This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rinzai, aka Lin- Chi Yi-Sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai Gigen, Venerable Master Lin Chi NULL
There are disciples who, being in chains, visit a teacher who then gives them yet another chain. The disciples, unable to differentiate, are delighted. That is called: A guest looks at another one.
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
Originality | System | Teach | Wants | Instruction | Teacher |
Rinzai, aka Lin- Chi Yi-Sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai Gigen, Venerable Master Lin Chi NULL
There are disciples who, being in chains, visit a teacher who then gives them yet another chain. The disciples, unable to differentiate, are delighted. That is called: A guest looks at another one.
Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
You will best realize the significance of color if we describe how it affects the occultist. For this it is necessary that a person should free himself completely from everything else and devote himself to the particular color, immerse himself in it. If the person devoting himself to the color which covers these physically dense walls were one who had made certain occult progress, it would come about that after a period of this complete devotion the walls would disappear from his clairvoyant vision; the consciousness that the walls shut off the outer world would vanish. Now, what appears first is not merely that he sees the neighboring houses outside, that the walls become like glass, but in the sphere which opens up there is a world of purely spiritual phenomena; spiritual facts and spiritual figures become visible. We need only reflect that behind everything around us physically there are spiritual beings and facts...The worlds which surround us spiritually are of many kinds, many different kinds of elementary beings are around us. These are not enclosed in boxes or in such a state that they live in various houses... But they cannot all be seen in the same way; according to the capacity of clairvoyant vision, there may be visible and invisible beings in the same space. What spiritual beings become visible in any particular instance depends on the color to which we devote ourselves. In a red room, other beings become visible than in a blue room, when one penetrates to them by means of color. We may now ask: what happens if one is not clairvoyant? That which the clairvoyant does consciously is done unconsciously by the etheric body of a person not clairvoyantly trained; it enters a certain relationship with the same beings.
Leadership means influencing the organization to face its problems and to live into its opportunities.
Teacher |
Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
The pious mind distinguishes between what is written with reference to the deity and with reference to the flesh, and thus avoids sacrilege.
Abstinence | Body | Desire | Prodigality | Soul | Spirit | Teacher |
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
Works and deeds gain passionlessness for the soul . . . and give quietness from thoughts when we acquire silence . . . Otherwise success is not possible. For if a tree is watered every day, can its root wither? Does water ever get less in a vessel if more is added daily? But when a man gains silence, his soul readily discerns passions, and the inner man, roused to spiritual work, overcomes them and, from day to day, lifts the soul nearer to purity.
The influence of woman is the same everywhere. Her condition influences the morals, manners, and character of the people of all countries. Where she is debased, society is debased; where she is morally pure and enlightened, society will be proportionately elevated.
The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown.
Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
The pious mind distinguishes between what is written with reference to the deity and with reference to the flesh, and thus avoids sacrilege.
Abstinence | Body | Desire | Prodigality | Soul | Spirit | Teacher |
You will know that you have this holy gift (of humility) within you and not be led astray when you experience an abundance of unspeakable light together with an indescribable love of prayer.
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
As women, however, we need to look very closely at these philosophies and ask ourselves the hard-headed, critical question, “What's in it for me? What does this spiritual system do for women?” Of course, the gurus, teachers, and ascended masters will tell us that, even by asking such a question, we are merely continuing in our enslavement to the Lords of Mind; that it is simply another dodge of the ego as it resists dissolution in the All.
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.
Argument | Day | Education | Enough | Good | Hope | Improvement | Little | Money | Problems | Recompense | Teach | Worth | Talent | Teacher | Value |
The lessons we learn in sadness and from loss are those that abide. - Sorrow clarifies the mind, steadies it, forces it to weigh things correctly. - The soil moist with tears best feeds the seeds of truth.
It is especially important in this discussion to recognize the unity of the total process, from that first unimaginable moment of cosmic emergence through all its subsequent forms of expression until the present. This unbreakable bond of relatedness that makes of the whole a universe becomes increasingly apparent to scientific observation, although this bond ultimately escapes scientific formulation or understanding. In virtue of this relatedness, everything is intimately present to everything else in the universe. Nothing is completely itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal. However distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.
Revelation | Universe | Teacher |
The lotus flower rises to the level of water greatness of men rise with mental strength.