"There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion.
What you call The Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures—all—those which you term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation—all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself.
These creatures are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One.
Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)
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"It is no coincidence that although all separate selves are known by others by a variety of names, all separate selves know themselves as ‘I’, a subliminal recognition of the fact that at the heart of all finite minds shines the same infinite, indivisible consciousness, of which all apparently separate selves are but partial reflections. It is for this reason that the first true statement that all apparently separate selves can make about themselves is simply ‘I am’, a statement that confesses the knowing of being that shines in all minds at all times, irrespective of circumstances, situations or states of mind. And it is for this reason that the knowledge ‘I’ is considered a portal through which the separate self passes on its return journey back to its home in pure consciousness, and the same portal through which infinite consciousness passes in the other direction as it assumes the form of the finite mind."
-Rupert Spira, "The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter"
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