Consciousness is what is, before what appears. The architecture beneath the architecture — the oldest questions, still open.
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Lao Tzu · Tao Te Ching
You are not your mind. Eckhart Tolle · The Power of Now
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Helen Schucman · A Course in Miracles
Across the hermetic tradition, modern non-dual teaching, and the consciousness work of the late twentieth century, the same observation keeps surfacing: mind is not in the universe; the universe is in mind. Reality is mental in its substance; the world arises in awareness, not the other way around.
The Kybalion, published anonymously in 1908, distils the seven hermetic principles into a small book. The first principle — the foundation the other six rest on — is the Principle of Mentalism. The All is Mind. The universe is mental in its substance, mental in its laws, mental in its phenomena.
The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental. The Kybalion · Three Initiates
The Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, predates the Kybalion by roughly two thousand years and says the same thing in fewer words. The macrocosm and the microcosm are not two things; they are one thing seen at two scales. What is true above is true below; what is true within is true without.
As above, so below; as within, so without. Hermes Trismegistus · The Emerald Tablet
Tolle's The Power of Now reaches the same conclusion through the back door of presence. The mind that creates suffering is the same mind that creates the world it suffers in. Step out of the stream of compulsive thought, even for a moment, and the substrate underneath — pure awareness — reveals itself as the ground from which everything else arises.
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Eckhart Tolle · The Power of Now
The observation is older than any of these books. The Upanishads. Plotinus's One. Advaita Vedanta. The Mahayana doctrine of mind-only. The same finding, surfaced repeatedly across millennia by people who did not know each other.
Love holds no grievances. Helen Schucman · A Course in Miracles