This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gilmary Simmons, born Eileen Catherine Simmons
To know our purpose for being here, we have to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know God who created us... Through knowing God’s love, through prayer, we come to find our best self. Each of us has a call. No two of us are alike in our potential for growth and development... Sometimes we find our meaning from our successes. Sometimes suffering is the prelude to understanding, and we realize that eventually, out of darkness, comes light... I chose to try to know God and to find a deeper meaning in life through sharing my life with others, reaching out and being more vulnerable and open to the stranger, the one in need, the depressed and the ill... The specific purpose each one of us discovers along the way, we do have a common purpose. It is to become part of the life of God; to know, love and serve Him; to come to know and love our brothers and sisters; to be energized and made whole by God’s tremendous love for us in this life and the next, a love that binds us all together.
Darkness | God | Growth | Knowing | Life | Life | Light | Love | Meaning | Need | Prayer | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Suffering | Understanding | Wisdom | God |
Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL
Our purpose is to live in harmony with those cycles [birth, growth, death and regeneration] to develop our peculiar organs of consciousness and creativity to add to the beauty, love, humor, diversity and general interest of the world.
Beauty | Birth | Consciousness | Creativity | Death | Diversity | Growth | Harmony | Humor | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom | World |
Ultimately, our purpose is to be so alive, compassionate and creative in our own lives that the whole universe quivers with excitement and enthusiasm and brings forth a new spirit, a new possibility, in our midst. Our purpose is to be both the womb and the midwife for the birthing into our world of a holy spirit filled with new potentials for life and creativity. We exist in order to quicken the creativity and spirit of our world so that new worlds, new wonders, new blessings may emerge... To truly appreciate the meaning of life, we must be prepared to let the meanings we have known stand in the presence of new insights and be transformed. We have no final answers, only the questions that lead to further discoveries, creativity and emergence. We are here that life may discover, know and express itself more abundantly for the blessing and fulfillment of all creation - past, present and potential.
Blessings | Creativity | Enthusiasm | Excitement | Fulfillment | Life | Life | Meaning | Order | Past | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World |
A vigorous five-mile walk will do more for an unhappy but other wise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
Psychology | Will | Wisdom | Wise | World |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, the races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, the oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, the lands to be welded together.
Earth | God | Marriage | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Wisdom |
Our personal question about our life’s purpose may very well be the tip as well as the foundation of the collective iceberg – part of the much larger question of where do we go from here? If we consider these individual longings in light of systems thinking, perhaps we can see them, not as isolated, narcissistic musings, but as equivalent to the DNA of our soul, the generative driver of evolution itself.
Evolution | Individual | Life | Life | Light | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Soul | Thinking |
You are a self-organizing system in an invisible field of energy organized by your purpose and a stream of continuous information. Information is the nutrient of a self-organizing system… It is by knowing yourself that your purpose is revealed.
A goal-oriented life locates the purposed of life in the achievement of a goal, which is necessarily tied to a discrete moment in time… But we also exist across time, and when our life’s goals are fixed so narrowly on moments that are only briefly the present, we fail to do justice to the enduring aspect of human life… Moments slip away and so if life’s purpose is tied to moments. Although moments can play a part, in order to find a purpose which is truly fulfilling, we also need to find a way of living which is worthwhile in itself. Life is rarely an undiluted pleasure that our own attitudes are themselves important to our sense of well-being.
Achievement | Goals | Important | Justice | Life | Life | Need | Order | Play | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Time |
To see altruism itself as the purpose of human life is confuse means and ends. We need to know whether good deeds are essential for life to be meaningful or whether they just comprise one possible road to fulfillment. Helping others cannot be the purpose of life, because helping others is just a means to an end… Altruism is thus not the source of life’s meaning but is something that living a meaningful life requires.
Altruism | Deeds | Ends | Fulfillment | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Deeds |
Do the best you can do with what you’re connected to at that moment. That’s your life’s purpose for that moment. Don’t try to find some absolute best thing. Go in the side door or the back door, and maybe you’ll find what your life purpose is.
Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
You will to believe that because you are an individual expression of God there is purpose, real and meaningful in your life, and you will to believe that to achieve this purpose you are also equipped with the talent and potential necessary for its achievement. Will to believe it!... It is the originality in each of us and not our uniformity which gives life its deepest meaning.
Achievement | God | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Originality | Purpose | Purpose | Uniformity | Will | Talent | God |
Book of Common Prayer, aka The Book of Common Prayer NULL
Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God.