This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We find the attribute of unchangingness always associated with the highest level of conscious experience. The experiences of truth are always similar. There is the changing mind, following time and change; and the unchanging mind behind it. There is the order of natural reasoning that goes with changing phenomena, and another above... The source of all truth lies in ‘unchangeable truth’ which is above the level of reason, and it is the internal perception of this unchangeable truth that endows man with the highest grade of being.
Change | Experience | Man | Mind | Order | Perception | Phenomena | Reason | Time | Truth | Wisdom | Following |
If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past.
Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley
The common course of things is in favor of happiness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want.
Attention | Disease | Health | Order | Rule | Wisdom | Happiness |
Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |
What is in time is of a lower order than time itself: time is folded around what is in time exactly as - we read - it is folded about what is in place and in number.
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.
Culture | Ideas | Knowledge | Nature | Order | Past | Society | Will | Wisdom | World | Society |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life.
Art | Balance | Life | Life | Man | Mystery | Novelty | Order | Science | Struggle | Wisdom | Novelty | Art |
J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics.
Dreams | Law | Man | Mind | Order | Religion | Universe | Wisdom | World |
J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
If parapsychology deals with all the personality manifestations that are beyond explanation by physics, then by definition it should claim the entire spiritual order of reality.
Order | Personality | Reality | Wisdom |
There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children.
Children | Day | Liberty | Men | Need | Nothing | Order | Patriotism | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wisdom | Work |
Each truth sparkles with a light of its own, yet it always reflects some light upon another; a truth, while lighting another, springs from one, in order to penetrate another. The first truth is an abundant sense, from which all others are colored, and each particular truth, in its turn, resembles a great river that divides into an infinite number of rivulets.
The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.
Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |
By the spirit of the age... the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority... Truth taken over by skepticism which has become believing... is not capable of uniting itself with him to the very marrow of his being.
Age | Authority | Man | Order | Skepticism | Spirit | Thinking | Truth | Wisdom |