Harmony Quote Know one, Know all.-Katha Upanishad

To know others, you do not have to go and knock on four billion separate doors. Once you have seen your real Self, you have seen the Self in all. It makes it easy to understand and to forgive, and very difficult to quarrel. All of life springs from the same root. The self in each of us is one and the same. 

For this Self, different names are given in different traditions. Christian mystics call it the Christ within. When a person ceases to identify with his perishable self, they say he has become Christ conscious. The Hindu mystic speaks of Krishna consciousness, or say that such a person has attained complete freedom from the conditioning of time, space and circumstances. The Buddhists call the same state nirvana, from nir, ‘out’ and vana, ‘to blow’. The ego has been extinguished; there is no more shadow to be mistaken for the real. 

(From ‘Words To Live By’ by Eknath Easwaran, founder of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, copyright 2005; reprinted by permission of Nilgiri Press, P.O. Box 256, Tomales, Ca 94971, www.bmcm.org.)