This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most important and the concluding stage in the life of a man is death. It does not mean passing away and extinction of life, but returning home to the divine world and being taken up again into the social and divine unity of mythical primeval time. Death is a passage into a new existence, the transition to a new and true life. It is thus an event of the same kind as birth, initiation, and marriage, and it is not only the most important of all of these stages of life, but receives the fullest and the most detailed ceremonial expression: all the other stages reach their culmination and final conclusion in this.
Birth | Death | Existence | Important | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Time | Unity | World |
Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death.
Our freedom depends on our willingness to see Perfection. The imperfection that we have been taught to see has led only to suffering... Perfection is not a standard to be achieved, but a truth to be acknowledged. It is not the difference between us and God, but the hallmark of our unity with Him. And the honoring of Perfection is not a sin of vanity, but the humble acceptance of our identity as offspring of the Eternal.
Acceptance | Eternal | Freedom | God | Imperfection | Perfection | Sin | Suffering | Truth | Unity |
Enthusiasm imparts itself magnetically and fuses all into one happy and harmonious unity of feeling and sentiment.
Enthusiasm | Happy | Sentiment | Unity |
Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities, seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimately metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other.
Contrast | God | Novelty | Unity | Vision | World | Novelty | God |
There is a unity of the body with the environment, as well as a unity of the body and soul into one person.
Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. If love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.
Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |
Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. IF love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.
Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |
The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind… it is the will which… gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.
Minds have forms because, although they are changing streams of consciousness, they exhibit the paradox of unity in diversity which is the characteristic of all wholes. Forms are aspects of consciousness and precede tangible and so-called substantial expression. The universe as a totality, comprising forms and their integration into wholes in infinite diversity, is an expression of Life universal in graded series on various levels. Every particular form-expression “creates” its own time-space. Substance and tangibility have no reality apart from sensory apprehension.
Consciousness | Diversity | Integration | Life | Life | Paradox | Reality | Space | Time | Unity | Universe |
Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Why? Because every human being has a root in the Unity, and to reject the minutest particle of the Unity is to reject it all.