WELCOME TO THE
River of Knowledge
To know and live unity of life is an age-old quest of humanity. In all ages and cultures, people have gone beyond the surface of reality to seek insight and understanding. The River of Knowledge flows through all lands. Explore how pure consciousness – Being or the Self – has been at the core of our world’s wisdom-traditions for thousands of years. Enjoy expressions of knowledge from around the world and an overview of the timeless Vedic tradition - the word “Vedic” itself means relating to wisdom, from the Sanskrit word for complete knowledge, “Veda”. Discover mathematicians and quantum physicists who share glimpses of the unity underlying the diversity of our world.
“Knowledge is structured in consciousness, in the transcendental field, in which reside all the impulses of creative intelligence responsible for the whole manifest universe. He who does not know this field, what can the words of the Veda structure for him? He who knows this field is established in evenness, wholeness of life.” Rik Veda
“Reality is one; the wise speak of it in different ways.” Rik Veda
Self Knowledge in
the Vedic tradition
Veda means knowledge. The Vedic wisdom-tradition has inspired humanity throughout the ages and is increasingly well known in the world today as a source of practical knowledge, especially due to Ayurveda, Yoga, and Transcendental Meditation. This painting represents the wisdom of Self-development being passed down for many thousands of years from Vedic teacher to student.
The Upanishads
The Vedic Upanishads are timeless expressions of wisdom that teach that consciousness is all there is. “The Self is all-knowing, It is all-understanding, and to It belongs all glory. It is pure consciousness, dwelling in the heart of all… the wise behold this Self, blissful and immortal, shining forth through everything.” – Mundaka Upanishad
500 BCE
Adi Shankara
Adi Shankara revitalised complete wisdom of integrated life, clarifying that consciousness is the ultimate reality. He is revered throughout India even today, and his work continues to influence scholars and seekers around the world.
1800
Guru Dev
Brahmananda Saraswati spent his entire life in deep meditation, mostly in secluded Himalayan caves and in the deep forests of central India. In 1941, at the age of 70, he became “Shankaracharya” - head of the great centre of knowledge that Shankara established 2500 years ago in northern India. For about 12 years, until his passing in 1953, one of his closest students was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became Dr. Tony Nader’s teacher.
1900
Maharishi
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi realised that 'consciousness is all there is' during his 12 years as a student of Guru Dev. After Guru Dev’s passing in 1953, Maharishi spent two years in silence and meditation, then dedicated his life to reviving effortless experience of transcending as the basis of 40 areas of Vedic knowledge. His world tours were instrumental in globally popularising Transcendental Meditation – the essence of Yoga – and Ayurveda, two key areas of Vedic knowledge.
MAHARISHI
“Being is like a limitless ocean of life, silent and ever-existing in the same status. The different aspects of creation can be taken to be as ripples and waves of the vast ocean of eternal Being. All the forms and phenomena and ever-changing states of life in the world have their basis in that eternal life of omnipresent Being.”
Maharishi
“It needed a scientific age for the world to appreciate the significance of the philosophy of Yoga and its practical application in creating integrated individuals, integrated nations, and an integrated world family.“
Maharishi
“My Transcendental Meditation is a simple, natural, effortless procedure whereby the mind easily and naturally arrives at the source of thought, the settled state of mind – Transcendental Consciousness – pure consciousness, self-referral consciousness, which is the source of all creative processes. This process can be likened to a river which naturally and effortlessly flows onto the ocean and gains the status of the ocean.”
2000
Dr. Nader
Dr. Tony Nader’s desire to understand the workings of the mind led him to medical school with a focus on psychiatry and it was there he learned Transcendental Meditation. He became a student of Maharishi shortly after and having worked together for 30 years became his successor, representing the Vedic tradition in this scientific age.
Self Knowledge from
Around the World
“I am Totality.”
The Upanishads
“All this is Totality.”
The Upanishads
“As is the atom, so is the universe; as is the body, so is the cosmic body.”
Ayurveda
11th-10th century BCE
“Hence the inscrutable God is called silent by the divine ones, and is said . . . to be known to human souls through the power of the mind alone.”
Zoroaster
C. 6th-4th Century BCE
“Be a lamp unto your own feet; do not seek outside yourself . . .”
Gautama Buddha
551-479 BCE
“What the superior man seeks, is in himself; what the ordinary man seeks, is in others.”
Confucius
C. 5th Century BCE
"God created man in His image."
Bible, Genesis 1:26–28
C. 500 BCE
“Attain Self-realisation, and the whole world is found in the Self.”
TAOISM | THE WENZI
C. 500 BCE
“Know thyself.”
Temple of apollo at delphi
C. 5 BCE - 30 CE
“Behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
Jesus Christ
121 - 180 CE
Roman Emperor
“Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.”
Marcus Aurelius
205 - 270 CE
Egypt & Ancient Rome
“This region of truth is not to be investigated as a thing external to us . . . It is within us.”
Plotinus
C. 300 CE
“The power of consciousness is infinite.”
Yoga Sutras
C. 300 CE
“In the vicinity of coherence (Yoga), hostile tendencies are eliminated.”
Yoga Sutras
C. 500 CE
“The greatest wisdom is to know thyself.”
The Talmud
C. 601 CE-661 CE
“Your cure is within you, yet you do not sense it! Your sickness is from you, yet you do not see it! You consider yourself a small body; Yet encapsulated within you is the entire universe!”
Imam Ali Bin Abi Taleb
C. 609 CE - 632 CE
"And on earth are signs of God for those of assured faith. They are within you, do you not perceive?"
Quran, Surat Adh-Dhāriyāt 51, 20-21
C. 1145 - 1221 CE
Persia
“I see myself to be the All. I am in heaven and earth, in water and air; I am in beasts and plants; I am a babe in the womb, and one that is not yet conceived, and one that has been born; I am present everywhere.”
Attar of Nishapur
1207 - 1273 CE
Persia
“I am everything, coming in, going out. How can I speak of another? Like a wave my body is here and gone. Look closely – a million waves, one sea.”
Rumi
1248 - 1309
Italy
“inwardly my soul is a chamber . . . and in this . . . is the whole Truth, and in it I understand and possess the whole Truth that is in heaven and in earth . . . together with so great a certainty that in nowise, were the whole world to say the opposite, could I believe otherwise.”
Angela of Foligno
1260 - 1328
Germany
“There is all one, and one in all . . . when he sees all in all, then a man stands above mere understanding.”
Meister Eckhart
1803 - 1882
USA
“Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.”
TRANSCENDENTALISM | Ralph Waldo Emerson
1821 - 1880
France
“Your mind itself finally lost the notion of particularity which kept it on the alert. It was like an immense harmony engulfing your soul with marvelous palpitations, and you felt in its plenitude an inexpressible comprehension of the unrivaled wholeness of things; the interval between you and the object, like an abyss closing, grew narrower and narrower, until the difference vanished, because you both were bathed in infinity.”
ROMANTICISM | GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1844 - 1929 CE
England
“The object is suddenly seen, is felt, to be one with the self . . . The knower, the knowledge, and the thing known are once more one . . . This form of Consciousness is the only true knowledge – it is the only true existence. And it is a matter of experience; it has been testified to in all parts of the world and in all ages of history.”
PHILOSOPHER, POET | EDWARD CARPENTER
1858 - 1947
Germany
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Physicist | max planck
1863 - 1950
Lakota tribe
“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the soul of men when they realise their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its Powers . . . and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
NATIVE AMERICAN | BLACK ELK
1879 - 1955
Germany and USA
“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science.”
PHYSICIST | ALBERT EINSTEIN
1880 - 1968
USA
“There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible . . . Reality, of which visible things are the symbol, shines before my mind.”
WRITER | HELEN KELLER
1882 - 1944
ENGLAND
“The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”
ASTROPHYSICIST | SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
1887 - 1944
USA
“No longer was ‘I’ spreading everywhere through the whole of an illimitable and conscious Space, nor was there a Divine Presence all about me, but everywhere only Consciousness with no subjective nor objective element.”
PHILOSOPHER | FRANKLIN MERRELL-WOLFF
1887 - 1961
Austria
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
PHYSICIST | ERWIN SCHRODINGER
1897 - 1986
Poland and England
“At that moment of that day I knew the Universe, which I held and beheld inside myself . . . I had undergone the birth of my creative spirit and the birth of that part of the mind which reaches out beyond the material and visible world.”
MEDICAL DOCTOR | CHARLOTTE WOLFF
1899 - 1986
Argentina
“Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Jorge luis Borges
1908 - 2003
Scotland & England
“The circumference of consciousness was the circumference of the perceptible world; the world perceived was that consciousness, the consciousness the world: there was no distinction knowledge and its object.”
WRITER & SCHOLAR | KATHLEEN RAINE
1909 - 1958
Wales
“In classical physics, science started from the belief – or, should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.”
PHYSICIST | WERNER HEISENBERG
1909 - 1958
WALES
“Sometimes I seem to know each separate thing while lost in the one, and then it is that I feel profoundly the almost palpable linking up of the universe. From life to life, from kind to kind, through the mind to the sky and out to each planet, the chain reaches. Ah, who can doubt it? . . . But I have failed to describe it, because . . . it is wordless and unimaginable and pictureless.”
WRITER | MARGIAD EVANS
1910 - 1996
ENGLAND
“This surely is one of the best rewards of humanity. To be filled with comprehension of the beauty and marvellous complexity of the physical world, and for this happy excitement of the senses to lead directly into an awareness of spiritual significance. The fact that such experience comes most surely with love, with possession by the creative eros, suggests that it belongs near the root of our mystery. Certainly it grants man a state of mind in which I believe he must come more and more to live: a mood of intensely conscious individuality which serves only to strengthen an intense consciousness of unity with all being. His mind is one infinitesimal node in the mind present throughout all being, just as his body shares in the unity of matter.”
WRITER | JACQUETTA HAWKES
1911 - 2002
USA
“As I gazed about the room on that first morning, one of the things which particularly fascinated me was that there was no essential difference between that which was animate and that which was inanimate – only in form and function, not in basic substance, where there was only one Substance, that living, knowing, Light which breathed out from everything.”
Author | Irina Starr
1923 -
USA
“. . . the architecture of the universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in its functioning.”
PHYSICIST | FREEMAN DYSON
1940 -
USA
“The very cosmos itself depends for its being on the uttermost mystery of consciousness.”
PHYSICIST | GEORGE GREENSTEIN
