This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Properly understood, prayer is a mature activity indispensable to the fullest development of personality - the ultimate integration of man’s highest faculties. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.
Body | Indispensable | Integration | Man | Mind | Personality | Prayer | Spirit | Strength |
The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense.
Action | Defense | Devotion | Evil | People | Progress | Purity | Religion |
The development of the Observer can allow a person considerable access to observing different identity states, and an outside observer may often clearly infer different identity states, but a person himself who has not developed the Observer function very well may never notice the many transitions from one identity state to another.
Man started out as a "weak thing of the world" and evolved "to confound the things that are mighty." And within the human species, too, the weak often develop aptitudes and devises which enable them not only to survive but to prevail over the strong. Indeed, the formidableness of the human species stems from the survival of its weak. Were it not for the compassion that moves us to care for the sick, the crippled, and the old there would probably would have been neither culture or civilization. The crippled warrior who had to stay behind while the manhood of the tribe went out to war was the storyteller, teacher, and artisan. The old and the sick had a hand in the development of the arts of healing and of cooking. One thinks of the venerable sage, the unhinged medicine man, the epileptic prophet, the blind bard, and the witty hunchback and dwarf.
Care | Civilization | Compassion | Culture | Man | Survival | War | World | Old |
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Cause | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mission | Purpose | Purpose | Search | Story |
It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.
In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is, therefore, capable of being more valuable to others.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Each major stage of development offers a window of opportunity distinctly different from anything that has come before. The increase of intelligence at each stage of development is disproportionately greater than the increase exhibited in the previous stage, similar to the order of increase found in the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes.
Intelligence | Opportunity | Order |
In the social production of their existence, human beings necessarily enter into determinate relations, independent of their will, relations of production, corresponding to a given stage of development of their material productive powers. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and tow which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive powers of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same things in terms of right - with the property relations in the framework of which they have thus far operated. From forms of development of the productive powers these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Consciousness | Era | Existence | Life | Life | Property | Revolution | Right | Society | Will | Society |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
When brain and heart frequencies entrain, they enter a synchronous, resonant, or coherent wave pattern. Though rare in adults, such entrainment is critical to full development of our human nature… The same entrainment of heart frequencies occurs between mother and infant during breast-feeding and other close body contact.
Body | Heart | Human nature | Mother | Nature |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual through liberty and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.
Attainment | Democracy | Good | Ideals | Individual | Justice | Liberty |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain.
Action | Anger | Attention | Children | Energy | Fear | Learning | Memory | Service | Survival | Thought | Learn |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
I have not much faith in "good government." What we need is the development of the individual.
Faith | Good | Government | Individual | Need |
At moments of crisis, where the roads to disintegration or to development separate, as on a watershed, a single decisive personality, or a small group of informed and purposeful men, may be a slight push determine the direction and movement of an otherwise uncontrollable mass of conflicting social forces… Only within the compass of the person can a total change be affected within the span of a single generation, sufficient to produce the necessary effect on civilization at large: like the seed crystal, he passes on to the whole new order of the part.
Change | Civilization | Men | Order | Personality |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is “faithful in that which is least” is dependable in all the world.
Amusements | Conscience | Discipline | Good | Manners | Nothing | Trifles | Work | World |
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
Prophecy consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty… an emanation from the Divine Being.
Prophecy |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Everything morally right derives from one of four sources: it concerns either full perception or intelligent development of what is true; or the preservation of organized society, where every man is rendered his due and all his obligations are faithfully discharged; or the greatness and strength of a noble, invincible spirit; or order and moderation in everything said and done, whereby there is temperance and self-control.
Control | Greatness | Man | Moderation | Order | Perception | Right | Self | Self-control | Society | Spirit | Strength | Moderation |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The realization that many of our actions are not of our choosing is the first step toward the development of a more authentic, more genuinely individual agenda.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition to the development of our consciousness.
Competition | Consciousness | Knowledge | Myth | Self | Theories |
Religious revelation, philosophical thought, scientific investigation all converge on the problem of time and all come to the same view of it - time does not exist. there is no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena. Everything exists always. There is only one eternal present. The world is world of infinite possibilities. Our mind follows the development of possibilities always in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibilities, and all of them are actualised.
Appearance | Eternal | Mind | Phenomena | Present | Revelation | Thought | Time | World |