This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A positive thing; in Joy one does not only feel secure, but something goes out from one’s self to the universe, a warm, possessive effluence of love.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Because the relationship between self and world is reciprocal, it is not a matter of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us. No need to wait. As we care enough to take risks, we loosen the grip of ego and begin to come home to our true nature. For in the co-arising nature of things, the world itself, if we are bold enough to love it, acts through us. It does not ask us to be pure or perfect, or wait until we are detached from all passions, but only to care to harness the sweet, pure intention of our deepest passions...
Care | Earth | Ego | Enough | Intention | Love | Nature | Need | Relationship | Self | Work | World |
Inspirations are brief, sporadic and rare. In the long interims the mind is often dull, bare and vapid. There is hardly a soul that can radiate more light than it receives. To perform a mitzvah is to meet the spirit. But the spirit is not something we can acquire once and for all but something we must constantly live with and pray for. For this reason the Jewish way of life is to reiterate the ritual, to meet the spirit again and again, tehs spirit in one self and the spirit that hovers over all beings.
Life | Life | Light | Mind | Reason | Self | Soul | Spirit |
For, as I have suggested, disruption of the unity of the self is not limited to the cases that come to physicians and institutions for treatment. They accompany every disturbance of normal relations of husband and wife, parent and child, group and group, class and class, nation and nation. Emotional responses are so total as compared with the partial nature of intellectual responses, of ideas and abstract conceptions, that their consequences are more pervasive and enduring. I can, accordingly, think of nothing of greater practical importance than the psychic effects of human relationships, normal and abnormal, should be the object of continues study, including among the consequences the indirect somatic effects.
Abstract | Consequences | Husband | Ideas | Nature | Nothing | Object | Self | Unity | Parent | Think |
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
We must continue to perform the sacred deeds even though we may be compelled to bribe the self with human incentives. Purity of motivation is the goal; constancy of action is the way… The way to purify the self is to avoid dwelling upon the self and to concentrate upon the task.
Action | Constancy | Deeds | Purity | Sacred | Self | Deeds |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
Civilization | Government | Self | World | Government |
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
Education | Individual | Present | Self | System | Thinkers | Thinking | Thought | Will | Think | Thought |
Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all.
It may, perhaps, be true, though we cannot distinctly see it to be so, that as all finite things require a cause, infinites admit of none. It is evident, that nothing can begin to be without a cause; but it by no means follows from thence, that that must have had a cause which had no beginning. But whatever there may be in this conjecture, we are constrained, in pursuing the train of causes and effects, to stop at last at something uncaused. That any being should be self created is evidently absurd, because that would suppose that he had a being before he had, or that he existed, and did not exist at the same time. For want of clearer knowledge of this subject, we are obliged to content ourselves with terms that convey only negative ideas, and to say that God is a being untreated or uncaused; and this is all that we mean when we sometimes say that he is self existent.
The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.
Self |
Subtle is the path of love! Therein there is no asking and no not-asking, there one loses one’s self at His feet,there one is immersed in the joy of the seeking:plunged in the deeps of love as the fish in the water. The lover is never slow in offering his head for his Lord’s service.
What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
Knowing that great and all-pervading Self by which one sees (the objects) both in the sleep and the waking states, the intelligent man grieves no more.
Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
Without self-discovery, a person may still have self confidence, but it is a self confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens. Self discovery is the end product of a great challenge mastered, when the mind commands the body to do the seemingly impossible, when courage and strength are summoned to extraordinary limits for the sake of something outside the self--a principle, an onerous task, another human life.
Body | Challenge | Confidence | Courage | Discovery | Ignorance | Mind | Self | Strength | Discovery |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
The aim of a complete course of development is to divest the basic structures of any sense of exclusive self, and thus free the basic needs from their contamination by the needs of the separate self sense. When the basic structures are freed from the immortality projects of the separate self, they are free to return to their natural functional relationships... hungry, we eat; when tired, we sleep. The self has been returned to the Self, all self-needs have been met and discarded; and the basic needs alone remain.
Immortality | Self | Sense |