This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Experience | Good | Life | Life | Love |
Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
Our willingness to take an alternative approach to a problem will perhaps relax the obsessive fixation of the adversary on his view, which he believes is the only reasonable possibility and which he is determined to impose on everyone else by coercion…This mission of humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Attention | Bible | Cost | Fidelity | God | Labor | Means | Mystery | Reality | Responsibility | Risk | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Truth | Work | God | Bible |
In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.
Ability | Authenticity | Belief | Decision | Hope | Life | Life | Men | Present | Reality | Relationship | Sacrifice | Salvation | Survival | Truth | Crisis |
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.
To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes. One cannot see his own eyes because they are that with which he sees and God is the light by which we see-by which we see not a clearly defined object called God, but everything else in the invisible One.
Experience | Good | Life | Life | Love |
A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.
Awareness | Desire | Ego | Experience | Good | Judgment | Order | Pain | Perception | Regard | Self | Suppression | Thought | Time | Wants | Awareness | Thought | Victim |
The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
His point [the absolutist] is that although what people think right varies in different countries and period, yet what actually is right is everywhere and always the same.
Ethics | Experience | Feelings | Individual | Individuality | Love | Men | Mystical | Position | Self | Sympathy | Will |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer... She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true... She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture... All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Oh Me! Oh Life! of the questions recurring, Answer - That you are here - that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
The new righteousness offered in the gospel occurs in a world where people like us are angry enough to kill. People who are angry enough to kill do come to church, do approach God, do bring an offering.
History | Individual | Language |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
When I clutch'd your hand, it was not with terror; but suddenly, pouring about me here, on every side, and below there where the boys were drilling, and up the slopes they ran, and where tents are pitch'd, and wherever you see, south and south-east and south-west, over hills, across lowlands, and in the skirts of woods, and along the shores, in mire (now fill'd over,) came again, and suddenly raged, as eighty-five years a-gone, no mere parade receiv'd with applause of friends, but a battle, which I took part in myself—aye, long ago as it is, I took part in it, walking then this hill-top, this same ground.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
There shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
There seems never to have been a time at which sentient beings have not escaped from the dungeon of individuality. In the East liberation was elaborated into a fine art, but it may be doubted whether more people made their escape from solitary confinement outside the organized religions than by means of them. In the West reintegration was sporadic, but in recent years it has become a widespread preoccupation. Unfortunately it’s technical dependence on oriental literature — sometimes translated by scholars whose knowledge of the language was greater than their understanding of the subject — has proved a barrier which rendered full comprehension laborious and exceedingly long. Therefore it appears to be essential that such teaching as may be transmissible shall be given in a modern idiom and in accordance with our own processes of thought. But this presentation can never be given by the discursive method to which we are used for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, for the understanding required is not conceptual and therefore is not knowledge. This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava ’s Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Ego | Eternal | Understand |
I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.
Think |