I thought today I would do something a little bit different. After reading a few books on Mysticism and comparative religion, I thought I’d compile a small list of quotations from prominent mystics through history and across the world. I’ll stay away from familiar texts like the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, and focus more on individuals who have achieved union, self-realisation, or whatever label one wants to give the experience of becoming one with Ultimate Reality.

Christianity

“Eternally, all creatures are God in God. So far as they are in God, they are the same life, same essence, same power, same One, and nothing less.” – Henry Suso

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” – Meister Eckhart

“My Me is God, nor do I recognise any other Me except my God Himself.” – St. Catherine of Genoa

“Who is God? I can think of no better answer than, He is who is. Nothing is more appropriate to the eternity which God is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, or anything else of this sort, it is included in these words, namely, He is.” – St. Bernard

“To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same.” -Meister Eckhart

Islam

“I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I. We are two spirits in one body. If thou sees me, thou sees Him. And if thou sees Him, thou sees us both.” – Mansur al-Hallaj

“I was wedded to all the stars of the sky. There was not a single star left, and I married every single one of them with great spiritual pleasure. Then I married the moon.” – Ibn Arabi

“The Beloved is all in all; the lover merely veils Him; The Beloved is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.” – Jalal-uddin Rumi

“I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!'” – Bayazid of Bistun

“You thought yourself part, small; whereas in you is a universe, the greatest.” – Ali ibn Abi Talib

Judaism

“They are then actually united with the Divine Essence and, in all aspects, your soul is included with them.” – Ba’al Shem Tov

“God is unified oneness-one without two; inestimable. Genuine divine existence engenders the existence of all creation. The sublime, inner essences secretly constitute a chain linking everything from the highest to the lowest edge of the universe.” – Moses de Leon

“All souls form but one unity with the Divine Soul. For God is the beginning and He is the end of all degrees of creation. And all the degrees are bound with His seal. He is the unique Being, in spite of the innumerable forms in which He is clothed.” – Rabbi Simeon

“They are on the way to truth who apprehend God by means of the divine, Light by the light.” – Philo

Buddhism

“When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.” – Sengcan

“Every grain of matter, every appearance is one with Eternal and Immutable Reality! Wherever your foot may fall, you are still within the Sanctuary for Enlightenment, though it is nothing perceptible.” – Huangbo

“When not enlightened, Buddhas are no other than ordinary beings; when there is enlightenment, ordinary beings at once turn into Buddhas.” – Huineng

“The Mind is no other than the Buddha, and Buddha is no other than sentient being. When Mind assumes the form of a sentient being, it has suffered no decrease; when it has become a Buddha, it has added nothing to itself.” – Huangbo

Hinduism

“For the Self [soul] is not the ego; it is one with the All and the One and in finding it, it is the All and the One that we discover in our Self” – Sri Aurobindo

“Liberation cannot be achieved except by the perception of the identity of the individual spirt with the universal Spirit” – Shankara

“Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.” – Kabir (note: also a prominent figure in Islam and Sikhism)

“The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.” – Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Truth is one; It is called by different names. From a lake… the Hindus take water in jars and call is jal… Muslims take water in leather bags and call it pani… the Christians take the same thing and call is water. Suppose someone says that the thing is not jal but pani, or that it is not pani but water, or that it is not water but jal. It would indeed be ridiculous.” – Ramakrishna

Hopefully by posting these quotes – many of which being quite vivid, poetic and beautiful, and others perhaps a little bit cryptic unless well-versed in the subject matter – I’ve given some impression of the similarities among mystical traditions regardless of the diverse religious traditions from which they come from. Despite hundreds of years, vast differences, and oftentimes completely alien cultures between many of these figures, they all seem to have similar ideas on the nature of humanity, reality and of God. To me, this suggests that there’s something important, and truthful to what they are all saying.