This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Meaning in life is determined by how we choose to experience the world, not by how the world experiences us. We are all born with the freedom to put whatever meaning we’d like into our lives.
Generosity’s aim is twofold: we give freely to others, and we give freely to ourselves. Without both aspects, the experience is incomplete. If we give a gift freely, without attachment to a certain result or expectation of what will come back to us, that exchange celebrates freedom both within ourselves as the giver and the receiver… In a moment of pure giving, we really become one.
Expectation | Experience | Freedom | Generosity | Giving | Will | Expectation |
All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience Him in our lives as Will-to-Love.
In the world He appears to me as the mysterious, marvelous creative Force; within me He reveals Himself as ethical Will. In the world He is impersonal Force; within me He reveals Himself as Personality. The God who is known through philosophy and the God whom I experience as ethical Will do not coincide. They are one; but how they are one I do not understand.
Experience | Force | God | Personality | Philosophy | Will | World | God |
My life is completely and unmistakably determined by the mysterious experience of God revealing Himself within me as ethical Will and desiring to take hold of my life.
Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our `at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.
Experience | Faith | Oneness | People | Reality |
Creation is not an end in itself; it is a means. This life is a vehicle for us to transport ourselves from a framework of time into the experience of eternity, from the realm of the physical to the realm of the Godly.
T’ai-p’ing-ching [Classic of the Highest Peace or Book of Supreme Peace] by Yü Chi NULL
Of all the love, kindness and pleasure a man can experience in this world, nothing is more beautiful than the love of a woman. If it is granted him, and the two have a child together, they are fused in a single heart in the child, which is truly the most pleasing thing love and kindness can give, and this will always be a bond between them.
Experience | Heart | Kindness | Love | Man | Nothing | Pleasure | Will | Woman | World | Child |
Eternity is the opposite of time. It is the experience where the barriers of creation and Creator are removed. And this is what the Torah tells us our choice is: time or eternity.
Choice | Eternity | Experience | Time | Torah |
We construct our phenomenological experience of the world, but not the world itself. We construct a meaningful experience of life, but that does not mean that we invent meaning.
Experience | Life | Life | Meaning | World |
Fred Brooks, fully Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Experience | Good | Judgment |
Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
The world asks that we focus less on how we can coerce something to make it conform to our designs and focus more on how we can engage with one another, how we can enter into the experience and then notice what comes forth. It asks that we participate more than plan.
Experience | Focus | Plan | World |
The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is good as dead.
Riane Eisler, fully Riane Tennenhaus Eisler
When children experience violence, or observe violence against their mothers, they learn it's acceptable--even moral--to use force to impose one's will on others. Indeed, the only way they can make sense of violence coming from those who are supposed to love them is that it must be moral.
Children | Experience | Force | Love | Sense | Will | Learn |