This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite...
Chance | Divinity | Earth | Experience | Life | Life | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Search | Suffering |
I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.
Divinity | Experience | Understand |
I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses.
Divinity | Experience | God | World | God | Learn | Understand |
I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I think of thee!-my thoughts do twine and bud about thee, as wild vines, about a tree... Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood I will not have my thoughts instead of thee who art dearer, better!
Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
Attention | Divinity | Longing | Meditation | Mysticism | Nature | Religion | Self | Spirituality | Time | Friends |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sleep on, Baby, on the floor, tired of all the playing, sleep with smile the sweeter for that you dropped away in! On your curls' full roundness stand golden lights serenely-- one cheek, pushed out by the hand, folds the dimple inly.
You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions.
Divinity | Effort | Experience |
There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Destiny | Divinity | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Reason | Religion | Scripture | Will | God |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There is no God, the foolish saith, But none, There is no sorrow. And nature oft the cry of faith In bitter need will borrow: Eyes which the preacher could not school, By wayside graves are raised; And lips say, God be pitiful, Who ne'er said, God be praised.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,-- and the drops will slacken so; weep, weep--and the watch thou keepest, with a quicker count will go. Think,--the shadow on the dial for the nature most undone, marks the passing of the trial, proves the presence of the sun.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Unlike we are, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies... Thou, bethink thee, art a guest for queens to social pageantries, with gages from a hundred brighter eyes than tears even can make mine... what hast though to do with looking from the lattice-lights at me, a poor, tired, wandering singer.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
Heaven | Hell | Human race | Race | Will |