This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Eternal | Excellence | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |
You can only live in the present… only act in the present… only experience in the present. What you call the future, things that you may be planning, or things that you may be dreading – all this is still but a present state of mind. This is the real meaning of the traditional phrase, The Eternal Now. The only joy you can experience is the joy you experience now. A happy memory is a present joy. The only pain you can experience is the pain of the present moment. Sad memories are present pain.
Eternal | Experience | Future | Happy | Joy | Meaning | Memory | Mind | Pain | Present |
Living life at its best means keeping on speaking terms with my conscience, to do nothing to outrage it or to inflict pain upon it. When my acts do violence to my moral or ethical standards, I sustain a loss for which no pleasure or material gain can compensate me, for I shrink in moral stature. When I keep my friendship with the best in me, I achieve a serenity which cloaks life with gentle beauty.
Beauty | Conscience | Life | Life | Means | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Serenity | Friendship | Loss |
Zen meditation does not mean sitting and thinking. On the contrary, it means acting with as little thought as possible. The fencing master trained his pupil to guard against every attack with the same immediate, instinctive rapidity with which our eyelid closes over our eye when something threatens it. His work is aimed at breaking down the wall between thought and act, at completely fusing body and senses and mind so that they might all work together rapidly and effortlessly.
Body | Little | Means | Meditation | Mind | Thinking | Thought | Work | Zen | Thought |
John E. Large, fully John Ellis Large
The pearl of great price always begins as a pain in the oyster’s stomach!
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Transcendent, mystical, and spiritual experiences have a real biological component. The neurological changes that occur during meditation disrupt the normal processes of the brain – perceptually, emotionally, and linguistically – in ways that make the experience indescribable, awe-inspiring, unifying, and indelibly real. In fact, the intensity of such experiences often gives the practitioner a sense that a different or higher level of reality exists beyond our everyday perceptions of the world.
Awe | Experience | Meditation | Mystical | Reality | Sense | World |
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
It is of primary importance that a certain space of time be allotted daily to meditation on eternal things. No priest can omit this without serious manifestation of negligence and without a grave loss to his soul.
Maggie Ross, pen name for Martha Reeves
The pain that gives us self-knowledge, willingly sought and moved through, is at the heart of repentance of any kind. Pain is… the open space - one meaning of the ancient Hebrew word for salvation - the point of intersection and integration of our selves with one another and all the Creation.
Heart | Integration | Knowledge | Meaning | Pain | Repentance | Salvation | Self | Self-knowledge | Space |
There is a kind and quality of pain that is creative, curative, redemptive, and… this is a kind of pain which man is privileged to share with God.
Meditation, because it is free of dogma, of historical commitments and narrow prejudices, because it is practiced for the most part silently and thereby secretly, and because it is practiced by some members of all religions - meditation is a channel for seekers of all faiths or no faith, a river into which many streams can freely flow.
Dogma | Faith | Meditation |
If you learn to see God in all things you will learn to love them according to His will, not your own self-will. If you see things as in eternity you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass.