This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the Immutable, infinite Supreme Brahman remain hidden the two: knowledge and ignorance. Ignorance leads to worldliness and knowledge, to Immortality. Brahman, who controls both knowledge and ignorance, is different from both.
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
So I say, ‘Oh, I am sorry but soon you will see the bright sunrise every morning and beautiful sunset in the evening, every evening, but right now perhaps you…under your situation it may be impossible to see the beautiful sunset or bright sunrise, or beautiful flower in your garden, and it is impossible to take care of your garden, but soon you will see the beauty of the flowers and you will cut some flowers for your room.’ When you start to do this kind of thing you are alright. Don’t worry a bit. It means when you become you, yourself, and when you see things as they are, and when you become at one with your surroundings, in its true sense, there is true self.
If a person does good, most people will look for ulterior motives. People by training are very suspicious. Because most of the experiences they have had always had a condition attached, they don't expect others will do something just for the sake of doing it. Their belief systems just cannot accept others are capable of doing so. Our language is full of such sayings such as. One hand washes the other. ---You rub my back, I'll rub yours. In the study of one's personal language and self talk it can be observed that what one thinks and talks about to himself tends to become the deciding influences n his life. For what the mind attends to, the mind considers.
Belief | Change | Mind | Pain | People | Trouble | Circumstance | Truths |
Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.
Pain |
Simcha Zissel of Kelm, fully Rabbi imcha Zissel Ziv Broida, aka the Elder of Kelm
Prayer is an excellent training ground for practicing control of one’s thoughts.
Pain |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.
Chance | Father | Meditation | Mother |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye, Hast learned from the monks, I trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them! that they should dishonor their own mothers by such teaching. A pretty world it would be with all the women out of it.
Change | Nothing | Pain | Perception | Public | Suffering | Terror | World |
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
Detachment | Lying | Pain | Present |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. After all, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and to persevere in unceasing union with Him?
Desire | Fear | Heart | Man | Pain | People | Sensuality | Spirit | Thought | Weakness | Thought | Victim |
The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, '2001' shows that what some people call 'god' is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call 'god' -Stanley Kubrick, interview, 1963
Awareness | Capacity | Consciousness | Death | Existence | Experience | Faith | Idealism | Indifference | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Soul | Universe | Wonder | Awareness | Child |
Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola
The shortest, yea, the only way to reach sanctity, is to conceive a horror for all that the world loves and values.
If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates—rather than by slow change in large central populations—then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range. We will first meet the new species as a fossil when it reinvades the ancestral range and becomes a large central population in its own right. During its recorded history in the fossil record, we should expect no major change; for we know it only as a successful, central population. It will participate in the process of organic change only when some of its peripheral isolates species to become new branches on the evolutionary bush. But it, itself, will appear ‘suddenly’ in the fossil record and become extinct later with equal speed and little perceptible change in form.
Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed.
Age | Joy | Oblivion | Pain | Persistence | Price | Success | Time | Universe | Will | Work |
You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity.
When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a victim of life. And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening.