This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Do what you know and perception is converted into character.
Character | Perception |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
Work is for the purification of the mind, not for the perception of Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination, and not in the least by ten million acts.
Mind | Perception | Reality | Truth | Work |
The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception - that is to say, when using the sense of sigh and hearing, or some other sense - for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses - is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal) and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change... But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
Body | Change | Eternity | Meaning | Perception | Sense | Soul | World |
Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
This astonishing change in outlook has been brought about by assuming that, of all the elements of our total experience, only those elements which acquaint us with the quantitative aspects of material phenomona are concerned with the real world. They alone refer to an objective world. None of the other elements of our experience, our perception of colour, etc., our response to beauty, our sense of mystic communion with God, have objective counterparts. All these things, which are ultimately products of the motions of little particles, are illusory in the sense that they do not acquaint us with the nature of objective reality.
Beauty | Change | Experience | God | Little | Nature | Perception | Reality | Sense | World |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
The perception of Good and Evil - whatever choice we may make - is the first requisite of spiritual life.
People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality, a barrier which Buddhism calls the attachment to the false view of self... means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own. To break through this false view is to be liberated from every sort of fear, pain, and anxiety.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Belief | Fear | Means | Pain | People | Perception | Phenomena | Reality | Self |
The realization that everyone perceives things differently, whether greatly or slightly, is a very important principle for dealing effectively with others. The greater your understanding of someone else’s perception of reality, the greater your ability to communicate effectively with him.
Ability | Important | Perception | Reality | Understanding |
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
You bluffed me! I don't like it when people bluff me. It makes me question my perception of reality.
People | Perception | Question | Reality |
Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. So you leave everything fresh, natural, vivid, and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade, and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness.
There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place and to be in a place is not, then, subsequent to perception– as Kant dogmatically assumed– but is an ingredient in perception itself. Such knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential
Knowing | Perception |
In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.
Force | Perception | Science | Will | Woman |
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
Perception | Thinking |
Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.
Appearance | Awareness | Hell | Perception | Reality | World | Awareness |
Reverence is an attitude of honoring life. Reverence automatically brings forth patience. Reverence permits non-judgemental justice. Reverence is a perception of the soul.
Perception | Reverence |
Concepts are, so to speak, problem-solving devices, the internal equivalent of technologies; they are the technologies of the mind-machine. Concepts, theories, hypotheses, distinctions, comparisons—all these may be taken ultimately as instruments for organizing perceptions into logically consistent patterns called explanations. But they do not and cannot awaken in man a new quality of feeling or perceiving, a new organ or faculty of awareness. Concepts are no more nor less than tools by which man combines or analyzes that which he already knows through perceptions. If man's perceptions are limited mainly to the external senses, concepts can do no more than organize the material collected by the senses. Concepts can never reach beyond the level of perception at which man lives. Ideas, on the other hand, evoke, support, and require a higher level of awareness itself.
Awareness | Man | Perception | Awareness |
Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner
In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli.
The increment of meaning corresponds to the increased perception of connections and continuities of the activities in which we are engaged.
Meaning | Perception |
Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors.
Error | History | Intelligence | Mind | Perception | Question | Truth |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
That all-pervading Beauty is not an exercise in creative imagination. It is the actual structure of the universe. That all-pervading Beauty is in truth the very nature of the Kosmos right now. It is not something you have to imagine, because it is the actual structure of perception in all domains. If you remain in the eye of Spirit, every object is an object of radiant Beauty. If the doors of perception are cleansed, the entire Kosmos is your lost and found Beloved, the Original Face of primordial Beauty, forever,and forever, and endlessly forever.
Beauty | Nature | Object | Perception | Right | Truth | Beauty |
Intelligence alone is dangerous if it is not subjected to the intuitive or rational perception of moral values. It has led, not only to materialism, but to monstrosities.