Al things are one

It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one the most highly valued and desired reactions of our species, is really the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, that he has an inextricable relationship with the entire reality, both known and unknowable.

This is a simple thing to say, but it was the profound feeling of it that made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things–plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.

It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

(John Steinbeck [American writer,1902-1968; Nobel Prize in Literature 1962], Sea of Cortez, cited by Frans de Waal [well-known biologist from the Netherlands, specialized in psychology and behaviour of humans, primates and animals in general], El bonobo y los diez mandamientos, p. 119-120).

Translated from Spanish by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler