This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If one is aware, one sees how through fear one’s concept of God arose; or perhaps there was a person who had an original experience of reality or of God and communicated it to another who in his greediness made it his own, and gave impetus to the process of imitation. Awareness is the process of completeness, and introspection is incomplete. The result of introspection is morbid, painful, whereas awareness is enthusiasm and joy.
Awareness | Enthusiasm | Experience | Fear | God | Reality | God | Awareness |
Our problem is not, how to make the mind tranquil, still, peaceful, but, to understand, to be free from those problems which agitate the mind. The mind obviously creates the problems. If there is a problem, how do we approach it, with what attitude? How do we experience it? It is that which it is important to understand, and not, how to escape from the problem into tranquillity.
Experience | Important | Mind | Problems |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
I is a great prison. It is your slavery and bondage to the mind. The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are -- but you don't have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.
Experience | Slavery | Think |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as [we] are free to ask what [we] must, free to say what [we] think, free to think what [we] will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
Dogma | Doubt | Error | Freedom | Life | Life | Science | Think |
For the total development of the human being, solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity. One has to know what it means to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learnt. One can indicate, but learning by what is indicated is not the experiencing of solitude or meditation. To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it.
Authority | Experience | Imitation | Inquiry | Learning | Means | Mind | Solitude |
The phenomenon of the observer and the observed is not a dual process, but a single one; and only in experiencing the fact of this unitary process is there freedom from desire, from conflict. The question of how to experience this fact should never arise. It must happen; and it happens only when there is alertness and passive awareness. You cannot know the actual experience of meeting a poisonous snake by imagining or speculating about it while sitting comfortably in your room. To meet the snake you must venture out beyond the paved streets and artificial lights.
Experience | Freedom | Question |
Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.
Ancestry | Experience | Individual |
Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit, it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.
Creativity | Experience | Longing | Mystical | Nature | Poetry | Silence | Spirit | Wants | World |
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powers—exacerbates many of these problems. The governments of the US were not designed to be efficient or powerful, but to be tolerable and malleable. Those who designed these arrangements always assumed that the federal government would exercise few and limited powers
Experience | Government | Government |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Deeds | Experience | Thought | Deeds | Thought |
Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?
Abuse | Better | Error | Humanity | Policy | Practice | Reason | Wisdom | World | Yielding |
James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
Young people ought to seek that experience that is going to knock them off center.
Experience | People |
Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.
Experience | Wrong |
Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth.
Experience | Influence | Man | Order | Search |
What we gain by experience is not worth that we lose in illusion.
Experience | Worth |
Despite our differences, we're all alike. Beyond identities and desire, there is a common core of self - an essential humanity whose nature is peace and whose expression is thought and whose action is unconditional love. When we identify with that inner core, respecting and honoring it in others as well as ourselves, we experience healing in every area of life.
Action | Experience | Humanity | Nature | Peace | Self | Thought | Thought |