This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideas and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be of the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated.
Ideas | Individual | Nature | Order | Principles | Reason | Society | Solitude | Universe |
The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now.
The worst is yet to come, however. Far more devastating that this pruning is that nature then brings about a corresponding increase of the connecting links of the emotional circuits in this cyngulate gyrus with the lower survival fight-or-flight structures of the amygdala, that neural module linked directly with our ancient defense and survival system in the reptilian brain. In this way, a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems.
Defense | Growth | Heart | Mind | Nature | Order | Survival | System |
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed... In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come to be the sheer alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being has been reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.
Absolute | Alienation | Object | Order | Poverty | Property | Sense | Wealth | World |
Since unhappiness excites interest, many, in order to render themselves interesting, feign unhappiness.
Order | Unhappiness |
Each major stage of development offers a window of opportunity distinctly different from anything that has come before. The increase of intelligence at each stage of development is disproportionately greater than the increase exhibited in the previous stage, similar to the order of increase found in the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes.
Intelligence | Opportunity | Order |
If anything could testify to the magical powers of the priesthood of science and their technical acolytes, or declare unto mankind the supreme qualifications for absolute rulership held by the Divine Computer, this new invention alone should suffice. So the final purpose of life in terms of the megamachine at last becomes clear: it is to furnish and process an endless quantity of data, in order to expand the role and ensure the domination of the power system.
Absolute | Computer | Invention | Life | Life | Mankind | Order | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Science | System |
The extent of the catastrophe that threatens gives the measure of the transformation that will be necessary in order to master it.
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
A person needs at intervals to separate himself from his family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
Administration | Anarchy | Contempt | Crime | Government | Law | Man | Means | Order | Government |
In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.
In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own; for men in general are very much alike, and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same; and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases, or offends you in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others in you.
Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them.
Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |
In the last analysis we remain persons who must flee from ourselves and from the dark mystery of our threatening guilt in order to find our true selves in God. Whoever has understood the importance of this flight, this critical distancing of ourselves from ourselves, whoever has understood this knows that it comes about only by allowing oneself to be loved by an infinite and all-forgiving love, which is called God, and by believing, hoping and loving in this love.
At moments of crisis, where the roads to disintegration or to development separate, as on a watershed, a single decisive personality, or a small group of informed and purposeful men, may be a slight push determine the direction and movement of an otherwise uncontrollable mass of conflicting social forces… Only within the compass of the person can a total change be affected within the span of a single generation, sufficient to produce the necessary effect on civilization at large: like the seed crystal, he passes on to the whole new order of the part.
Change | Civilization | Men | Order | Personality |