This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
How is it, then, that we have collectively bamboozled ourselves into believing in material limitlessness? That we could grow our businesses without reference to their field of play – the resources of the earth? That our possessions could grow without reference to the limits of our ability to pay, now or in the future? The same ideology that treated land like an input for industrial agriculture, depleting it of available nutrients and filth had turned me away from caring for my own exquisite territory of body and soul. I came to call the kind of freedom we practice as Americans “hyper-freedom.” Freedom on steroids. We took “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as permission for all of us to seek our own good in a system we thought should get in our face the very least possible.
Choice | Cost | Longing | Mind | Need | Rest | Time | World |
You can either think about yourself or you can study yourself. The difference between the two is the difference between chains and liberty.
Excitement | Fear | Inspiration | Mind | Nothing | World |
And whatever he did, he always fell back onto this paradox at the core of his thought. To remain in paradise and become a demon! To re-enter hell and become an angel!
The less life in a person, the more he will try to live off your life.
I feel within me the future life. I am like a forest that has been razed; the new shoots are stronger and brisker. I shall most certainly rise toward the heavens. The sun's rays bathe my head. The earth gives me its generous sap, but the heavens illuminate me with the reflection of-of worlds unknown. Some say the soul results merely from bodily powers. Why, then, does my soul become brighter when my bodily powers begin to waste away? Winter is above me, but eternal spring is within my heart. I inhale even now the fragrance of lilacs, violets, and roses, just as I did when I was twenty. The nearer my approach to the end, the plainer is the sound of immortal symphonies of worlds which invite me. It is wonderful yet simple. It is a fairy tale; it is history. For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and in verse; history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song; all of these have I tried. But I feel that I haven't given utterance to the thousandth part of what lies within me. When I go to the grave I can say as others have said, I have finished my day's work. But I cannot say, I have finished my life. My day's work will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight, but opens on the dawn.
Mind |
One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.
One can dream of something more terrible than a hell where one suffers; it's a hell where one would get bored.
I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and his grandchildren, and hear them cry without being tortured himself.
But the most powerful arguments in favor of 'a tragic optimism' are those which in Latin are called argumenta ad hominem. Jerry Long, to cite an example, is a living testimony to 'the defiant power of the Spirit' . . . To quote the Texarkana Gazette, 'Jerry Long has been paralyzed from his neck down since a diving accident which rendered him a quadriplegic three years ago. He was 17 when the accident occurred. Today Long can use his mouth stick to type. He attends two courses at Community College via a special telephone. The intercom allows Long to both hear and participate in class discussions. He also occupies his time by reading, watching television and writing.' And in a letter I received from him, he writes: 'I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn't break me. I am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.'
Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights. But a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure and death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would have never achieved. To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be applied: Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.
Contemplation | Conversation | Life | Life | Love | Means | Mind | Need | Nothing | Prison | Strength | Thought | Wife | Contemplation | Think | Thought |
Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
Behavior | Decision | Dignity | Freedom | Life | Life | Man | Martyrs | Mind | Suffering | Witness | Words |
One should be cautions not to speak anything that hurts others. Such kind of speech never helps but always brings destruction.
One should eat nutritious food and exercise regularly to have sound health. Virtuous deeds performed with intelligence shall naturally bring good wealth. – Rig Veda
Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology homeostasis, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Body | Cause | Courage | Death | Hope | Mind | Will | Loss | Understand |