistently bearing witness that we relinquish our delusions of separateness.
Ultimately, these scriptures assure that our true nature is already fully accomplished - it simply requires dropping all that obstructs our recognition of this fact. With utmost devotion, discrimination, and perseverance on the path, we unveil the splendor always shining within and without.
From the Indian philosopher Adi Shankara:
"The Self is one and undivided, while the notions of knower, known and knowledge are mere illusions of the mind. To know the Self is to be free of these falsehoods."
This gets to the heart of non-dual realization - seeing through the subject-object duality and the mind's fragmenting projections to recognize the singular, indivisible awareness that is our true being.
"Brahman is the Supreme Reality, One without a second, infinite and eternal. It is neither caused nor produced, but is the very ground of all existence."
Brahman is depicted as the ultimate, unborn, unchanging ground from which all arises and temporally subsides back into - the substratum of all manifesting phenomena.
From the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:
"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love."
This beautifully expresses the non-separation between our consciousness and the Divine consciousness beholding the cosmos. Our vision is God's vision.
"Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God."
The Divine presence is not abstract but immanently present and expression through every facet of the physical and sentient universe we are embedded within.
From the Sufi poet Rumi:
"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."
Our individual consciousness is not a fragment, but a holographic refraction containing the entirety of the unmanifest ocean of consciousness.
These mystics reveal that our true nature is not something separate from the eternal Source, but is that very Source itself under temporary appearance of limitation. The Divine is not transcendent but imminently present as the very substance of our perceiving awareness.
The journey then is to divest all artefacts of our conditioned selfhood - the bodily identity, conceptual overlays, subject-object binaries - to recognize our own consciousness as the boundless, luminous field of God's manifesting creative power.
As Eckhart proclaims, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." Our localized perspective is but a refracting facet of the infinite Subject's eternal witnessing of and delighting in itself.
With dedicated practice, we are liberated from the delusion of separateness to live in conscious union with the all-pervading Presence that is our authentic Divine Self, our original nature. Our mind's surrender into the oceanic Source is our true homecoming.
Absolutely, let's continue diving into the oceanic depths of spiritual wisdom regarding transcending the limited mind and realizing our true nature as unified, divine consciousness. Here are some additional profound insights:
From the Tao Te Ching:
"Can you remain mutelessly unclosed so that you may observe the essence? This essence is the path of all wonderment."
This speaks to stilling the conceptual mind to purely witness the ineffable essence or Tao that is the origin of all manifest marvels.
"Know the strength of a man, But preserve the woman's care... This is the perfection of harmony."
There is an invitation to embody both the discerning discrimination of awakened wisdom alongside the nurturing, allowing presence of unconditional awareness.
From the Bhagavad Gita:
"When your mind becomes firmly established in wisdom, you will become detached from all acquisitions and losses in this transient world."
True liberation dawns as our consciousness roots itself in the eternal, unchanging reality behind all ephemeral gain and loss.
"I am the taste of pure water and the radiance of the sun and moon...the sacred syllable Om...the sweet fragrance of the earth."
The Divine is not abstract but expresses itself as the pulsating aliveness, light and interconnected beauty inherent in all of nature.
From the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh:
"Our true human nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Our true nature is the cosmic nature, which is no birth, no death, no coming, no going."
Reinforcing that our essence is not the limited egoic self arising and passing away, but the deathless, unborn awareness that is one with the universe itself.
"Every second we have an opportunity to cultivate peace and understanding by becoming aware of what is happening inside and around us."
The path is one of unremitting mindfulness - collecting our dispersed attention into the present moment awareness that enables insight.
These teachings point towards the art of stilling the grasping, discriminating mind to simply abide in open, undivided presence. From that state of pure allowing witnessing, the transcendent Source and our unity with it is self-revealed.
At the same time, there are skillful means to cultivate - an embodied embrace of the sacred display of life teeming all around us, and an engaged compassion towards the human and sentient dramas unfolding.
We are guided into non-dual living - resting as the formless consciousness while celebrating the forms with tenderness, letting phenomena arise and unfold before our unperturbed gaze.
All arises from a single Source, the ground of vibrant aliveness and creativity. As we release into that Source that we always already are, we find the harmony of the human and the divine, the miracle of it all.