This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
I think the beautiful thing about lovingness is the performance of an act dedicated to the Self in all creatures.
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.
Those who argue and discuss without understanding the truth are lost amid all the forms of relative knowledge, running about here and there and trying to justify their view of the substance of ego. If you realize the self in your inmost consciousness, it will appear in its purity. This is the womb of wonder, which is not the realm of those who live only by reason. Pure in its own nature and free from the categories of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled wonder, which is wrongly apprehended by many.
Justify | Mind | Nature | Self | Truth | Understanding | Will |
Change is the end result of all true learning. Change involves three things: first, a dissatisfaction with self - a felt void or need; second, a decision to change - to fill the void or need; and third, a conscious dedication to the process of growth and change - the willful act of making the change: doing something.
Change | Decision | Dedication | Growth | Self |
We, and all things, exist in God’s infinitude now; our individuality battens within it; our personality grows strong because of it; and we know, if we know anything, that while the more we approach the good the more we please God, at the same time the more men approach the good the more nobly distinctive, the more beautifully individual, do their characters become. To imagine, then, that at the end of this life we shall cease to exist as conscious beings, that our characters, our personalities, will fall back into some boundless being, instead of becoming more and more definite, more and more individual, is certainly not to exalt God; for it is founded on the belief, either that God is now belittled by our present individuality, or that our present individuality is a mere delusion. In the latter case God, whom we find in the depths of our souls, is doubtless also a delusion, for if the self is not real it is no respectable witness on whose testimony we can accept God. Our deepest mature conviction is that finite and infinite interpenetrate, as time and eternity interpenetrate, and our problems must be solved in the light of that conviction.
Eternity | God | Good | Individuality | Life | Life | Light | Men | Personality | Present | Problems | Self | Time | Will | Witness | God |
From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
Eternal | Hospitality | Present | Prison | Self | Wit | Words | Learn | Value |
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, fully David Martyn Lloyd Jones
Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you.
Life | Life | Listening | Problems | Self | Talking | Unhappiness |
Lin-chi, also Lin-chi Yi-sen, Lin-chi I-hsuan, Rinzai, Rinzai Gigen, Linji, Línjì Yìxuán NULL
When it's time to get dressed, put on your clothes. When you must walk, then walk. When you must sit, then sit. Just be your ordinary self in ordinary life, unconcerned in seeking for Buddhahood. When you're tired, lie down. The fool will laugh at you but the wise man will understand.
By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moral existence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.
Imagination | Love | Reason | Self | Surrender |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
He was his usual philosophic self and tried very hard to explain to me that although life was stained with agony, this was necessary. That scars only concealed, and finally helped to reveal, an essential peace. He said that what we, who pass so swiftly, experience as songs of love or cries of pain are only overtones to a single note in a very much larger harmony.
Madame Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon
It is only by the death of self that the soul can enter into Divine Truth, and understand in part what is the light that shineth in darkness.
Death | Light | Self | Soul | Understand |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
Where, for instance, is the identity of myself? There's a special quality that makes me different from everything else and also from all other selves. And I want that identity, my own self, to continue. So where does that identity dwell?" "Where indeed?" asked the Buddha. "That self to which you cling is in constant change. Years ago you were a baby, then a youth, and now a man. Which is your true self—that of yesterday, that of today, or that of tomorrow which you so long to preserve?" "I see I have misunderstood things," replied Kutadanta slowly, "and although I find it hard to endure the light, the truth now dawns on me that there is no separate and enduring self. I will take my refuge in your teaching and find that which is continuing and everlasting in the truth.
Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad
As the same fire assumes different shapes When it consumes objects differing in shape, So does the one Self take the shape Of every creature in whom he is present.
Self |
Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym for Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
Martha Washington, fully Martha Dandridge Curtis Washington
I very linearly [sic] wish you would exert yourself so as to keep all your matters in order your self without depending on others as that is the only way to be happy to have all your business in your own hands.